US EditionStudy Shows 12 Farm Animals Reshaped Global Ecosystems
Research reveals human-driven agriculture and domestication reshaped mammal communities globally, causing extinctions and ecosystem changes comparable to Ice Age events.
- Last month, Macquarie University researchers published an international study in Biology Letters using fossil bones from six continents to show humans profoundly reshaped mammal communities worldwide.
- About 10,000 years ago, farming began and domestication soon followed, reducing biodiversity by favouring a handful of livestock and crop species and reorganizing ecosystems.
- Their dataset included 475 mammal species from 191 Pleistocene sites and 350 species from 206 Holocene sites, with 12 domesticated species appearing in 110 sites at a mean of 1.47 per site.
- Many wild species went extinct following human arrival rather than a climate event, with New Guinea and Sri Lanka seeing minimal change while Europe, the Americas, Australia and parts of Africa faced high turnover; researchers say this should guide conservation efforts to ensure resilience.
- Including domesticates reshapes clusters by uniting distant regions like Brazil and Java while fragmenting others, and researchers suggest large mammals reintroduction could restore ecological balances.
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11 Articles
A fossil study shows how human impact, especially agriculture and livestock, has altered mammalian communities as deeply as the extinctions of the Ice Age.
Farming transformed mammal communities worldwide over 50,000 years
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Oct 01, 2025 Fossil evidence from six continents shows that humans reshaped global mammal communities over the last 50,000 years, according to new research published in Biology Letters. During the Ice Age, animal distributions reflected climate zones and geographic barriers. But after the advent of farming 10,000 years ago, livestock species spread with people, permanently disrupting those natural patterns.
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. ...
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