Here’s a questions humans would be hard-pressed not to wonder about: What would the world be like if you never existed? Imagine the idyllic world, brimming with biodiversity without us disaster-prone, monstrosity-creating creatures.
Human beings are complex and if not, we very much like to think so. This is probably a central reason a new study, from Danish researchers of Aarhus University, started to answer the question: What would Earth be like if humans never existed?
Biodiversity Should Push for Affirmative Action
If homo sapiens died off much earlier in existence’s timeline, Earth would reek of biodiversity much to nobody’s surprise. Today’s native Europeans wouldn’t know it without specific research or hearsay, but many native mammal species were wiped out over the past thousands of years.
This Danish research team actually conducted another study before that blamed the rise of man as the dominant species to the last Ice Age as a purveyor of the large die-off of many species. This serves as a continuation.
A Map Without Us is One We Won’t Recognize
The Arrhus University researchers, in creating the world’s largest biodiversity map, discovered that Europe as a land mass suffered the most devastation from human activity. If not for this sad fact, northern Europe would now crawl with wolves, elk, bears(!) — even elephants and rhinoceros would have stopped in to join the party via long distance migration.
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of the research team concluded from the study’s findings that biodiversity would certainly not be limited to Europe. Not by far.
This map is the first of its kind, the first approximation of mammal diversity around the world without homo sapien existence. It visualizes animals everywhere, in places where you’d never see one in the wild. In the scale on the map, the number of large mammal species that would have existed is shown with red depicting more species.
Visibly, predictably, human beings had a hand in the extinction of tons of plant species as well. The landscape would not be as it is.
I Bless The Rains Down in Africa
As Science News observes, the current map (above) of biological diversity shows Africa as the only place with a truly remarkable diversity of large mammals.
Today’s world touts Africa as one of the last places of major biodiversity among mammals, but it wouldn’t be just Africa. North and South America would bathe in biodiversity’s well. Africa is not special (despite Toto’s musical romanticization) for its climate and landscape as much as it is for being one of the rarified places where human activity has not made too much of a wreckage.
Other places on Earth mammals exist widespread include mountainous areas. This is because human beings prefer not to go higher up. Human laziness happens to be nature’s saving grace up in the mountaintops – what protects them from the tradition of habitat destruction.
This study was published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.
