I'm not going to let you get away with playing the "skin" card.

Whatever, not playing it, just concerned by the very last few words of that statement. Specifically the last eleven, to wit.

they ultimately deprived themself of buffalo as a source of meat.

In your reply you said;

You don't have personal knowledge of the actions of Native Americans across a span of tens of thousands of years.

Didn’t claim I did, but let’s not quibble.

I was speaking more along the lines of recent (historically speaking) groups. One of the cardinal sins according to many of our traditions is greed, more to the crux of this discussion, killing more than you need. A lot was lost in the first half of the 20th, mostly through forced separation of children from their parents. Placed in “Boarding Schools” severely punished for speaking their own language, observing their own beliefs, dressing in traditional clothing, even wearing their hair in traditional fashion. I’ll stop about that now, I get really wound up anytime I start talking about that.

But, fortunately enough elders remained who knew the old ways, that is what is learned now.

Look I’m not preaching that hoary old crap about the “Noble Savage”, our history is filled with just as many black sheep as anyone else. From greed to cheating on spouses, we’re just as human as the rest of humanity.

But, and this is germane to the specific topic of this single conversation, nearly all “modern” tribal groups held the land, and all that lived on it, as sacred. Part of the greater whole. Not separate pieces of a mosaic, not to be wasted, or overused without some thought to the future. This was deeply ingrained in both social custom and religious belief.

Speaking of bones, what the record--fossil and archeological--shows repeatedly, in Australia and many isolated Pacific Islands as well as North and South America and southern parts of Africa, is that like clockwork, immediately upon the arrival of humans in a land that hadn't known humans before, there were mass extinctions. 40,000 years ago people made it to Australia, and a rich fauna of large marsupial analogs to bison and rabbits and wolves and chickens--food animals--disappears from the fossil record. Indeed, the last traces of those species is bones in the campfire pits of hunter-gatherers and in their middens.

When humans arrived in the Americas, archeological records show that it took them only about a thousand years to travel as far south as Tierra del Fuego. That's actually only a few miles per year on average and not remarkable. It merely demonstrates a population exploding in a virgin land, whose voracious appetite could be sated by vast quantities of food. Mammoths went extinct, bison survived in isolated pockets (I think what we saw in the 19th century represented a population resurgence, not evidence of the true status quo as it had been for thousands of years), and many smaller species went extinct.

Absolutely no argument, what happened in the paleo era expansions isn’t in much debate, though in many cases the influx of humanity was often accompanied by drastic climate change. Such as the drying out of the southwest at, or nearly coincidental with human emigrations. But, generally there is little doubt that human predation brought to extinction countless species across the world over the last 70 thousand years.

It's been observed that if those extinctions were all coincidental, why were species used as food by humans selected preferentially to die out? Why were humans not only unaffected by a hypothetical ecological catastrophe but indeed thrived? How counterintuitive is that?

Understand that I'm not assigning blame. "Overnight" in geological terms is still much longer than the span of an individual human lifetime, and on our scale the extinctions were gradual and largely imperceptible. As long as people could compensate for a local extinction by moving to virgin territory, there was no problem to perceive; and by the time the phenomenon could be perceived, there was nobody alive to remember how it used to be. The phenomenon of species extinction, until recently, has been below the human radar. No sense berating our ancestors for not knowing what we know now. That's why I was careful to say that "With 20/20 hindsight we know it was ultimately foolish for the Native Americans to drive herds of buffalo off cliffs and into extinction..."--"hindsight" and "ultimately" are the two key terms.

Human expansion has always been accompanied by extinction, sometimes including subsets of humanity. Nobody's ancestral hands are clean. Finger-pointing's a waste of time, let's be concerned about dealing with the obligation laid upon us now by the curse of knowledge.

Not to mention the disappearance of major predators in most places, the sabertooth, great short nosed bear, lions in North America. The enormous predatory lizard related to Komodo dragons in Australia. Took the Europeans til the end of the first millennium too get rid of lions in Europe.

My response was purely to what I perceived as a factual statement that Native Americans were directly to blame for the slaughter to near extinction of what was nearly the sole source of food, shelter, clothing and more for a number of the Plain’s tribes. They had little to do with it during the 1800's even after the introduction of firearms most took no more than could be eaten or preserved. Those that went to far suffered social pressures, up to and including shunning.

That event was driven by market for buffalo hides in the east and choice cuts off the carcass. The rest was left to rot. All encouraged by Political forces and Railroads wanting to clear the way. Simply another chapter of history that tends to get left out of the books.