This is why Africa is what most here would consider a "dump" (going by the racist white European standards). Personally I don't believe there was anything wrong with pre-whiteman Africa. I don't recall them destroying whole eco-systems. It's when whites tried to force European civilization on to them that the population exploded and it turned in to such a mess of suffering. They are not evolutionarily hard-wired for it.
The evolutionary stressor of those cold Euro winters shaped Euro brains to literally think too much. They see everything as a problem to be solved, and every problem "solved" creates more problems. The harsh winter environment didn't just create a compulsion for problem solving, but also a compulsion for greed. The ones that hoarded the most food for the winter survived and procreated the most and passed on the greedy evolutionary behavior.