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The percentage of megafauna on different land masses over time, with the arrival of humans indicated. Extinction of animals, plants, and other organisms caused by human actions may go as far back as the late Pleistocene, over 12,000 years ago. [58] There is a correlation between megafaunal extinction and the arrival of humans.
As the possibility of extinction became more widely established in the sciences, so did the prospect of human extinction. [4] In the 19th century, human extinction became a popular topic in science (e.g., Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population) and fiction (e.g., Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man).
The extinction was biased toward larger-sized species because smaller species have greater resilience because of their life history traits (e.g., shorter gestation time, greater population sizes, etc.). Humans are thought to be the cause because other earlier immigrations of mammals into North America from Eurasia did not cause extinctions. [212]
Beginning of animal evolution. [54] [55] 720–630 Ma Possible global glaciation [56] [57] which increased the atmospheric oxygen and decreased carbon dioxide, and was either caused by land plant evolution [58] or resulted in it. [59] Opinion is divided on whether it increased or decreased biodiversity or the rate of evolution. [60] [61] [62 ...
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.. Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. [1] Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, [2] as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), [3] indicating ...
[47] [48] Brain expansion (enlargement) between 0.8 and 0.2 Ma may have occurred due to the extinction of most African megafauna (which made humans feed from smaller prey and plants, which required greater intelligence due to greater speed of the former and uncertainty about whether the latter were poisonous or not), extreme climate variability ...
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
The latter, dubbed the sixth mass extinction in Earth history, is largely attributed to increased human population and activity, and may have started already during the preceding Pleistocene epoch with the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna.