Max Planck Society
New research led by scientists from Griffith University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History reveals that the arrival of Pleistocene humans and their hominin ancestors to uninhabited islands didn’t always lead to widespread extinctions, as is often thought.
Published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, the research team examined archaeological and paleontological records of all islands inhabited by humans over the last 2.6 million years, finding that hominin arrivalsoften had minimal impacts on biodiversity loss.
“We often have this picture that as soon as people arrive in a new ecosystem, they cause untold amounts of damage” says lead researcher Associate Professor Julien Louys, from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, “but we found that this was only the case for the most recent human arrivals on islands.”