Ecological Serial Killer
In his awesome book, Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari says that the “historical record makes Homo Sapiens look like an ecological serial killer”. He says that while the speed at which we drive species to extinction has gone to warp speed in recent centuries and decades, we even managed to wipe out species with just Stone Age technologies at our disposal! He says it would be a remarkable coincidence if the timing of extinction events in Siberia, the Americas and Australia just happened to overlap with humans landing in those areas. The usual other suspect in such extinction events, climate change, is probably not the culprit in those cases because it was always life on land that suffered when man landed, never life in the seas (an area in which our capabilities have built only in recent centuries). Ian Fleming one wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Like it or not, humans have been the enemy for other life forms, long before modern techn...