The Long Way Back to Ourselves

1.10

The Ecological Footprint Before Civilization

This episode opens with a timeline: mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until roughly 4,000 years ago, still alive while the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built. It weighs the overkill hypothesis against the climate hypothesis for Ice Age megafauna extinction, arguing the strongest evidence is timing: extinctions in Australia, the Americas, and New Zealand each coincide with human arrival, not a shared climate event. The clearest case is New Zealand, where Polynesian seafarers arrived in the late 13th century and the giant moa vanished within roughly 100 to 150 years. It closes with Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning finding that sustainable resource use is not a trait but rules and sanctions communities built and enforced.