Most of the mammals that lived in India 200,000 years ago
still roam the subcontinent today, in spite of two ice ages, a volcanic
super-eruption and the arrival of people, a study reveals. India's ancient
mammals survived multiple pressures
Leopard in southern India [Credit: PlanetEarth Online]
In contrast, nearly two-thirds of mammals in northern
Eurasia, Australia, Madagascar and the Americas died out by 10,000 years ago.
The findings suggest that many of India's charismatic animals, such as bears,
leopards and wolves, may have been more able to adapt to ecological pressures
than mammals elsewhere. They also highlight the importance of connected
habitats and could help protect some of today's most endangered Indian
creatures.
Researchers think India's mammals survived crises by moving
between connected safe havens, known as refugia. More stable weather in the
area over the last 200,000 years compared to other parts of the world could
also have played a part in the mammals' persistence. Until now, many
researchers thought widespread extinctions affecting far-apart places like
North America, Europe and Australia must have been worldwide phenomena, caused
by single problems like climate change or overhunting. But this latest study
adds to the growing body of evidence suggesting that extinctions may instead be
the result of multiple pressures.
'Most of the research on mega-faunal extinctions over the
last 30 or 40 years has focused on North America, Australia and Madagascar, so
that has shaped our thinking on the topic. These places saw much more extremes
of climate change than the Indian subcontinent did. These and human factors may
have led to big changes in faunal populations,' says Professor Michael
Petraglia of the University of Oxford, who led the study. 'But it now seems
that major extinctions during the Late Pleistocene weren't a worldwide
phenomenon after all, which was surprising,' he adds.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, aimed to find out how climate change and the first influx of
people affected some of the bigger mammals on the Indian subcontinent. This was
probably one of the first regions reached by early modern humans leaving Africa
in the Late Pleistocene. The researchers painstakingly identified and dated
animal fossils from ancient sediments from caves in southern India. Some of the
caves' chambers contain ten-metre-thick sediments, made up of layers of mud
slowly deposited over thousands of years. These provide a glimpse into the
past, revealing details about which animals lived when.
Researchers have built such timelines for the Americas,
Europe and Australasia, but not, until now, for the Indian subcontinent. Petraglia
and his colleagues found that 20 of 21 mammal groups from at least 100,000
years ago are still in India today. 'We managed to successfully date this long
sequence going back 200,000 years. We saw a broad-scale continuity of fauna and
in the wider perspective, our findings conflicted with other major extinction
events,' says Petraglia. 'The relative stability of rainfall and topography
across the Indian subcontinent as a whole meant that habitat survival in
patches facilitated faunal recombination, migration, and general long-term
persistence,' write the authors. Source: PlanetEarth Online [April 17, 2014]
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