>Most native peoples were very in tune withe the earth (Pagan Europe, Native American tribes, Hindu India, Tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, etc).

The reason there were so many bison in the US when the settlers arrived is that the native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction. While I think there is a kernel of truth to your comment, I also think the premise that primitive people's were more "in tune" with nature than their Western counterparts in some deep cultural or spiritual sense is a revisionist myth predicated on the "noble savage" archetype. The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival for such people. Obviously, if your culture survives primarily on deer, you don't kill all of the deer. But primitive people were quite capable of destroying or harming their environment, as long as they could survive it, just not as capable as more advanced societies.

The theory of natives wiping out American megafauna is well-disputed. It was probably a combination of factors (possibly including hunting).

The idea of primitive people being more in tune with the earth doesn't have to go hand-in-hand with the "noble savage" romanticization. There's evidence that North America was essentially a well-managed game reserve. For people that didn't have much in the ways of truly domesticated livestock, it makes sense that they worked towards food security in a different way than societies that had cattle and pigs. By necessity, they would have had to develop practical and efficient methods for managing their food source. So sure, they were probably much more in tune with nature their contemporary Europeans or modern Americans, if "in tune" means having the know-how to bend and shape the natural world for their benefit.

> The reason there were so many bison in the US when the settlers arrived is that the native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction.

do you have a good source that details the evidence of this? and what megafauna were killed off?

i tried searching and from what i found, it isn't anywhere as close to clear cut as you state it. i even saw an article debunking the "overkill hypothesis" which claimed some scientists did some dating studies and showed that in a region of north america the large animals died off before native americans arrived. of course that could be false, but it just doesn't seem so clear as you state it.

> primitive people

The only indigenous population I know about in any detail is that of my nation (Australia). They were far from "primitive", rather constituted an unimaginably ancient continent-wide civilisation.

> native Americans had already hunted the rest of the megafauna to extinction

Again, speaking for the Aus equivalent: there's an arguable case that descendants of the original settlers arriving across the PNG land bridge may have caused species extinctions. Given what we know of H. Sapiens, it's pretty likely.

But that has little to do with the indigenous Australians who the European invaders encountered. By this time they had undergone 40-60,000 years of cultural and social development. By this advanced stage they had an extraordinarily detailed understanding of the ecologies they lived in and managed. The "in tune with nature" phrase is not to my taste, but if any population could be described this way, it was them.

> The truth is more likely that being "in tune" with nature was simply a matter of survival

Well this assumes they were not true human cultures, a hallmark of which is rarely doing anything only for survival. All known human cultures have myths and institutions, beliefs, roles and manners of life woven deeply with all the acts that also happen to perform survival functions. It's a bit of a dehumanising stance to expunge everything but the survival aspect. It's also not a stance that ever withstands even a modicum of familiarity with any real human culture.

The Chinese don't follow an Abrahamic religion and yet they've built huge urban empires.

It's unlikely this is a factor.

Also, the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs.

It could be a factor everywhere else I mentioned, though. This is a logical fallacy.

Abrahamic Religions arrived perhaps too recently. The records we have of ancient civilizations show that they successfully dominated their environments already, and certainly accomplished amazing things.

Which fallacy? I don't understand.

Person A got cancer from smoking, but person B got cancer from exposure to chemicals so smoking likely doesn't cause cancer. Its the same argument.

I think I meant it more in the sense of "smoking causes cancer and so does exposure to chemicals so it's not the smoking or the chemicals that we need to look at but something they both have in common."

I may not have made that clear enough, however.

I’d say the Earth was fairly well dominated by the time Abrahamic religion started to become mainstream around 300AD.

Axial[1] religion might have something to do with which societies succeeded later, but that isn't the same thing as Abrahamic and is all about a later phenomenon.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

This sort of thing really makes me wish we had high-fidelity simulations of human societies we could do experiments with. And then comes the fear that we’re in one.

I think this is a little simplified but I honestly believe that if the bible didn't contain the phrase "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" the world may be a better place.

Or maybe the starting point is that sapiens' DNA really is shaped for ruling.

That sapiens mostly preferred 'Abrahamic religion' to others is then a consequence to this starting point.

>That sapiens mostly preferred 'Abrahamic religion' to others is then a consequence to this starting point.

Sapiens didn't mostly prefer Abrahamic religion. Judaism didn't proselytize as far as I'm aware, and Christianity and Islam converted many cultures and people by force (although not exclusively.)

And you're not considering the widespread preference for Buddhist and animist religions, which over time likely equal if not surpass the Abrahamic faiths... although to be fair those also sometimes were spread by force as well.

> And you're not considering the widespread preference for Buddhist and animist religion [...]

Actually I'm not considering anything, I was just pointing that the theory in the parent's book could be reversed.