this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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This is so condescending
It's also bullshit. There are plenty of examples of indigenous people destroying ecosystems
It's humans.
All humans.
Not here to argue, but I would like those examples. That's not something that comes up often.
Indigenous Australians hunting megafauna to extinction is one that immediately comes to mind
The Maori wiped out huge numbers of species in New Zealand when they settled there about a thousand years ago
Australian megafauna died out due to climate change. Humans did not help, but they were already on the way out due to food shortages.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302698110
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/01/climate-change-helped-kill-off-super-sized-ice-age-animals-in-au
Easter island is a popular example.
I believe the land sloth likely went extinct because of humans
I know one is Easter Island. Dudes destroyed the ecosystem of the island and, predictably, starved to death.
When people spread across the globe, we hunted or out-competed so much shit to extinction. Mammoths, giant sloths, wooly rhinos, American cheetahs, American Lions, etc. IIRC the average is forty percent of all land animals above 100 pounds went extinct when we showed up someplace new.
Also, a lot of archeologists will tell you most of the work is sifting through trash, like ancient people's actual trash.
https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/551331468767432503
Honestly, it's life in general. When trees first evolved, they were essentially an invasive species; nothing at the time could break through the lignin that makes them so tough, and so nothing could eat them for millions of years. They would grow, absorb CO2, die, and just lie there until they got buried, then more would grow in their place and absorb more CO2 over and over until the global levels dipped and the planet got colder, causing an ice age.
Devastation happens every time a species ends up in an environment without any natural predators or other mitigating factors. Life doesn't have a point where it looks around, says "yeah, that's enough" and stops growing - it needs something to keep it in check. Humans just change way faster than any other life ever has, so the problematic traits become more and more problematic, and the natural checks and balances of the world are way too outpaced to do anything about it.