Comment by Retric

By that the token humans drove a great number of species to extinction long before the Industrial Revolution. So by that line of thinking we were already running into the limits of natural resources in the Neolithic.

Obviously we’re becoming better at extracting resources over time, but humans ran out of new land to exploit long before Europe's conquest of the Americas. Land only seemed empty because disease decimated native populations, people lived in San Francisco thousands of years ago.