Dating the first historic extirpation of a whale species: The demise of the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus) in the eastern North Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The grey whale ( Eschrichtius robustus ), once present in both the eastern and western North Atlantic, is the only whale species to have been extirpated from an ocean in historical times. For several centuries the species has been confined to the North Pacific, with the exception of isolated vagrants in recent decades that may be harbingers of its return to the Atlantic. Yet the chronology and causation of the past Atlantic extirpation have been unclear. A new radiocarbon dating programme applied as part of this study, including archaeological and palaeontological grey whale specimens from mainly European contexts, reveals the past spatiotemporal range of the species in the eastern North Atlantic as inferred from subfossil evidence. The new radiocarbon evidence dates the extirpation to between the mid twelfth and mid fourteenth centuries CE, earlier than previously assumed and a period of pre-industrial, yet extensive, European whaling activity undertaken by several medieval societies along the likely migration route of this coastal species. Pre-modern whaling may thus have contributed to this first anthropogenically driven extirpation of a whale species from an ocean and, by extension, eliminated the grey whale's distinctive and important ecosystem services, such as sediment reworking and near-coastal translocation of nutrients, from the eastern North Atlantic. • Radiocarbon dating efforts on European grey whale specimens were optimized. • Newly identified archaeological and paleontological grey whale specimens were dated. • Previously radiocarbon dated grey whale specimens were redated to assess their accuracy. • Grey whales were extirpated from the eastern North Atlantic three to five centuries earlier than previously thought. • Medieval whaling contributed to the grey whale's extirpation from European waters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".