Biodiversity loss and climate change due to overexploitation of our natural resources is making it increasingly urgent to understand how to interact sustainably with our natural surroundings. Archaeological, anthropological and palaeoecological studies investigating the interactions between humans and their environments can provide the opportunity for us to learn from our past.

Humans have been evolving with their environments for millions of years. While we have adapted to environmental and climatic conditions, we have also engineered our own environments. Early hominins navigated an expanding African grassland on two legs, eventually learning to utilize surrounding stone to create increasingly complex toolkits. Those toolkits facilitated the expansion of our ancestors across the globe, where they were faced with unknown environments, often unforgiving and harsh. Humans then domesticated plants and animals, supporting growing populations, and leading to more intensive modifications of land for agriculture and habitation.