I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I don’t think this finding suggests that humans are innately negative forces in ecosystems, but rather that becoming indigenous to a place is a process. As people spread out to new areas, they didn’t have cultural practices that maintained historical ecological relations, and upended some of the ecology in the new places. But over time, it’s in everyone’s best interest to maintain relatively sustainable and cyclical ecological relations for long term survivalship, and that becomes part of the culture and stories, and then you get indigeneity. I think there’s no coincidence that the megafauna that still exists is primarily in the area where humans evolved (subsaharan africa). This is where people have been indigenous to the longest, perhaps before people had the means to extirpate megafauna. And once the cultural indigeneity was in place, there were reasons to not destroy megafauna populations (until the modern colonial era, at least)
Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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Cool things to ponder while I ride my bicycle to work.
Until a people develop science its pretty silly to me to assign a value judgment to things like this. Invasive species wipe out other species all the time, and did so before humans to boot. Mitigating that is ideal, but you don't even really conceive of a problem until you have a society which can conceive of the harms and alternatives anyway.
Yeah i think you have a point but I also think humans were moral agents and ascribed value to each other and their environment long long before the advent of science
Sure. But until a people can even know what the consequences of their actions are it's a stretch to judge them harshly.
In this particular case, humans weren't really moral agents until much later.
In the book Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari proposes that one of the problems with humans is that we lept to the top of the foodchain too quickly. Other alpha predators like lions got there by slowly evolving over millions of years, giving themselves time to adjust to their new position and giving nature time to delevope checks and balances. For example, antelope getting faster over time.
Neither we nor nature has adjusted to the new hierarchy. We are unable and unwilling to create enough checks and balances on ourselves so we rape the environment and set whole species to extinction.
When the first humans arrived in Australia almost immediately all the large mammals were wiped out. They didn't have time to learn to fear the tiny little apes newly arrived on their shores.
An interesting point he made is that genetically we are still scavengers. The earliest tools were likely for smashing apart bones to get at the marrow, after other animals had taken their share. We still feel hunted, and it could be that a large part of anxiety and depression we see could be attributed to our insecurity at our place in the world.
If you once again look at a lion, they are full of confidence and power and all the things we expect to see in an alpha predator. Who knows how long it might take humanity to become comfortable with our place in the world. Who knows if we and the planet will be able to adapt together well enough for that to come to fruition, rather than just becoming another extinct species ourselves.
Hasn’t this been known for a long time?