ملاحظات
مقدمة
(1)
This quotation is typically attributed to the German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but it does not appear in any of
Schopenhauer’s published works. What Schopenhauer actually wrote was:
“Der Wahrheit ist allezeit nur ein kurzes
Siegesfest beschieden, zwischen den beiden langen Zeiträumen, wo sie
als Paradox verdammt und als Trivial gering geschätzt
wird.” (“Truth is allowed only a brief celebration of
victory, between two long periods, during which it is condemned as
paradoxical and disparaged as trivial.”) From Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation),
first published in Germany in 1818.
(2)
See Wildman, Derek E., Monica Uddin, Guozhen Liu, Lawrence
I. Grossman, and Morris Goodman, 2003, “Implications of Natural
Selection in Shaping 99.4% Nonsynonymous DNA Identity between Humans and
Chimpanzees: Enlarging Genus Homo.” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America 100:7181–7188.
الفصل الأول: منطلق الرئيسيات
(1)
There is, of course, facial hair above and below the lips in
the form of mustaches and beards among the adult males in most human
populations. However, the presence or absence of this facial hair varies
greatly. In some human societies, such as the San Bushman of Africa’s
Kalahari Desert and the Yanomamö of South America’s Amazon Basin, adult
males typically have little or no facial hair. Some non-human primates also
have facial hair: the male orangutan often grows a beard, and both male and
female patas monkeys typically have well-developed mustaches and beards in
adulthood.
(2)
Some baboon species (e.g., the hamadryas baboon of Ethiopia) that inhabit
open, exposed environments have a flexible, multi-layered social
structure, in which several harems combine to form “clans” that forage
together during the day and then combine with other clans to share a
common sleeping area at night. This enables the baboons, while
maintaining their pattern of forming exclusive harems, to form very
large groups of up to 750 individuals that are effective defenses
against predators during the hours of darkness.
(3)
In the modern world, ethnic identities are not as uniformly
strong as they are in traditional societies. Some people tend to remain
faithful to their cultural origins, while others—especially the
young—prefer to embrace innovation and change. But the tremendous
increase in contact among the world’s cultures made possible by
industrial technologies of interaction and later by the invention of
digital technologies—combined with the hugely accelerated pace of
technological and cultural change—has in recent years caused many ethnic
traditions to lose their former power and importance, much to the
despair of the older generations.
الفصل الثاني: تقنية الحراب وعصي الحفر
(1)
For a detailed description of the discovery of the Laetoli
footprints, see John Reader, Missing Links: In
Search of Human Origins (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
(2)
As I have previously explained in greater detail in the
introduction, for many decades, the familiar term “hominids” was universally
used by anthropologists, paleontologists, and all other scientists to refer
to the various species of prehistoric and modern humans. But “hominids” fell
out of favor during the 1990s, when advances in DNA analysis showed that
gorillas and chimpanzees are genetically closer to humans than had been
previously assumed. As a result of these findings, all of the great apes
were reclassified and grouped together into the family Hominidae. In the years since this
reclassification took place, anthropologists have generally favored using
the term “hominins”—on the theory that it identifies humanity as belonging
not to the family Hominidae but rather to
the sub-family Homininae and/or the tribe
Hominini. However, since the
Hominini includes chimpanzees and the
Homininae includes both chimpanzees
and gorillas—both of which are quadrupedal apes that are not human and are
not part of the human family tree—I have decided, with apologies to my
fellow anthropologists, to use the more familiar term “hominid” in this
book, since it is addressed to the general reader as well as to the scholar
and scientist.
(3)
A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1948), 79. In the same work, Kroeber also asserts that culture “is that
which the human species has and other social species lack” (p. 253)
—another “prevailing opinion” among scientists of the day that has since
been completely discredited.
(4)
Even the kangaroo (which is not a placental mammal but
rather a marsupial), with its specialized ability to stand comfortably
on its hind legs and to run across the landscape with great speed by
jumping with its hind legs, must get down on all fours when it walks.
And the kangaroo is burdened by an immensely heavy tail, required to
counterbalance its forequarters. Even when the kangaroo is standing
erect, its spine is held not in a vertical position but rather at an
angle, halfway between vertical and horizontal.
(5)
See P. S. Rodman and H. M. McHenry, “Bioenergetics and the
Origin of Hominid Bipedalism,” American Journal
of Physical Anthropology 52, (1980),
103–106.
