We report 95 vertebrate taxa (13 fishes, 11 reptiles, 63 birds, 8 mammals) from late Pleistocene bone deposits in Sawmill Sink, Abaco, The Bahamas. The >5,000 fossils were recovered by scuba divers on ledges at depths of 27-35 m below sea level. Of the 95 species, 39 (41%) no longer occur on Abaco (4 reptiles, 31 birds, 4 mammals). We estimate that 17 of the 39 losses (all of them birds) are linked to changes during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) (∼15-9 ka) in climate (becoming more warm and moist), habitat (expansion of broadleaf forest at the expense of pine woodland), sea level (rising from −80 m to nearly modern levels), and island area (receding from ∼17,000 km 2 to 1,214 km 2 ). The remaining 22 losses likely are related to the presence of humans on Abaco for the past 1,000 y. Thus, the late Holocene arrival of people probably depleted more populations than the dramatic physical and biological changes associated with the PHT.vertebrates | fossils | island | extinction | Pleistocene
We report an intertidal, bone-rich peat deposit on the windward (Atlantic Ocean) coast of Abaco, The Bahamas. The age of the Gilpin Point peat ( c. 950–900 cal. yr BP) is based on five overlapping radiocarbon dates (one each from single pieces of wood of buttonwood Conocarpus erectus and sabal palm Sabal palmetto, and single bones of the Cuban crocodile Crocodylus rhombifer, Albury’s tortoise Chelonoidis alburyorum, and green turtle Chelonia mydas). The short time interval represented by the charcoal-rich peat suggests rapid sedimentation following initial anthropogenic fires on Abaco. The site’s diverse snail assemblage is dominated by terrestrial and freshwater species. The peat is exposed today only during exceptionally low tides, suggesting a lower sea level at the time of deposition as well as a degrading shoreline during the past millennium. Fossils from Gilpin Point represent a late-Holocene vertebrate community at the time of first human presence; only 10 of the 17 identified species of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals still live on Abaco. Numerous unhealed bite marks on the inside of the thick carapaces of the green turtle attest to consumption by Cuban crocodiles, which probably scavenged turtles butchered by humans. This concept, along with the dense concentration of bones in the peat, and charring on some bones of the green turtle and Abaco tortoise, suggests a cultural origin of the bone deposit at Gilpin Point, where the only Amerindian artifact recovered thus far is a shell bead.
We report eight new accelerator-mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates performed directly on individual bones of extirpated species from Crooked Island, The Bahamas. Three dates from the hutia (Geocapromys ingrahami), recovered from a culturally derived bone assemblage in , all broadly overlap from AD 1450 to 1620, which encompasses the time of first European contact with the Lucayan on Crooked Island (AD 1492). Marine fish and hutia dominate the bone assemblage at McKay's Bluff Cave, shedding light on vertebrate consumption by the Lucayans just before their demise. A fourth AMS 14 C date on a hutia bone, from a non-cultural surface context in Crossbed Cave (site CR-25), is similar (AD 1465 to 1645) to those from McKay's Bluff Cave. From Pittstown Landing (site CR-14), an open coastal archaeological site, a femur of the Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) yielded an AMS 14 C date of AD ∼1050-1250, which is early in the Lucayan cultural sequence. From a humerus in a non-cultural surface context in 1702 Cave (site
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.