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Mankind: Waster of Worlds
We are in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction
Earth, about 4.5 billion years old, has had no life on it for about 65% of its existence.
Approximately two billion to 1.6 billion years ago, simple life forms arose: bacteria, prokaryotes (unicells), and eukaryotes. The last form of life is multicellular, and is the domain in which all animals — including humans — live. Despite what purports to be its evolution over the last several million years, Mankind has a sad and disturbing history of being principally driven by the workings of the basal ganglia, the so-called “Reptilian Brain,” leading to territoriality, aggression, “Us versus Them” attitudes, religious hatred, racism and all other forms of bigotry, intolerance, wars, and many other forms of destructive behavior.
Our age, increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene, roughly synonymous with the term Holocene, began with the agricultural revolution about 11,650 years ago, most likely in what is now Turkey, as well as in the Levant, parts of Pakistan and India, China, and throughout the Americas. Man’s overhunting behavior almost certainly caused the extinction of megafauna — camels, wooly rhinoceroses, mammoths, mastodons, megatheria, and many others — and this led to substantial changes in the environments in which these animals once thrived. Most of those…