(6)
See Tim D. White et al.,
“Ardipithecus ramidus and the
Paleobiology of Early Hominids,” Science 326, no. 5949 (2009), 64,
75–86.
(7)
See C. Owen Lovejoy, “The Origin of Man,” Science (new series) 211, no. 4480 (1981),
341–350.
(8)
See R. W. Newman, “Why Man Is Such a Sweaty and Thirsty
Naked Animal: A Speculative Review,” Human
Biology 42 (1970):12–27, and Peter E. Wheeler, “The
Evolution of Bipedality and Loss of Functional Body Hair in Humans,”
Journal of Human Evolution 13
(1984), 91–98.
(9)
See N. Jablonski, and G. Chaplin, “Origin of Habitual
Terrestrial Bipedalism in the Ancestor of the Hominidae,” Journal of Human
Evolution 24 (1993), 259–280.
(10)
See Kevin D. Hunt, “The Evolution of Human Bipedality:
Ecology and Functional Morphology,” Journal of
Human Evolution 26 (1994),
183–202.
(11)
See Ralph L. Holloway, “Tools and Teeth: Some Speculations
Regarding Canine Reduction,” American
Anthropologist 69(1) (1967): 63–67. For a different
perspective, see Sherwood Washburn and R. Ciochon, “Canine Teeth: Notes
on Controversies in the Study of Human Evolution,” American Anthropologist 76, no. 4 (1974),
765–784.
(12)
Gen Suwa noted that the canine teeth of Ardipithecus had
become significantly reduced when compared with those of its likely
ancestors. “In the hominid precursors of Ar.
ramidus, the predominant and cardinal evolutionary
innovations of the dentition were reduction of male canine size and
minimization of its visual prominence … The fossils now available
suggest that male canine reduction was well underway by six million
years ago.” See Gen Suwa et al.,
“Paleobiological Implications of the Ardipithecus ramidus Dentition,” Science 326, no. 5949 (2009),
94–99.
(13)
For a detailed explanation of this hypothesis addressed to
a scholarly audience, see Richard L. Currier, “Canine Teeth and Lethal
Weapons: Was the Fabrication of Wooden Spears and Digging Sticks by
Human Ancestors Responsible for the Evolution of Bipedal Locomotion?”
Available at:
http://www.richardlcurrier.com/articles/canine-teeth-and-lethal-weapons.html.
(14)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of
Man (New York: Penguin Books, 2007),
90–91.
(15)
C. Loring Brace, The Stages of
Human Evolution, 5th ed (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1995),
130-131.
(16)
Graber, Robert Bates, Randall R. Skelton, Ralph M. Rowlett,
Ronald Kephart, and Susan Love Brown, Meeting
Anthropology Phase to Phase: Growing Up, Spreading Out, Crowding In,
Switching On (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000),
90.
(17)
Monogamy is common among birds, because once the female has
laid the eggs, either parent can perform all the remaining tasks
required to care for the offspring, from sitting on the eggs to keep
them warm to protecting and feeding the nesting chicks. Thus it stands
to reason that two birds would generally have a better chance of
successfully raising a nest of offspring than would a single bird. But
monogamy is rare among mammals, including primates, among which the care
and feeding of the young is primarily or exclusively the burden of the
female, the giver of milk (although among a few monogamous primate
species, the father tends to become the preferred beast of burden).
There are several monogamous primates, including gibbons, siamangs, titi
monkeys, and marmosets, but in every one of these species the primary
group consists of a single breeding pair. Humans are the only primates
that form monogamous families that remain integrated within larger
groups of cooperating adults.
الفصل الثالث: تقنية النار
(1)
See Charles K. Brain and Andrew Sillen, “Evidence from the
Swartkrans Cave for the Earliest Use of Fire,” Nature 336 (1989), 464–466.
(2)
In The Spark That Ignited Human
Evolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2009), 173, Frances Burton, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto,
writes: “It is hard to identify why the Ancestor [the earliest hominid]
first approached fire. It surely must have occurred, however, somewhere
between 7 and 10 million years ago.” On the other hand, Steven R. James, an
anthropologist at the California State University at Fullerton, wrote in
1989 that “there are no actual hearths until the appearance of the
Neandertals … at the end of the Middle Pleistocene [approximately 130000
years ago]. Much of the evidence [for the human use of fire] prior to this
time is equivocal, and natural processes may explain it.” See Steven R.
