There always seem to be an inverse relationship between technological growth and the “well-being” of the environment. The more sophisticated technology humans are equipped with, the easier it is to make an impact on the environment. Technology enables us to control and exploit our surrounding to our needs. This innate characteristics of humans to exploit the environment at the expense of the ecosystem and other animals that share the environment with us was also exhibited in our ancestors. Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, and Homo Sapiens Sapiens all had impacted the environments they lived in, even though the degree to which they affected the environment varied depending on their respective technological advancements or the lack thereof. In his publication, “A Green History of the World”, Pointing asserts that the gathering and hunting way of life of early humans as, “the most successful and flexible way of life adopted by humans and the one that caused the least damage to natural ecosystems” (Pointing, 18). Whether it was successful or not is arguable but there is no doubt that this way of life caused the minimum damage to the environment. Even though it looks like Pointing is trying to portray the early gatherers and hunters as environmental conscience beings, this paper argues that the sole reason why they lived the harmonious life with the environment was due to the lack of technology advancements. This paper also tries to show how the introduction of technology was necessary for survival and how it affected the interaction between early humans and the environment changed.

Pointing’s tendency to depict a perfect harmony between early humans who lived by gathering and small-scale hunting and the environment and a happy and “leisure” time pursued by the early man could be misleading. Even though he is trying to show that new anthropological studies have provided “a fascinating insight” into how humans did not live a “nasty, brutish, and short” life as Thomas Hobbes claims, he portrays this ‘harmony’ between early humans and the environment as if it was optional and voluntary. However, this paper claims that they were forced into this way of life by their lack of technology that would otherwise would enable them to control and exploit the environment. He claims that there was no danger of starvation and goes ahead to embellish how they had so much leisure time since gathering took only a small portion of the day, etc. On the contrary, the examples Pointing provides to support his claim of ‘least ecosystem damage’ and ‘successful and flexible’ life turn out to indicate how the gatherers and hunters had to resort to modifying their social structure and way of life because they could not get the upper hand on nature using technology. For example, he mentions the seasonal grouping and ungrouping of the contemporary Netsilik Inuit tribe living north and west of Hudson’s Bay in Canada as an indication of how early hunters and gatherers adapted to a harsh environment. Furthermore, Pointing points out how gathering and hunting groups “seem to have tried to control their numbers so as not to overtax the resources of their ecosystem. This was achieved through a number of accepted social customs. The most widespread was infanticide involving the selected killing of certain categories such as twins, the handicapped and a proportion of female offspring” (Pointing, 23). Definitely, not a way one envisions a “successful life” that is full of “leisure”! This leads us to our claim that this harmony between the gatherers and the environment was the result of early man’s lack of tools and technology to bend the environment to his will; instead they resorted to constant population shuffling, exercising horrendous population control. Not only that, the world was being overpopulated beyond the capacity of this way of life.

Incorporating technology enabled early human to control, exploit and bend the environment to his will. The invention of tools and ‘effective’ hunting strategies, the taming of fire, and the development of agriculture assured early man’s survival and put him in a position where population shuffling and population control were unnecessary (even though he lost the much praised “leisure” time). However, this came at the expense of the ecosystem and the animals that share the environment with the early man.

Early humans were poor carnivores, the role they were trying to play as members of the top of the food chain. The ratio of kills to the number of attempts was very low. With the help of hunting tools such as spear, bow and arrow, and other hunting strategies like driving animals from cliffs, the proportion of meat in early man’s diet went up compared to the time when he was dependent on hunting small animals or scavenging on animals left behind other carnivores.

Another important technological advancement was the taming of fire. Even if the actual date of when it was tamed is highly controversial, the role it played in transforming human life is unquestionable. The taming of fire is one of the most important phenomena in human history that guaranteed the survival of humans. It was used for cooking, hunting strategies such as smoking-out games, protection against predators, keeping warm in cold areas (enabled humans “to venture outside of Africa” to much colder places), to burn wild plants that are less desired by humans in order to make room for favored ones , etc. Some scholars associate the taming of fire with development of language as it was indicated by several archeological sites that had “lens-shaped burned patches,” (McCrone, 31) which are indications of a campfire, a social gathering.

The most important technological advancement was the development of agriculture. With the help of fire, humans replaced the natural ecosystem with an artificial one (by clearing forest). As mentioned earlier, the hunting and gathering method was being saturated when the world population was about 4 million. With human population reaching 200 million by 200BC, there would have been absolutely no way humans could have survived by just gathering and hunting. Agriculture, like fire and other technological advancements enabled early man to claim partial independence from the environment.

However, these technological advancements had a negative impact on the environment. The more sophisticated the technology, the greater dent humans could make on the ecosystem. The use of hunting tools and effective (not necessarily efficient) methods of hunting strategies led to over hunting which eventually resulted in the extinction of several animals. Large flightless birds and other thirty-nine species of land birds, the pygmy hippopotamus, two-thirds of the large mammals in America were some of the few examples of animals who became extinct once they faced humans with technology (Pointing, 34-35). Through the use of fire and agriculture, humans were also able to modify the environment. The extensive use of fire to drive game from their ‘hiding’ place and clean up a ‘wild’ forest for agriculture altered the vegetation of the ecosystem. Recent discoveries in Australia might be indicative of an extreme case of this alteration of natural ecosystem. The extinction of the megafauna in Australia about 50,000 years ago , previously believed to be due to over hunting, might have been caused by a climate change that resulted from the extensive burning of natural ecosystem by the new comers. The burning of forests could have upset the two way relation between the biosphere and the atmosphere. The lack of leaves to recycle water back to the atmosphere causes a decrease in rainfall which further decreases the number of trees. So, in a way, the system was pushed past a certain threshold and ends up in a vicious cycle of self-destruction (NPR broadcasting).

In conclusion, without the use of technology, early humans had to constantly adjust their social structure and way of life to work around the environment by using methods like population shuffling and “brutal” method of population control. Why Pointing claims the life of the gatherer and the hunter in the ‘pre-technology’ era as the “most successful” is questionable. However, it is clear that with the help of technology, early man was able to control, exploit, and shape the environment to his will. And these technological advancements guaranteed his survival, fire enabled him to live in cold areas, agriculture enabled him to support the population that was increasing in astronomical proportions (hunting and gathering was a saturated way of life even for 4 million people), etc. However, all these came at the expense of the natural ecosystem and the animals that live in it. Humans were responsible for the alteration of vegetation and the extinction of many species from the face of this earth. Even hundreds of thousands years later, we still operate under this innate attitude of “humans before everything else”, as we are still actively involved in damaging the environment and everything in it, making an even bigger dent on the environment with our more sophisticated technology.