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

Technology, Population, and the mend of Ancient Humans on the Environment In recent years, macrocosm have become increasingly concerned with their effect on the orbiter and its ecosystems. In the popular view, these problems are new and unprecedented in valet de chambre history. While it is probably true that our affect on the environment on a global scale has never been as great, the difference is precisely the scale on which our actions are being taken. Situations that previously were local or regional in scope have now become global, owe to the increasingly sophisticated technologies that we have developed and our ever-increasing population. As an examination of the impact of ancient reality on the environment illustrates, however, the current impact fits into the ordinary pattern that the degree to which tenders influence their environment is determined by their concentration and the sophistication of their technology. Contrary to the popular view which sees ancient huma ns 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, archaeology 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 beforelandscapes had become recognizably modern. (Note 2).My purpose in this account is to illustrate some of the ways ancient humans, using a renewal 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 authors 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 Anth ropology, ed T. Ingold, New York Routledge, 1994. and terms, 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 coarse use of a few species.10. The opposite is k-selected species such as mammoth, who maintain fewer offspring, but give these offspring more care in order to give each offspring a higher stake of survival. Earlier subsistence patterns had tended to focus on k-selected species.