Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

particular Cuba and Hispaniola, they found petri ed ground-sloth scat dating to
about 5000 
BC
. This is exactly the time when the rst humans managed to cross the
Caribbean Sea and settle these two large islands.
Again, some scholars try to exonerate 
Homo sapiens
and blame climate change
(which requires them to posit that, for some mysterious reason, the climate in the
Caribbean islands remained static for 7,000 years while the rest of the western
hemisphere warmed). But in America, the dung ball cannot be dodged. We are the
culprits. There is no way around that truth. Even if climate change abetted us, the
human contribution was decisive.
7
Noah’s Ark
If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-
scale extinctions that took place as 
Homo sapiens
spread over Afro-Asia – such as
the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when
ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is
that the rst wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest
ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry
creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about
200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fty kilograms. At the
time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. 
Homo sapiens
drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans
invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.
This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the
Agricultural Revolution. The archaeological record of island after island tells the
same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied
population of large animals, without any trace of humans. In scene two, Sapiens
appear, evidenced by a human bone, a spear point, or perhaps a potsherd. Scene
three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre stage and most
large animals, along with many smaller ones, are gone.
The large island of Madagascar, about 400 kilometres east of the African
mainland, o ers a famous example. Through millions of years of isolation, a
unique collection of animals evolved there. These included the elephant bird, a
ightless creature three metres tall and weighing almost half a ton – the largest
bird in the world – and the giant lemurs, the globe’s largest primates. The
elephant birds and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of

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Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1,500 years ago – precisely when the rst
humans set foot on the island.