Engineering the Anthropocene
Scalable social networks and resilience building in human evolutionary timescales
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4189147 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Fox (Independent Consultant, UK), Matt Pope (0000-0002-8215-5000, University College London, corresponding author), Erle C Ellis (0000-0002-2006-3362, University of Maryland, Baltimore County) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 199-215 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Anthropocene Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-0196 • E-ISSN: 2053-020X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/2053019617742415 |
| OpenAlex | W2769175443 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 91 |
The Anthropocene represents the emergence of human societies as a 'great force of nature'. To understand and engage productively with this emergent global force, it is necessary to understand its origins, dynamics and structuring processes as the long-term evolutionary product of human niche construction, based on three key human characteristics: tool making, habitat construction and most importantly: social network engineering. The exceptional social capacities of behaviourally modern humans, constituting human ultrasociality, are expressed through the formation of increasingly complex and extensive social networks, enabling flexible and diverse group organisation, sociocultural niche construction, engineered adaptation and resilience building. The human drive towards optimising communication infrastructures and expanding social networks is the key human adaptation underpinning the emergence of the Anthropocene. Understanding the deep roots of human ultrasocial behaviour is essential to guiding contemporary societies towards more sustainable human-environment interactions in the Anthropocene present and future. We propose that socially networked engineered solutions will continue to be the prime driver of human resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of global environmental risks and societal challenges such as climate change, sea-level rise, localised extreme weather events and ecosystem degradation
Anthropocene · Biology · Environmental ethics · Environmental resource management · Niche construction · Psychological resilience · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Environmental Science · Psychology · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Ecology
Earth altruism
An Issue of Scale
Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age
Paleoenvironmental humanities
The Anthropocene Concept in the Natural and Social Sciences, the Humanities and Law – A Bibliometric Analysis and a Qualitative Interpretation (2000–2020)
Children and innovation
Anthropocene
Deep-time organizations
Cultural heritage and climate adaptation
Engineered landscapes of the southern Murray-Darling Basin
Vulnerability, risk, resilience
Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology
Defining Behavioral Modernity in the Context of Neandertal and Anatomically Modern Human Populations
The Cultured Chimpanzee
Niche Construction
Animal Tool Behavior
The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas
Towards a unified science of cultural evolution
An early and enduring advanced technology originating 71,000 years ago in South Africa
Urban land teleconnections and sustainability
Quaternary International
The Origins of Scaling in Cities
The Food-sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids
New fossils from Koobi Fora in northern Kenya confirm taxonomic diversity in early Homo
Used planet
Domestication as a model system for niche construction theory
A Cultural Niche Construction Theory of Initial Domestication
Teaching among wild chimpanzees
Ecological consequences of human niche construction
From hominins to humans
Evolution, revolution or saltation scenario for the emergence of modern cultures?
The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene
Evolution of early Homo
Defining the Anthropocene
Global Change and the Ecology of Cities
The role of shellfish in hunter–gatherer societies during the Early Upper Palaeolithic
The emergence of human uniqueness
Precision grips, hand morphology, and tools
Thinking Through Networks
Long-term dynamic modeling of global population and built-up area in a spatially explicit way
The causes of land-use and land-cover change
Materials embodied in international trade – Global material extraction and consumption between 1995 and 2005
Sticks and Stones
Geoarchaeological analysis of an acheulean site at Kalambo Falls, Zambia
Middle Paleolithic Behavioral Organization
Middle Stone Age shellfish exploitation
Things to do in Doggerland when you're dead
Cladistic analyses of behavioural variation in wild Pan troglodytes
Human societies
The Social Brain and the Shape of the Palaeolithic
Million-year-old stone tools and associated bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Afar, Ethiopia
Archaeology and Global Change
Boxgrove
The onset of the Anthropocene
Humans and technology in the Anthropocene
The technofossil record of humans
The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative
Palaeolithic society and the release from proximity
A multilevel evolutionary framework for sustainability analysis
Sustainability of Human Ecological Niche Construction
Contingencies of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene
A functional approach to Paleolithic open-air habitation structures
High resolution Neanderthals? Interpreting middle palaeolithic intrasite spatial data
The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies
Origins and Development of Urbanism
Preindustrial Markets and Marketing
The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes
An Emerging Paradigm Shift in the Origins of Agriculture
Dental Evidence for the Reconstruction of Diet in African EarlyHomo
Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |