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Early Humans and the Environment Essay

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Early Humans and the Environment

Approximately 3.5 million years ago our ancestors first learned to walk upright. They were “homo erectus”, and with this innovation of walking upright they began to appreciated some things that we take for granted today like having our hands free, and increased mobility. As humans progressed along their history they earned the distinction of “homo sapiens”. This title was conferred as the brain casing increased in size indicating the developmental process of human thought. Our ability for abstract thought has given us the ability to effect the places where we live. Today we have the distinction of “homo sapiens sapiens”, and we are spectators of the ever more rapid pace of human …show more content…

Technology is embodied in such things as the houses (or dormitories) that we live in, the computers that we write our papers on, the telephones that we talk to our friends and family on, the televisions that we watch, and video games that we play… the list goes on. But life hasn’t always been like this. The chain of events and inventions that lead up the things we take for granted today started millions of years ago when humans first walked upright. Early humans began as just another animal living in a world where everything was uncertain. Their main concern was where their next meal was coming from. As time passed they learned how to gather, and where to find the best food. This lifestyle has been termed a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and according to Thomas Hobbes it was “nasty, brutish, and short”. This lifestyle, though, was all that humans and their abilities were capable of sustaining. The state of the cultural and physical environment made it so that “the population was small, thinly spread, living in groups which probably depended mainly on the gathering of nuts, seeds and plants, which they would have supplemented by scavenging dead animals killed by other predators and perhaps hunting of a few small mammals.”(Ponting, 19) They needed to move around to find food, and couldn’t afford to be weighed down with large amounts of people. There is evidence of such things as infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and other methods

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