From dodos to 'lost' tribes: a history of extinction

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Soon after landing on Mauritius and causing the extinction of the dodo, humans came to terms with the fact that we have the power to destroy entire species. But that realization wasn't as straightforward as it might seem. Speaking to James Osborne, Sartya Kureshi discusses her new book, Vanished, which looks at how changing ideas about extinction have reshaped the face of the planet. Today I'm joined by Professor Sadia Kureshi, who is a historian of race, science, and empire in the modern world.

Sathya, your new book is titled Vanished. an unnatural history of extinction. I want to hone in on a specific word in that title, unnatural. Can you describe for us what the first example that we know of of an unnatural extinction might have been? The classic

unnatural extinction that people are aware of, people tend to think about is the dodo. And that's because on Mauritius, for instance, it's an island that is not populated by human beings and when human beings arrive they very, very quickly, especially when the Dutch and Portuguese arrive, the Arabs know about the island for centuries but don't really do much. And when they arrive they introduce mammals and that very, very quickly leads to a depletion in dodo numbers and extinctions. And this is something that's known about throughout the early modern world and it's very much seen as the result of human interference within that island.

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