Friday, October 26, 2007

Monkeys, Apes Teetering on Brink of Extinction - Report

Mankind's closest relatives are teetering on the brink of their first extinctions in more than a century, hunted by humans for food and medicine and squeezed from forest homes, a report on endangered primates said on Friday.


[. . .]

"You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium -- that's how few of them remain on earth today," said Russell Mittermeier, president of US-based environmental group Conservation International.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're probably responsible for wiping out the neanderthals too, so why not go ahead and finish the job?

Mac said...

Oh, I get it -- you *want* the monkeys to win, don't you?

Elan said...

There is a scene in a new movie about the Rwandan genocide.
The movie is called "Shaking hands with the Devil."
A Canadian General defies the United Nations and protects several thousand Rwandans from being hacked to death - he gives them safe haven in a sports stadium.
The metaphorical description of the remaining, non-human primate species fitting into a stadium is a glimpse into our own future.
One day, soon, we homo sapiens sapiens will have gored our own ox to the point where our last remnants will fit into a few thousand seats...and we'll probably be oblivious, complaining about the absence of television and asking what happened to the air conditioning.

Mac said...

Lovelock predicts we'll be reduced to a few thousand within the next few hundred years, if I recall correctly. Probably huddled around the remains of the Arctic. Monday Night Football, anybody?

Anybody...?

Michael said...

Maybe this is how it happens, over and over again. "The bottleneck theory" Humans are reduced to a small breeding population due to severe climatic conditions around 70 thousand or so years ago. The number of around 10,000 to 15,000 breeding individuals is usually mentioned and then we start all over again. Let's hope next time we, nah what am I dreaming?