James, “Hominid use of Fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene: A Review of
the Evidence,” Current Anthropology 30,
no. 1 (1989), 1–11.
(3)
It is no accident that those species of non-human primates
who have adapted to a terrestrial existence—including baboons, vervets,
and patas monkeys—never venture far from the safety of the trees and
high cliffs that they use as sleeping places when darkness falls. Even
the chimpanzee, hardly a terrestrial species, always sleeps in the
trees, even though, due to its large size, it must construct a sleeping
platform out of tree branches that is strong enough to support its
weight. Only the massive gorilla, which lives in mountain habitats where
large predators are rare, and is strong enough to overpower most
predators, sleeps on the ground at night.
(4)
The various emerging humans that have been given their own
status as separate “species” to date include Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, Homo
antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis, and Homo
floresiensis. Some of them, such as H. habilis and H.
ergaster, are very ancient and have long been extinct,
while others, such as H.
floresiensis, may have survived until as recently as twelve
thousand years ago. Still others, especially Homo heidelbergensis, were so advanced that they may not
have been emerging humans at all but rather early forms of modern
humans. Precisely how all of the many fossil remains of the various
emerging humans should be classified continues to be the subject of
lively debate among prehistorians and will doubtless remain so for a
long time to come.
(5)
For a fascinating discussion of the probable antiquity of
Homo erectus, see Christopher
Wills, Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating
Pace of Human Evolution, 164–171.
(6)
For a full explanation of this hypothesis, see Richard
Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us
Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 98–102. Wrangham
further elaborated this argument in a publication with Rachel Carmody in
2010. See Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody, “Human Adaptation to the
Control of Fire,” Evolutionary
Anthropology 19 (2010), 187–199. See especially 190-191
and 196.
(7)
In captivity, however, the chimpanzee has demonstrated an
uncanny degree of casualness in handling and using fire—complete with
the ability to smoke cigarettes and cigars, a behavior that is described
in detail in A. S. Brink, “The Spontaneous Fire-Controlling Reactions of
Two Chimpanzee Smoking Addicts,” South African
Journal of Science 53 (1957), 241–247. One particularly
precocious chimpanzee was even capable of gathering dry twigs together,
lighting them with a cigarette lighter, adding more twigs to this little
fire, and toasting a marshmallow. See Frances D. Burton, Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human
Evolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2009).
(8)
Several of the more primitive primate species, however, are
nocturnal in nature. Aside from a few species of “night monkeys”
(aotidae) that live in Central
and South America, most of these nocturnal primates belong to a more
ancient and more primitive suborder of primates called “prosimians”
(literally, “before monkeys”) that include dwarf lemurs, tarsiers, bush
babies, galagos, lorises, and pottos. As a rule, the nocturnal
prosimians tend to be rare, relatively small-brained, and solitary. Most
of them survive in small numbers in the more remote habitats of Africa
and Madagascar.
(9)
The release of melatonin is also governed by the normal
daily pattern of wakefulness and sleep, a phenomenon known as the
“circadian rhythm.”
(10)
With apologies to the French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss, who published The Raw and the
Cooked: Mythologiques, volume 1 in 1964, a classic work
that explored the food mythologies of numerous societies. In it,
Lévi-Strauss concluded that all human cultures distinguish between food
in its natural state (“the raw”) and food that has been processed by
human activity (“the cooked”). He further theorized that the process of
cooking was viewed in all cultural mythologies as the crossing of the
boundary that exists in the human mind between nature and
culture.
(11)
See Francesco Berna, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz,
James Brink, Sharon Holt, Marion Bamford, and Michael Chazan,
“Microstratigraphic Evidence of in situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of
Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America 109, no. 20 (2012),
1215–1220.
(12)
See Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and
Richard Wrangham, “Great Apes Prefer Cooked Food,”
Journal of Human
Evolution 55 (2008),
343–348.
(13)
The difficulties that humans encounter when
they attempt to live on a diet of raw foods are
described in detail in Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us
Human, 15–36.
(14)
See Leslie C. Aiello and Peter Wheeler, “The
Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis: The Brain and the Digestive System in Human
and Primate Evolution,” Current
Anthropology 36, no. 2 (1995),
199–221.
