York York , You don’t need to read the news or scroll through Instagram for long to stumble across the latest example of a rare and beautiful species that has gone extinct. Since AD1500, at least 705 vertebrate species and 571 plant species have died out. Humans have now appropriated over half of the Earth’s surface for farms and urban areas, and this is primarily to blame for these recent declines in global biodiversity.
But humans didn’t suddenly appear in the year 1500. Early humans were burning the African savannahs from about 400,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. There is evidence that Neanderthals altered the plants and landscapes of Europe about 125,000 years ago.
And while there is still some debate, humans were probably the decisive factor in the extinction of most of Earth’s once-widespread megafauna over the past 100,000 years. Then, about 12,000 years ago, the most recent ice age ended and a new geological unit of time, known as the Holocene, began. This marked a major shift in human-environment relationships, as people independently transitioned from foraging to farming in many different places around the world.
Whether this transition looked like rice paddies in China, wheat fields in the Levant or maize and squash production in Mesoamerica, humans were modifying the landscape more and more. Domesticated livestock soon followed in many places. All this had a surprising impact on biodiversity.
Our latest research shows farming and other human-driv.