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Herbivore distribution throughout Africa is strongly linked to mean annual precipitation. We use that relationship to predict functional group composition of herbivore communities during the last glacial maximum (ca. 21 ka) on the now submerged Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP), South Africa. We used metabolic large herbivore biomass (MLHB) from 39 South African protected areas, in five functional groups (characterized by behavior and physiology). We examined how modern factors influenced MLHB and considered the effects of biome, annual rainfall, percentage winter rainfall, and protected area size. Overall, biome was the most important factor influencing the relationship between MLHB and rainfall. In general, MLHB increased with rainfall, but not for the grassland biome. Outside grasslands, most functional groups’ metabolic biomass increased with increasing rainfall, irrespective of biome, except for medium-sized social mixed feeder species in savanna and thicket. Protected area size was influential for medium-sized social mixed feeders and large browsers and rainfall influenced medium-sized social mixed feeders, offering some perspectives on spatial constraints on past large herbivore biomass densities. These results improve our understanding of the likely herbivore community composition and relative biomass structure on the PAP, an essential driver of how early humans utilized large mammals as a food resource.

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Throughout much of the Quaternary, lower sea levels in the southern Cape of South Africa exposed a different landscape to what we see today, the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP). The PAP was dominated by large-bodied and gregarious grazing species contrasting with the small-bodied predominantly solitary species we find in the region today. The distribution of these herbivores would likely have been driven by similar drivers we see in contemporary herbivore ecology. Importantly, the occurrence of early humans and their associated technology would have also influenced the probability of herbivores occurring in an area. Here we create a predictive model for large herbivores using probability of occurrence of functional grouping in relation to environmental drivers and humans. We show how early humans influenced the distribution of large herbivores on the PAP alongside other environmental drivers. In the fynbos biome, probability of occurrence was highest for the medium-sized social mixed feeders' functional group in the thicket for small non-social browsers, large browsers, and non-ruminants and in grasslands for water-dependent grazers. In our models, human influence affected functional groups to varying degrees but had the strongest effect on medium-sized social mixed feeders.

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