Patrick Friel

ENVS 02

Paper #1

Professor Everbach

February 2, 2003

Early Humans and Their Relationship with the Environment

There is a very frequently voiced idea that long ago humans and nature coexisted in peaceful equilibrium. In this state humans did not have any harmful effect on the environment and they lived within the means that nature provided. This happy and perfect coexistence is used repeatedly by environmental groups and others to symbolize the ideal habitation of the planet. While summarizing man’s existence before the last several thousand years, Clive Ponting states in his Green History of the World that the habits and existence of the small, mobile hunter gatherers “was without doubt the most successful and flexible way of life adopted by humans and the one that caused the least damage to natural ecosystems” (Ponting, 18). However, recent evidence and theories make points that refute this idea and show a very different beginning. Now there is current thought that humans were just as damaging, if not more so, than humans today.

Possibly the most damaging piece of evidence against the idea of humans and nature initially coexisting comes from a new theory that humans are actually responsible for wiping out 85% of animals over 22 lbs. in Australia around the end of the ice age. An NPR broadcast by Christopher Joyce on January 8, 1999 offered that the time all the megafauna disappeared from Australia coincided with the arrival of humans. Furthermore, was the possibility that humans hunted these giant creatures so heavily and combined with the humans’ burning of forests to make way for more edible plants or better hunting, the strain on the ecosystem was more than the large animals could bear causing them to die off rapidly. Since many of these animals would have been large lizards or giant cats that hid in trees waiting for prey, it is not hard to believe that newly arrived humans would have felt extremely threatened by their existence and certainly taken measures to thin out their populations for their own security. The large extent of the human burning found by archeologists also supports this theory.

Another piece of evidence that shows humans have been hurting the environment and permanently changing natural ecosystems lies with the human domestication of the wolf or dog. While original theories thought that humans and dogs came to live in harmony together simply by being around one another long enough that eventually a human gave a wolf some food. This giving of food set off a chain of events where wolves eventually became more and more friendly towards humans until they lived with them and were supported by them. However, this idea seems a highly idealized and simple explanation of how a once unassociated and dangerous creature becomes the best creature in the world to understand human gestures and act on them. It is known that humans valued dogs as very prized objects and were active in breeding and spreading them all over the world. With the dogs ability to smell, track, and sense both prey and predator it seems only natural that early man would have used dogs to make up for their own deficiencies in vision and smell. With recent evidence it seems that humans had indeed made active and conscious decisions to train, breed, and use dogs for their own ends. The end result was that dogs were very close to being completely removed from their natural ecosystems. (Pennisi) (Wade(NYT))

Clive Ponting’s green view of early man could be incorrect in that humans did in fact cause damage to the existing ecosystems and may have even caused more damage that humans do today. However, both Ponting and other theories are still based on speculation drawn from bone fragments and other types of fossil records. When trying to figure out what early man’s effect on the environment was in the past I think it is a better approach to look at today’s humans and their effects on the environment. I believe that this is a better approach because we do know what our behavior is like today, and that our behavior in the past is going to be more similar to today than to a fictional, harmonious existence with natural ecosystems. Looking at the way today’s humans have literally reshaped the landscape of the world, not to mention ecosystems, when building things like hydro-electric damns it is only logical to believe that our ancestors behaved in a similar way.