ABSTRACT
Plant geography has tended to dominate the textbooks and the ecological field of study, although in zoogeography has proved the main stimulus in the generation of theories concerning the world distribution of organisms. Whilst most geographers have thus busied themselves with the integrating concept of the ecosystem and with the applied aspects of ecology, it is interesting to find that many botanists and zoologists have been developing a new spatial focus in biogeography. Particular interest has been shown in the ecological impact of human societies during the prehistoric period. Indeed, since the important address of H. H. Barrows to the American Association of Geographers in 1923, human ecology has inevitably become a central tenet in any definition of geography, even when it carries the prefix, bio. The approach was to a large extent autecological in nature, in that each organism was classified according to its key environmental or ecological relationship.
