I’ve said that a few times before. It’s even truer than I thought. Yesterday, someone sent me the following.

Elephants had lots of relatives. Then humans came along

Today, three kinds of elephants walk the Earth. But hundreds of thousands of years ago, they had many kin. Nearly 200 species in the order Proboscidea, including mastodons and mammoths, have been described. Paleontologists have long wondered why so few of these usually massive mammals are still around. Now, a reexamination of fossil data suggests another group of mammals played a major role in dooming elephants’ relatives to extinction: humans.

With a little help from AI, researchers explored possible explanations for changing speciation and extinction rates of proboscideans over the past 35 million years, as estimated from fossil data. While their analyses, which leveraged neural networks to rank possible factors, identified connections to major environmental changes, the effects of humans were enormous. Extinction rates jumped five-fold when early humans emerged some 1.8 million years ago and climbed even more sharply—17-fold—when our species started spreading around the world roughly 129,000 years ago.

“The primary driver of proboscidean extinction was inferred to be the overlap with the human lineage, aligning with the growing body of evidence indicating humans’ severe impact on recent extinctions and on megafauna in particular,” the team concluded. “If early humans had not appeared, the number of species would probably still be increasing,” first author Torsten Hauffe told New Scientist.