Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability [Hardcover]

Richard Potts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1996 | Series: Humanity's Descent (Book 1)

The director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program presents a new view of how we became human, making eloquently clear how our activities are intimately connected with the shifting climates of the planet. Potts maintains that altough we have acquired the capacity to alter our surroundings and to mimic the environmental changes that created us, our future still lies in our ability to tolerate environmental insult and to clarify our relationship with nature. Maps & charts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Who are we and where have we come from? Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, offers an academic study tracing humanity's ancestors and the forces that led to our dominance on Earth. He argues persuasively, if redundantly, that environmental instability has been the single constant shaping our interaction with nature. He is at his best when discussing characteristics that may make us unique in the animal kingdom: our acquisition of language and culture, as well as our capacity to plan for the future, particularly with respect to maintaining a viable food supply. Unfortunately, Potts concludes the book by attempting to apply his anthropological, archeological and paleontological hypotheses to current environmental issues such as global warming, habitat loss and species extinction; his treatment of both environmentalists and their opponents is too simplistic. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Potts, the director of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins program, proposes that climatic forces are always at work in the world and that ecological stability is a misnomer. Exploring the relationship of human and animal life with nature in an attempt to explain evolutionary patterns, he notes that similar evolutionary paths are traveled by a wide variety of plants and animals, even by those on isolated continents. Like Steven Stanley in Children of the Ice Age (LJ 4/15/96 ), Potts proposes that the evolutionary advantage of Homo sapiens lies in the ability to adjust constantly to a changing environment. Yet he goes further by exploring this premise with many other species, concluding that the earth's ecology is constantly changing. Numerous animal and plant species have flourished for thousands of years only to become extinct at some point when they could no longer meet the challenge of a changing environment. Potts has presented a truly interesting hypothesis that he supports throughout with good examples. Recommended for most libraries.
Gloria Maxwell, Kansas City P.L., Kansas
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition (May 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688104703
• ISBN-13: 978-0688104702
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,601,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weather we like it or not, May 28, 2004

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability (Paperback)

In this well-written, comprehensive study, Rick Potts has provided a landmark book on human evolution. Looking beyond scattered fossils and debates over African origins or Multi-regional evolution of modern man, he views vast stretches of time and space. What made a primate species descend from a forest canopy to become a skilled survivor on the African savannah. How did it happen and when, he asks. In answer, he provides a detailed examination of the environmental history surrounding and influencing our path. We are still on that path, he reminds us. We cannot separate ourselves from our surroundings. Nor did we "overcome" the conditions nature set as we evolved. Instead, conditions drove our evolution.

Potts surveys the remote past to set his theme - climate varies, sometimes catastrophically. It may also change with stunning rapidity - as his noting of a Canadian site showing tundra becoming spruce forest in 150 years suggests. There may be long periods of relative stability, as when Pangaea, home to the dinosaurs, dominated the scene. At one time Antarctica had no ice sheet and the North Pole was tropical. Continental breakup changed more than the landscape, it revised the weather. This was no more true than in the Miocene [24 to 5.3 Mya] when weather patterns changed drastically. And continued to change.

While all this meteorological madness was occurring, a certain primate species in Africa confronted the challenges shifting weather offered. Overturning the old myth that early humans dropped out of the forest and learned to run, Potts shows how it was the forests that ran away. He's quick to point out, however, that this was not a gradual nor a steady change. Forests came and went, only to return. Lakes filled and dried, then filled. In order to survive, this primate population needed to adapt. Some did, but others failed the challenge. Those who succeeded, he argues, learned to follow the best scenario for survival. Hence, humans began their great migrations across the globe.

When those migrations, combined with improved brain power, led humans to begin transforming their environment with agriculture, that transition wasn't as revolutionary as most anthropologists usually contend. To Potts, it was simply an extension of the habits learned over the millennia. Weather changes had been adapted for. Changing the local environment by "controlling" it was simply another logical step in the sequence. However, he reminds us, cultural growth, by which innovation is admired and becomes part of tradition, turned this adaptation into a philosophy. "Dominion over the Earth" became a set piece of human thinking. It's a dangerous philosophy leading us to make irrational choices in our dealings with the rest of nature. Flexibility is lost as fewer species are relied upon to sustain us. He gives the example of the New England colonists transforming the existing relationship Native Americans generally enjoyed. Land use became limited in application, with whole tracts of forest and ecological balances disrupted. The time span of these events is infinitesimal in contrast with the long ages of adaptation. In thinking we can "control" what is uncontrollable, humans are flirting with disaster. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]