Many kinds of aborigines in various parts of the world where the Europeans have arrived only relatively recently have been praised for the sustainable and efficient ways in which they were exploiting their local resources.

Nevertheless, this assessment is true only for their more recent history, i.e. for the last few hundreds or few thousands of years before the contact with Europeans, depending on the place.

Everywhere, their more distant ancestors had not practiced a sustainable way of exploiting the local nature and they had hunted to extinction many of the bigger animals, or even all of them. Even many smaller animals and plants may have become extinct as a consequence of human activities. Only later, the aborigines have eventually learned to practice a sustainable way of living, otherwise they would have become extinct themselves.

This is also true for Australia, which was very different by the time of the arrival of the first humans.

Unfortunately, while indeed many aborigines had learned by necessity to be not greedy in order to have a society based on equilibrium, not on growth, this did not happen for the more "civilized" humans, because for a long time they were able to expand over the rest of the world and now they continue to hope for miracles that would allow unlimited growth in the future too.

I'm not an expert in archaeology, but this is more complicated than it appears at first glance.

My understanding is that either people are in equilibrium, or they are not. When they're not in equilibrium, they can cause extirpation or extinction of food species if the alternative is starvation. Once equilibrium is reached, resources get managed pretty well, partly because anything that's still around must be resilient and partly because people learn to manage resources. Then the climate unexpectedly changes, people leave equilibrium, food sources either become available or disappear, and we can see middens switch to different foods or become abandoned.

> 10,000 year old fish traps in my old home region are still in operation...

You mean that the design is so old or that the traps themselves are?