Dartmouth Events

Tyler Faith
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah
Chief Curator, Natural History Museum of Utah, University of Utah

Title: It must have swarmed with great monsters: 7 million years of extinctions and ecological change in Africa

Abstract: Many of the defining features of the Anthropocene are rooted in an ancient history of human impacts on the natural world. Resolving the antiquity, consequences, and present-day implications of this history is a matter of intense debate across the paleo-sciences. Researchers have long argued that humans played a central role in the extinction of Earth’s megafauna over the last 50,000 years, but a growing body of literature has extended the antiquity of our impacts deeper in time, arguing that hominins drove African mammal extinctions for millions of years. In this presentation, I examine the “ancient hominin impacts” hypotheses in the context of ecological changes over the past 7,000,000 years. Paleoecological evidence suggests that declining productivity coupled with expansion of grassy habitats played a key role in extinctions once attributed to hominin activities. It follows that in the search for anthropogenic impacts on ancient African ecosystems, we must focus our attention on the one species known to be capable of causing them: Homo sapiens over the past 300,000 years.