DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0145600 Terrestrial ecosystems have continuously evolved throughout the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, deeply affected by both progressive environmental and climatic modifications, as well as by abrupt and large climatic changes such as the Heinrich or Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Yet, the impacts of these different events on terrestrial mammalian communities are poorly known, as is the role played by potential refugia on geographical species distributions. This study examines community changes in rodents of southwestern France between 50 and 10 ky BP by integrating 94 dated faunal assemblages coming from 37 archaeological sites. This work reveals that faunal distributions were modified in response to abrupt and brief climatic events, such as Heinrich events, without actually modifying the rodent community on a regional scale. However, the succession of events which operated between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene gradually led to establishing a new rodent community at the regional scale, with intermediate communities occurring between the Bolling and the Allerod.
| File | Pages | Size | Access | |
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Publisher's official version | 25 | 3 Mo | ||
S1_Fig. The line is the regression line obtained using the Reduced Major Axis method, which was also used to calculate the time-intervals reported in S2 Table. | 1 | 68 Ko | ||
S2_Fig. Rodent species are the following: the garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus), the fat dormouse (Glis glis), the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) | 1 | 166 Ko | ||
S1_Table. Dates are calibrated at 2σ (95.4%) using OxCal 4.2 and calibration curve IntCal13 [64]. | 8 | 109 Ko | ||
S2_Table. Time-intervals defined with their standard errors as well as the number of stratigraphic units that cross over them. | 2 | 37 Ko | ||
S3_Table. Number of stratigraphic units in which each species is present for each time-interval. | 2 | 92 Ko |
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