The UN estimates as many as one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.Īfter the spread of farming and significant population increases, it was European expansion that would be the next big blow to the planet’s biodiversity.
#The world after humans show driver#
Farming is the primary driver of destruction and, of all mammals on Earth, 96% are either livestock or humans. Fast forward to today and we are not just killing megafauna but destroying whole landscapes, often in just a few years. “Weirdly enough, I think the first biodiversity crisis was at the end of the last ice age, when early humans had slaughtered the megafauna and therefore they’d sort of run out of food, and that precipitated, in many places, a switch to agriculture,” he says.Īlthough the debate is far from settled, it appears ancient humans took thousands of years to wipe out species in a way modern humans would do in decades. People started farming in at least 14 different places, independently of each other, from about 10,500 years ago. Prof Mark Maslin, from University College London (UCL), suggests that the unsustainable hunting of megafauna may have been one of the driving forces that led humans to domesticate plants and animals. In all, more than 178 species of the world’s largest mammals are estimated to have been driven to extinction between 52,000 and 9,000BC.įor a long time, these extinctions were thought to be linked to natural changes in the environment – until 1966, when palaeontologist Paul S Martin put forward his controversial “ overkill hypothesis” that humans were responsible for the extinctions of megafauna, destroying the romantic vision of early humans living in harmony with nature.
In North America, giant beavers weighing the same as a fridge and an armadillo-like creature called a glyptodon, which was the size of a small car, existed until about 12,000 years ago, when they, too, went extinct. It lived in Australia until, along with many other megafauna, it went extinct 50,000 years ago. Take the case of Genyornis, one of the world’s heaviest birds, which was more than 2 metres tall and weighed in excess of 200kg. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is – unsurprisingly – patchy.
#The world after humans show full#
When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. T he story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old.
0 kommentar(er)
