Here is a response from @jongarvey: Hump retrospective 2: old earth with death, carnivores and natural evils | The Hump of the Camel
Here’s what they say:
But what sort of ‘death’ before the Fall did most of the church countenance? It was not the ‘death before the Fall’ envisioned by modern old-earth compromisers that one finds in the fossil record, full of disease, carnivory, and suffering. Patristics scholar Benno Zuiddam documented a number of Church Fathers who explicitly affirmed Genesis 1:30 teaching that animal diets were non-carnivorous, and this was reflected in the Edenic allusion of Isaiah 11 and 65. And while ideas about ‘no animal death before the Fall’ may not have been universal among early Christian scholars, the same cannot be said about ‘no human death before the Fall’. Thomas Aquinas (in responding to an objection) is representative: “It would seem that death and other bodily defects are not the result of sin” with “On the contrary, The Apostle says (Romans 5:12), ‘By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death.’” And how does this square with the historical evidence that the church was nearly unanimous in believing the earth was not more than a few thousand years old in 1517?
Let me first remind you that my core investigative principle was always “What does the Bible teach?” So as I recalled the old, troubling, scenario of innocent Adam walking the earth on the bodies of billions of years of corpses, my first recourse was to see what the Scripture actually says, and what it does not. To my surprise (and with some embarrassment, as a Bible student since 1965) positive teaching on the necessary corollary of a death- and suffering-free pre-fall world, ie that there was a fundamental shift in the nature of physical reality afterwards, simply wasn’t in Scripture at all.