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The GABI in Southern South America

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The Great American Biotic Interchange

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Earth System Sciences ((BRIEFSEARTHSYST))

Abstract

The Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) between North and South America is one of the most important events in the history of land mammals. The interchange occurred in several phases during more than nine million years. We here analyze the chronology and dynamics of the GABI, the evolution of some South American mammalian groups through time, and the Quaternary mammalian extinctions. As the GABI was a complex process, we divide it into ProtoGABI and GABI 1 to 4. In our concept, the extinction of the megafauna by the gatherer/hunters that entered South American during the latest Pleistocene is a part of the GABI. The putative scarce frequency of extinct mammals in archeological sites is discussed. The evolutive relevance of the GABI is reflected in that half of the species living in South America had a North American ancestry. A final process, not included in the GABI, is the remarkable alteration of ecosystems by modern man. Presently, the composition and distribution of almost all autochthonous land mammal faunas are changing dramatically. Moreover, frequently they are replaced with domesticated and/or wild exotic species.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. División Paleontología Vertebrados, Museo de La Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, UNLP, Paseo del Bosque s/n°, B1900FWA, La Plata, Argentina

    Alberto Luis Cione, Germán Mariano Gasparini, Esteban Soibelzon, Leopoldo Héctor Soibelzon & Eduardo Pedro Tonni

Authors
  1. Alberto Luis Cione
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  2. Germán Mariano Gasparini
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  3. Esteban Soibelzon
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  4. Leopoldo Héctor Soibelzon
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  5. Eduardo Pedro Tonni
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Correspondence to Alberto Luis Cione .

Epilogue

Epilogue

The first authors that considered the interchange between the Americas were Wallace, Ameghino, and few others as early as the second half of 19th. Notwithstanding the remarkable work done by thousands of paleontologists, zoologists, botanists, geologists, and professionals of other disciplines, we are far from having a precise panorama about one of the most important event in the history of mammals.

However, we are confident that more complete survey of mammal-bearing units in southern South America as well as the discovering others in the central and northern Andes and Central America will give us the factual evidence for proposing, confirming, or rejecting many hypotheses. Moreover, the expanding molecular studies will provide minimum age for the origin of many endemic clades of North American families whose first appearance is not adequately explained.

In this book, we consider the extinction of megafauna in South America as a part of GABI. Several paleontologists (including the authors of this book) are commited with the study of the processes that modified for ever the composition and distribution of land mammals in South America. The appearance of hunter–gatherers at the end of the Pleistocene occasioned the spectacular extinction of megafauna. However, this process is being completed by modern man. For this, research about recent distribution of vertebrates in South America has to be accelerated. During the last part of twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrestrial and aquatic environments changed radically because modern human activities occasioned extinction, pseudoextinction, and alteration of distribution of many mammals. This disruption might make conventional and molecular studies about historical patterns and relationships between different lineages extremely difficult. However, fossils are still in the rocks. They are waiting for us to find them, unearth them, and make them drops of light for explaining the origin of a treasure in danger: the richest land mammal fauna of the world.

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Cione, A.L., Gasparini, G.M., Soibelzon, E., Soibelzon, L.H., Tonni, E.P. (2015). The GABI in Southern South America. In: The Great American Biotic Interchange. SpringerBriefs in Earth System Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9792-4_3

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