Archeologists (and hikermor will know more about this than I do) state that the population of the Americas could have been as high as 100,000,000 at the time when Europe was being ravaged by the plague! The plunder of the Americas was probably the worst genocide humanity has ever seen. Fully 95% of all the native peoples died.

I kind of wonder, philosophically, if humans are or even could be cut off from "nature". When a beaver dams a river, is he cutting himself off from nature or expressing the nature of a beaver? Is our civilization and technology someone foreign and alien to the world or simply or version of what it is to be a beaver? Or an ant? When a bird builds a 500 lb nest, is that alien?