Interesting new study suggests that the giant Moa of New Zealand suffered a population crash of at least an order of magnitude before the arrival of Polynesians to the islands. Why is this important? Money shot:

"If they are right then a deer-infested forest would be closer to the original New Zealand forests," he says.

I wonder if in the future (thousands of years) geneticists will reconstruct human induced environmental change by tracing the various population bottlenecks and man-wrought migrations of species between biogeographic domains. Of course, by that time "humanity" might have reached an "omega point" and such primitive inferential methods might be unnecessary.