Technology, Population, and the Impact of Ancient Humans on the Environ

Technology, Population, and the Impact of Ancient Humans on the Environment In recent years, humans have become increasingly concerned with their effect on the planet and its ecosystems. In the popular view, these problems are new and unprecedented in human history. While it is probably true that our impact on the environment on a global scale has never been as great, the difference is simply the scale on which our actions are being taken. Situations that previously were local or regional in scope have now become global, owing to the increasingly sophisticated technologies that we have developed and our ever-increasing population. As an examination of the impact of ancient humans on the environment illustrates, however, the current impact fits into the general pattern that the degree to which humans influence their environment is determined by their concentration and the sophistication of their technology. Contrary to the popular view which sees ancient humans as either benignly living with their environments (see Note 1 below) or as leading miserable short lives during which they were at the mercy of those environments, archeology tells us that humans have been interacting with and affecting their environments since the beginning. As Neil Roberts comments, humans' impact on landscapes began "even before†¦landscapes had become recognizably modern." (Note 2). My purpose in this paper is to illustrate some of the ways ancient humans, using a variety of technologies, altered the environments they lived in. Before I begin, however, I would like to emphasize that discussing human "impact" on the environment implies human action was detrimental to the environment. In this paper, I shall define "impact" as any change in the lands... ...ng paragraphs come from the author's lecture notes as described in note 7 above, as well as Ellen, R. "Modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism," in The Companion Encyclopedia to Anthropology, ed T. Ingold, New York: Routledge, 1994.; and Price, T.D. and J.A. Brown. "Aspects of Hunter-Gatherer Complexity," in Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers, T. Price and J. Brown, eds. San Diego: Academic Press, 1985. 9. Other populations such as mammoth hunters of the Central European Plain dealt with these pressures by shifting to specialized economies based on the extensive use of a few species. 10. The opposite is k-selected species such as mammoth, who produce fewer offspring, but give these offspring more care in order to give each offspring a higher chance of survival. Earlier subsistence patterns had tended to focus on k-selected species.