Which landmass / culture / epoch are you trying to describe here?
I'm not trying to deny anything. I'm sure there were pockets of what we (modern) might recognise as agriculture, though not pastoralism (for obvious reasons).
My question was actually just what it looked like, an earnest question to chrisco255, replying to elmomie, about the context of their statements.
GP seemed to be talking global, and so did parent - which would make sense in the context of climate change (a global phenomenon) and also massive human population growth (also mostly global, resulting form settlements / agriculture).
For most of the globe agriculture was not possible. While canines were probably domesticated in the glacial period, they served as hunting partners primarily. It's actually quite hard to build fencing over large amounts of land area (like sheep and cows require) that is capable of keeping animals in, unless you have metal to cut wood with. The United States had open cattle ranging until barbed wire was invented in the 1870s, since it was too difficult to fence. And open ranging was only possible after horse domestication.
We also do not see evidence of grain domestication or any kind of real farming until the start of the Holocene 10K-12K years ago. The climate was not particularly friendly to farming, and without access to metal, farming is orders of magnitude more difficult.
The original article is about Australia alone, and 45K years ago, Australia probably had a human population in the low thousands, with it being on the frontier of human expansion at the time. There is no evidence of massive human population at that time or any time before 12K years ago. In fact, there's several population bottlenecks where they think the total number of humans alive globally was around a few thousand.
I know living, brush, or ha-ha type fences would have been possible - but agree all of those were easier with some metal utensils.
The thing about climate change in prehistory is that it drives changes to human life. Archaeologists put glacial maxima on their timelines because it's such an important factor when trying to understanding human migration, the spread of new technologies that do better in drier or wetter climates, the shift to different food sources, and so on. This predates the current climate-aware political landscape.
If 90% of a species is killed off by climate change, and if for hundreds of thousands of years that species survived glacial maxima in reservoir populations in areas that are now populated by starving humans who kill the remaining 10%, was it the climate or the humans who wiped out the species? The changing climate killed more, but the humans were the differentiating factor, so which one do you point the finger at?
I don't think it's right to call that denialism.
If we're the differentiating factor, I'd have to blame us. Am I right in understanding that these species were normally being thinned during each glacial maxima, such that it was already a set part of their evolutionary environment? If that's right, then aren't we the ones to blame?
Otherwise, is a murderer merely a "contributing cause" to someone's death if the victim happens to be sick at the time of the killing?
My main point was that I don't think it would be denialism for someone to say "no, the species was pushed to the brink by climate change anyway, we know other species went extinct prior to human colonisation, and even though humans arguably made it worse there's no conclusive evidence". Glacial maxima are hundreds of thousands of years apart and given the timescales involved it's hard to say whether a species is adapted to them or whether it just got lucky.
Denying native people's the agency and ability to alter their environment is exactly the type of thing the institutionalized racists in academia push for.
The obvious conclusion that native people are no more the stewards of the land than the British during the industrial revolution then collapses the whole 'blood and soil' ideology of modern academia and the push for race based land rights.
To keep this from happening the historical fiction of the noble savage must be defended as strongly as all previously discredited pseudo science that the universities have pushed to wider society. In 50 years everyone will pretend that they didn't support it just like phrenology.
The mountains of evidence that the arrival of humans lead to mass extinctions of mega fauna, drastic changes in the flora and even climate change before circa 1500 are conveniently ignored and downplayed.
> There are indications that the legs of Genyornis were gradually adapting to this drier climate, but the species would have remained under considerable pressure. This environmental stress is thought to be why the birds had higher than expected levels of bone disease at around the same time.
In this case it sounds like climate change was in fact a stressor, though I believe you're right--even without climate change this bird would have gone the way of the moa. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been "Already under stress from climate change, they are thought to have been eaten to extinction."