J842P
Veteran Member
Don't have a cite but my best guess would be loss of habitat. Human animals, as their population expands, destroy the habitats of other organisms. Some species can coexist, some even experience population increases and are better off, but generally the cost of loss of habitat is loss of species.I realize that humans have been making big changes to the ecology for thousands of years. But I'll need a cite for "more of it." Whether measured by acreage of land transformed by man or number of species driven extinct, man's negative influence on ecology is bigger than ever now, and getting worse.
No.
Human animals, as their range expands, do this.
It mostly happened back in the distant past, when total population of humans was minuscule compared to today.
Adding another million people to Shanghai or Mumbai makes very little difference. Adding a billionaire to California makes more, but not much more. A handful of people crossing the Timor Sea with their dogs 40,000 years ago wiped out vast numbers of species. The same happened in the Americas a few thousand years later.
Human impact on our environment has very little to do with raw population numbers.
Well, I get your point but you are oversimplifying. It's the range and population density that matters. A handful of hunter gatherers, even if their range was the entire continent, would not have lead to the extinction of the megafauna (assuming the human predation hypothesis is correct).