This sounds to me like an understatement. Before homo sapiens, most of the world had the biodiversity of charismatic megafauna we still see today in Africa. 15,000 years ago, North America had mammoths, ground sloths, glypodonts, giant camels, and a whole bunch of other things. Humans may not have been involved in all of those extinctions, but it is a good guess they had something to do with many. It is even more plausible that we caused the extinction of every other homo species. There were a few that had been doing reasonably well until we expanded into their areas.
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.
Humans have caused the extinction of some species. And chickens are typically disempowered due to the actions of humans.
This sounds to me like an understatement. Before homo sapiens, most of the world had the biodiversity of charismatic megafauna we still see today in Africa. 15,000 years ago, North America had mammoths, ground sloths, glypodonts, giant camels, and a whole bunch of other things. Humans may not have been involved in all of those extinctions, but it is a good guess they had something to do with many. It is even more plausible that we caused the extinction of every other homo species. There were a few that had been doing reasonably well until we expanded into their areas.
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.