Rapid drying combined with human-made fires changed Southern California forever, killing off ancient bison, dire wolves and five other megafauna species there.
), and a single species that survived to today, the coyote . Sure enough, about 13,000 years ago, the seven of the eight megafaunal species all vanished from the tar pit fossil record, the team found.
The sediment cores revealed that over the millennium preceding the extinction, the region warmed by 5.6 degrees Celsius and dried out. The area’s juniper and oak woodlands gave way to more drought and fire-tolerant plants. Shortly after this shift started, Southern California went through a 300-year-long period of intense fires, evidenced by a spike in charcoal in the lake records. The team’s modeling on human populations shows their numbers rapidly grew right before the burning started.
O’Keefe describes it as a feedback loop, noting that hunting herbivores also makes the ecosystem more fire prone as plants go uneaten. “You get this vicious cycle,” he says. “You add more people and it gets hotter and drier, and you’re killing more herbivores. So there’s more fuel [to burn].” By 12,000 years ago, La Brea had been transformed by climate change and fires into a dry, chaparral scrubland ecosystem. Among the eight megafauna species traced in a new study, only coyotes remained in the region .Sandra Brügger, a paleoecologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who wasn’t involved in the research, notes that similarly rapid ecological transformations have been documented in the Mediterranean and a broader swathe of the U.S.
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