We’re wiping out so many species Earth will need five million years to recover after we're gone

We’re currently living through Earth’s sixth mass extinction – but this time, species aren’t being wiped out by an asteroid or other natural disasters, it’s us.

And we’re exterminating species so fast that it will take our planet five million years to evolve back to our current level of biodiversity after the next 50 years, according to Aarhus University researchers.

It could take up to seven million years to evolve back to the level of biodiversity found before modern humans evolved, the researchers warn.

The researchers simulated different rates of evolution and extinction to come up with different scenarios – warning that some species can take entire branches of the evolutionary tree with them when they become extinct.

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Matt Davis from Aarhus University says, ‘It is much easier to save biodiversity now than to re-evolve it later.’

The researchers drew lessons from previous extinctions, such as the extinction of Pleistocene ‘megafauna’ after the last ice age.

Davis says, ‘Large mammals, or megafauna, such as giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago, were highly evolutionarily distinct.

‘Since they had few close relatives, their extinctions meant that entire branches of Earth’s evolutionary tree were chopped off.

‘There are hundreds of species of shrew, so they can weather a few extinctions. There were only four species of sabre-toothed tiger; they all went extinct.’