As a further thoughts in that line, the concept is seen elsewhere. When colonizers spread new pathogens to a people and it decimates them, why didn't that pathogen kill the explorers in the first place? Because their population has been growing and incubating with the disease historically. It's also exactly what happens with invasive species - they're introduced to an environment where the local flora and fauna haven't had a chance to evolve alongside them.MirariNefas wrote:There's plenty of papers analyzing that subject. My understanding of it is that when you evolve alongside a creature, it evolves with you. That is, successive generations of ever smarter hominids puts evolutionary pressure on the surrounding fauna at a slow rate. This leads to fauna developing which are either harder to kill, or less rewarding to kill for those hominids.
Eventually, the nth generation of evolved superpredator hominid leaves the continent and heads off to strange new lands, where they find big giant stupid dodos which have never had to deal with a hominid before. Easy lunch, and they're wiped out too quickly to evolve in response.
In that context, I think it's a little ridiculous to deny the role of hunter-gatherers in causing extinctions. Of course they caused extinctions, just like any other invasive species that spreads around the world.