Humans profoundly reshaped mammal communities on a global scale.
"After farming began, just a handful of livestock species spread with humans and scrambled those natural boundaries, reshaping mammal communities worldwide...Large ungulates like horses and cows are important because they monopolize food resources wherever they are in high numbers...At the same time, many wild mammals went extinct, in each case following human arrival—not during a particular worldwide climate change episode."
"Post-extinction ecosystems have not been truly natural for the last 10,000 years or more, so national parks in the hardest-hit regions, such as Australia and the Americas, lack over half of the native large mammal species that would have been present if not for humans. Over the last 10,000 years or so, humans have overseen the wholesale replacement of native mammal communities with a very limited set of domesticated species."
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How humans reshaped the animal world: Research traces 50,000 years of change
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-humans-reshaped-animal-world-years.html
"These findings underscore how human-driven extinctions, agriculture and resource extraction profoundly reshaped mammal community structures. How we manage these interactions today will determine whether mammal communities become resilient or increasingly destabilized."
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Barry W. Brook et al, Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts, Biology Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2025.0151
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0151
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