A History of Technology and Environment

From stone tools to ecological crisis

Edward L. Golding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134867813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

This book provides an accessible overview of the ways that key areas of technology have impacted global ecosystems and natural communities. It offers a new way of thinking about the overall origins of environmental problems. Combining approaches drawn from environmental biology and the history of science and technology, it describes the motivations behind many technical advances and the settings in which they occurred, before tracing their ultimate environmental impacts. Four broad areas of human activity are described:

• over-harvesting of natural resources using the examples of hunting, fishing and freshwater use;
• farming, population, land use, and migration;
• discovery, synthesis and use of manufactured chemicals; and
• development of sources of artificial energy and the widespread pollution caused by power generation and energy use.

These innovations have been driven by various forces, but in most cases new technologies have emerged out of fascinating, psychologically rich, human experiences. This book provides an introduction to these complex developments and will be essential reading for students of science, technology and society, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.

1
OVER-HARVESTING OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Hunting and Fishing

Introduction

Among the important human activities which have placed us on a collision course with the rest of the living world, the over-harvesting of natural resources is one of the most obvious. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors’ tiny numbers and simple technologies posed little threat to the supply of most of the useful things that nature and the earth could provide. By around 50,000 years ago, however, following the development of language, advanced tool-making, and complex cooperative behavior, things seem to have changed. Starting with the over-hunting of large game animals, people began to gradually reduce or even completely exhaust many different natural resources: big game animals, high grade deposits of valuable minerals, quality timbers, different kinds of animals and plants, fresh water, and even clean air.¹ The greatest drivers of these changes were our increasing numbers, our geographical expansion out of the Old World, and the ongoing march of technology. Population growth created demand for ever larger amounts of more and more varied goods; technological innovation led to ingenious new methods of capturing resources as well as to seemingly endless ways of incorporating them into economically valuable products. Throughout history, numerous natural resources were over-exploited in this way, and many scholars have documented the reduction or exhaustion of one valuable material or another.² In our account, we will limit ourselves to just two examples, the excessive harvesting of wild animals, and the over-use of fresh water.

Tools and Hunting

Many anthropologists believe that even before intentional stone tool-making began, our pre-human ancestors used stones as pounders, choppers and scrapers, along with sharpened sticks for digging and foraging. There may also have been a slow progression from using natural stones as hammers—for driving a digging stick into the ground or for attacking prey or enemies—to hammering one stone against another to make a sharp edge. There is evidence that stones with edges were being created by around 3.4 million years ago, in what is today Ethiopia, in order to scrape the meat off animal bones.³ Stone tool-making marked an important turning point in human evolution, one with profound implications for the rest of the living world. Once it began, natural selection led to changes in our ancestors’ bodies which allowed them to more easily hold sticks and stones, and to manipulate them in ever more complex ways. Changes occurred in the arms, hands and fingers, along with less obvious modifications in the brain and nervous system with the result that our ancestors developed remarkable manual dexterity and hand–eye coordination.⁴

The lack of abundant fossil material makes it difficult to tell how widespread tool use by human ancestors actually was after its first occurrence in Ethiopia— early humans were not very numerous and tools made of wood or bone tended to decompose over time. Stone, however, is one of earth’s most durable materials, and we have a better record of early humans’ stone artifacts than we do even of their bones. (In contrast, the archaeological record of our ancestors’ early use of fire is much sparser and harder to interpret, leading to considerable controversy about just how early this other key tool of early humans came into use. Some researchers see evidence of it dating back more than a million years, while others believe that the use of controlled fire began only a few hundred thousand years ago.)

By about 2.6 million years ago, stone tools seem to have become more common, with the oldest ones from that time being recovered from Ethiopia. Many, however, have also been found in or near Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, a location where many key human fossils have also been unearthed. This region also provided a name for this early style of stone tool—Olduwan—of Olduvai. For roughly the following million years, until about 1.65 million years ago, Olduwan-style choppers, cutters and scrapers seem to have been the only stone tools our ancestors made and used. Generally, these implements are of two types: larger stones that have been chipped to make one or more sharp edges, and which were probably used as axes and choppers; and smaller, sharp flakes that had been knocked off the larger stones and were probably used as knives and scrapers. So far there is no direct evidence that these very early stone tools were used as hunting weapons, although they may well have been used to sharpen wooden spears or to cut up animal carcasses.

Most people today have little or no experience of stone tools beyond the occasional use of a natural rock as a primitive hammer. But in the past this was not the case. Human evolution over several million years was closely tied to the creation and use of carefully crafted stone implements. To shape cutters—particularly the more complex blades that started to be made after 1.65 million years ago—our ancestors had to evolve not only dexterity and fine motor control in their hands and arms, but also the mental capacity to imagine both the variety of stone blades that could be made, and the complex steps required to make them. For this reason, stone tool-making not only marked the beginnings of human technology, but also likely served as a powerful spur to the evolution of human intelligence and creativity. Our own species, Homo sapiens, for example, did not appear in Africa until roughly 200,000 years ago. But even when it first arose, it was heir to an already ancient tradition of stone tool manufacture, a set of skills that had allowed earlier humans without large claws or teeth to efficiently hunt, gather and process food in the face of competition from more heavily toothed and clawed carnivores and scavengers.⁵

Numerous anthropologists have spent their working lives studying prehistoric stone tools and the people who made them. Unearthed on every inhabited continent, many tens of thousands of such objects have made their way into museums and other collections, resulting in numerous detailed histories of various stone tool industries from different parts of the world. Around 1.65 million years ago, for example, there started to be widespread evidence of an Acheulean stone industry (named for Saint-Acheul in northern France) in which early humans, first in Africa, and then in Asia and Europe, made sophisticated pear and oval-shaped hand axes with stone blades symmetrically shaped on both sides. Acheulian stone tool-making was in fact the longest lasting of all human technologies, and it continued for more than one million years until roughly 250,000 years ago.⁶

