Population Increase and a Decrease in Resources Placed Hunter Gatherers Under Mounting Pressure
Over the millennia, human hunter gatherer communities got better at collecting information about, and understanding, their environments. As that knowledge was passed down the generations, it accumulated and steadily grew. As a result, humans became more skillful at both hunting and gathering, and their impact on their environments steadily grew.
Steadily more efficient human hunters steadily placed many animal species, especially the mega fauna – large animals weighing more than 100 lbs – under increasing pressure. It is probably just a feel good myth that our hunter gatherer ancestors were particularly respectful of their environments, killing only what they needed, and consuming all that they killed.
Arriving in new territories outside Africa, where the mega fauna had evolved alongside humans for hundreds of thousands years – long enough to learn to fear us – they entered lands teeming with game that was not particularly wary of humans. In such bonanza conditions, our ancestors were as wasteful of food as we are today. The first arriving humans would have frequently killed only to consume the choicest bits, letting the rest of the carcass go to waste. Why bother eating any but the tastiest parts, when there was seemingly limitless game around? Similarly, our ancestors often adopted wantonly wasteful hunting techniques, such as stampeding entire herds to their death off cliffs, where most of the killed animals’ meat would have spoiled.
By the end of the last ice age, roughly 11,500 years ago, most mega fauna around the world, except those in Africa that had evolved to fear us, had gone extinct. In years past, conventional wisdom absolved our hunter gatherer ancestors from responsibility for those extinctions. It was fueled in no small part by “noble savage” mindsets that wanted to believe that our primitive ancestors were gentle environmentalists who respected nature and could do no wrong.
Unfortunately, our ancestors were often inclined to be just as selfish, destructive, and shortsighted as we are today. They simply lacked the technology and numbers to wreak as much havoc on their environment, and do so as quickly, as we can today. However, within the parameters of their capabilities, they wreaked enough havoc to drive or tip over many species into extinction.
That coincided with a changing climate at the tail end of the ice age that brought floods from melting glaciers, and warmer weather that blighted the plant life in many biospheres that had developed during a cooler era. For many humans around the world, that spelled the end of the idyllic conditions that had enabled earlier generations to feast upon seemingly limitless and easily hunted game. Life was about to get tougher.