large mammals disappeared at the end of the Rancholabrean period. Most of these animals were lost within the last 12,000 years. However, in the preceding one to two million years before the end of the Rancholabrean period, an estimated 13 genera of megafauna were lost. This may be attributed to a poor understanding of fauna that existed before to this period. To compare this rate of megafaunal loss with Africa, the differences between the earlier, middle and later Pleistocene faunal losses are less drastic to compare. In the first 1.5 million years 19 megafaunal genera were lost. Within the last 100,000 years 26 or more genera were lost. This rate of megafaunal extinction in Africa in the last 100,000 years was an estimated 20 times greater in magnitude as the losses that occurred within the preceding 1.5 million years. Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world with the highest amount of Pleistocene megafauna surviving to the present day. These surviving species include the African bush elephant, African forest elephant, black rhinoceros, white rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. All of these species maintained populations in sub-Saharan Africa even after many of them were extirpated from Eurasia during the early Holocene. This means that all of the largest herbivore genera present in Pleistocene Africa are still present today. Overall, estimates as to the proportion of Africa’s Quaternary megafauna which went extinct range from 5% to 18%, much lower than for all the other continents. Multiple reasons have been suggested by scientists as to why Africa apparently had a much milder experience during the Quaternary extinction. First, some have suggested that the Late Quaternary extinction has been comparatively less studied in Africa than in other regions. As a result of this lack of studying, there is little evidence that paleontologists are able to draw upon when trying to develop a timeline of extinctions in Sub-Saharan Africa. This hypothesis therefore also argues that further investigation into sites with Late Quaternary fossils in Sub-Saharan Africa will reveal previously-undiscovered extinct taxa of African megafauna. Other scientists have suggested an explanation for the relative lack of extinction among Africa’s Pleistocene megafauna which follows the overkill hypothesis as the cause of the Quaternary extinction. According to this hypothesis, many of the extinctions during this time period were due to overhunting by humans who had recently migrated to their continents. In sub-Saharan Africa, the megafauna species had evolved