In my research, it seems to follow pretty closely that within 5,000-10,000 years of humans arriving in a territory with abundant mega-fauna, that the megafauna are completely wiped out. However the increase in global temperature put additional pressure on mega-fauna as the earth warmed

My naiive interpretation is that climate warming into the Holocene put significant pressures on mega-fauna ecology, and humans took advantage of these new pressures and over-consumed the fauna. They did not realize there was such a thing as "running out of food."

It seems pretty clear to me that 200,000-10,000BC was this kind of wonderland of human growth because all of the conditions were perfect for humans to just totally dominate the landscape with relative ease.

The problem is, we are just smart enough as a group to mess things up really efficiently for short term benefits (within two generations), but we're not smart enough to act as though we're planning for 5-10 generations into the future.

[1] Christopher, S., et.al. (2014). Global late quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

[2] Ellis, E.C. (2021) People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (17).

[3] Stewart, M., Carleton, W.C. & Groucutt, H.S. (2021) Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America. Nat Commun 12, 965.