The archaeological record of human impacts on animal populations

Recent archaeological research has fundamentally altered our understanding of the scope of past human impacts on nondomesticated animal populations. Predictions derived from foraging theory concerning the abundance histories of high-return human prey and diet breadth have been met in many parts of the world. People are known to have introduced a broad variety of nondomes-ticated animals, from sponges to agoutis and rats, to a remarkably broad set of contexts, in turn causing a wide variety of secondary impacts. By increas-ing the incidence of fire, human colonists have in some cases transformed the nature of the vegetation on the colonized landscape, in turn dramatically af-fecting animal populations on those landscapes. In island settings, these triple threats—predation, biotic introductions, and vegetation alteration—routinely led to extinctions but there is no archaeological evidence that small-scale soci-eties caused extinction by predation alone on islands or continents. Indeed, the recent history of this famous argument suggests that it is better seen as a state-ment of faith about the past rather than as an appeal to reason. Perhaps most importantly, our burgeoning knowledge of past human impacts on animals has important implications for the conservation biology of the future. KEY WORDS: prehistoric human impacts; biogeography; extinction; translocation; conservation