Causes and consequences of late pleistocene extinctions

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Approximately 12,000 years ago, roughly 70 mammalian species in North America and perhaps more than 80 in South America went extinct. Most of these were large animals, a highly unusual trend in vertebrate extinctions. The cause or causes of these losses have been debated for more than a century, without any resolution. Was it due to a rapid warming phase around 11,000 years ago, the arrival of big game hunters into North America, novel infectious diseases or even an extraterrestrial impact? Although these losses may be ancient, they are relevant to existing concerns about worldwide extinctions. Using state-of-the-art techniques pioneered in our lab, here in Canada, we plan to carefully withdraw damaged genetic material from fossil remains and reconstruct how key Pleistocene species, including various species of mammoths were adapted to their environments, and how they changed (or, alternatively, became extinct) with their environments. This work by its nature is prodigiously multidisciplinary; to this end I am engaged in collaboration with a wide variety of scientists, including paleontologists, geologists, bioinformaticians. Our objective is to refashion the Pleistocene extinctions debate in a context, where the questions are empirical and the major tools of exploration are molecular.