The Earth has experienced several mass extinction events in its history, the most famous of which is the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, which ended the reign of the dinosaurs.
Since the beginning of the Holocene, around 11,650 years ago, another mass extinction has taken place, the sixth in the history of our planet, and by far the fastest of all.
It began towards the end of the last glaciation, with the disappearance of the large terrestrial mammals constituting the megafauna.
The most emblematic of these animals were the woolly mammoth, the last specimens of which became extinct around 4,000 years ago, the saber-toothed tiger, which is thought to have disappeared from the American continent around 10,000 years ago, and the woolly rhinoceros. , who lived in Europe and northern Asia and died out around the same time.
The islands, lands of dazzling extinctions
If climate change seems responsible for the disappearance of some of these animals, or may have weakened the populations of some others, humans are clearly implicated in many cases.
During prehistory and protohistory, men hunted all kinds of large herbivores and carnivores and cut down forests to develop agriculture.
They caused or precipitated the extinction of many land mammals, such as the lion and the cave bear, or the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.
In many regions of the world, the arrival and proliferation of humans coincide with the disappearance of species that they knew and hunted, as evidenced by testimonies and bones found in places of residence or worship.
However, things really accelerated later, when people reached a critical population level and perfected their tools and techniques for hunting, fishing and forest destruction, as well as their means of transport.
When navigation made it possible to colonize isolated islands, the capacity of men to decimate animal species became particularly evident, and the rate of extinctions accelerated.
Almost all of Madagascar's megafauna thus disappeared when humans arrived 2,000 years ago;
a dozen giant ratite birds were eradicated shortly after the arrival of Polynesians in New Zealand around 1500;
several giant tortoises and many birds of the Mascarene Islands, including the famous dodos, no longer existed shortly after the colonization of these lands.
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Hunting, invasive species and new viruses
Hunting, whether for food, clothing or getting rid of so-called harmful species, is not the only cause of these extinctions: very often, especially in the case of ground-nesting birds, these are invasive species brought by humans (such as their dogs or unintentionally transported rats) which are responsible for their disappearance.
The introduction of new viruses also played a role.
Since the industrial revolution, but even more so since the 1950s, the rate of disappearances has accelerated further and now also has other causes, such as pollution, global warming, or the destruction of natural areas until then. inaccessible, for mining, trade in precious woods, or the construction of energy infrastructure, among others.
It is estimated today that more than 26,000 animal or plant species disappear each year.
And if nothing is done to reverse this trend, more than half of the species currently living on Earth will have disappeared by the end of the century.
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