The preceding methodological discussion of adaptation and adaptive systems provides a conceptual framework capable of dealing effectively with the interrelationships between people and their environment. This paradigm allows systemic integration of the many environmental variables and, above all, the interactive processes that have been the subject of this book. This paradigm is ideally suited for diachronic analysis, and it subsumes the spatial dimension. In this concluding chapter, the adaptive-system paradigm will be applied to briefly examine two key adaptive transformations in human history and then to evaluate the adaptive modifications that permitted the remarkable persistence of hydraulic systems over some five millennia in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This presentation will take the form of an interpretative synopsis, lightly documented, that is intended to illustrate the roles of multiple variables in cultural change or continuity.

Adaptive transformation in the Pleistocene record: hominization

In considering cultural adaptations in a diachronic perspective, the fundamental differences between early prehistorical and historical adaptive systems must be emphasized. In the case of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, prior to about 35,000 B.P., we are dealing with rudimentary adaptive structures characterized by few components and interlinkages, initially perhaps not substantially more complex than those of modern chimpanzees. In the case of the Upper Paleolithic and more recent adaptive systems there is evidence for intricate multicomponent structures analogous to the systems common to modern humanity and prone to an almost unlimited range of partly idiosyncratic variation.