Chapter 17, The Golden Age That Never Was Summary and Analysis

A prevalent habit among modern peoples of all time is to look toward the distant past and imagine it as a sort of golden age where contemporaneous problems did not exist. Many suggest that today's societal ills could be eliminated by a return to a fondly remembered era of peace and environmental purity. Many imagine that humans living during these golden ages were somehow more in tune with nature and behaved with high moral and ethical standards as a sort of "noble savage." The archaeological and historic records suggest that these views are entirely incorrect.

A thorough archaeological investigation of New Zealand indicates that the first human settlers hunted local large fauna to extinction within a few dozen years. Numerous large endemic New Zealand species went extinct at the...