(15)
It should be noted that Aiello and Wheeler argued that the
increase in brain size between the early hominids and the emerging
humans was most likely due to the addition of substantial amounts of
meat in the hominid diet, and they assumed that cooking was invented
much later, closer to 250000 years ago. But Wrangham makes a convincing
case that cooking was indeed responsible for the first and most dramatic
increase in brain size, and his argument has been strengthened by the
steady accumulation of evidence that hominids were already using fire on
a regular basis well before one million years ago. See Richard Wrangham,
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us
Human, 96–127.
(16)
Just as the human embryo has a tail and other archaic
structures in an early phase of its development, the human fetus may
have a considerable amount of fine hair all over its body before it is
born. This fetal hair, or lanugo, is typically shed in the womb several
weeks before birth.
(17)
In The Palaeolithic Settlement of
Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Robin
Dennell explains in detail how changes in geology and climate resulted
in a huge expansion of grasslands in Asia and Africa and that by three
million years ago, the grasslands of the two continents had merged into
a vast belt of savannah habitats that stretched uninterrupted from West
Africa to Northern China. Dennell theorized that this unbroken belt of
grasslands provided a pathway for the migration of hominids north out of
Africa and eastward all the way to the Pacific shores of East
Asia.
الفصل الرابع: تقنيات الملبس والمسكن
(1)
The Schöningen javelins described in chapter 2 provide one
of the rare exceptions. These wooden spears, fortuitously preserved in
the highly acidic environment of German peat bogs for four hunderd
thousand years, showed that the manufacture of wooden artifacts by
emerging humans was already in an advanced state by the beginning of the
Middle Paleolithic approximately three hunderd thousand years ago. Yet
of all the billions of wooden artifacts that were doubtless created by
the hominids who roamed the earth for several million years, only these
four objects, some wooden artifacts from Bilzingsleben in Germany, and a
single spear point from Clacton, England, have been found that date from
before fifty thousand years ago.
(2)
Among the rare exceptions are the decorative beads that
some prehistoric humans fashioned from seashells beginning about
eighty-five thousand years ago.
(3)
While gold, silver, and copper were used extensively
throughout the Americas in pre-Columbian times, these metals were used
primarily for the manufacture of jewelry and other objects that
functioned as symbols of wealth and status. The techniques we usually
associate with metallurgy and that characterized the technologies of the
Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures in Europe and Asia—the smelting of
ores, casting of metal into shapes, mixing of molten metals to create
alloys, and the tempering of finished metal objects—were rudimentary in
pre-Columbian America and were not central to their technologies. In
fact, in some of the most advanced of these civilizations—such as the
Mayan civilization of Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula—metal
artifacts played only a marginal role and were not essential components
of their military, political, or economic
activities.
(4)
See Colin Groves and Jordi Sabater-Pi, “From Ape’s Nest to
Human Fix-Point,” Man 20, no. 1
(1985), 22–47. “Anyone however slightly familiar with Great Apes in
their natural environment,” the article begins, “will have been struck
by their elaborate nests: their ubiquity, the regularity of their
construction, [and] the skill required to make
them.”
(5)
A few instances of nest-sharing between adults have been
observed between consort pairs of bonobos, which occasionally share
sleeping nests with their partners. But juvenile gorillas and
chimpanzees as young as one year of age have been observed beginning to
construct their own nests, and juveniles older than five years of age
regularly construct their own nests and use them to sleep apart from
their mothers.
(6)
Groves and Sabater-Pi, 1985, 38.
(7)
This was the time period during which the inhabitants of
Schöningen, less than one hundred miles to the north of Bilzingsleben,
were making their famous hardwood javelins and using them for hunting
wild horses.
(8)
For an excellent argument in support of the view that
Neandertals must have used dwellings and clothing in spite of the near
total lack of archeological evidence, see Mark J. White, “Things to Do
in Doggerland When You’re Dead: Surviving OIS3 At the Northwestern-Most
Fringe of Middle Palaeolithic Europe,” World
Archaeology 38 (2006), no. 4, 547–575. For a rebuttal of
the hypothesis that the stone circles of Terra Amata were in fact the
remains of prehistoric habitations, see Paola Villa, Terra Amata and The Middle Pleistocene Archaeological
Record of Southern France (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
(9)
See Aiello and Wheeler, “Neandertal Thermoregulation and
the Glacial Climate” in Tjerd van Andel and William Davies, eds.,
Neandertals and Modern Humans in the
European Landscape of the Last Glaciation: Archaeological Results of
the Stage 3 Project, (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, 2003).
