T. Pievani, A. Menaganzin, Homo sapiens: the first self-endangered species

With the increase of technological impact over the past decades, Homo sapiens has become the world’s dominant evolutionary force of its epoch – the “Anthropocene” – producing a biodiversity crisis on a global scale. Drawing a comparison between the amount of lost species in the five prehistoric mass-extinctions and the range of species lost in recent times, a similar trend can be recognised: a Sixth Mass-Extinction. Rodolfo Dirzo and co-authors in Science propose the term “defaunation” (2014) to describe the pervasiveness of the anthropogenic impact on terrestrial fauna. According to the “Perfect Storm Model”, mass-extinctions arise from three simultaneous key-conditions; these conditions are perfectly met today in the geophysical parameters induced by human activities. Homo sapiens, beneficiary of mass-extinctions of other species and now the cause of a new mass-extinction event, has built its own evolutionary paradox, that is now affecting also human wellbeing through multiple eco-evolutionary feedbacks. Human ‘niche construction’ is proving to be an unsustainable process that is threatening global health and the provision of goods and services to humanity, demanding an interdisciplinary effort to contain the self-endangering cascading effects that have long since been triggered.