"Climate is a factor that underpins all of human history"

Peter Frankopan talks to Rhiannon Davies about his pioneering new book exploring how humanity's complex relationship with the natural world has altered over the millennia

- By Rhiannon Davies

Rhiannon Davies: In The Earth Transformed you argue that the history of humanity is inextricably linked to the history of the environment. Why is that?
Peter Frankopan: Well, I’m not the first person to make that point. The Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – all have an origin story rooted in the Garden of Eden. The point of the Garden of Eden is that if you obey God’s commandments, you have plenty. You have optimal climate conditions; you have ecologies that give you everything you need. But when you transgress and you eat from the forbidden tree, you’re punished by being kicked out of the Garden of Eden and forced to live in a dangerous world. Though other global religions don’t have exactly the same story, there are certainly similar ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, and how fundamental it is to our existence.

Your book is wide-ranging in scope, going back to the dawn of time. Let’s begin with a brief visit to prehistory, to the start of the Holocene [a geographical epoch that began almost 12,000 years ago]. Why do you believe that this was a watershed moment for humanity?
Around 50,000 years ago, long before the Holocene, our subspecies –