Would mammoths still be around? 🦣
Humanity's fingerprint can be seen across the planet today, from the towering skyscrapers that define our modern metropolises to the pyramids and other ancient monuments of our past. Human activity also marks our sprawling open fields of agriculture and the roads that link everything together. But what would the world look like if humans had never existed?
"My great, great grandfather was able to observe flocks of thousands of parakeets in the natural landscapes, my grandfather saw flocks of a hundred, my father saw a few and I'm lucky if I can see two in the forests," Worthy said. Serengeti Earth Sören Faurby, a senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, believes humans played a key role in the disappearance of many large mammals going back thousands of years. He led a 2015 study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions , which suggested that, without humans, Earth would largely resemble the modern-day Serengeti, an African ecosystem teeming with life.
A 2021 study published in the journal Nature concluded that climate change ultimately wiped out woolly mammoths and other Arctic-dwelling megafauna that survived the end of the Pleistocene, as the warming climate made it too wet for the vegetation they ate to survive. The climate might also be different, and while it's difficult to say how humans and megafauna may have influenced climatic changes thousands of years ago with evidence obscured by time, it's much easier to judge our impact on Earth's climate today. Through global warming, caused by activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, humans have raised the average global temperature by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the beginning of the 20th century.
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