ABSTRACT
No element sets Homo sapiens apart from the other animals, but rather a combination of elements found in other species. Our biological, technological, and organizational inheritance links us to nature and also helps explain the long-term evolution of unsustainability features in present-day human cultures. This chapter reviews literature on the evolution of such features. An apparent result is that they seem to be relatively recent and so amenable to rapid corrective actions: while our brain-hand-eye connections seem to have coevolved with technology and human sociability since at least 2.5 million years ago, our evolution in the last 200,000 years has been essentially social. Moreover, elevated rates of human population growth and technologically led encroachment on the planet’s resources have only occurred in the last 10,000 years.
