Before humans migrated out of Afro-Asia about 45,000 years ago, Australia was home to a variety of organisms that had evolved in isolation for millions of years.
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Among these creatures were 450-pound, six-foot kangaroos, a marsupial lion as large as a modern tiger, flightless birds twice the size of ostriches, the giant diprotodon - a two-and-a-half-ton wombat - as well as lizards, snakes, and giant koalas.
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Save for the birds and reptiles, these animals were marsupials - meaning that, like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless offspring, which they nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches.
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Within a few thousand years of Humans' arrival in Australia, twenty-three of the twenty-four animal species weighing 100 pounds or more became extinct, as did a large number of smaller species. The entire food chain throughout the Australian ecosystem was broken and rearranged.
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As if that weren't remarkable enough, the Homo Sapien migration to America - which took place around 16,000 years ago - resulted in an even bigger ecological disaster.
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Upon arriving in North America, humans "encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant sloths."
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"South America had an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles, and birds. The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation. . . ."
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Within 2,000 years of humans setting foot, most of these species were gone. In North America, thirty-four our of forty-seven genera of large mammals disappeared. In South America, fifty out of sixty. So did thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds, and insects.
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Note that this was all millennia before the Agricultural Revolution, after which events like this repeated themselves many times. Fucking humans, man. Always fucking shit up.
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
We're an invasive species by design. The problem is we have no new ecosystems to disrupt, colonize and take advantage of.
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After the industrial revolution, humans branched out and expanded our colonialism to the seas. We've had our fun with terrestrial life, and now we're also fucking up the oceans with industrial pollution.
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