(10)
Remains from Paleolithic sites in eastern Europe indicate
that as long as twenty-seven thousand years ago, prehistoric people had
already developed sophisticated techniques of weaving and sewing. They
made cordage, knotted netting, wicker basketry, and woven and twilled
textiles sewn together with bone needles. In fact, the advanced state of
weaving and sewing that was already evident by twenty-seven thousand
years ago indicates that these technologies had actually originated much
farther back in time. Finally, many of the Venus figurines recovered
from these time periods are inscribed with patterns and designs
suggesting that the people of those ancient societies were customarily
wearing woven, tailored clothing.
(11)
Since women in preindustrial societies typically bore
several children during their lifetimes, it can be estimated that as
many as 10 percent of all human mothers died in childbirth throughout
all but the most recent decades of human history. This high rate of
mortality in human childbirth still exists throughout much of the
developing world, and it continues to be the norm in much of sub-Saharan
Africa.
(12)
See Vincent Balter and Laurent Simon, “Diet and Behavior of
the Saint-Césaire Neandertal Inferred from Biogeochemical Data
Inversion,” Journal of Human
Evolution 51 (2006), 329–338.
الفصل الخامس: تقنية التواصل الرمزي
(1)
The spear-thrower or atlatl is a short stick with a cupped
or hooked end that is held in the throwing hand, with the hooked end
fitted into the butt end of the spear, and used to increase the
effective length of the hunter’s throwing arm. The use of a
spear-thrower makes it possible for a spear to be hurled with
significantly greater force and speed than is possible when a spear is
thrown while held only in the hand. A light spear or javelin launched
with a spear-thrower can attain speeds of 150 miles per hour and has
enough force to pass entirely through the body of an antelope when
thrown from a distance of less than twenty-five feet. Spear-throwers
first appeared about thirty thousand years ago and were still in use
until modern times by hunter-gatherers all over the
world.
(2)
The term “petroglyph” was originally coined in the
eighteenth century by the early investigators of cave art, who combined
two Greek words: petros, meaning
“stone,” and glyphē, meaning
“carving.” The meaning of this term has since been extended to mean any
man-made design on a rock or stone surface, whether carved or painted,
either out in the open or on the walls of caves.
(3)
See Carl C. Swisher, III, W. J. Rink, S. C. Antón, H. P.
Schwarcz, Garniss H. Curtis, and A. Suprijo Widiasmoro, “Latest
Homo erectus of Java: Potential
Contemporaneity With Homo Sapiens in
Southeast Asia.” Science vol. 274,
no. 5294 (1996), 1870–1874.
(4)
Homo floresiensis stood
only three feet tall and had a brain no larger than the typical
chimpanzee brain. But the anatomy of its brain case indicates that its
prefrontal lobes—the area of the brain devoted to conscious thought—may
have been more highly developed than the corresponding regions of the
brains of early hominids. This suggests that Homo floresiensis may have been the offshoot of a
Homo erectus population that had
become isolated on Flores Island when the sea levels rose during
a warming period in the global climate. See P. T. Brown, et al., “A New
Small-Bodied Hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia.”
Nature 431, no. 7012 (2004),
1055–1061. See also M. J. Morwood and W. L. Jungers, “Conclusions:
Implications of the Liang Bua Excavations for Hominin Evolution and
Biogeography,” Journal of Human
Evolution 57 (2009), 640–648, and Leslie C. Aiello, “Five
Years of Homo floresiensis,”
American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 142, issue 2 (2010),
167–179.
(5)
For a detailed discussion of how anatomically modern humans
were responsible for the decline and eventual extinction of the
Neandertals, see Pat Shipman, The Invaders: How
Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
(6)
The Paleolithic or “old
stone age” technically refers to the entire span of time during which
the hominids evolved from the earliest bipedal forms such as Australopithecus to the first anatomically
modern humans, because the remains of stone tools were by far the most
common artifacts found in prehistoric habitation sites throughout this
long period.
The Paleolithic is usually subdivided into three eras based on tool types: (1) the Lower Paleolithic, which begins roughly three million years ago with the manufacture of the first crude Oldowan pebble tools by the early hominids and continues throughout the 1.5-million-year period during which the emerging humans such as Homo erectus made their more finely worked Acheulean hand axes; (2) the Middle Paleolithic, which begins approximately 250000 years ago and is generally associated with the Neandertals and their Mousterian flake tools; and (3) the Upper Paleolithic, which begins roughly fifty thousand years ago and corresponds to the time of the anatomically modern humans such as the Cro-Magnons, who made the finest and most varied stone tools from long, thin blades of fine-grained stone such as flint and obsidian.
