On Fri, 17 Nov 1995, Eugene Hunn wrote:
> Islands are special cases, as I believe the island biogeography
> literature shows.

It may well be that critical human population densities are lower on
islands, but surely no one would suggest that humans cannot reach
critical densities on continents(?); the evidence would seem to argue
otherwise. My point was simply that when human populations exceed
the ability of unmodified habitat to sustain them, species will become
extinct. If only a small number of extinctions (or even "none") were
caused by Native Americans, this low impact is more directly attributable
to their low population densities than to their religious beliefs.

David Wright
dwright at u.washington.edu