To add to your point, in those times nature was seen as equal to humanity and sustainability was therefore paramount.

You’re kidding, right? Hunter-gatherer societies regularly radically altered the environment and drove native species to extinction through overhunting. This idea of an ideological proto-environmentalist view is largely constructed in response to hunter-gatherers being pushed off of land by more efficiently unsustainable societies; not because hunter-gatherers have an inherent ideological or spiritual disinclination towards altering the environment.