Supplementary material from "Small populations of palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction"

The hypothesised drivers of megafauna extinctions in the late Quaternary have wavered between human over-exploitation and environmental change. Most studies still rely on comparing the estimated timing of initial human arrival into naïve ecosystems and inferred dates of megafauna extinctions. While some models have tested the susceptibility of megafauna to theoretical offtake rates, none has explicitly linked human energetic needs, prey choice, and hunting efficiency to examine the plausibility of human-driven extinctions. Cyprus in the terminal Pleistocene is an ideal test case because of its late human settlement (~ 14.2 ka–13.2 ka), small area (~ 11,000 km2), and low megafauna diversity (2 species). We developed stochastic models of megafauna population dynamics, with offtake dictated by human energetic requirements, prey choice, and hunting-efficiency functions to test whether the human population could have caused the extinction of dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minor) and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes). Our models reveal not only that the estimated human population sizes (N = 3,000–7,000) could have easily driven both species to extinction within < 1,000 years, the model predictions match the observed, Signor-Lipps-corrected sequence of megafauna extinctions (P. minor ~ 12 ka–11.1 ka, followed by P. cypriotes ~ 10.3 ka–9.1 ka).