Are We Going To Be Extinct?

Posted by Dr. Gopal Unnikrishna Kurup

Are We Going To Be Extinct?

 

 

The most of us urban people are getting less and less connected with the spectacle of Nature. Do we at any time stop to think about our place on the planet. To put the history of life on earth in to a timescale, imagine a book of say 400 pages. Then the very first life in the oceans is seen at page 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at page 381 middle. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half pages. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, just 5 pages from the end, and then making way for the mammals, the broad group we belong to. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last page. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters towards the bottom of this page, some 200,000 years. How many of us appreciate that all our roots are African, as Homo sapiens and who left the continent only some 75,000 years ago to populate the globe, and that it will be many  millennia before this page could be turned.  In a time period that cannot be depicted on this page as it would be too microscopical, we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period

 We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth of the mass extinction events that the planet has seen in its history.  Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540? million years or so. Biologists now suggest that the sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. The current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the fact that it is a crisis. 

 The fossil record presents an opportunity to contemplate how this human story unfolded. Many hominids, species resembling modern man the Homo sapiens  had lived and become extinct before us. After the discovery of  Zinjanthropus  in 1959, many more spectacular fossil finds of hominins, species closely related to humans, have since been made both in Africa and elsewhere. Genetics has given us the fascinating story and map of the migration journey of humans in intricate details. Genetic research has confirmed that there was gene flow between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and with a totally different hominid species only known from DNA extracted from a finger bone found in a cave in Denisova in southern Siberia.

There have been at least 12 species of immediate ancestors of humans who are extinct. Three different peoples or subspecies of modern humans, namely, the Homo sapiens idaltu, the Archaic Homo sapiens ( Cro-magnon),and the Red Deer Cave People (scientific name not yet assigned) have disappeared from the face of earth. What are the prospects facing man? If history is any guide, human's time is also finite.

One evolutionary advantage of human kind is its immense technological capability. Although the last 50 years have shown an enormous increase in human population, the time has also shown extraordinary leaps in technological innovation. The question that needs to be asked is if we can rise to the opportunity, to use our technology to better understand our impact, to stem the tide of extinction on land and in the oceans, 

We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited planet earth and ran out their span of lives. Like these distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently,,our time on planet earth is also finite. Even with all our technological prowess, it may not take much to tip the balance against us and man might also run out his course on earth. Just to add a silver line however, man might continue in other planets, but then again, whether like as we are now, is a moot question.