> The changing climate killed more, but the humans were the differentiating factor, so which one do you point the finger at?

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?

I think there's a good argument that either or both factors contributed. We tend to blame people because they have agency and the natural world does not, and that's not a bad way to understand things.

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.

Weren't there something like 5 glacial maxima in the past 200 thousand years? I had the impression they were more regularly occurring than "hundreds of thouands of years apart".

Yeah my bad, I meant that glacial and interglacial periods happen in a cycle that can take up to 100k years before it repeats, but phrased it in a way that's outright wrong as well as misleading. I think the overall point still stands though.

It is very charitable to call out the latest form of Western racism.

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.

I’m not disagreeing with the premise of what you are saying but did you read the article? At least with this I don’t think anyone was saying it was the British that made it go extinct. The article references a study saying about the native people eating the eggs like 50,000 years ago.