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I globally agree and will have about 3-4 points to add, that came during reading... I am aware that the main reason for commenting is some urge to share a discord, some "yes but..." so that's why I focus on adding parameters!

The main shift could be illustrated by this image: how to pull out a stuck drawer, a bit on each side. Maybe agriculture and population increased through this pattern?

Overpopulation is rarely considered before the very visible recent bigger and sudden rise. You did, and I appreciated the read.

So my 1st addition is to consider that we are unable to see what's slow, like plant growth. Until we suddenly see the change.

My background is behaviour, animals' and plants', trauma resolution and anthropology. I live in the Canaries and you will find interesting information there, as the only place with clear limits where the native islanders had NO BOATS to migrate with! The consequences were very different according to the size and steepness of each island. They had to control their population in other ways than in Polynesia...

I am not an English speaker and don't remember all my thoughts at once, as it needs scrolling up and down your post, but we'll exchange on the go, right?

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In a bit of a rush and came past your stack on a different page, so have not read properly, but it seems to me that there might be a generalisation going on here, which is possibly unhelpful. Pardon me if I missed something in this early morning ramble...

There are different _kinds of civilisation_. Those that radiated out of West Asia, based on ploughing, grains, slavery, tax and debt commanded and controlled by an elite in a state bureaucracy, are but one kind of civilisation. Though dominant in more than one sense, including that of the human imagination, there have been other attempts at configuring the complex web of life.

Notably much better attempts were made in the Amazon before the Europeans turned up. Charles Mann has written nicely about the cultural context and scientific framework relevant here, in "1491", and this archaeology piece is an easy intro https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30038410/ - see also the illuminating work of Michael Heckenberger.

The point I am trying to make is that: Whether plant knowledge leads to civilisation or not, is less interesting than questions concerning: What can plants teach us about building complex societies, how we can we learn from them to live in alliances with all the other beings (and in extension of their alliances with fungi and the rest of the soil communities)?

In other words, what exists in the patterns we know about that we can deploy today, here and now, to regenerate our habitat, develop more-than-sustainable food systems, and enrich our landscape with biodiversity - and so on.

People can do good, people can do bad. All things have two handles, beware of the wrong one.

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Good article with many interesting points.

I think you are too sure of the idea that climate drove the extinction of the megafauna. I’m sure it had an impact, but we know for a fact that humans hunted megafauna, and that extinctions occurred after human arrival at different times on many continents. Also, considering that climate changed rapidly throughout the ice age suggests to me that megafauna were relatively adapted to these changes.

Of course these are just heuristics, but I think if you do a broad look at the literature, it seems to come down slightly if not heavily in favor of humans playing a role in these extinctions, with many papers also arguing for climate impacts. I think the plausible scenario is that humans began hunting megafauna, and some combination of over hunting, climate change, and human led range restriction, lead to the demise of many megafauna. There is usually an increase in ecosystem fire after these extinctions, which may have been partly aided by humans as well.

I think that people resist the idea of human induced exctinctions because they assume it was an instance of greed, overhunting, overpopulation, etc. I think it was more that people were an introduction into ecosystems that were fragile to the impacts people have, even in modest numbers. A bit of hunting and competition for resources at the wrong moment can lead to extinctions, especially for apex herbivores who don’t have natural predators (for adults).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307005?casa_token=DL2oeKCER3QAAAAA:F3xB4WEfRNdJZGlI5gYD_g1cFBb6WehapZyMy7VxE7CEtewM_F23Bd3D8t6LMLJJuX48Dw_E2w

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abb2459

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13277-0

You may disagree with this point, but I think it’s worth investigating, because it may impact your conclusions in some way.

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Great response, a good read.

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