Radiocarbon chronologies and extinction dynamics of late Quaternary mammalian megafauna from the Taimyr Peninsiula, Russian Federation

• Main Authors: Ross D. E. Macphee, Alexei N. Tikhonov, Dick Mol, Christian De Marliave, Hans Van Der Plicht, Alex D. Greenwood, Clare Flemming, Larry Agenbroad
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Alces alces; Canis lupus; Moose; muskox; ovibos moschatus; Rangifer tarandus; Taimyr
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.570.8822; http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/2002/JArchaeolSciMacPhee/2002JArchaeolSciMacPhee.pdf

This paper presents 75 new radiocarbon dates based on late Quaternary mammal remains recovered from eastern Taimyr Peninsula and adjacent parts of the northern Siberian lowlands, Russian Federation, including specimens of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), steppe bison (Bison priscus), muskox (Ovibos moschatus), moose (Alces alces), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), horse (Equus caballus) and wolf (Canis lupus). New evidence permits reanalysis of megafaunal extinction dynamics in the Asian high Arctic periphery. Increasingly, radiometric records of individual species show evidence of a gap at or near the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary (PHB). In the past, the PHB gap was regarded as significant only when actually terminal, i.e., when it marked the apparent ‘‘last’ ’ occurrence of a species (e.g., current ‘‘last’ ’ occurrence date for woolly mammoth in mainland Eurasia is 9600 yr ). However, for high Arctic populations of horses and muskoxen the gap marks an interruption rather than extinction, because their radiocarbon records resume, nearly simultaneously, much later in the Holocene. Taphonomic effects, C14 flux, and biased sampling are unlikely explanations for these hiatuses. A possible explanation is that the gap is the signature of an event, of