The term “Paleolithic” is useful here because it distinguishes the societies of the nomadic hunters and gatherers from those of the Neolithic or “new stone age,” which begins shortly before the development of agriculture. During the Neolithic, the larger stone tools are increasingly made by grinding and polishing rather than by flaking, while the smaller stone tools made by flaking—generally called microliths— became very small and specialized. In the later years of the Neolithic, the use of pottery became widespread, and the remains of broken pottery eventually became the most common type of artifact in prehistoric habitation sites. In between these clearly-defined periods, there is a somewhat vague middle ground called the Mesolithic or “middle stone age.” This is sometimes used as a catch-all term for prehistoric cultures that do not fit neatly into the categories of either Paleolithic or Neolithic.
I have used the term “Upper Paleolithic” extensively in this chapter to refer to the period when anatomically modern humans appeared in Europe roughly fify thousand years ago—and who lived by nomadic hunting and gathering—in order to distinguish them from the food-producing societies of the Neolithic that first began to appear fifteen thousand years ago and that will be described in detail in chapter 6.
(7)
The anatomically modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic
were the first hominids to show clear evidence of distinct cultural
traditions. Although many different Upper Paleolithic cultures have been
identified in different areas of the world, those of Europe are the best
known and have been the most carefully studied. While most of these
cultures overlap in time with each other, they are usually organized in
a rough chronological order. The oldest of these cultures was that of
the Châtelperronians, who lived roughly thirty-thirty thousand years
ago. They were followed by the Aurignacians, Gravettians, and
Solutreans. The most recent culture was that of the Magdalenians, who
survived in Europe until approximately eleven thousand years
ago.
(8)
These include the grotto of Chabot in Gard in 1878, the
cave of La Mouthe near Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac in 1895, the caves of Les
Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume at Les Eyzies in 1901, Marsoulas Cave in
the Pyrenees in 1902, and La Calevie and Bernifal caves in the Vézère
Valley in 1903.
(9)
I am indebted to Robert Bates Graber for this observation.
See Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and
Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company,
1954), 30-31.
(10)
Homo heidelbergensis was
a large-brained emerging human so similar to the more advanced forms of
Homo erectus that many scientists
consider them to be essentially the same species. It was originally
identified from a fossil jaw found near Heidelberg, Germany in 1907, and
other remains of this hominid have since been found in Africa and
western Asia. Homo heidelbergensis is
the evolutionary branch of Homo
erectus that is most likely to have been ancestral to the
Neandertals as well as to anatomically modern
humans.
(11)
See John Feliks, “The Graphics of Bilzingsleben:
Sophistication and Subtlety in the Mind of Homo
erectus,” Proceedings of the XV UISPP World Congress,
Oxford: BAR International Series, 2006. Available at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~feliks/graphics-of-bilzingsleben/index.html.
See also: John Feliks, “The Golden Flute of Geissenklösterle:
Mathematical Evidence for A Continuity Of Human Intelligence as Opposed
to Evolutionary Change Through Time,” Aplimat—Journal of Applied Mathematics 4, no. 4 (2011),
157-162.
(12)
This argument is set forth by Iain Davidson and William
Noble in “The Archaeology of Perception: Traces of Depiction and
Language.” Current Anthropology 30,
no. 2 (1989), 125–156.
(13)
See Leslie C. Aiello and Robin I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex
Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language,” Current Anthropology 34, no. 2 (1993),
184–193.
(14)
From Alice in
Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
الفصل السادس: تقنية الزراعة
(1)
For the “oasis theory,” see V. Gordon Childe, “Chapter V:
The Neolithic Revolution” in Man Makes
Himself (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936). For
the “hilly flanks” theory, see Robert J. Braidwood, “The Agricultural
Revolution,” Scientific American 203
(1960), 130–148. For the
“demographic” or “population pressure” theory, see Lewis R. Binford,
“Post-Pleistocene Adaptations,” in Sally R. Binford and Lewis R.
