Human Theory of the Sixth Mass Extinction

The Human Theory of the Sixth Mass Extinction was a hypothesis put forward by salticid scientists in 2941 PT regarding the importance of human beings in Earth's history, their salticid-like sapience, and their role in the Sixth Mass Extinction.

History
Human fossils were recovered and accounted for in most of salticid history, being among the most widespread fossils on Earth and important markers of the Holocene and Anthropocene in the fossil record. Careful dedication by humans to the protection of the remains of their dead from the elements led to graveyards and mass graves being immaculately preserved, and many of these were discovered during early mining activity in the Terran Mingle. Fossilized human skeletons were connected to lizards, the most prominent extant land-dwelling vertebrates with four limbs, and for centuries humans were thought of as enigmatic ancestral lizards. Their bones were often used as trinkets and remained a consistent body decoration throughout the lifespan of salticid civilization.

Advances in thought about humans came with the first geological and paleontological schools in salticid society during and after the Portian colonial period. Human fossil omnipresence was explained by the hypothesis of a human civilization existing before the creation of salticids. Terran religious schools connected the idea to the forbidden knowledge of the First Spider, and much controversy followed over whether or not humans should be further researched. In spite of both protests and occasional violent opposition, research continued.

As an understanding of the fossil record and evolution by natural selection continued to develop, human evolution was mostly understood. Popular consensus dismissed and then re-adopted the theory that humans had a civilization, with anomalies in the fossil record (former museums and fossil collections which had been preserved with fossils completely out of place from where they were always otherwise found) being used as the primary evidence of their sapience, as they had to have been able to dig up and relocate fossils for their own purposes the same way salticids did. Eventually, the sudden emergence of Plastic Insects about 200 million years before the present, as well as geological evidence for the massive and rapid change in the Earth's composition around the same time, were connected to humans as a related school of phenomena.