The Caribbean is one of the world’s largest seas, stretching over 1700 km from Florida to Panama, and between 2300 and 2800 km from Central America in the west to the Lesser Antilles archipelago

in the east. It is approximately the same size as the Mediterranean at over 2.75 million km2 and contains dozens of islands of varying size, ranging from Cuba (the largest at around 111,000 km2) to hundreds of smaller sand islets and cays (keys), with a total land area of approximately 230,000 km2. As noted by Conservation International, see more the Caribbean is distinguished for its high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Of the 13,000 known plant species, a remarkable 6500 are single-island endemics, with more than 200 plant genera and one plant family, which are found nowhere else. Of the more than 600 bird species recorded, over 25% of which are endemic, 13 are extinct and dozens more are threatened. While many island regions have an impoverished mammalian biota, the Caribbean is home to more than 90 mammal species, nearly half of which are endemic, including many species of rodents such as rare Raf activation giant shrews and 20 species of Capromyidae (hutia). The reptilian and amphibian fauna are also diverse, with almost 95% of the former’s 500 recorded

species being endemic. All 170 species of frogs are also endemic, many to single islands. In addition, more than 1500 species of fish, 25 coral genera, 630+ mollusc species, and numerous crustaceans, sea mammals, echinoderms, and sponges have been recorded. Many of these are threatened or have already OSBPL9 been driven to extinction in historic times—the Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis), the region’s only endemic pinniped, was declared extinct in 1996 after having not been seen in four decades as a result of overhunting. Manatees (Trichechus manatus) and sea turtles are threatened as

well, and the recent introduction of the non-native, rapidly spreading, and voracious lionfish (Pterois volitans and Pterois miles) is also causing widespread ecological damage ( Schofield, 2009 and Albins and Hixon, 2011). A plethora of evidence from the Caribbean demonstrates a high level of biodiversity that has been transformed since European contact, but scholars are only now beginning to grasp how humans affected these island environments prehistorically (Fig. 1). Archeological evidence, though ephemeral in many places, suggests that hunter-gatherers (termed the “Lithic” or Ortoiroid) settled the Greater Antilles first ca. 5000–3000 B.C., though it is debated whether they came from Mesoamerica (Keegan, 2000 and Wilson et al., 1998) or South America (Callaghan, 2003).