Reply to Westaway and Lyman: Emus, dingoes, and archaeology’s role in conservation biology

In a curious comment on our PNAS Perspective (1), Westaway and Lyman (2) offer two Australian zooarchaeological case studies—one involving eggshells and the other dingoes—that they argue undercut one of our main points: that archaeological data and deep time perspectives have much to offer conservation biology. Neither example provides a specific substantive critique of our perspective: there are no dingoes in our article (1), no eggshells, and we mention the long and rich record of human management and alteration of Australian environments only briefly. Nor do we suggest that all archaeological assemblages can effectively inform current conservation biology efforts. Such datasets obviously vary in their quality …