While in Anthropological human evolution textbooks the first part of the story is couched in evolutionary and environmental terms, the second part denies the environment a meaningful role in human history. Instead values, beliefs and issues, history, and culture constitute the key elements of the explanatory framework. Few efforts have been made that incorporate information about how humans have altered the environment or about how environmental change revised human activity. Examples of such changes are subsistence strategies, demographical patterns, and perceptions. To achieve this, there exists a need to develop a multidisciplinary framework.
Anthropology plays an important role in the development of such an framework.
It motivates an historical focus on the dynamics of change. Landscape ecology recognizes human influence on non-human species, yet persist in distinguishing human from natural landscapes. Human ecology concentrates on systematic and evolutionary aspects, while social ecology emphasizes behavior. Both study human-environmenal relationships in distant past or present. Sociobiology is a paradigm within human social ecology Cultural ecology and cultural geography examine adaptive strategies.