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The iconic Cape buffalo has experienced several documented population declines in recent history. These declines have been largely attributed to the late 19th century rinderpest pandemic. However, the effect of the rinderpest pandemic on their genetic diversity remains contentious, and other factors that have potentially affected this diversity include environmental changes during the Pleistocene, range expansions and recent human activity. Motivated by this, we present analyses of whole genome sequencing data from 59 individuals from across the Cape buffalo range to assess present‐day levels of genome‐wide genetic diversity and what factors have influenced these levels. We found that the Cape buffalo has high average heterozygosity overall (0.40%), with the two southernmost populations having significantly lower heterozygosity levels (0.33% and 0.29%) on par with that of the domesticated water buffalo (0.29%). Interestingly, we found that these lower levels are probably due to recent inbreeding (average fraction of runs of homozygosity 23.7% and 19.9%) rather than factors further back in time during the Pleistocene. Moreover, detailed investigations of recent demographic history show that events across the past three centuries were the main drivers of the exceptional loss of genetic diversity in the southernmost populations, coincident with the onset of colonialism in the southern extreme of the Cape buffalo range. Hence, our results add to the growing body of studies suggesting that multiple recent human‐mediated impacts during the colonial period caused massive losses of large mammal abundance in southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is unique among the continents in having maintained an extraordinarily diverse and prolific megafauna spanning the Pleistocene-Holocene epochs. Little is known about the historical dynamics of this community and even less about the reasons for its unique persistence to modern times. We sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes from 43 Cape buffalo ( Syncerus caffer caffer) to infer the demographic history of this large mammal. A combination of Bayesian skyline plots, simulations and Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) were used to distinguish population size dynamics from the confounding effect of population structure and identify the most probable demographic scenario. Our analyses revealed a late Pleistocene expansion phase concurrent with the human expansion between 80 000 and 10 000 years ago, refuting an adverse ecological effect of Palaeolithic humans on this quarry species, but also showed that the buffalo subsequently declined during the Holocene. The distinct two-phased dynamic inferred here suggests that a major ecological transition occurred in the Holocene. The timing of this transition coincides with the onset of drier conditions throughout tropical Africa following the Holocene Optimum (∼9000-5000 years ago), but also with the explosive growth in human population size associated with the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic cultural stage. We evaluate each of these possible causal factors and their potential impact on the African megafauna, providing the first systematic assessment of megafauna dynamics on the only continent where large mammals remain abundant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Cape Buffalo Mitogenomics Reveals a Holocene Shift in the African Human-Megafauna Dynaimcs," that was published in a previous issue, is presented.