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Human Culture Research Paper

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The journey of prehistoric human culture on the Texas coast begins with how hunting and gathering populations adapted to the opportunities and limitations of their shoreline and nearby prairie environments. All the while using limited technology strengthened by first-hand knowledge about the location and seasonal availability of important subsistence resources within their homeland. Before my bioregion is explored, its best that I depict the history of the state that I live that spreads across the millennia. When European explorers and colonists first arrived in the region, beginning in the 1500s, the indigenous coastal peoples practiced a mix of subsistence economies which included rigorous fishing in the shoreline bays and lagoons, …show more content…

The coastal population density was moderately high, and people spent much of the annual cycle living in large shoreline fishing camps that housed several hundred people during peak fishing seasons. The coastline as we see it today is, from a geologic perspective, a very recent phenomenon that dates back only about 3,000 years. In fact, prior to around 8,000 B.C., the area of the modern shoreline was high and dry, with the Gulf coast far to the east of its present position. This is because, in earlier millennia, global sea level was as much as 300 feet lower, with much of the world’s water supply inaccessible in vast continental ice sheets and montane glaciers that were far more extensive than those of modern times. The Pleistocene era, or Ice Age, had markedly lower global temperatures than those of historical times. The final cold phase of the Pleistocene was around 20,000 years ago, after which rising global temperatures caused the continental ice sheets and mountain glaciers to begin a gradual melting process, with the result that sea level began to rise rapidly over the next 10,000 years (Hester, 1995).
As sea level rose, shorelines around the world moved progressively father inland. By 8,000 B.C. the sea had inundated major river valleys along the Texas

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