Our ancestors, at least many of them, harshly treated the fauna of their time. My sense of it has been that when humans first colonized the land of other animals the outcome was often extinction.
Then, after a period of “settling in,” a degree of balance with wildlife would occur. We often learn how indigenous peoples, who have long lived in a given area, better coexist with wildlife.
However, the results of this research on woolly mammoths makes it hard to generalize. The great animals were not killed off suddenly in Eurasia but rather declined over a long period of human presence, with their final disappearance corresponding to increased human migration northward as the climate warmed.
It appears that both humans and climate change reduced the number and range of the mammoths but that the former delivered the fatal blow. Had that not been the case, the shaggy beings would have lasted for thousands of years more, perhaps even longer if they had adapted to the warming climate.
Today there is a tendency to place too much blame on climate change for the increased plight of the world’s wildlife. We humans continue to overkill wildlife in many cases, but far worse are the devastating effects of us crowding them out. Like the mammoths, so many more will now vanish, and this time from a warming of climate we ourselves have caused.
The scientific debate about whether humans or climate change caused extinction of woolly mammoths is ongoing. See this article favoring the latter view. However, my belief is that climate change was not the driving factor extinguishing mammoths and other megafauna. That's because Pleistocene climate was marked by repeated glacial cycles, and only when humans arrived on the scene did mass extinctions occur. What we do know is that in more recent times the arrival of humans on islands, large and small, had devastating effects on wildlife.
The current wave of wildlife destruction is globally worse than at any time, and that is due to industrialization as well as corresponding massive population growth. I see no way out of this except to scale down humanity and heed the lessons of the past.
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Jon Austen , a Scale Down member on Facebook, adds that “I'm pretty sure that the megafauna extinctions all happened soon after humans arrived in those parts of the planet. Woolly mammoths, sabre tooth tigers, mastodons thousands of years ago. The recent giant emus on Madagascar and also species in new Zealand. Food for humans where these species had no natural predators before. Unlike in Africa where humans co-evolved with other species.”