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Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.

“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”

In other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023

The Amazon River basin is covered with rain forest that many people mistake for a primordial sort of natural reserve, lightly peopled and untouched until recent deforestation.

On the contrary, we now know that the Amazon was once densely peopled as archeologists continue to discover the remains of city after sprawling city. The Amazon forest we see today is the remains of what was once a vast garden, cultivated to supply food to those cities.

Indigenous land use was once so pervasive and intensive that the forest’s soils, normally fairly poor, are pockmarked with patches of terra preta de Índio—“black earth of the Indians”—which are particularly fertile and self-sustaining soils produced by human activity.

nature.com/articles/s41467-022

NatureEvidence confirms an anthropic origin of Amazonian Dark Earths - Nature Communications

It’s a common belief that our modern environmental destruction is simply an expression of a deeply-rooted impulse to over-consume to the point of self-destruction. I’ve been told, for example, that everywhere ancient humans migrated to, large animals were driven to extinction—correlation presenting clear evidence of over-hunting by our ancestors. We haven’t changed at all, we’re doomed by our nature, etc etc.

Except that in the classic example—the peopling of the Americas—the timing for over-hunting is all off:

“Nevertheless, our findings make it clear that overkill by rapidly expanding human populations is not supported by the available data. Using the largest assembled database of directly dated North American megafauna, and accounting for chronological uncertainty in the radiocarbon and climate records, our results demonstrate that there is currently no evidence for a persistent through-time relationship between human and megafauna population levels in North America.”

nature.com/articles/s41467-021

NatureClimate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America - Nature CommunicationsThere are a number of competing explanations for the late Pleistocene extinction of many North American megafauna species. Here, the authors apply a Bayesian regression approach that finds greater concordance between megafaunal declines and climate change than with human population growth.

A similar argument, that humans drove hominid cousins such as the Neanderthals to extinction, has been demolished by DNA evidence.

Rather than arriving in Europe and swiftly driving the Neanderthals to extinction over a few thousand years, it turns out that humans had interacted and interbred with Neanderthals over a span of *200,000 years.* Most modern humans inherited a few percent of their genome from Neanderthal ancestors, while Neanderthals apparently inherited up to ten percent of their genome from their human ancestors.

Like the megafauna of the Americas, the timing doesn’t line up. Rather than violent replacement, Neanderthals and humans look like two communities that had been on the path to hybridization.

science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc

@HeavenlyPossum "A similar argument, that humans drove hominid cousins such as the Neanderthals to extinction" <- Neanderthals were humans.

@HeavenlyPossum ok. The phrasing seemed ambiguous.

@FelisCatus

In every toot, we are faced with the challenge of being succinct vs being precise