Global Spatiotemporal Patterns of Pleistocene Large Mammal Extinction: Integrating the Evidence and Resolving the Contradictions

The modern world is depauperate in large terrestrial animal species relative to most global assemblages since at least the early Mesozoic. This impoverished state can be attributed to the Late Quaternary Extinction (LQE) — a global extinction event the effects of which disproportionately impacted the largest species. While the causes and consequences of the LQE have been topics of heated debate for at least sixty years, one notable biogeographic subphenomenon has received relatively little scrutiny — a marked unevenness in the extinctions intensity between the continents. In this thesis, I assess the current dominant explanation of this unevenness — Paul Martin’s coevolution hypothesis — and find that the coevolution hypothesis has gone largely uninvestigated and rests heavily on highly contestable underlying assumptions. I then present an alternate explanation of the LQE’s geographic unevenness based on a novel theoretical synthesis based on paleoecological evidence, the paleoanthropological record, allometric physiological principles, and existing ecological theory.