Top Highlights

• Charles O. Frake defined cultural ecology as "the study of the role of culture as a dynamic component of any ecosystem"
• One part of cultural ecology with immediate impact is the study of adaptation, how people deal with, affect and are affected by their changing environment.
• Human ecologists study how and why cultures do what they do to solve their subsistence problems, how people understand their environment and how they share that knowledge.
• The development of cultural ecology as a theory has its start with a scholarly grappling with understanding cultural evolution
• Some cultures moved back and forth between agricultural and hunting and gathering or, quite commonly, did both at once.

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