If climate change caused the ice age megafauna to go extinct then how did African megafauna survive?

"If climate change caused the ice age megafauna to go extinct then how did African megafauna survive?"

Big if. Also, but did they? The diversity of African megafauna we see today is certainly the least depleted assemblage, but it's not an intact one. Sub-Saharan Africa lost between 5% and 20% of its Pleistocene taxa, depending how you measure it - from the elephant Palaeloxodon iolensis and the giant buffalo 'Pelorovis' antiquus, through the giant warthog Metridiochoerus compactus and a whole loada' antelopes (e.g. Rusingoryx atopocranion - which are so cool, basically a modern Lambeosaurus with their hollow, honk-ey head crests. An antelope with a trumpet for a face!). It's a common misconception Africa escaped - it didn't, it just held on better, and for longer (but for who knows how long?). It's an interesting example, actually, against the otherwise largely anthropogenic-driven extinctions, and perhaps explains why they did indeed happen at all. Lots of big beasties in Africa died out not only well before the very last glacial maximum, but some also a million years before any evidence of Hominin consumpton of large animal tissue. To be fair, no evidence is not evidence of absence, so we can't rule out anthropogenic pressure outright, but we do know there was falling atmospheric CO2 at the time, and C4 grasslands were massively expanding - the browsing megafauna was therefore thinned out in a slow burn by, well, climate change. Nonetheless, I get your point though. The reality was that most of the Pleistocene extinctions around the end of the last glacial maximum were almost certainly driven by humans - albeit with some emphasis on us putting pressure on animal populations made already vulnerable by shifting environment. The megafauna sailed through about fifty-odd glacial-interglacial cycles during 'the ice age' - across some 2.6 million years - and then only died out at the last one. The most conspicuous thing that is different is the expansion of Hominins, and especially Homo sapiens out of Africa. There's a near-perfect inverse relationship between the depth of extinction severity on a landmass, and the order in which humans arrived: - Sub-Saharan Africa: 5-20% (hominins for millions of years) - Northern Eurasia: 29-35% (archaic hominins for a million or so years) - North America: 72% - South America: 83% - Australia: 88% - Madagascar and New Zealand: 100% (colonised last) It's undeniable extinction severity is tied strongly with human palaeogeography, and it's understandable why - as we spread, and further honed our technology, the species had increasingly little exposure to us, and didn't have time to play catch-up. The ones which survived were the ones that had evolved innate wariness to humans, and could better evade us given other biological constraints, such as body size and generation time (and even in those that did survive into the Holocene, genomic evidence shows inferred prehistoric declines in ~90% of them). There's limited evidence of more climate-associated pressure in Northern Eurasia, but no, the above dose-response curve remains the single most damning fact in the whole human-vs-climate debate (which is a false binary anyway, but hey-ho), and no climate-only model has a good explanation for why glacial-interglacial transitions would be lethal in inverse proportion to how long people have been around. The reality is going to be more nuanced; humans explain the largest chunk, and like the prior slow-burn Africa extinctions, climate modulates some regional timing and severity; ultimately with different taxa having different stories - the woolly rhino does indeed seem more climate-driven, but Australian diprotodont