and St. Paul Island) (Guthrie, 2004; AJ Stuart et al., 2004). In central North America, extinctions corresponded with the second Eurasia–Beringia pulse, starting at 15.6 kyr B.P. and concentrating between 13.5 and 11.5 kyr B.P. (Koch and Barnosky, 2006; Waters and Stafford, 2007). In South America, the extinction chronology is not well worked out, but growing evidence points to a slightly younger extinction episode, between 12 and 8 kyr B.P. (Hubbe et al., 2007).

Extinction intensity varied by continent, with Australia, South America, and North America hard-hit, losing 88% (14 extinct, 2 surviving), 83% (48 globally extinct, 2 extinct on the continent, 10 surviving), and 72% (28 globally extinct, 6 extinct on the continent, 13 surviving), respectively, of their megafauna mammal genera. Eurasia lost only 35% of its genera (4 globally extinct, 5 extinct on the continent, 17 surviving). Africa was little affected, with only 21% loss (7 globally extinct, 3 extinct on the continent, 38 surviving), including at least three Holocene extinctions.

Humans evolved in Africa, and hominins have been interacting there with megafauna longer than anywhere else. Insofar as they are dated, there is no correlation between human arrival or climate change for the few African extinctions. In general, extinctions in Australia intensified within a few thousand years of human arrival ≈50 kyr B.P. but did not correspond with unusual climate change. Extinctions in northern Eurasia corresponded in time with the first arrival and population expansions of H. sapiens, but both pulses also were concentrated in a time of dramatic climate change, the first pulse at the cooling into the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the second pulse at the rapid fluctuation of YD cooling followed by Holocene warming (Barnosky et al., 2004; Koch and Barnosky, 2006). Other species of Homo had been interacting with the megafauna for at least 400,000 years without significant extinctions before H. sapiens arrived. In Alaska and the Yukon, the first pulse of extinctions corresponded with LGM cooling but in the absence of significant human presence; the second pulse coincided with humans crossing the Bering Land Bridge and with the YD and Holocene climatic events. In central North America, extinction was sudden and fast, coinciding with the first entry of Clovis hunters, the YD–Holocene climatic transition, and the purported comet explosion. In South America, humans were already present by 14.6 kyr B.P., megafauna did not start going extinct until Holocene warming commenced some 11 kyr B.P., and species of ground sloths, saber cats, glyptodonts, and horses have seemingly reliable radiocarbon dates as young as 8 kyr B.P. (Hubbe et al., 2007).

Few islands ever had non-human megafauna sensu stricto. That, and the fact that even human biomass of islands is very small compared with the continents, caused me not to consider them in this analysis. However, it is important to note that, on nearly every island where humans have