Ancient Civilizations Were Already Screwing Up the Environment | Opinion

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Humans are a strange species, if you think about it.

We’re arguably the only species capable of romanticizing our past. We’re much more capable of things like “denial,” and “neuroticism,” than most other species.

Like many of you, I was taught that humans are supposed to be stewards of our world, and that older civilizations than our own were much kinder to the environment. It’s a bizarre extension of our fascination with progress and the, “Great Men,” of history. But for, it seems, a dearth of such Great Men, we’d surely progress enough to save the world we live in. Surely those ancient civilizations had many Great Men driving their connection with the environment.

But a huge collaborative study in Science a few years back reiterated something closer to the truth — rather than the rose-colored glass version.

Early humans the world over were changing and impacting their environments as far back as 10,000 years ago.

The study out of the University of Pennsylvania, was part of a larger project called ArchaeoGLOBE. Researchers studied responses from regional land use experts in 146 different areas around the globe. Land use is anything from hunting and gathering to modern urbanizing to use of pastureland for grazing animals.

They found ancient humans used land in ways that weren’t quite “leave-no-trace.”

One of the study’s whopping 250 authors, Gary Feinman, MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, said that 12,000 years ago, humans were mainly foragers. Those early humans, he explained, weren’t farmers. They hunted and gathered. By the time agriculture came around, and particularly by 3,000 years ago — people were already engaging in what he called “really invasive farming,” practices in various places around the world.

Humans back then were already clearing forests for cropland, and creating the earliest man-made GMOs — plants and animals changed into something more useful to us, via selective breeding.

For a good, long time, we believed that these were errant practices, likely concentrated in just a few places. But this study found the practices were widespread and occurring across cultures by 3,000 years ago.

A separate study found that the Mayan civilization’s empire may have vanished due to human-led climate change — caused by huge levels of deforestation in already-drought-prone Central America. It’s also generally believed that humans — not natural climate change — were the primary cause of the Quaternary megafauna extinction, beginning around 50,000 years ago. We hunted various creatures to extinction. For no other reason than, “we wanted to.” For those of you who remember that far back in history class — yes, that was before humans started migrating and spreading around the globe.

Not much has changed. And we didn’t learn after the megafauna extinction. We continued into another human-led extinction event, the Holocene extinction, what’s generally referred to as the ongoing “Sixth Extinction.”

The extinction we’re currently causing is due to any number of things: man-made climate change, human population growth, suburban sprawl, increasing per capita consumption (especially among the ultra-rich, who also tend to reproduce at higher rates), higher demands for meat and meat production per capita, overfishing, ocean acidifying and trashing, wetland destruction, declines in key indicator species, and sport culling (for example, “coyote bounties”).

We like to think that humans haven’t been doing this for most of our history. That it’s a problem of capitalism or a problem of the poor, or immigrants to developed countries. This is, sadly, just how we have been.

Unlike most creatures, we do have something that makes us uniquely human — we have the ability to alter our fate, and not be creatures bound by our basest instincts of fear and violence. That does, however, entail realizing that it’s not “someone else,” causing all the damage. It’s not some mysterious, abstract entity in some far-off office building or a boogeyman bringing a family across the border.

It’s all of us. It always has been.

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