The Relationship Between Early Humans and Their Environment

The Relationship Between Early Humans and Their Environment

In television shows and textbooks, early humans are often presented as being an isolated force within their environments - that is, that they evolved with relatively little influence from their environment. This view often stresses the advances of human beings and their exploitation of the environment as a function of their anatomical development, particularly brain capacity. However, it fails to address the fact that human beings were not as we know ourselves to be today; that we were simply another large carnivore interacting with many different types of animals and environmental conditions, who happened to evolve into a social creature with capacities for reason and innovation. I believe that that aspect of human evolution is extremely important because it is the only way in which one can begin to decipher the reasons why humans evolved from a relatively "dumb" creature, one among many, to the animal which they are today.

In A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting analyzes human history from humans' hunter-gatherer roots, their ability to stand upright, their use of speech, and their use of tools. Mary Stiner would emphasize that although these aspects of humanity are important, it is just as fruitful, if not more so, to study the interactions of humans with their faunal counterparts. In doing so, one can try to uncover the reasons why humans evolved into large predators capable of using speech and tools to survive rather than remain like their primate relatives, who are relatively non-predatory. In Stiner's article, "Modern Human Origins - Faunal Perspectives," she emphasizes that because of changes within human beings themselves and changes in the environment (climactic conditions and types of surrounding predators, competitors, and prey) were human beings able to perhaps diverge from these primates with non-modern human characteristics and instead evolve to resemble their predatory competitors.

Interestingly, a work on the nature of dogs has shed some insight into this idea of Stiner's - that the predatory competitors of humans rather than human ancestors heavily influenced humans in their hunting and lifestyle habits. It has been debated for some time how dogs became domesticated animals, how and from where they evolved, and how they helped humans to evolve. In a New York Times article by Nicholas Wade ("From Wolf to Dog, Yes, but When?"), Wade convincingly argues that perhaps dogs were never domesticated by humans, but rather domesticated themselves as a survival skill.