Out in the cold ... Recent mass extinction events have been linked to rapid changes in the Earth’s climate. Source: Supplied

The paper published Friday in Science Express combines DNA analysis of fossils with detailed paleo-climate data from ice and sediment cores.

Lead author University of Adelaide Professor Alan Cooper found extinction events “staggered through time” across the northern hemisphere coincided with short, rapid warming events.

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Temperatures increased 4C to 16C over just a few decades and “lasted for hundreds to thousands of years”, causing “dramatic shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns”.

Animals struggled to cope and dispersed or died out, disappearing from regions such as Europe and North America, or Alaska and the Yukon, northwest Canada.

Source: Alan Cooper /Science Express / AAAS Source: Supplied

These warming events occurred throughout the late Pleistocene, 60,000 to 12,000 years ago, before the climate settled down. Then humans arrived and made the “final hit”.

“But it was climate change that had done all the damage, reduced the populations down to small sizes and in many cases wiped out the species from most of the planet, even before humans turned up,” Professor Cooper said, speaking from Wyoming, US, on fossil dig at Natural Trap Cave.

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The Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA said rather than being totally responsible for megafauna extinctions, humans had a “synergistic role”, exacerbating the impacts of climate change.

“Humans are certainly having an impact when they turn up,” he said.

“What we suggest is they are disrupting the ways in which populations are connected, so that when a population in an area becomes extinct, due to the climate shifts, it’s not possible for that population to be refounded by neighbouring populations, by individuals moving back into the vacant space,” he said.

Coup de grace ... Hunting by humans destroyed Wooly Mammoth populations already heavily depleted by rapid-changing climates. Source: Supplied

“Humans are having their impacts by interrupting that process and stopping areas that have become vacant for climatic reasons from being filled back up. That way these vacant areas can start getting bigger and bigger and start causing whole ecosystem changes.”

He warned current human-induced global warming would be even worse for animals because in most cases “moving is no longer an option”.

“When you add the modern addition of human pressures and fragmenting of the environment to the rapid changes brought by global warming, it raises serious concerns about the future of our environment,” he said.

@ClarePeddie