In the earliest days of tool-making our ancestors seem to have lived by a combination of gathering plant food, scavenging dead animals—perhaps by driving other predators away from carcasses after they had made a kill—and by hunting small, easy-to-kill prey, probably with wooden clubs. It seems likely that the majority of early stone tools were used to cut up animal and plant food. As time went on however—and the archaeological record here is poor—stone blades also came to be combined with wooden handles to make hatchets, axes and spears, the last of which marked a particularly important advance in human weaponry. Attached to a long wooden shaft, a sharp stone blade could now be used to attack prey animals or to defend against predators while keeping the hunter some distance away from the animal’s claws, hooves or teeth. This made big game hunting a feasible proposition, if still a very dangerous one. We do not know exactly when this began, but by 400,000 years ago in Germany there are important archaeological remains of a site occupied by humans, likely Homo heidelbergensis, that contain large, well-crafted wooden hunting spears, roughly seven feet long, which seem to have been designed to throw at prey animals. They were discovered near the town of Schoeningen, adjacent to a coal mine, in what were originally shallow lake deposits. Rapid burial there in sediments lacking oxygen seems to have allowed the wood to be preserved. The site also included stone blades made of flint, and a wooden handle that was notched to hold those blades; with them were the remains of butchered horses. Additional evidence of the hunting success of the spear-makers was found nearby in the form of numerous skeletal components of red deer, bison and a variety of smaller animals.⁷

In Europe by 250,000 years ago, Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) had begun to make even more sophisticated edge tools using a complex procedure known as the Levallois technique. This method involved carefully preparing a large, rough stone by rounds of chipping, followed by a single, precisely placed blow which then produced an almost completely formed point. It was a tricky and intricate process requiring careful planning and good design sense in addition to considerable physical strength and hand–eye coordination.⁸

The technological developments we have been describing were occurring in the Old World during the Pleistocene epoch, a time characterized by repeated episodes of widespread glaciation in Eurasia and North America as well as in high mountains all over the world. Such large climatic changes were themselves stressful for animal and plant populations, and it is against this background that the impacts of changing human hunting technologies should be viewed. It is also important to remember that the two and a half million years of the Pleistocene were not uniformly cold and ice-covered—there were a number of warmer periods when the ice retreated, alternating with a number of major and minor glacial advances. Overall though, it was still a time of great climatic stress in most of the cooler and higher altitude parts of the world, with large glaciated areas being largely denuded of their vegetation, animals and people.⁹

Advance and retreat of the ice sheets did not happen all at once; in the Midwestern USA, for example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet is estimated to have advanced roughly 200 feet per year, or about one mile every twenty-five years.¹⁰ In response, many kinds of plant communities, and most animals, were able to move south as the glaciers expanded, and then north again after they receded. Exceptions occurred in places where barriers like high mountains lay to the south, as the Alps did in central Europe. In such cases, lacking suitable habitat to move south towards, some species became extinct. During this time, humans did best in warmer, ice-free lowlands in the Old World, where they continued to invent new kinds of weapons and tools as they increasingly became important predators of large animals.

By 200,000 years ago in Africa the first anatomically modern humans, members of our own species, had appeared; it is possible that they already possessed some aspects of culture and language including the earliest art, music and religion. By 100,000 years ago, archaeological remains show continuing cultural advances including intentional burial of the dead and more uniform, precisely fashioned stone tools. By 60,000 years ago, our immediate ancestors had also begun to make small, sharp stone points that look like arrowheads, suggesting that their hunting equipment had further diversified to include bows and arrows. Also within the last 50,000 years, prehistoric peoples invented a new way of making sharp stone tools by grinding rather than chipping, an approach that allowed them to use additional kinds of stones as starting materials; the first evidence of this comes from northern Australia about 35,000 years ago.¹¹ Axe heads prepared by grinding were smoother than chipped axes and hence better at heavy wood cutting. For the first time, this made it relatively straightforward for people to intentionally chop down medium and large trees. This increased their supplies of wood for fuel, building and tool-making while also raising the level of potential damage that people could do to forested ecosystems. Fire had probably already been used to alter forests for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Now, however, a combination of chopping, fire, and later on the grazing of domestic animals meant that it became easier and easier for early people to alter or even eliminate forests, reducing their populations of animals and plants or even wiping out some species entirely.¹²

The Spread of Modern Humans and the Impact on Natural Communities

Between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago, our own species, Homo sapiens, began to expand its range outwards from its original homeland in Africa. By that time, Africa had been inhabited by various human species for more than two million years, and Europe and Asia for more than a million and a half years. On those continents some large animals seem to have been driven extinct by human activities. In Africa, these included several species of elephants, a giant hippopotamus, various warthogs, giant buffalo and antelope, a wolf and several saber-toothed cats. To some extent, however, Old World faunas’ long existence side by side with slowly advancing human hunting techniques and weapons may have allowed them to adapt in ways that reduced species’ extinctions.¹³ There is also some evidence that in the Old World, modern Homo sapiens was largely confined to temperate areas, while the largest mammals like mammoths, that survived until ten to twenty thousand years, were mostly inhabitants of frigid Arctic zones.¹⁴

Once they left Africa, modern Homo sapiens are believed to have moved initially north and east across the Red Sea, around Arabia and over towards India; later on, they also moved north and west into Europe and central Asia where Neanderthals had long been present. We do not know what pushed them to migrate—reduction of game populations in their old lands, escape from predat...