Humans Have Been Changing The Environment Since Prehistoric Times

May 31, 1996

GAINESVILLE —Although early civilizations did not clear land for convenience stores, strip malls or housing developments, they did change the land to suit their needs and overused natural resources long before the industrial revolution, archaeologists have shown.

“We are able to see quite a change in animal remains through time. We believe some of these changes are the result of overexploitation of resources,” said Elizabeth Wing, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. “We think of overexploiting resources as a product of industrial nations, but we see evidence of this during preindustrial times in many places.”

Wing and her son Stephen, an ecologist at the University of California at Davis, presented a paper in March to the American Society of Archaeology detailing how they used remains of bones, shells and teeth to show how civilization changes natural resources.

Early humans changed their environment through the domestication of animals, hunting and irrigation, Wing said. Remnants of raised fields and long dried-up irrigation canals can still be seen at sites in Bolivia, and elsewhere across the world, through aerial photography that reveals a criss-crossing of lines across the land.

“Channels to distribute water can be seen in the landscape,” Wing said. “We think that these changes went way back, probably more than 1,000 years. This is a way to see the impact that humans have had on the landscape. I don’t think that we have any habitats that haven’t been modified in some way or another by people.”

Many may not realize how extensively early settlers changed the environment, mainly because of persisting beliefs that primitive societies kept the land intact and lived simply with nature.

“There is still the idea of the ‘noble savage’ that is pretty instilled in people’s minds,” Wing said. “Not that I feel that people aren’t noble, but we have been changing the Earth for millennia.”

Evidence of these changes is seen in the environment and in thumbnail-sized bits of shell, bone and teeth found at archaeological sites and cataloged at the museum. Through comparison with other collections at the museum, Wing can tell what species were eaten by early humans and how these species changed over time due to human interference.

“When most people think of archaeology, they think of stone tools and pottery,” Wing said. “But animal remains are equally important as these stone artifacts, ceramic artifacts and other cultural remains. Since most animal remains at a site are the residue from meals, this provides insight into how people lived on a day-to-day basis.”

These small pieces of bone are crucial in determining the diet of early people and how this diet changed the land through hunting, farming and transporting non-native animals to these sites.

“This gives us a better insight into the use of natural resources and the effect we have on these resources,” Wing said. “We look at both biological and anthropological aspects, such as farming and development of domestic animals.”

Although early humans changed their landscape, modern people have altered the environment to a much greater extent, through dams, construction, industrial farming and pollution, ways that early people could probably not comprehend.

“All changes wrought by people are not necessarily detrimental to other plants and animals,” Wing said. “In fact, some changes improve conditions for some organisms. The point is, people have made great changes in the world from early times and archaeology can document some of these.”