Thanks for the comment! Wonder if you, or @Derek Shiller knows of any research on the number or proportion of extinctions caused by humans? Thinking it would be a useful number to use as a prior!
My impression is that it is very unclear. In the historical record, we see a lot of disappearances of species around when humans first arrived at an area, but it isn’t clear that humans always arrived before the extinctions occurred. Our understanding of human migration timing is imperfect. There were also other factors, such as temperature changes, that may have been sufficient for extinction (or at least significant depopulation). So I think the frequency of human-caused extinction is an open question. We shouldn’t be confident that it was relatively rare.
Thanks for the comment! Wonder if you, or @Derek Shiller knows of any research on the number or proportion of extinctions caused by humans? Thinking it would be a useful number to use as a prior!
My impression is that it is very unclear. In the historical record, we see a lot of disappearances of species around when humans first arrived at an area, but it isn’t clear that humans always arrived before the extinctions occurred. Our understanding of human migration timing is imperfect. There were also other factors, such as temperature changes, that may have been sufficient for extinction (or at least significant depopulation). So I think the frequency of human-caused extinction is an open question. We shouldn’t be confident that it was relatively rare.