PROGRAM TITLE: Human Ecological History ACTIVITY STREAM: Process Studies SCIENCE ELEMENT:Earth System History SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY (NMNH) SCIENTIFIC MERIT: Human groups have been manipulating and changing plant and animal communities over thousands of years. Human modification of world ecosystems intensifies daily. Research on these long histories of expanding human alteration of ecosystems provides the essential developmental context for understanding present-day research on modern ecosystems. This program focuses on the long history of human modification of ecosystems and human responses to changing environments. The objective is to document and understand major turning points in mankind's ability to change the earth's environment, from human origins up through the agricultural revolution and the development of the state. Collaborative fieldwork in East Africa, especially Kenya, focuses on the behavior and ecological interaction of early humans in the face of changing tropical environments over the past 5 million years, including detailed analysis of tools, animal remains, and paleoenvironmental indicators. Modern agriculture increasingly alters ecosystems and reduces biological diversity worldwide. The initial development of agriculture marks the first emergence of humans as powerful agents of environmental change. Worldwide field and laboratory research aims to explain the origins, intensification, and impact of agriculture in different world areas. Analysis of plant and animal remains is used to construct a rich and detailed record of the development of agriculture and its environmental consequences. Parallel research on early states documents and analyzes the emergence, subsequent development and impact of specialized agricultural economies. The program directly addresses the USGCRP objective of improving our understanding of the physical, biological and social processes that influence Earth system processes and trends on global and regional scales. It is designed to answer the fundamental question of how and why humans and human systems influence physical and biological systems, and to characterize the relevant processes of change in human systems over the greatest possible periods of time and spatial dimensions. Existing programs in archaeobiology/paleoanthropology have created a strong base of accomplishments over the past several years, which has placed this program in the forefront of international efforts to understand man's impact on the environment through time. New resources are urgently needed to enlarge the scope of field and laboratory studies and to speed up the time frame for analysis and distribution of results. The existing methodology has now been fully tested and significant successes have been achieved and reported, but progress is impeded by lack of personnel. STAKEHOLDERS: International scientific communication and cooperation is a cornerstone of this program, with NMNH serving as the base for an international consortium of 40 researchers on human origins and ecological history. The consortium of 30 U.S. and foreign research institutions will coordinate collection and analysis of a vast body of data on climatic, biotic, and human evolutionary history of the past several million years. Current collaboration exists with the Carnegie Institution, eight U.S. universities, and several universities and museums in Africa, Europe and Asia. POLICY RELEVANCE: The explicit objective of this group is to formulate an ecological history of the Hominidae, the taxonomic family to which modern humans belong, in order to explain the processes by which humans have emerged as dominant players on the ecological scene. Recent articles in Science magazine have documented the successes and widespread support among colleagues for the paleoecological approach to human ecological history taken by Richard Potts and Bruce Smith, the scientists in charge of this program. PROGRAM CONTACTS:SI SGCR Representative: Ted A. Maxwell NASM MRC 315 Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. 20560 202 357 1424 FAX: 202 786 2566 Email: tmaxwell@ceps.nasm.edu Bureau Representative: Marsha Sitnik NMNH MRC 106 Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. 20560 202 357 2670 FAX: 202 786 2934 Email: nmhod004@sivm.si.edu