Ancient humans not to blame for mass island extinction

An excavation at the Tron Bon Lei rock shelter on the island of Alor in Indonesia. Credit: Julien Louys - An international research team has debunked a popular theory that ancient humans caused mass animal and plant extinctions on newly inhabited islands. Archaeologists and palaeontologists, including from Griffith University and The Australian National University (ANU), compared records of human arrival and extinctions on islands spanning the past 2.6 million years, finding little overlap between the two events. Co-researcher and ANU Professor Sue O'Connor said the evidence did not reveal early modern humans to be the destructive agents that "they're often portrayed to be".   "Human arrival had minimal impacts on biodiversity loss," Professor O'Connor said.  "Our research shows that causing mass extinctions has not always been part of the human story. We shouldn't see extinctions as inevitable."    Lead researcher Associate Professor Julien Louys from Griffith University said the work challenges the notion that these ancient people caused "untold amounts of damage" to ecosystems.  "We found that this was only the case for the most recent human arrivals on islands, in the past few thousand years," Associate Professor Louys said.  "Based on classic cases of island extinction from the more recent past, we expected that mass extinction should shortly follow island colonisation.