Inspired by talk of extinct elephants in this thread.
What was the first animal species driven to extinction wholly or mainly through the actions of mankind?
Cave bear, Mastodon, Giant ground sloth, sabre toothed cats, terror birds of australia? I think you’ll have to go back a long way into prehistory to find your answer.
Yeah, it’s not really a question with any clear answer. There were probably hundreds of thousands of species that vanished within 1000 years of humans arriving in Australia around 50, 000 years ago, but it’s still a matter of debate which if any of them can actually be attributed to human interference.
The problem is that it’s extremely uncommon for any species to vanish for one incontrovertible reason. Usually it’s a combination of multiple factors, some anthropogenic and some natural. At what stage can we say that it’s “wholly or mainly through the actions of mankind”? In the case of Australia for example humans arrived, animals diminished in range, human activities altered the environment further, natural climate change then followed at which point it becomes effectively impossible to separate human driven extinctions from the natural extinctions. There can be little doubt that humans caused at least some extinctions, but how do you define which one precisely.
What you really need to do Pete is clearly define your criteria for “wholly or mainly through the actions of mankind”. Do we need to have incontrovertible evidence that a species would still exists if humans had never evolved, in which case it’s hard to think of any candidates at all. Or do we just need a reasonable correlation between the arrival of humanity and the extinction of the species?
The crude answer to the simple OP is that there’s been five extinctions - the greatest being the Permian extinction.
However, that’s mass extinctions. We’ll never know what was the first extinction of a species due to homo sapiens, because we have no way of knowing what was lost. (Put it this way - we’ve little idea about the Dodo, and that’s a 100th of the age of man. What other things have vanished in that time?)
Moa {giant flightless birds, akin to emu’s and cassowaries} were rendered extinct in pre-European NZ, after the Maori arrived about a thousand years ago {archaeologists aren’t sure of the exact date} and ate them all.
Comparitively recent, on a Western time-scale, but probably fairly early in terms of human-inflicted extinctions. Other species {mostly birds, since that’s pretty much all there was in pre-human NZ, barring lizards, frogs, bugs and bats} also disappeared around the same time, due to loss of habitat and non-human predation.
However, as Maori had an oral culture, no-one is sure exactly when they finally vanished - they MAY have still been around at the time of the first European contact in 1642. There have been reported sightings up to the present day, but they’re almost certainly hoaxes.
Not really. As I pointd out we’ve got many such extinctions going back around 50, 000 years just across the pond.
There have been well over five extinctions, and possibly even more than five mass extinctions (depending on who you ask), throughout geological time. The so-called “big five” are the greatest mass extinctions (in terms of percentage of species or families lost), not the only ones.
The first species? We’ll never know, of course, but it could have been* H. neanderthalensis*!
True, but my point was that extinctions in NZ occurred within historic, albeit unwritten historic, time - while Europe was between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance: I guess we’d count them as relatively late, yet pre-modern {for the sake of argument, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, when messing up the planet really moved into gear} extinctions; as opposed to Australian extinctions, which we’d have to count as prehistoric.
Our extinctions were late on a historic time-scale, yet early when it comes to exterminating entire species. They also deal fairly effectively with Rousseauan notions of “primitive” {I know, a very loaded word - take it to mean technologically unsophisticated} peoples living in harmony with nature. However, that’s a subject probably best left to another thread.
I still don’t get it. They occurred 40, 000+ years later than other known extinctions, I can’t see how they can be called early.
Not that it matters.
I suppose my point is that most people are accustomed to thinking of extinctions incontravertibly caused by humans as a historically recent {say, from the 17th century on, accelerating considerably in the 19th and 20th centuries} and predominantly Western-inspired phenomenon. Using those criteria, NZ extinctions count, by many people’s standards, as at least earlier than most. I realise those standards are probably flawed in not counting human-inspired prehistoric extinctions, but then no one at the time made a note of them, having yet to invent writing.
Middlecase: Extinctions in the 19th century, and especially the 20th century, have taken place mostly by habitat depletion; human activity has destroyed all the places where the species can live, thus indirectly causing its extinction. Earlier extinctions, such as the dodo and passenger pigeon, were caused directly by human activities such as hunting. It’s easier to say that a species was incontrovertibly made extinct by human activity when it’s activity of the latter type, rather than habitat destruction, particularly because habitat destruction can also occur by natural processes.
Though the OP specifies animal species, there are also plants that have been made extinct by human activity. One is silphium, a giant relative of fennel much adored by the Romans. It grew only in a small area of modern-day Libya, and it was in such high demand by the Romans that it became extinct. The idea that animals that grazed on silphium would yield better-tasting meat can’t have helped, though desertification may have also been a factor, and isn’t something the Romans could have caused.
John Mace: Some people would prefer Homo sapiens neandertalensis, regarding Neandertals as a subspecies of the species to which modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, also belongs. This is controversial, though, and I’m not sure which name is used by a majority of current researchers.
The majority use H. neanderthalensis. The subspecies designation was popular 30 years or so ago, but not much anymore. Milford Wolpoff and the other “Multiregionalists” use the subspecies desgnation, but they represent a small minority of anthropologists on this matter.
I attended a talk a couple of years back by a paleontologist from Michigan who had been doing research on what had been lakes post ice-age, 10,000+ years ago.
His findings convinced him that the humans who entered the area caused the extinction of the mastodons who had been found there by hunting them to death. He gave detailed reasoning based on the state of the remains and the abrupt way that they disappeared out of the fossil record. I didn’t take notes so I can’t be more specific, but it was impressive research.
The fossil record tells a lot, if only by inference. Written human records are not required to get a sense of the past. 1000 years ago is not “fairly early” under any definition.
Middlecase appears to be considering “fairly early” relative to “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”; not a physical date, but a cultural one.
I’d heard that the chestnut blight and the consequent loss of the fruit of perhaps the most prolific tree in the eastern forest was also implicated.
So, anthropogenic reasons are unnatural ones?
Well, are not humans natural creatures as well? Maybe Im being too picky, but it bothers me when someone says something like ‘human driven extinctions from the natural extinctions’. We arent other-than-natural. In a pre-industrial context most especially, human driven extinctions are natural ones as well. Im quite certain that we are not the only species to have caused the extinction of other species.
I do agree that the OP might wish to confirm whether they meant pre or post industrial humans.
Well, my original question was inspired by a comment about elephants driven to extinction by the Romans. So I’d say pre-industrial.
But elephants aren’t extinct…
Actually, the Passenger pigeon and the Dodo were not wiped out by “direct … human activities such as hunting” at all. The PP was wiped out by the cutting down of the hardwood forests and the Chestnut blight (as Xema pointed out). there really were so many that humans could NOT kill them by hunting. They were wiped out by elimination of their habitat. This also could have been abetted by several climatological changes going on then. The Dodo was mostly wiped out by cats & rats- which were human induced, true, but inadvertantly.
In fact- AFAIK, there have been no successful thriving species that were ever wiped out by DIRECT human action. This makes the theories of stone-age humans causing such mass extinctions extremely doubtful. (Although some of the late european extinctions are more likely than anything esle).
I mean- if early Amerinds wiped out the Mammoth (and the ground sloth, and the mastadon, and etc etc… :rolleyes: )- why were there so many freaken bison still around when the white man got here? :dubious: Bison are much easier to kill than mammoths, and make better prey as there is less wastage & risk.
The American Bison came very close, but even that was also caused to a large extent by fencing (habitat destruction) rather than direct human action.
As far as the large flightless birds of Autralasia- I blame rats and dingos more than human hunting.