Binford, New Perspectives in
Archaeology (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968),
313–342. See also Kent Flannery, “The Origins of Agriculture,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2 (1973),
271–310, and Mark N. Cohen, The Food Crisis in
Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For the “co-evolutionary”
theory, see David Rindos, The Origins of
Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (Orlando,
Florida: Academic Press, 1984). For the “competitive feasting” theory,
see Brian Hayden, “Nimrods, Piscators, Pluckers, and Planters: The
Emergence of Food Production,” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 9, no. 1 (1990), 31–69. For
the “hospitable climate” theory, see Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd,
and Robert L. Bettinger, “Was Agriculture Impossible during the
Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene?,” American Antiquity 66, no. 3 (2001),
387–411.
(2)
Graeme Barker, The Agricultural
Revolution in Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 383.
(3)
The plump yellow grain that grows in large cobs on tall
fleshy plants is known throughout most of the world as “maize” or
“mealie” but is called “corn” in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand. By contrast, the word “corn” is used throughout most of
the world for the cereal grains such as wheat, rye, and
barley.
(4)
The horse was domesticated about five thousand years ago in
the steppes, or grasslands, of present-day Kazakhstan, nearly a thousand
miles north and east of the Fertile Crescent, where it first became
important as a means of transportation. The important story of the
domesticated horse will be discussed at length in the next chapter,
where we will see how, as one of the key elements in the technologies of
interaction, the horse contributed significantly to the emergence of
cities and the emergence of urban civilization.
(5)
Andrew Sherratt, “Climatic Cycles and Behavioural
Revolutions: The Emergence of Modern Humans and the Beginning of
Farming,” Antiquity 71, 1997,
277.
(6)
See R. Alexander Bentley et al., “Community Differentiation and Kinship Among Europe’s
First Farmers,” Proceedings of the National
Academic of Sciences of the United States of America 109,
no. 24 (2012), 9326–9330.
(7)
See Verrier Elwin, The Kingdom of
the Young (London:
Oxford University Press, 1968), 165–169; Clellan S. Ford and Frank A.
Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951), 268; William A. Lessa, Ulithi: A Micronesian Design for Living
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 88; Bronislaw Malinowski,
The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western
Melanesia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929),
198–200; and Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life
and Words of a ¡Kung Woman (New York: Vintage Books,
1983), 150-151.
(8)
See Melvin J. Konner, “Hunter-Gatherer Infancy and
Childhood: The !Kung and Others,” in Barry S. Hewlett and Michael E.
Lamb, eds., Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods:
Evolutionary, Developmental and Cultural Perspectives
(Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2006),
19–64.
(9)
The purpose of these arrangements was mainly to obtain the
allegiance—and often the services—of the prospective son-in-law.
However, when these girls reached adulthood, they were usually free to
leave their “assigned” husband in favor of some other man who was more
to their liking. See Victoria K. Burbank, “Premarital Sex norms:
Cultural interpretations in an Australian Aboriginal Community,”
Ethos 15, no. 2 (1987),
226–234.
(10)
See Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The
Fierce People, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1977), 119–124. See also Kenneth Good, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the
Yanomama (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 72–74
and 194–204.
الفصل السابع: تقنيات التفاعل
(1)
Jared Diamond, The World until
Yesterday (New York: Viking, 2012),
4-5.
(2)
In deference to the sensitivities of atheists, agnostics,
and non-Christians, scientists and scholars have recently begun using
the term “BCE,” meaning “Before the Common (or Current) Era,” in
preference to the traditional “BC” or “Before Christ.” For the same
reason, they have also begun using the corresponding term “CE,” meaning
“Common (or Current) Era,” instead of the more traditional “AD” or
“Anno Domini” (“the year of our
Lord”). While not meaning to take issue with the logic of this
change—but for the convenience of readers who are not be familiar with
these terms—I have continued using the more traditional “BC” and “AD” in
this book for dates before and after the birth of
Christ.
(3)
These were the Warring States period (476–221 BC), the
Sixteen Kingdoms period (304–439 AD), the Five Dynasties and Ten
Kingdoms period (907–960 AD), and the Song, Liao, Jin, and Western Xia
dynasties period (960–1234 AD).
(4)
See Robert G. Bednarik, “Seafaring in the Pleistocene,”
Cambridge Archaeological Journal
13, no. 1 (2003), 41–66.
(5)
Although three hundred miles of open sea separate Timor
from the Australian coast today, sea levels during the ice ages were
three hundred feet lower than they are now, and large areas of the
continental shelves on both sides of the Timor Strait were exposed. The
distance between Australia and Timor sixty thousand years ago was
approximately fifty miles of open sea.
