> We were causing mass extinctions with pointy sticks as the state of the art Not at anything like this scale, nor this rate, as is clear from the wiki article

> We were causing mass extinctions with pointy sticks as the state of the art Not at anything like this scale, nor this rate, as is clear from the wiki article linked above. > the mythical era of "not causing mass extinctions" never even existed. It existed everywhere we weren't, and again, scale and rate both matter. > Even when humanity was at its lowest creating the genetic bottleneck we were nomadic because we ate the prior area empty. The current consensus is a lot more complex than humans being "purely nomadic" because they "ate the prior area empty." Evidence of early permanent settlement appears much earlier than the advent of agriculture ~12,000 years ago. Ohalo II in Israel is 23,000 years old. There's likely many other sites as old and older, but our archaeology is not advanced enough to know more. > Now we've progressed to sedentary lifestyles being possible long term and even soil management ... What?? We're only now rediscovering soil management practices which were used hundreds/thousands of years ago by people native to areas we've all but destroyed. If we'd listened to them instead of dehumanizing and murdering them things could be different, but we can still at least not whitewash them out of history. Globally speaking, top soil is in a variety of concurrent crises. It's in the worst shape it's ever been.