ABSTRACT
The physical conditions of planet Earth have never been constant. Continents have moved, ice ages come and gone, oceans and mountains have changed places. If humanity disappeared, then there would be life on Earth and it would evolve in a Darwinian sense. Whenever humans lived by the sea, they developed ways of utilizing its diverse food resources. Human cultures apprehend the rest of the universe mostly through mediating ‘lenses’, of which language, memory and technology are integral and important parts. The sharper the lens, the deeper in time human impacts can be traced: human-induced fire seems to have been significant in the global methane budget between ad 1 and ad 1700. Nature from time to time produced enforced coalescence: the first half of the nineteenth century was the worst phase of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in the northern hemisphere.
