Paleo To Pioneer: Studying humans and our environment from the Stone Age to the Age of Steam.

Exploring the nexus between humans, our technology, and the environments we live in.

Paleo To Pioneer is particularly interested in human subsistence before electricity as we adapted to and altered our environment via our indominatable will to flourish. 

Here, subsistence is defined as the specific diet consumed and the necessary technology incorporated to hunt, gather, collect, fish, cultivate, domesticate, process, and prepare food.  Modern people are largely divorced from any intuitive holistic or systematic understanding of the natural world around us and how we, or anyone previously, lived without modern technology.  Observations and information critical to the survival of people for aeons is often dismissed as quaint or primitive as our computer driven world allows us to ignore the physical realities of the planet on which we live.

Research conducted by Paleo To Pioneer delves into colonization of previously uninhabited landscapes, first and last occurrences and interactions between plant and animal species and humans, pre modern technology and change through time, and human behavioral and adaptive responses to different conditions across time and space.  Looking at how the environment has influenced us at the same time we have altered it as well.  Producing original research precedes educational outreach from professional publications to informal talks and more formal educational opportunities online, in the press, and in person.

The rearrangement of biotic communities in the New World at the end of the Pleistocene coincides with the arrival of humans and a small number of other large mammals.  Because of extirpation and extinction the lack of a meaningful modern or historic analog for Pleistocene biotic communities means that our interpretations need to be based on a studied consideration of each of the individual taxa once present in a given environment.

The overarching goal of Paleo To Pioneer is to address these issues using a combination of original field and collections based research in conjunction with replication and experimentation to figure out exactly how people adapted to their world over time, and share that information.