An arid-adapted middle Pleistocene vertebrate fauna from south-central Australia.

How well the ecology, zoogeography and evolution of modern biotas is understood depends substantially on knowledge of the Pleistocene. Australia has one of the most distinctive, but least understood, Pleistocene faunas. Records from the western half of the continent are especially rare. Here we report on a diverse and exceptionally well preserved middle Pleistocene vertebrate assemblage from caves beneath the arid, treeless Nullarbor plain of south-central Australia. Many taxa are represented by whole skeletons, which together serve as a template for identifying fragmentary, hitherto indeterminate, remains collected previously from Pleistocene sites across southern Australia. A remarkable eight of the 23 Nullarbor kangaroos are new, including two tree-kangaroos. The diverse herbivore assemblage implies substantially greater floristic diversity than that of the modern shrub steppe, but all other faunal and stable-isotope data indicate that the climate was very similar to today. Because the 21 Nullarbor species that did not survive the Pleistocene were well adapted to dry conditions, climate change (specifically, increased aridity) is unlikely to have been significant in their extinction.

Pleistocene human footprints from the Willandra Lakes, Southeastern Australia.

Human and other hominid fossil footprints provide rare but important insights into anatomy and behavior. Here we report recently discovered fossil trackways of human footprints from the Willandra Lakes region of western New South Wales, Australia. Optically dated to between 19-23 ka and consisting of at least 124 prints, the trackways form the largest collection of Pleistocene human footprints in the world. The prints were made by adults, adolescents, and children traversing the moist surface of an ephemeral soak. This site offers a unique glimpse of humans living in the arid inland of Australia at the height of the last glacial period.

Last Glacial Maximum ages for robust humans at Kow Swamp, southern Australia.

The Kow Swamp people are a fossil population of robust modern humans. We report optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages on sediments from Kow Swamp that are at odds with radiocarbon ages obtained previously for the site. The calibrated 14C ages place the Kow Swamp people in the period 15-9 ka. Our single aliquot OSL ages suggest that they lived around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) between 22 and 19 ka. An LGM age for the Kow Swamp people is supported by palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. The shoreline silt, in which most of them were interred, was deposited by high lake levels between 26 and 19 ka. Few robust people were left after 19 ka when a sand lunette formed. Climate change may explain the demise of this unusual genetic population.