When I lived in New Mexico, I always enjoyed visiting various places around the state whenever possible. One of those interesting places is White Sands National Park, a vast expanse of pure white sand stretching as far as the eye can see. Similar in some ways to Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado, about two hours away from where I live. I also love nature.
On a spring day in 2017, along the edge of the ancient lakebed in what is now White Sands National Park, a paleontologist was following the fossilized tracks of a ground sloth - a bulky Ice Age animal that could weigh more than a ton and whose long, curved claws likely forced it to waddle on the sides of its feet. As he uncovered the crescent-shaped tracks in the sediment, he happened upon one print even stranger than the rest. He told the press that the oval bump in its center made it resemble a “Klingon Bird-of-Prey in negative relief.”
He soon realized he was looking at not one print but two that overlapped. Made in close succession more than 11,000 years ago, the larger belonged to a sloth; the smaller belonged, unmistakably, to a human. More overlapping tracks suggested that a group of adults and children had deliberately stepped into the sloth prints and followed the animal until it turned to face them, dragging its knuckles along the ground as it reared up to its full eight-foot height. In another part of the lakebed, the team documented a set of similarly aged human prints left by a teenager or young adult who carried a child on one hip while hurrying through territory crisscrossed by sloths and mammoths.
North and South America were the last temperate continents reached by early humans, but humans have nevertheless lived here for a very long time: in 2021 scientists studying another set of fossilized human footprints in the White Sands lakebed published an analysis of the surrounding seed layers that suggested the footprints were about 23,000 years old. The more recent sets of near-simultaneous sloth and human footprints are among the oldest known records of human interactions with other species in North America, and the stories they suggest are familiar: then as now, humans and their fellow animals reacted to one another with curiosity, recklessness, and fear, coexisting in relationships often touched by violence.
The first signs of humans in the North American fossil record are scant and scattered: those footprints in New Mexico, the remains of a mastodon kill in Florida, traces of a mastodon roast in Virginia. But 16,000 years ago, when the retreat of the Pleistocene ice sheets reopened a land route between present-day Alaska and the continental United States, humans began moving rapidly from Asia through Beringia and across North America, establishing a civilization that extended from Alaska to Florida and produced distinctive tools and weaponry for at least 300 years. While earlier humans likely had little impact on the continent’s plant and animal species, the Clovis people - named for the site in eastern New Mexico where a teenage archaeology enthusiast encountered its projectile points in 1929 - had the numbers, and the tools, to leave a far more lasting mark.
Radiocarbon dates suggest that by the end of the Pleistocene, 11,700 years ago, more than three dozen genera of large mammals had gone extinct in North America. Exactly how lethal the Clovisians were is the subject of an extended, and still animated, debate.
Though there is some direct fossil evidence of large-scale Pleistocene hunting by humans, it is far from conclusive, and critics point out that the extinctions, which included birds and reptiles as well as large mammals, may have happened more gradually than some have surmised. For now, at least, the arguments for both the overkill hypothesis and its alternatives rest heavily on inferences.
Archaeologists are in general unpersuaded by the fossil evidence and tend to see human hunting as only one of several reasons for the Pleistocene die-off. In contrast, ecologists - whose studies of modern species declines and extinctions make them eyewitnesses to humanity’s ability to alter the planet - largely accept the overkill hypothesis, casting it as a distant mirror of modern societies’ awful appetites.
For most of North America’s flora and fauna, the approximately 10,000 years between the Pleistocene die-off and the arrival of Columbus appear to have been relatively peaceful. Species such as the new, smaller bison expanded to fill empty niches, allowing many indigenous American cultures to continue hunting and gathering instead of resorting to agriculture like their counterparts in Europe and Asia. While some North American societies migrated seasonally with their animal quarries, others stayed in place, building lasting structures such as the massive earthen mounds along rivers in the South and Midwest. Initially erected by hunter-gatherers and inherited by later agricultural societies, these mounds apparently served religious purposes.
Native cultures developed - and continue to develop - elaborate artistic and religious traditions, many centered on the complex connections between humans and other species. In Blackfeet cosmology the “Below World,” where humans reside, is one of three separate but interconnected worlds, each of which contains both visible and invisible, or supernatural, elements. Animals are believed to live in all three worlds, and human alliances with supernatural animals are traditionally seen as a means of survival in unpredictable surroundings.
All human societies, in the Americas and elsewhere, had lasting effects on their ecosystems. That indigenous societies used traditional taboos to restrict the hunting of certain species, such as the passenger pigeon, to particular seasons or locations suggests that harmony between people and other animals, if it existed in North America, was not a default state but the product of deliberate effort.
