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Early man lived mainly on plants, or animals that lived on plants. Plants, rocks and leather provided most of his tools. He learned to use plants to make shelters and to keep warm. Using plants for fuel he learned to make ceramics, glass, smelter metals, and to keep warm as well as feed. Still today, we use plants (wood) for much of our shelter. This was pretty much the way man lived until about 1850.
Coal started replacing plants for fuel, and in 1859 the first Oil Well in the U.S.A was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. I suspect that well was dug more to get lubricants than to burn as a substitute for coal and wood. It took very little time for man to develop a taste, and hunger, for petroleum. By 1900 Oil Exploration was going big time.
I was born in 1934, and can well remember when very little petroleum was used for home heating or freight transportation. There was very minor use of kerosene for heating and cooking; and trains were all pulled by steam locomotives. If any appreciable distance was involved, transportation of people was by rail, or steam ship, until after WW-II. My father who was born in 1903 could easily remember when short distance transportation, and all farming, was fueled by hay. In my home town, the last farmers using horses got a tractor in 1944.
When Henry Ford introduced the Model T, in 1910, it spelled the end of the horse and buggy for short distance transportation,
In the 50 years after WW-II the human animal became totally dependent on petroleum to provide all transportation both for people and freight. The vast majority of us heat our homes on petroleum. We burn electricity generated by petroleum or natural gas to cool and light our buildings. We eat food produced, fertilized, and watered by the energy supplied by petroleum. We don't even dress in clothes produced largely from plants. Cotton and wool (produced by putting plant material through a sheep) provide only a small portion of our clothing.
Today, the human animal is dependent on petroleum for: heat, and transportation; plus energy to pump water, wash our clothes, cook our meals, and even run the computer I am typing on, also to keep our telephones and radio stations going. Petroleum is the basic material used to make plastics, fertilizers, weed and insect sprays, tires, roads, synthetics, solvents for paints and glues, and even medicines and a host of other things.
I conjecture, if we had to go back to using plants (not watered, farmed, and fertilized using petroleum) the planet could support less than ten percent of the population we now have. Simply put: Without petroleum most people would either freeze, starve or choke. In less than 100 years humans have evolved to where they cannot live without petroleum and its products.
With the 3-dimensional techniques we have for todays oil exploration it is folly to think that any significant amount remains to be found. At the 1990 consumption rate and rate of increase (I have not found data later that 1990.) the world supply of petroleum will be exhausted sometime around 2025 to 2050.
Since 1990 consumption rates have been increasing as third world countries are "modernizing" using more energy and petroleum per capita. Look at the advances going on in China. They want and are getting: cars, paved roads, airplanes, washers, dryers, television, computers, the internet, modern buildings, and modern medicine. The same is true for the people in Africa, India, Mexico, South America and all the other less developed nations. But, this all spells higher use of petroleum; the increased consumption cannot be stopped without major problems.
When people of the world realize we are running out of petroleum and they cannot have or afford what they have become used to, I predict, there will be major political and economic problems. This will erupt into panic, bickering and fighting like the human animal has never seen before. Wars will probably reduce the human population to what the planet can support using just plants for food and energy. If nuclear weapons are thrown about all animal life on the planet could be eliminated. These changes will come but will not be pretty.