Doom and gloom this week for those who believe in the essential goodness of the human race, with two papers in the journal Science that implicate humans in mass extinctions of mammals in North America and Australia.
In the 4 billion-year history of life on Earth there have been five true mass extinctions, each caused by external phenomena such as the meteor which snuffed out the dinosaurs. A sixth, which is occurring now, is being caused by humans.
However, the papers in today's Science say such human-driven extinctions are not just due to industrialization, deforestation and global warming, since other extinctions also occurred tens of thousands of years ago as human populations spread across the planet. What does it mean? That people just ain't no good?