From what I've read, prior to humans' entrance on the scene, and excluding the mass extinctions, the normal extinction rate is about 1 species every year for every million species on the planet. This is of course an estimation, since we do not know every species on the planet.
The problem is that recently (in the past few hundred decades, say, since the start of what we would call "civilization"), extinction rates have skyrocketed (I could not find an actual number here, I apologize. However, everything I've read agrees with this). I believe most of the causes of this increase can be quite easily traced back to human activity.
So no, humans have never been the only thing causing extinctions. From what we can see, though, humans are very likely behind the start of this most recent bunch of mass extinctions.