ABSTRACT
From prehistory humankind have accumulated environmental know-how and developed strategies for exploiting nature. To help regulate resource use people evolved taboos, superstitions and common rights, formulated laws to improve stewardship, and even undertook national resource inventories (such as the twelfthcentury AD Domesday survey). While some managed to sustain reasonable lifestyles for long periods, the idea that pre-modern people ‘close to nature’ caused little environmental damage is largely an arcadian myth. Indeed, with populations a fraction of today’s, prehistoric people, using fire and weapons of flint, bone, wood and leather, managed to alter the vegetation of most continents and probably to wipe out many species of large mammals (Tudge, 1995).
