A Companion to Global Environmental History

J. R. McNeill, Erin Stewart Mauldin, J. R. McNeill, Erin Stewart Mauldin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118279540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike.

• Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day
• Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times
• Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China

PART I

Times

CHAPTER ONE

Global Environmental History: The First 150,000 Years

J. R. MCNEILL

If, as scholars of human evolution suppose, our species emerged about 150,000 years ago, then roughly 97% of human history took place before the first cities and civilization. This chapter will briefly explore global environmental history over that very longue durée. It will sketch some of the ways in which the changing earthly environment affected human affairs, including almost ending them entirely about 73,000 years ago, and will outline some of the ways in which human actions changed the environment. By and large, in the 140 millennia before farming, environmental change affected human affairs more than human affairs affected the environment. But with the transition to agriculture beginning about 10,000 years ago, that began to change fundamentally: our numbers and technologies attained new levels so that, when combined with our long-standing heedlessness, we became an increasingly important force in shaping the global environment.

The Environment Shapes Paleolithic Humans and Human Affairs

About 7 million years ago our ancestors diverged, genetically speaking, from other apes. After another couple of million years, later ancestors began to walk upright (bipedalism) and develop big brains all out of proportion to their bodies. Climate change, according to prevailing interpretations, likely played a role in these fateful departures. In East Africa, where it all happened, drier conditions some 6 to 8 million years ago reduced the domain of forest and encouraged the spread of grassy savanna. This new environment rewarded upright posture and bipedalism, which allowed hominins (now the preferred term for humans plus their ancestors) to see longer distances and to move faster in open terrain. Standing upright also made it easier to dissipate heat under the tropical sun, an important task if one is obliged to keep moving to stay away from predators. East African climate also apparently became more unstable, with rapidly alternating wet and dry phases. This instability, the thinking goes, rewarded flexible behavior and thereby big brains. So, if this line of reasoning is correct, climate change helped shape the human animal in basic ways.¹

Climate change continued to influence human affairs in subsequent millennia. Beginning about 3 million years ago, the Earth entered a period – in which we still live – of alternating glacial and interglacial phases. In our African homeland, this oscillating climate rhythm appeared as wetter and drier phases, because it was never so cold as to encourage glaciation (outside of the highest mountains). When hominins left Africa, which some did more than a million years ago, they had to adjust to ice ages that in Eurasia involved much colder temperatures, as well as a drier, windier, and more unstable climate.

Migration

Our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, evolved within Africa and by perhaps 150,000 years ago had emerged as a distinct species. A few intrepid populations walked out of Africa, perhaps 100,000 years ago. As they crossed to Arabia and Southwest Asia, they too encountered colder climate. Their migrations coincided with the early millennia of a new cold phase, an ice age that lasted from about 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. This latest ice age was not only much colder and dryer than modern climate, but in most parts of the world far more unstable. For decades or centuries comparatively sudden cooling or warming might occur, in swings of average temperatures of 5 to 10 degrees Celsius (9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit). The slender evidence suggests these swings were smaller in Africa than on other continents. Elsewhere, the incentives to migrate, either to avoid the worst of the cold and drought or to take advantage of warming and moisture, were often strong. Staying put for centuries was usually a poor gamble because climate was too unstable.

The best aspect of ice-age conditions (for humans) was lower sea levels. This gave terrestrial species about 25 million more square kilometers to work with – the equivalent of an additional continent the size of North America. It was possible to walk across most of Indonesia, and from Australia to New Guinea, from Korea to Japan, and from Britain to France. The unfortunate part of this for historians and archeologists is that probably most people lived most of their lives in these zones, helping themselves to seafood found along the ancient shores, and all archeological remains of their existence vanished beneath the waves when sea levels rose sharply around 22,000 to 8,000 years ago.

The most challenging moment of the last ice age came around 74,000 to 70,000 years ago when a giant volcanic eruption (of Mt. Toba, on the island of Sumatra in what is now Indonesia) spewed enough dust and ash into the skies to block sunlight and lower temperatures by 5 to 15 degrees Celsius for 6 to 10 years. It may have tipped climate into another regime; the next thousand years were especially cold on average. Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2 million years, 280 times the size of Krakatoa (1883) and about 5,000 times larger than Mt. St. Helens (1980), as measured by the quantity of tephra – rock, magma, and other material – thrown heavenward. Ash fell from the sky as far away as Arabia and the east coast of Africa. In some places in India the resulting tephra layer was, and is, six meters thick!

The Toba catastrophe played havoc with plant and animal life. The fossil pollen record shows collapses of vegetation in many parts of Asia, leaving animal species with little to munch on. DNA evidence suggests that several animals, including tigers and orangutans, suffered dramatic reductions in populations at about this time. Toba’s impacts probably brought the human species close to extinction: it is possible to interpret the DNA ­evidence to mean that at around this time our ancestors’ numbers were reduced to 10,000 or so – our closest brush with extinction so far. Quite plausibly all humans outside favorable locations in Africa were wiped out by Toba’s effects. This is also the time, incidentally, when (inferred from DNA evidence in lice) humans began to wear clothing.²

The Toba event was of unique intensity in human experience, but the ice age contained numerous cold spells and severe droughts. Over the past 150,000 years, modern humans evolved in a time of generally cool and highly erratic global climate, and they colonized Eurasia during the colder phases of the last ice age, a circumstance that surely rewarded innovation, learning, and communication in any species. Adverse climate may well have contributed to cultural dexterity.

