Changing contexts

In three chapters, Part II analyses critical beginnings. This chapter explores the nature and influence of various natural environments across the world, which are very different. The core of the chapter is a discussion of the environments of the different regional areas of the world, including a fourfold division of Eurasia. The treatment focuses on the interaction between people and place, with an eye to the influence of environments on the nature and pattern of settlement across the world, and on the timing of the later transition to agriculture. It also emphasises the impact of change over time in those environments, especially climate change. Two elements of the natural environment are selected for special treatment – the resource endowment and the risk environment. It concludes with a comment on how the natural environment has produced a long-lasting global concentration of population in certain regions.