Global patterns of mammalian biodiversity loss over the last 50,000 years

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Wild mammals have experienced major population losses and extinctions in recent centuries, but their communities had already suffered from widespread losses during the Pleistocene. Existing literature has focused on documenting individual extinctions or continental-scale patterns. This project aims to show how biodiversity loss played out at the local scale around the world. It will use palaeontological and zooarchaeological data to show how losses varied in space, how population sizes changed, and how species attributes such as rarity and body size related to loss. The world of mammals has become more homogeneous as biodiversity has declined. The challenge is to show how that happened across space and time.