After reading Chapters 6 and 10 in your textbook and reviewing all the required resources, imagine you have been invited to speak for three minutes about climate change at a local environmental rally. In your post, draft five points of speaking notes on how environmental changes affected human biological and/or cultural evolution during the Paleolithic and what that can tell us about how climate change might be impacting people today.
Make sure that you include a point or two on why you believe climate change affected human evolution and/or cultural evolution or why you think it has not. The following are examples of speaking notes:
Climate change affected the animals that survived. Early hominins had to build better tools to hunt the ones that survived.
Because humans came into more contact with larger mammals, they required more efficient tools to hunt these animals.
Your own notes must not replicate these examples.
In response to your peers, add two to three points that would help them improve their speeches.
1.
Intensive agriculture or intensification was a solution for a large community of people to be able
to eat, however it can lead to declining environmental conditions. (pg 393)
2.
Climate change affected cultural evolution because of the change that humans had to adjust too. While, it made them educated with trial and error, they constantly had to adapt to their environment and what food was available for them. 3.
Population growth and overconsumption are one of the leading causes of climate change. The ecological footprint is a tool anthropologist uses to analyze this and how societies use different amounts of resources and how much waste they produce. (398)
4.
Ecological knowledge was different for each society due to the environments they lived in and their specific cultural. Local language and ritual knowledge helped keep these practices safe within the community. 5.
Industrial agriculture, which is the most intensive form of agriculture, is the cause of overproduction in food and leads to a decline in the landscape (393 399.) 6.
Communities who produce cash crops, face a lack of food security for themselves. (399.)
7.
People became more innovative adjusting to the climate around them (403)
8.
407
9.
Because the human species became adaptable to the environment, the human diet also became
flexible. For societies they are able to use food as having a source of meaning. (393) Welsch, R. L., Vivanco, L. A., & Fuentes, A. (2019). Sustainability: Environment and Foodways, Anthropology, 2, 385-410. Oxford University Press Academic US. https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/books/9780190057381
