What exactly does the term 'Sixth Extinction' mean - Biology - Biodiversity and Conservation

Question

What exactly does the term 'Sixth Extinction' mean?

Lily S · Accepted Answer

We can divide the Sixth Extinction into two discrete phases:

Phase One began when the first modern humans began to disperse
to different parts of the world about 100,000 years ago
Phase Two began about 10,000 years ago when humans turned to
agriculture

Humans began disrupting the environment as soon as they
appeared on Earth The first phase began shortly after Homo
sapiensevolved in Africa and the anatomically modern humans
began migrating out of Africa and spreading throughout the world
Humans reached the middle east 90,000 years ago They were in Europe
starting around 40,000 years ago Neanderthals, who had long lived
in Europe, survived our arrival for less than 10,000 years, but
then abruptly disappeared — victims, according to many
paleoanthropologists, of our arrival through outright warfare or
the more subtle, though potentially no less devastating effects, of
being on the losing side of ecological competition
Everywhere, shortly after modern humans arrived, many
(especially, though by no means exclusively, the larger) native
species typically became extinct Humans were like bulls in a China
shop:They disrupted ecosystems by overhunting game species, which
never experienced contact with humans before And perhaps they
spread microbial disease-causing organisms as well The fossil
record attests to human destruction of ecosystems:Humans arrived in
large numbers in North America roughly 12,500 years ago-and sites
revealing the butchering of mammoths, mastodons and extinct buffalo
are well documented throughout the continent The demise of the bulk
of the La Brea tar pit Pleistocene fauna coincided with our arrival
The Caribbean lost several of its larger species when humans
arrived some 8000 years ago Extinction struck elements of the
Australian megafauna much earlier-when humans arrived some 40,000
years ago Madagascar-something of an anomaly, as humans only
arrived there two thousand years ago-also fits the pattern well:
the larger species (elephant birds, a species of hippo, plus larger
lemurs) rapidly disappeared soon after humans arrived
Indeed only in places where earlier hominid species had lived
(Africa, of course, but also most of Europe and Asia) did the
fauna, already adapted to hominid presence, survive the first wave
of the Sixth Extinction pretty much intact The rest of the
world’s species, which had never before encountered hominids
in their local ecosystems, were as naively unwary as all but the
most recently arrived species (such as Vermilion Flycatchers) of
the Galapagos Islands remain to this day