But then again maybe not. Maybe we'd never overcome the activation energy for innovation. You can't do true experiments in history.
There seems to be this strange idea that 'culture' means 'has a religious festival' or somesuch. You hear of some traveller lionising a travel destination as being so culturally deep because they happened to visit when a festival was on. Then, because the home country doesn't have that festival or ritual, it's seen as culturally bereft.
There is a ridiculously wide assortment of activities you can get involved in when you're not a scratching at the earth for subsistence - including debating the difference in what 'culture' means with someone on the other side of the world. Whether you're seeing a movie, running a fantasy football league, doling out soup in a soup kitchen, filibustering to stop some random law, fishing through your credit cards for one the plane's entertainment system will accept, chewing the fat with a passerby while sitting on your stoop on a hot night, spending a Saturday doing a gastro-tour of a great vineyard region... pretty much any activity you can think of, right down to submitting your tax forms... these are all culture. The more different kinds of people you throw together, the greater the variety of cultural activities available.
The idea that we are culturally bereft is just plain wrong. We may not have our priorities right with certain aspects of our culture, but we are drowning in culture. I just don't see how culture would be 'deeper' with less interaction between people from the removal of fossil fuels - we had that for human history up until a couple of hundred years ago, and culture was both slow to change and quite unfair, without being any deeper than it is now.
/rant
Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else...
Rather pointing out that (at the time) oxygen in the atmosphere was hostile to more complex forms of life. As we know, oxygen is a pretty unpleasant element in its raw state - but we managed to work around that particular problem.
Similar to the way one might satirize traditional marriage by pointing out that tradition advocates a lot of things that traditional marriage people would find abhorrent, if you take a view of tradition that extends past the start of the industrial revolution.
Which I think is justified, but we should make clear what is being asked and not painting humans as being something their not (i.e. uniquely exploitive, violent, selfish, etc.)
The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.