Data from: Climate warming and humans played different roles in triggering late Quaternary extinctions in east and west Eurasia

Climate change and humans are proposed as the two key drivers of total extinction of many large mammals in the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, but disentangling their relative roles remains challenging due to lack of quantitative evaluation of human impact and climate-driven distribution changes on extinctions of these large mammals in a continuous temporal-spatial dimension. Here, our analyses showed that temperature had significant effects on mammoth (genus Mammuthus), rhinoceros (Rhinocerotidae), horse (Equidae), and deer (Cervidae); rapid global warming was the predominant factor in driving total extinction of mammoths and rhinos in frigid zones from Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. Humans showed significant and negative effects on local extinctions of the four mammalian taxa, and were the predominant factors in causing final or massive extinction of rhinos, and horses. Deer survived both rapid climate warming and extensive human impacts. Our study indicates that both the speeds of current climate warming and range shift of species are much faster than those from the late Pleistocene to Holocene. Our results provide new insight into the extinction of late Quaternary megafauna by demonstrating taxon-, period- and region-specific differences in extinction drivers of climate change and human disturbances, and some implications about the extinction risk of animals by recent and on-going climate warming.