Then came the great reckoning, when the Earth could bear no more and humans decided to reverse course.
At last they had begun to come to grips with all the damage they had done over thousands of years. In a panic, they scaled back dramatically. They stopped acquiring. They stopped developing. They stopped expanding. They even stopped having children in order to preserve the limited resources left to them.
And so after 200,000 years, humans abruptly vanished, the only species to choose its own demise.