The Messak Settafet, a sandstone massif in the Central Sahara (Libya), is littered with Pleistocene stone tools on an unprecedented scale and is, in effect, a man-made landscape. However, measures of the impact of hominin stone exploitation are rare and inherently difficult. The use of stone tools, which dates back over 2.5 million years, and the subsequent evolution of a technologically-dependent lineage required the exploitation of very large quantities of rock. Here we report on an earlier anthropogenic environmental change. The use of fire and over-exploitation of large mammals has also been recognized as having an effect on the world’s ecology, going back perhaps 100,000 years or more. This has been particularly intense in the last millennium but has been noticeable since the development of food production and the associated higher population densities in the last 10,000 years.
Humans have had a major impact on the environment.
0 kommentar(er)
