Records for 15 large-bodied mammal species across 17,684 European Holocene archaeological sites

Records for 15 large-bodied mammal species across 17,684 European Holocene archaeological sites, associated with the publication "Anthropogenic predictors of varying Holocene occurrence for Europe’s large mammal fauna" (Ament et al., Biology Letters 2023).

Zooarchaeological records were obtained from published and unpublished literature, grey literature, museum and institute reports, online databases and personal communications, with data collection conducted until 2013 from all of these available sources. Data are derived with permission from “The Holocene History of the European Vertebrate Fauna” project, and the PhD thesis of Dr Jennifer Crees ("Dynamics of large mammal range shifts and extinction: evidence from the Holocene record of Europe", Imperial College London 2013).

A record is defined as the occurrence of a species within a stratigraphic layer (this can represent either a single occurrence or multiple occurrences within the same layer). Bones found within different dated stratigraphic layers from the same site are counted as separate records.