From their African refugia, post-Toba human populations soon migrated once more into Eurasia. Once again, lower sea levels, thanks to the buildup of ice, helped. Humans reached Australia and New Guinea, at the time united as a single continent, perhaps as early as 60,000 years ago and no later than 40,000 BP (= before the present). Getting there required a sea journey of at least 100 kilometers (60 miles). This voyage implies a considerable technological and logistical competence, as well as high tolerance for risk: the first Australians were surely a plucky lot. Other modern humans headed north into what is now China and Japan by about 30,000 BP. Distant cousins entered Europe around 40,000 years ago, to the misfortune of the indigenous Neanderthals. These new Europeans, according to genetic evidence, are the ancestors of 75–85% of contemporary Europeans. They soon encountered the depths of the last ice age and – not unlike their more affluent descendants today – headed for Spain and the south of France in search of balmier climes. Meanwhile other humans walked into the chilly expanses of Siberia, attracted by the abundance of large, tasty, naive mammals. At this time, some 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, the global population was probably only a few hundred thousand, roughly as many people as live today in Des Moines, Lubbock, or Boise (or Nottingham, Coventry, Canberra, or Christchurch). It was an uncrowded world.

Nevertheless, some people moved further afield. The last chapter in these epic migrations brought people to the Americas, possibly as early as 20,000 years ago, certainly by 13,000 BP. They crossed from Siberia to Alaska, at that time a broad land corridor because of lower sea levels. They could have come by boat or they might have walked. Once in the Americas they apparently spread out quickly, reaching Chile no later than 12,000 years ago. The archeological, linguistic, and DNA evidence concerning this discovery of America is not consistent, so arguments rage about its timing, about the size of the founding population, and about whether or not it came all at once or in two or three separate waves. It does seem that the first Americans are most closely related to peoples of southern Siberia, although rival interpretations maintain their cousins were from what is now Korea and North China.

These long, slow migrations out of Africa and throughout the world no doubt contained many setbacks. Groups guessed wrong and found themselves in deserts from time to time. Others attempted what they thought was a short sea voyage and never saw land again. The Mt. Toba deep freeze might have killed off everyone not living in warm places. But slowly, in fits and starts, humankind colonized the globe.³

Domestication and Farming

The deep cold of Siberia in these millennia contributed to another momentous development: the first domestication. Man’s first friend was the dog. Dogs evolved from wolves over thousands of years. Just how, when, and where this first happened is unclear, but the latest (genetic) evidence suggests it occurred in Southwest Asia around 30,000 BP.

The dog–human symbiosis was a mutually profitable partnership. Dogs provided people with hunting help (compensating for our poor sense of smell), with an early-warning system against attackers, and with loyal companionship including furry warmth on cold nights. In dire circumstances, people could also eat their dogs. People provided dogs with food (or hunting help, as the dogs might see it), and sometimes protection and shelter. People with cooperative dogs enjoyed great advantages in hunting and in self-protection. People living with barking dogs would not easily fall victim to surprise attack. Dogs with cooperative people got a more reliable food supply, including access to big game such as mammoths, which dogs could scarcely bag by themselves. So, over time, a genetic selection occurred for dogs that worked well with humans – dogs that showed loyalty, barked at the appearance of strangers, accepted human commands, and could read human gestures and expressions. Meanwhile, a cultural selection took place for human groups that worked well with dogs, training them, breeding them, protecting them, and eating them only in extreme need. The Ainu, a people in Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, even taught their dogs to catch salmon for them. The dog–human symbiosis spread rapidly and became well-nigh universal.

The domestication of dogs was the first of many such in the human career. Dozens of animals and hundreds of plants proved susceptible to domestication. Almost all of these domestications took place in remote times before written records. But archeologists can often tell the difference between wild and domesticated species from remains of seeds and bones.

Few things in human history have mattered as much as domestication. Raising one’s food as opposed to collecting or hunting it implied broad changes in the human way of life. It required people to submit to laborious routines, but allowed enormous expansions in terms of cultural richness and diversity. Mobile hunters and foragers around the world had only a few tools (often very similar ones), the same social structures just about everywhere, and – as far as we know, which is not terribly far – roughly the same sorts of ideas about nature and spirits. In the late Paleolithic some people settled down in a few choice spots, becoming at least semi-sedentary if not fully so, and a notable elaboration of culture, especially in tools and art, took place. But, by later standards, there wasn’t much cultural diversity in the Paleolithic, because most people remained mobile and had to carry their culture with them.⁴

With farming, all that would change. As the ice-age cold gave way to warmer temperatures and damper conditions, plant life flourished. Forests replaced steppe and scrubland, deserts retreated, and rivers rose. In many locations, these were favorable trends for people, allowing some groups to settle down and live off newly abundant local plants and animals. In many spots in Southwest Asia, for example, there were plenty of acorns, almonds, and grasses with edible and storable seeds. Some evidenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Global Environmental History: An Introduction
• PART I: Times
• PART II: Places
• PART III: Drivers of Change and Environmental Transformations
• PART IV: Environmental Thought and Action
• Index