Causes and consequences of late pleistocene extinctions

大约12,000年前，北美大约有70种哺乳动物灭绝，南美洲可能有80多种哺乳动物灭绝。其中大多数是大型动物，这在脊椎动物灭绝中是一种非常不寻常的趋势。这些损失的原因已经争论了一个多世纪，没有任何解决方案。这是因为大约11000年前的一个快速变暖阶段、大型猎人进入北美、新的传染病，还是甚至是外星生物的影响？尽管这些损失可能是古老的，但它们与人们对全球物种灭绝的现有担忧有关。使用我们在加拿大这里的实验室开创的最先进的技术，我们计划仔细地从化石遗骸中提取受损的遗传物质，并重建关键更新世物种，包括各种猛犸象是如何适应它们的环境的，以及它们是如何随环境变化(或灭绝)的。这项工作的本质是惊人的多学科；为此，我与各种各样的科学家合作，包括古生物学家、地质学家和生物信息学家。我们的目标是在这样一个背景下重塑更新世灭绝的争论，在这个背景下，问题是经验的，探索的主要工具是分子。

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.