Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds

The huge loss is a tragedy in itself but also threatens the survival of civilisation, say the world’s leading scientists

Damian Carrington Environment editor

Tue 30 Oct 2018 00.01 GMTLast modified on Wed 31 Oct 2018 16.53 GMT

Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.

The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.

“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”

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17-Million-Year-Old Whale Skull Helps Place Humanity's First Steps

by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | March 16, 2015 04:10pm ET

A 17-million-year-old beaked whale fossil is helping researchers solve a puzzle about the likely birthplace of humanity in East Africa, a new study finds.

The whale (Ziphiidae) lived when the East African plateau was substantially lower and covered by dense forests, the researchers said. Scientists have long tried to figure out when the uplift occurred, because when it did, the moisture from the Indian Ocean could no longer reach the trees and vegetation, and the area turned into a savannah, research suggests.

Extinct ancestors to modern humans may have lived in trees in East Africa, but after the area turned into grassland, these early humans gradually began walking on two feet, researchers suggest.


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Stephen Hawking: Humans have less than 1,000 years left on Earth

Stephen Hawking believes humanity has less than 1,000 years left on Earth and must embark on more space exploration to help mankind ‘escape beyond out fragile planet’.

The 71-year-old revealed his fears while speaking at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles this week.

‘We must continue to go into space for humanity. We won’t survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet,’ he said.

‘Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.’

It comes as Nasa’s planetary science budget, which would be central to finding another Earth, was cut by $300 million this year to fund other projects.

Professor Hawking, who has been in a wheelchair since being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease 50 years ago, also toured a stem cell laboratory focused on trying to slow the progression of the illness.

Professor Hawking is famous for bringing his concepts to the masses through his best-selling books, including A Brief History Of Time.

He has spent his career decoding the universe, constructing theory and research on black holes and the origin of matter.

He also reiterated his belief at the conference in why humanity exists, referring to M-theory, a unifying physics and mathematics theory which includes the suggestion that there are higher dimensions in space-time.

‘To understand the universe at the deepest level, we have to understand why is there something rather than nothing,’ he said.

‘If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way.’

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/13/stephen-hawking-humans-have-less-than-1000-years-left-on-earth-3614602/

Fish Swam the Sahara, Bolstering Out of Africa Theory

Fish may have once swum across the Sahara, a finding that could shed light on how humanity made its way out of Africa, researchers said.


The cradle of humanity lies south of the Sahara, which begs the question as to how our species made its way past it. The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and would seem a major barrier for any humans striving to migrate off the continent.

Scientists have often focused on the Nile Valley as the corridor by which humans left Africa. However, considerable research efforts have failed to uncover evidence for its consistent use by people leaving the continent, and precisely how watery it has been over time is controversial.

Now it turns out the Sahara might not have been quite as impassable as once thought ­ not only for humanity, but for fish as well.

"Fish appeared to have swam across the Sahara during its last wet phase sometime between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago," researcher Nick Drake, a geographer at King's College London, told LiveScience. "The Sahara is not a barrier to the migrations of animals and people. Thus it is possible ­ likely? ­that early modern humans did so, and this could explain how we got out of Africa."

Using satellite imagery and digital maps of the landscape, the researchers found the Sahara was once covered by a dense network of rivers, lakes and inland deltas. This large waterway channeled water and animals into and across the Sahara during wet, "green" times.

In their analysis, Drake and his colleagues found evidence that many creatures, including aquatic ones, dispersed across the Sahara recently. For example, 25 North African animal species have populations both north and south of the Sahara with small refuges within the desert, including catfish (Clarias gariepinus), tilapia (Tilapia zillii), jewel cichlid fish (Hemichromis letourneuxi) and freshwater snails such as the red-rimmed melania (Melanoides tuberculata). Indeed, more animals may have once crossed over the Sahara than over the Nile corridor, the researchers said ­ only nine animal species that occupy the Nile corridor today are also found both north and south of the Sahara.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/fish-possibly-swam-across-sahara-101228.html