Past, Present, Future

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Impacts on the Environment All living things live in interaction with their environment. That is, their behavior changes the environment more or less, and environmental conditions in turn affect them, their behavior, their chances of survival and reproduction. Interactions between the behavior of living organisms and their environment More on

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Resource Use All living things use resources from their environment to survive, to grow, to reproduce. However, if the resource consumption of a population is permanently higher than the renewal rate of the resource, in other words exceeds the limits of ecological sustainability, then the availability of the resource gradually

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Social (In)Equality For most of our evolutionary history, we humans have been living in small groups, with no more than a few dozen up to a hundred people. Any life in groups brings with it the potential for conflict and the challenge of how to distribute resources or how

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Democracy For most part of our evolutionary history, we humans have been living in small groups, with no more than a few hundred people. Any life in groups brings with it the potential for conflict and the challenge of how to distribute resources or how to make decisions. We have

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Population Growth Through better and better tools and technologies, our species has been able to make better and better use of food sources in the course of evolutionary history. Our social skills also enabled us to work together in ever-larger groups where we could divide work and share resources.

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Living Standards As technologies have improved and have spread faster between people and regions, more and more people have come to live in better living conditions, with better food, better healthcare, and improved sanitation throughout history. For these reasons, the average life expectancy of humans in the last century increased more and more.  On a global scale,

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Food production An important element that was important to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors was the use of tools to extract enough food from the environment. With tools, more food could be procured more efficiently than with “bare hands”. For most of our evolutionary history, we were hunters and

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Spread of Innovations Technologies that facilitate or improve life and that do not entail any other direct costs or disadvantages to the user are popular and preferred by people. When new technologies are developed, there are often only a few in the population who have access to them, or who

Connecting the Past, Present, and Future Social Networking Throughout our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in ever larger groups. Due to the need for division of labor (foraging, toolmaking, child care, preparing food …), our ancestors depended on the group. For most of the approximately 250,000-year history of our species, people lived in small hunter-gatherer