[yterdy]

"The global nature of the problem" is also an assumption; there is the chance that, should oral histories in West and Central Africa have survived, or more was known about surviving, undeciphered Mesoamerican and Andean records, we might have learned of differing conditions outside of the Global North. In both cases, our inability to access those sources of information is not an accident of nature, but the result of several historical campaigns of cultural or total genocide.

I think you're missing my point, which is that the erasure of these regions from the record (which runs through the history of archaeology, up to the publishing of this article) was a purposeful and avoidable tragedy. If we are to talk about the conditions of human life and civilization, we should aspire to do one better than the example of your intellectually-honest historian, and affirm that we simply don't know, not that we could not have.