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Understanding the population dynamics of megafauna that inhabited the mammoth steppe provides insights into the causes of extinctions during both the terminal Pleistocene and today. Our study area is Alaska's North Slope, a place where humans were rare when these extinctions occurred. After developing a statistical approach to remove the age artifacts caused by radiocarbon calibration from a large series of dated megafaunal bones, we compare the temporal patterns of bone abundance with climate records. Megafaunal abundance tracked ice age climate, peaking during transitions from cold to warm periods. These results suggest that a defining characteristic of the mammoth steppe was its temporal instability and imply that regional extinctions followed by population reestablishment from distant refugia were characteristic features of ice-age biogeography at high latitudes. It follows that long-distance dispersal was crucial for the long-term persistence of megafaunal species living in the Arctic. Such dispersal was only possible when their rapidly shifting range lands were geographically interconnected. The end of the last ice age was fatally unique because the geographic ranges of arctic megafauna became permanently fragmented after stable, interglacial climate engendered the spread of peatlands at the same time that rising sea level severed former dispersal routes.

The collapse of the steppe-tundra biome (mammoth steppe) at the end of the Pleistocene is used as an important example of topdown ecosystem cascades, where human hunting of keystone species led to profound changes in vegetation across high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Alternatively, it is argued that this biome transformation occurred through a bottom-up process, where climate-driven expansion of shrub tundra (Betula, Salix spp.) replaced the steppe-tundra vegetation that grazing megafauna taxa relied on. In eastern Beringia, these differing hypotheses remain largely untested, in part because the precise timing and spatial pattern of Late Pleistocene shrub expansion remains poorly resolved. This uncertainty is caused by chronological ambiguity in many lake sediment records, which typically rely on radiocarbon (14C) dates from bulk sediment or aquatic macrofossils--materials that are known to overestimate the age of sediment layers. Here, we reexamine Late Pleistocene pollen records for which 14C dating of terrestrial macrofossils is available and augment these data with 14C dates from arctic ground-squirrel middens and plant macrofossils. Comparing these paleovegetation data with a database of published 14C dates from megafauna remains, we find the postglacial expansion of shrub tundra preceded the regional extinctions of horse (Equus spp.) and mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and began during a period when the frequency of 14C dates indicates large grazers were abundant. These results are not consistent with a model of top-down ecosystem cascades and support the hypothesis that climate-driven habitat loss preceded and contributed to turnover in mammal communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]