Mammalian fauna experienced dramatic changes during the late Quaternary (ca. since 50,000 yr BP) leading to large scale extirpation and extinction events and distribution shifts. Climatic change and anthropogenic pressure are the main causes considered for these events, but the exact contribution of each kind of process and the detailed scenarios for these changes are still difficult to establish and subject to hot debates. During the last two decades, new approaches augmented the field of palaeontological studies and yielded invaluable information relevant to understand these processes at an unprecedented resolution level. On the basis of clear palaeontological data, the recent contributions of three of these approaches will be discussed in this session: direct radiocarbon dating of fossil remains, palaeoecological reconstruction based on stable isotope tracking and palaeogenetic investigations (e.g., phylogeography and palaeogenomics).