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Significance Human activities have played an important role in driving biodiversity loss throughout history, but the nature of these dynamics remains unclear. Importantly, the role of cultural evolution is mostly ignored, despite strong societal changes over time worldwide. Here, we show that megafauna range contractions across China in the last 2 millennia have been dominated by the spread of farming and agricultural intensification, often associated with expansion of the Han culture, with little or no direct importance of climate change. Our findings demonstrate that cultural evolution is important for shaping the assembly of contemporary communities from historical regional species pools and has long overshadowed climate change in driving even broadscale biodiversity patterns.

Long-term effects of cultural filtering on megafauna species distributions across China