Causes and consequences of late pleistocene extinctions

大约12000年前，北美大约有70种哺乳动物灭绝，南美可能有80多种。其中大多数是大型动物，这是脊椎动物灭绝中极不寻常的趋势。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。是由于大约11000年前的快速变暖阶段，大型猎物猎人来到北美，新型传染病，甚至是外星人的影响？虽然这些损失可能是古老的，但它们与目前对世界范围内物种灭绝的担忧有关。利用我们在加拿大的实验室所采用的最先进的技术，我们计划仔细地从化石遗骸中提取受损的遗传物质，并重建关键的更新世物种，包括各种猛犸象，是如何适应环境的，以及它们是如何随着环境而改变（或者，或者，灭绝）的。这项工作本质上是多学科的；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、生物信息学家。我们的目标是重塑更新世物种灭绝的争论，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.