730 Mammals (Late Quaternary), Extinctions of antiquitatis), woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), and musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) This stepwise sequence of change in temperate and boreal faunas of Eurasia is gradual compared with the sudden extinction of both cold- (woolly mammoths and woodland musk oxen) and warm-adapted species (tapir and jaguar) in North America Intriguing differences in the pattern of Old and New World extinction are best illustrated in the case of proboscideans Extinction of straight-tusked elephants did not begin until early in the last cold stage of the late Quaternary Extinct throughout their European range by 60,000 years ago (Stuart, 1991), Elephas persisted in Japan until 30,000 years ago or less The largest Holocene survivors in the megafauna of Japan were Sika deer (Cervus), wild boar (Sus), and black bear (Selenarctos) Although dwarf relatives of Elephas evidently did not survive on Mediterranean islands as late as the Holocene, as was once thought (Martin and Klein, 1984), mid-Holocene woolly mammoths have been found on Wrangel Island off Siberia, 6000 years younger than any other known mammothsFcontemporary with the Pharaohs The Akrotiri Aetokremnos bone cave, an epipaleolithic site on Cyprus, yielded dwarf straight-tusked elephants along with abundant bones of dwarf hippo The deposit is radiocarbon dated at 10,500 years old Just as Wrangel Island served as a refugium for the last of the boreal woolly mammoths, thousands of years after they were extinct throughout the rest of their range, Japan and Cyprus apparently sheltered the last populations of temperate Eurasian Elephas long after its extinction on the continent (Martin and Steadman, 1999) Unlike the slow pace of extinction of the Proboscidea in northern parts of Eurasia, in North America prior to an extinction spasm 10,000–11,000 yr bp the animals suffered no loss of taxa, no clear-cut reduction in range, and no apparent decline in numbers (see maps in Graham and Lundelius, 1994) Had American Proboscidea followed the Old World extinction pattern for elephants, the temperate elephant of midlatitudes, the Columbian mammoth, would have predeceased high-latitude extinction of woolly mammoths by tens of thousands of years while the order would endure in tropical America, represented by a living species Both ivory carvings and cave paintings depicted by Stone Age artists reveal their intimate knowledge of the anatomy and behavior of Old World woolly mammoths and many other animals Although field evidence of mammoth kills is scarce, low rates of increase of modern megaherbivores means that modern elephants, rhinoceros, and hippo would have been highly vulnerable to human predation (Owen-Smith, 1988) Even with governmental protection in this century, the future of surviving megaherbivores is by no means ensured The gradual decline of Eurasian mammoths could readily have resulted from a minimal amount of human hunting or interference, especially if younger age classes were targeted Although the nature of the association and its meaning in modeling insular faunal extinctions in the Mediterranean are uncertain, the record at Akrotiri Aetokremnos suggests a Paleolithic ‘‘commando raid’’ in which Stone Age hunters or foragers overran an island, slaughtered preferred prey (dwarf hippo, dwarf elephant, and endemic deer), did not find sufficient resources for a sustainable economy, and soon left with no other evidence of their passage besides the remarkably rich contents of one cave Possibly Crete, Ireland, Wrangel Island, and the Channel Islands of California also lost megafauna to commando raids that left scant evidence or at least none discovered to date Given the scarcity of convincing kill or processing sites on continents, the rarity of such features on offshore islands is not surprising Only in the remote Pacific such as on the low limestone islands in Tonga are extinct animals (bones of megapodes) abundantly associated with artifacts of the first colonists In other cases (Hawaii and Madagascar), such associations are rare or unknown (MacPhee, 1999) Africa has been held up to modelers of overkill as a conundrum If people are such effective exterminators, how did the African megafauna survive? However, the argument cuts two ways If late Pleistocene climatic change played a major role in triggering megafaunal extinctions elsewhere, how did so many large animals manage to survive in Africa and Asia, continents no more immune to Pleistocene climatic change than other corners of the globe? One reply to the conundrum is that in Africa and Asia there was sufficient time to evolve a balanced predator-prey relationship, perhaps with human populations locally suppressed by sleeping sickness and other endemic human diseases and on occasion by intertribal buffer zones (Martin and Klein, 1984) The extinction record in both Africa and Asia is so unlike that found elsewhere on the planet that important differences in historical biogeography and human ecology may be postulated The record of gradual human evolution and radiation confined to the Afro-Asian landmass, ending in the late Quaternary with explosive expansion of human colonists onto all other temperate landmasses, fits the model of a time transgressive overkill Oceanic Islands Late Quaternary losses were limited neither to continents nor to mammals They swept through oceanic islands For example, on the larger oceanic islands the extinction of large terrestrial vertebrates included flightless moas in New Zealand; gorilla-size extinct lemurs, extinct hippo, giant tortoises, and giant flightless birds such as Aepyornis in Madagascar; house cat to bear-size ground sloths in the West Indies; dwarf elephants and dwarf hippo on islands of the Mediterranean; and dwarf elephants and/or giant tortoises on oceanic islands beyond the continental shelf in southeastern Asia such as Timor, Flores, and Sulawesi In one unusual case, prehistoric extinction only 4000 years ago eliminated elephants (woolly mammoths) not from a deepwater island but from a shelf island, Wrangel, in the Arctic Ocean (Figure 2) With their discovery 25 years ago on Hawaii of a flightless goose (Thambetochen) and a flightless ibis (Apteribis), ornithologists Alexander Wetmore and Storrs Olson triggered the search for unknown extinctions on Pacific archipelagos In the following years, archeologists and paleoecologists began to uncover rich fossil faunas reflecting prehistoric (Holocene) extinctions During the past two decades their efforts on the Cooks, the Marquesas, the Kingdom of Tonga, and the Line Islands, to name a few examples from the South Pacific, have yielded many extinct species of small birds, especially flightless