For years, scientists have debated whether humans or the climate have caused the population of large mammals to decline dramatically over the past several thousand years. A new study from Aarhus University confirms that climate cannot be the explanation....
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)
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
People, not the climate, found to have caused the decline of the giant mammals (phys.org)
For years, scientists have debated whether humans or the climate have caused the population of large mammals to decline dramatically over the past several thousand years. A new study from Aarhus University confirms that climate cannot be the explanation....