This award will support a seminar, "Quaternary Extinctions," organized jointly by Drs. Richard G. Klein of the University of Chicago, Richard Wright of the University of Sydney, Australia and Atholl J. Anderson of the University of Otago, New Zealand. Twelve participants from the U.S. will join 12 scientists from Australia and three from New Zealand between 6 and 11 August 1988 at the University of Sydney. The purpose of the seminar is to understand why massive faunal extinctions occurred in both Australia and the Americas near the end of the Pleistocene. Participants will discuss: (1) the chronology of extinctions, as revealed by geomorphic or other proxy evidence and especially by radiocarbon dating; and (2) the archeological, paleobiological, geochemical, and geomorphic evidence for a coincidence between extinctions and climatic change or between extinctions and important events in human prehistory, including the first appearance of people in the Americas and Australia. A wave of bird extinctions that swept the Pacific in late prehistoric times provides an interesting potential analog for the late Pleistocene extinction events, and its pertinence will be addressed particularly by New Zealand participants. This joint U.S.-Australia-New Zealand seminar will enable the first in-depth comparison between the American and Australian extinction events. To date, American and Australian/New Zealand scholars working on this question have, for the most part, worked in isolation from one another. Interregional comparisons will undoubtedly provide new insights as to whether the extinction of large numbers of animal species near the end of the Pleistocene resulted primarily from human activity or from climatic change.
