Figure 13.

Africa and South America have very different physical geographies, which may have contributed to their different histories of megafaunal extinction. Africa is unique in having extensive dryland regions lying on both sides of the Equator, which are sensitive to major, episodic shifts in vegetation caused by repeated, millennial‐scale climate changes that have maintained extensive plaid landscapes during the Holocene. By contrast, South America is only 60% the size of Africa, lacks arid zones of comparable size, and has a large fraction of its total area lying at higher latitudes. Compilations of Köppen–Geiger climate zones by Peel et al. (2007).