Oh the human conditions and the self-inflicting ruse of overpopulation inculcating the inability to see alternatives to the descent into barbarism in the name of supposed advantages. Where was VHEMT when we didn't need them? Nor do we now. I somehow doubt its historic equal.
I knew that Darwin was Malthus' cousin (twice removed) but I hadn't considered until today that it was perhaps that inspiration from which the Galapagos were sought because they supposedly had always been uninhabited. I know that Thor Heyerdahl asked that question (for whom I have enormous respect) but all the pooh-pooh-pshawing I've seen have been on mostly agro-urban metrics, whatever evidences of the type of people he might have posited being much less sedentary. Yet it is entirely rational to expect that ancient Polynesian peoples made introductions to those islands for food production. Thus possibly indicating yet another "scientific" flubub.
Thoughts?
Over recent decades, I've been very uncomfortable with the idea of "Nature" as self optimizing when I see so many indications to the contrary. This is not to say that I'm in love with monoculture farming (quite the contrary), but that our propensity is to allow the marketplace to forget the importance of estimating stochastic risks in order to mitigate them objectively. This is the real driver of so much of what we too readily bewail about human influences on "Natural" systems (particularly soils), particularly when we have so little idea what those systems operate, much less how they got the way they did when European cultures invaded territories once managed by aboriginal peoples.
It's another one of those "We are Cain" problems, as we would seem too un-Abel to see through those glasses.
Ordinarily when a population outgrows its multi-generational territory, it either makes a deal with the neighbors, or gets into a conflict with them. Precolumbian America was no different than any other place on Earth. Given the number of language families, I very much doubt that the Americas were settled in one go, by just one pretty small cultural group.
OTOH, I’d think the Polynesian expansion was probably merely the last coat of paint. At least some of the places they took over had been occupied before, but being islands, if the prior population had managed to lose inter-island mobility, it was bound to be a fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas