Deciphering North American Pleistocene extinctions

摘要

The debate over the cause of North American Pleistocene extinctions may be further from resolution than it has ever been in its 200-year history and is certainly more heated than it has ever been before. Here, I suggest that the reason for this may lie in the fact that paleontologists have not heeded one of the key biogeographic concepts that they themselves helped to establish: that histories of assemblages of species can be understood only be deciphering the history of each individual species within that assemblage. This failure seems to result from assumptions first made about the nature of the North American extinctions during the 1960s.