You don’t need to read the news or scroll through Instagram for long to stumble across the latest example of a rare and beautiful species that has gone extinct. Since AD1500, at least 705 vertebrate species and 571 plant species have died out.
Humans have now appropriated over half of the Earth’s surface for farms and urban areas, and this is primarily to blame for these recent declines in global biodiversity.
But humans didn’t suddenly appear in the year 1500. Early humans were burning the African savannahs from about 400,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier.
