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To complete this activity, download and print the Student Question Sheet.
 Since the dawn of man, humans have needed food, water, and shelter to survive. The natural resources of the landscape supplied these three basic needs. Sometimes these resources have been abundant. Other times they’ve been scarce or absent.
How humans adapted to changing environments often defined them as a culture. The Paleo-Indian culture traveled the Grand Staircase-Escalante area from 10,000 to 7,000 B.C., hunting large game animals like mammoths, horses, and camels. When the ice caps retreated and huge environmental changes occurred, mammoths and many other animal and plant species became extinct.
The Paleo-Indian people changed their lifeways to adapt. They evolved into what we now call the Archaic culture. Archaic people began as hunter-gatherers, inhabiting the Grand Staircase-Escalante area from 7,000 to 100 B.C. Over time the people started manipulating the plants they gathered, creating new strains that allowed them to stay in one place for extended periods of time. This was the beginning of horticultural cultures, including the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloan people. |
