Vertebrate fossils collected from a limestone fissure filling BP, at Burma Quarry on Antigua, Lesser Antilles, are associated with radiocarbon dates ranging from 4300±150 to 2560±70 years BP, contemporaneous with the earliest aboriginal human occupation of the island. Four Amerindian lithic artifacts (two blades and two flakes) were collected within the same sediments. Two taxa of invertebrates and ten of vertebrates from Burma Quarry are either completely extinct or have not been recorded previously from Antigua. These species, which represent more than one-third of the total number of species represented as fossils, include the land crabs Cardisoma and Gecarcinus, the lizard Leiocephalus cuneus, the snakes Alsophis antillensis and an uncertain genus, possibly Boidae, the birds Puffinus lherminieri, Poliolimnas flaviventer, and Cinclocerthia ruficauda, the bats Pteronotus parnellii, Mormoops blainvillei, and Phyllonycteris major, and a rodent (Oryzomyini sp.). The extinction of these vertebrates occurred well after any major climatic changes of the late Pleistocene and are best attributed to the environmental influences of man over the past several millennia. Such biotic alterations have affected patterns of distribution and species diversity throughout the West Indies and other island groups. The faunal distinctions between the Greater and Lesser Antilles have been exaggerated by late Holocene extinctions in the northern Lesser Antilles. Ecological and biogeographical studies in the West Indies that consider only the historically known fauna are likely to be based upon data that do not completely reflect natural events.