When Europeans arrived on American shores, they began to destroy at an entirely different magnitude. Diseases such as smallpox and measles, never encountered by Native immune systems, quickly took a horrifying toll on indigenous communities. This population crash was followed by a post-pandemic boom in wildlife numbers, leading many observers to conclude that 16th- and 17th-century North America was a sort of Eden - a pernicious assumption that persists in various forms even today.
Tens of thousands of years before the initial encounters between Europeans and Americans, their respective ancestors parted ways in Africa, with one group traveling north to Europe and the other moving east through Asia and, eventually, across Beringia to North America. During those many centuries of separation, their cultures diverged. In Native American cultures, free-roaming animals remained essential to human diets and economies and were often regarded as close kin.
In contrast, as wildlife populations dwindled across Eurasia, European societies became primarily agricultural, domesticating animals instead of hunting them. European invisible realities were reserved for humans, and in the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical view of life that dominated European thought, humans ranked just below the angels; all other species followed, ordered by their relative utility to humans. Large predators capable of preying on livestock were considered worse than useless, and Europeans saw wolves as particularly malevolent - an antipathy that later had disastrous effects on North American ecosystems.
The Great Chain of Being also provided the rationale for modern racism. The Portuguese began to import slave labor from West Africa in the 1400s, and as other European nations followed, the trade in enslaved people for agricultural and domestic labor expanded into Central Africa and across the Atlantic. European church, state, and popular support for the systematic enslavement of Africans relied at least in part on the belief that people with darker skin were inherently inferior, and by the 18th century European intellectuals had revised the Great Chain of Being to include a ranking of human races, unsurprisingly placing their own at the top.
Native American knowledge of flora and fauna, accumulated over thousands of years, was decimated by European disease and persecution, and only a handful of European-descended Americans recognized the value of the surviving expertise. Some appreciated the immense diversity of North American plant and animal species, most of them new to European eyes, and several 18th- and 19th-century naturalists, both famous and obscure, drew attention to its richness.
In the 19th century these dubious ideas served as the foundation for an unprecedented - and hideously destructive - national and international market in North American wildlife. Birds were shot and sold by the thousands to satisfy the demand for both meat and feathers; commercial buffalo hunters, who were predominantly white but included some Native Americans, all but exterminated the plains bison as they raced to supply Europeans and urban North Americans with buffalo robes. Some of these hunters may have genuinely believed that these animal populations were inexhaustible, but plenty understood the likely consequences of their actions.
Importantly, hunters benefited not only from market demand but from government subsidies; state and later federal support for the wholesale killing of wolves and other carnivores extended well into the 20th century. Few voices opposed this massacre until the Progressive Era, when the extinction or near-extinction of many famous species - among them the bison and the passenger pigeon - combined with a growing awareness of the manifold cruelties of unregulated markets to birth the modern conservation movement.
Just as the overkill hypothesis is not necessary to understand that humans have long inflicted heedless cruelty on other species, the biophilia hypothesis is not necessary to understand that humans can treat other species with respect, care, and self-interested foresight. The leaders of these efforts, wary of the enduring stereotype of the ecological Indian, generally avoid claims to any innate capacity for protecting other species; they are instead motivated and informed by ancestral experience, cultural traditions, and concern for the ecosystems that support us all.
Any account that begins with the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid and extends to the impact of 1960s Disney nature documentaries must sacrifice some complexities.
Though the vilification of market hunters led to legislation that, by 1920, had ended the trade in wild birds, it also helped establish the conservation movement’s reputation for elitism, a reputation - and, to some extent, a reality - that remains a political vulnerability. Consider, for instance, the claims by the timber industry in the 1980s that protecting the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest would lead to economic ruin for both companies and communities: while the claims were highly exaggerated, the longstanding perception that conservation was a special interest of the privileged rather than a universal responsibility primed many working-class people to believe that conservationists were out to destroy their jobs. Similar assumptions prop up today’s manufactured outrage over climate legislation and the regulation of gas stoves.
While sportsmen worked to distinguish themselves from those who hunted for a living, they glorified experiences in which wildlife and their habitats functioned as commodities. Even today, conservation organizations routinely present other species as irreplaceable objects, forgetting or ignoring that they are also fellow members of our ecosystems - or, as many traditions far older than the market would put it, kin.
Before we can think about how to prevent wildness from disappearing under the weight of the market, we need to escape the vortex of commerce ourselves.
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