Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The fossil record suggests that food may have been cooked as early as 1.9 million years
ago, while the earliest reliable evidence for controlled use of fire dates to about 400,000
years ago. Roughly 100,000 years ago (David et al.
2009
) humans learned to start fire at
will, using either stones such as flint to create sparks or the friction of dry wood to create
embers. By the start of the late Stone Age (about 40,000 years ago), human mastery of fire
had advanced to the point of using lamps that burned animal fats (Smil
2006
), and just a
few millennia later humans were firing clay into pottery figures.
E + T = C
Twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was still in the grip of its most recent ice age. The
polar ice caps extended southward to the latitudes of modern-day London and New York,
and mammoth roamed the subarctic tundra of central Europe and Asia. Crouching in the
sparse, wind-gnarled bushes, two groups of hunters, very different in gait and appearance,
stared out into the open plains.
Humans and wolves competed for the same prey and both had social systems that
enabled them to hunt in packs. They learned to fear and eventually respect each other,
and they finally discovered the advantages of teaming up. Initially, this partnership was
probablybasedpurelyonmutualadvantage.Forthewolf,thehumanuseofweaponsmeant
a share in a greater number of kills, and perhaps even an occasional taste of larger prey,
such as mammoth. For humans, the wolf's speed and ferocity was the equivalent of a new
weapon.
Not long after we began to keep and breed dogs as hunting partners, humans
domesticated sheep and goats (ca. 9000 BCE), giving us a reliable source of energy in
the form of meat and milk, and facilitating the move away from hunting and gathering
to agriculture. Agriculture emerged independently in the Fertile Crescent, South Asia,
Oceania, Africa's Sahel and several parts of the Americas, starting with the eight so-called
Neolithic founder crops: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch,
chickpeas and flax (Brown et al.
2008
). By 4000 BCE, agriculture was widely practised
in many of the fertile regions of the world, and cattle, pigs, horse and dromedary camels
had also been domesticated. Highly organised net fishing of rivers, lakes and ocean shores
also brought in great volumes of food. So profound were the changes to human lifestyles
brought by this new relationship to food energy, that anthropologists refer to this as 'The
Neolithic Revolution'. Agriculture and the domestication of animals changed humans'
energetic pathways and our cultural evolution. Not only did agriculture give us a stable and
predictable food supply but, thanks to selective cultivation, it gave us varieties of plants
with farhigher energyyields than are foundinthe wild. Awild grain suchaseinkorn wheat
