HONOLULU If humans continue down our current path, we may soon find ourselves living in a world with no other great apes.

On Sunday, the Eastern gorilla , the largest living primate species, was listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature s updated Red List of Endangered Species .

The reclassification means that four out of the six non-human great ape species the Eastern gorilla, Western gorilla, Bornean orangutan and Sumatran orangutan are now listed by IUCN as critically endangered, the closest category to extinction. The other two, the chimpanzee and bonobo, are listed as endangered.

Today is kind of a sad day because the IUCN Red List shows we are wiping out some of our closest relatives, Inger Andersen, IUCNs director general, said Sunday during a press conference a the organizations World Conservation Congress in Honolulu.

Over the last 20 years, the Eastern gorilla has seen a devastating population decline of more than 70 percent, mainly as the result of illegal hunting, according to the world conservation union. One subspecies, the Grauers gorilla, has dropped from 16,900 to 3,800 individuals since 1994, while the other, the mountain gorilla, has a population of around 880.

We are the only one species of great ape that is not threatened with extinction, said Carlo Rondinini, a research scientist at Sapienza University of Rome and member of the IUCN red list committee. This is something we should really reflect about.