Ellsworth Huntington’s Victorian Climatic Writings

Abstract

In the late Victorian era, one could find Ellsworth Huntington caravanning through Eurasia, counting tree rings in northern California, or subsisting on stipends on the fringes of Yale’s geology department. Writing on demography as much as geography, Huntington described non-random change through founding effects and migration, as much as natural and sexual selection. Importantly, he distinguished between physical and community ecology, applying these concepts to human biogeography. Though not available to Huntington who wrote most prolifically in the earliest part of the twentieth century, life history evolution is indispensable to understanding the dynamics of climatically induced evolution across populations treated, for instance, in The Principles of Human Geography and The Human Habitat. Through Huntington’s writings, cross-continental variation in life histories is introduced and explained.