ABSTRACT
The concept of sustainable development was formulated because humanity faces climatic change. While climatic changes are common throughout Earth’s life, they are less common in human history, and even less so in the past 200 years, when human populations undertook their dramatic expansion. Anatomically modern humans appear to have originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and to have reached “full behavioural modernity” about 50,000 yr ago. However, for all their abilities, they were eking out a precarious existence as hunter-gatherers until the onset on the Holocene, about 12,000 yr ago. It was soon after the onset of this relatively warmer climatic period that human civilizations appear, their fortunes ebbing and fl owing in parallel to climate variations (Fagan 2008).
