This section focuses on how people using tools and technology affect the environment. The material presented is designed to help you meet the following objective.
- Determine the ways tools and technological advances affect the environment.
As long as humans have existed their activities and the technology they have developed have been affecting their environments—and each other. One way early hunter-gatherers impacted their environment was by causing various extinctions. By the 1400s, the Maori, the earliest settlers in New Zealand, wiped out the island's large flightless bird, the moa, entirely, and sea lions locally. The Maori hunted moas with spears or traps, and then used their bones to make ornaments, fishhooks, and bird spear points.
What kind of hunting technologies did the early Maori employ? Read "When the Māori First Settled New Zealand, They Hunted Flightless, 500-Pound Birds" at the following link.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-biggest-bird
When hunter-gatherers groups turned to agriculture and developed farming technologies such as cattle-drawn plows, they impacted their environment yet again: people settled, land was cleared, crops were grown, populations increased. When numbers of people exceeded the land's carrying capacity, they migrated. As populations grew, their lives intertwined with new inventions and technologies that extended human reach and affected Earth's environment in new ways.
