Do Agriculture and Cities Impair Nature?

Cave Paintings from Chauvet Cave

I watched Werner Herzog's documentary on Chauvet Cave yesterday. The paintings in the cave depict a zoo of extinct animals: woolly mammoths, rhinos, cave lions. When ice covered much of Europe, the remaining forests and grasslands were able to feed a diversity of species of large mammals--including huge elephants and rhinos. That means the entire food chain had to be really productive.

Those animals were present in southern Europe during the last ice age, up until about 10,000 years ago. A few of them, like the Aurochs, straggled into the human era. (The last Aurochs died around 1600.)

The Aurochs went extinct because humans hunted it and destroyed its habitat. Nobody really knows what happened to the mammoths and the others. One theory is they died out as the climate warmed. Another is humans hunted them to extinction.

When humans introduced agriculture and cities, it's possible they severely curtailed the productivity of nature--totally the opposite of what we're taught in history classes. Rather than freeing themselves from want and deprivation, they starved everything else and ruined their own home.