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There is this prevailing notion that 'traditional indigenous' people lived in harmony with earth. but by the time European colonizers arrived on the north American continent the land had been fairly thoroughly transformed. Tribes that practiced certain agriculture degraded habitats. Some irrigation systems had degraded rivers with sediment runoff. Not that it's a good thing, but with European colonization, mass die off of about 90% of millions of... Here, let me quote:

"population decrease, which came about due to the introduction of previously unknown diseases, led to the rapid reforestation of the Americas. This led to a sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being pulled from the air, which meant the atmosphere wasn’t able to hold as much heat, which led to colder air covering Europe.
The team, led by visiting scholar Richard Nevle, came to this conclusion after analyzing charcoal remnants in soil and lake sediments left behind by early American inhabitants as they burned forests to make room for farmland. They found that starting approximately 500 years ago, the charcoal accumulations came to a virtual standstill, coinciding with the death of native peoples.
Nevle et al then got out their calculators and crunched the numbers. They estimate that for a population of some 40 to 80 million indigenous people, the total amount of deforested land would likely have amounted to something the size of California. And since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived, that meant most of that land returned to forest. That many trees, they say, all of a sudden appearing, almost as if out of nowhere, could have resulted in a loss of some 2 to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air..." https://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html

One of the themes of my blog is that early humans colonized and degraded the planet, resulting in things like mass extinctions of megafauna, etc. https://veganprimitivist.wordpress.com/