Early Humans and the Environment

Early Humans and the Environment

Early humans were quite different from modern humans. Modern humans have many technologies and advances that we take for granted. In my lifetime (1982 - present) I have seen the five and a half inch floppy yield to the dvd, cloning of sheep and other advances in the fields of math, science, and engineering. Humans and Pre-Humans have always been developing, either intentionally or unintentionally, technologies that were either necessary for the continuation of life, or for the improved quality of life, thus changing the environment.

Early humans lived by hunting and gathering, affecting their environment only minimally. There was a small human population that supported itself by hunting, gathering, and scavenging until about ten thousand years ago (Ponting 19). Ponting asserts that these early human groups lived in conjunction with the environment, planning their migration and food consumption patterns around environmental cycles (Ponting 20). In this case, the environment has more control over humans than humans have over the environment. Gathering and scavenging are much easier for hunter-gatherers than hunting, because with hunting, humans faced additional difficulties and hazards not associated with gathering and scavenging. Not only were there these additional factors, the success rate of hunting was low - top carnivores only make a kill once in every ten tries, so most of the protein in early humans' diets came from scavenging (Ponting 21-22). Early humans also seemed to employ some sort of population control, so that they did not overstress the environment. This type of population planning shows foresight on the part of early humans, and though it can be argued that selective infan...

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...an provide to humans, as guard animals, as aids in hunting, as a last resort food supply, humans had a good incentive to live alongside these animals. In return for these benefits, they also had to feed the dog, so the environmental impact a particular tribe had on the environment would also include the environmental impact of its dogs.

Early humans interact with the environment in a very different way than modern humans, in many ways, they seemed to have much more respect for it and what it provided for them, by way of sustenance and what it allowed them to develop and develop into. It could be argued that humans would not have developed new technologies unless they were necessary, but I feel that the new technologies developed and used by humans were not necessarily needed, but that they made lives easier, and interactions with the environment more complicated.