If you can't stand the heat....
When it's summer in the northern latitudes, when we're looking forward to two months of excruciatingly hot weather after suffering through an extraordinarily warm and wet spring, when next week includes the first of July, and when our editors asked us to, my fellow guides at About.com and I decided to spend some time talking about air conditioning.
Air conditioning is a symptom of civilization. As civilization progressed and progresses, we as humans gradually move from adapting to our environment (i.e., changing our behavior as conditions change) to adapting our environment ( molding the nearby environment to suit us). This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, nor is it restricted to a particular culture--all humans seek to control their surroundings. In fact, if I were in a contentious mode of discourse, I might argue that the driving force behind much of civilization is a need to control the uncontrollable. But it's too hot to do that.
An historic example is roads. The first roads connecting place to place followed the contours of the land. By and large, foot paths and horse trails followed the uplands, because it was dry and relatively flat there, and crossed streams only where the stream bed allowed. Later roads accommodated our horse- and engine-driven vehicles, and bridges and crossings were built to ford creeks and streams and steep grades reduced to make climbing them easier. Now, of course, four-lane and eight-lane highways are built flat and straight, almost regardless of original geographic contours. Mountains are blasted through to make shortcuts through ranges. Terraforming, assisted by large machinery, is commonplace.
So, what did our prehistoric ancestors do about the heat? High temperatures weren't the only problem, of course. There were winters to be got through, and spring flooding, all of which impacted prehistoric peoples just as directly and devastatingly as they do us modern folk, perhaps more so. So, what did we do when the climate got sticky?
....Get out of the kitchen. For pretty much all of prehistory (that is, before written records), people used mobility strategies, albeit probably primarily for obtaining food. During American prehistory, big game hunters moved to follow herds of bison and mammoth; hunter-gatherers moved to the prairies when the strawberries were ripe and to the timber when the nuts ripened. Early agriculturalists moved to be near their crops while they ripened, and back into small protected valleys for the winters. All of these movements were tied to seasonal changes, and indeed when archaeologists refer to such movement, they often use the term "seasonal round."
It was only when we had a reason for staying in the same place, whether because we needed to defend our agricultural lands, because our former wandering places were already populated, or for other, non-material reasons, that large-scale adaptation of our surroundings became necessary. So, when grandma spends her winters in Florida and her summers in the Catskills, she's only practicing an age-old coping method.
Keep as cool as you can, and see ya next week!
