Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals (SRC-FAITH-SUROVELL-2009)

Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals

Faith, J. T.; Surovell, T. A. · 2009

AI-verified citationSRC-FAITH-SUROVELL-2009

identifier / locator

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(49): 20641–20645. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908153106

verification note

Confirmed via Crossref (2026-08-22 batch): all fields match.

reliability notes

'Synchronous' here means geologically concentrated: the assessed interval (~12,000–10,000 radiocarbon years BP, roughly 13.8–11.4 ka calibrated) is far broader than any instantaneous event.

Evidence drawn from this source

Supports· strongYDIH-E025

what the source states: Analysis of last-appearance radiocarbon data for North American megafaunal genera found the record statistically consistent with a synchronous extinction concentrated in the terminal Pleistocene (assessed interval ~12,000–10,000 radiocarbon years BP, roughly 13.8–11.4 ka calibrated), rather than a long staggered decline.
what we infer: Supports the extinction observation while setting its resolution honestly: "synchronous" at the scale of this analysis means a window of two millennia. The paper is regularly miscited as dating the extinction to the impact horizon; it cannot and does not.
limitations: Last-appearance dates systematically underestimate true extinction times (Signor-Lipps effect); species-level chronologies remain sparse.