(6)
See Robert G. Bednarik, “Crossing the Timor Sea by Middle
Palaeolithic Raft,” Anthropos 95
(2000): 37–47, and Robert G. Bednarik, “Seafaring,” in Helaine Selin
Springer, ed. , Encyclopaedia of the History of
Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western
Cultures, 2nd ed., 2008.
(7)
With apologies to David W. Anthony, whose exhaustive study
The Horse, the Wheel, and
Language has illuminated the pivotal role played by the
domesticated horse in the histories of both ancient and modern
civilizations.
(8)
See David W. Anthony, The Horse,
the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian
Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007).
(9)
See Robin I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on
Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human
Evolution 20 (1992), 469–493.
الفصل الثامن: تقنية الآلات الدقيقة
(1)
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A
History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New
York: Vintage Books, 1985), 62-63.
(2)
Peter Hutchinson, “Magazine Growth in the Nineteenth
Century,” A Publisher’s History of American
Magazines (2008), 1. Available on line at:
http://www.themagazinist.com/Magazine_History.html.
(3)
J. V. Thirgood, “The Historical Significance of Oak,” in
Oak Symposium Proceedings: 1971 August
16–20 (Upper Darby, PA: US Department of Agriculture,
Forest Service, Northeastern Forest Experiment Station),
9.
(4)
Ibid.,
10.
(5)
Nicéphore Niépce is better known as one of the first
inventors of photography. His “View from the Window at Le Gras,” taken
in 1827, is the world’s oldest surviving
photograph.
(6)
Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global
History to 1700. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 25.
(7)
Warren D. Devine, “From Shafts to Wires: Historical
Perspective on Electrification,” The Journal of
Economic History 43 (1983), 349.
(8)
Perhaps this is why many behavioral scientists in the
twentieth century embraced the preposterous idea that humans are the
only animals capable of reason and emotion—as if such mental activities
had emerged full-blown for the first time in the history of life on
Earth with the appearance of Homo
sapiens. Such views—which were never supported by
credible scientific evidence—could only have been taken seriously by
someone who had never lived with an intelligent animal such as a dog,
cat, horse, pig, monkey, or parrot. People who have lived intimately
with such animals are well aware that they are capable of both reason
and a wide range of emotions.
(9)
In 1935, there were nearly seven million farms in the
United States. By the year 2007, the number of farms had declined to 2.2
million. In that year, the largest 188000 farms accounted for 63 percent
of all agricultural products sold, while the smallest 2012000 farms
accounted for only 37 percent of all agricultural products sold (see US
Department of Agriculture, “2007 Census of
Agriculture”).
الفصل التاسع: تقنية المعلومات الرقمية
(1)
See Jonathan Fildes, “Campaign builds to construct Babbage
Analytical Engine,” BBC News, October 14,
2010, and John Graham-Cumming, “Let’s Build Babbage’s Ultimate Mechanical
Computer,” New Scientist 2791, December
23, 2010.
(2)
See M. H. Weik, “Computers with Names Starting with E
through H,” A Survey of Domestic Electronic
Digital Computing Systems, 1955.
(3)
Moore’s exact words in 1965 were as follows: “The
complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of
roughly a factor of two per year (see graph). Certainly over the short
term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the
longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although
there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at
least ten years. That means by 1975, the number of components per
integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65000.” Gordon E. Moore,
“Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965),
114–117.
(4)
ENIAC contained 17468 vacuum tubes, each of which was
equivalent to a modern transistor. Since the 15-Core Xeon E7 V2
microprocessor contains 4.31 billion transistors, it would require the
equivalent of 4310000000 divided by 17468 or 246737 ENIACs to equal the
processing power of one 15-Core Xeon E7 V2 microprocessor. Each ENIAC
was 100 feet long, thus 246737 ENIACs laid end to end would measure
24673700 feet or 4673 miles in length. The weight of each ENIAC was
thirty tons or 60000 pounds. Thus, 246737 ENIACs would weigh 7402110
tons—equal to the weight of sixty-six Nimitz-class supercarriers
weighing 112000 tons each. The ENIAC cost $500000 to construct,
which in 2014 dollars amounts to approximately $6 million. Thus,
246737 ENIACs would have cost $1480422000000 to build in
2014.
(5)
Since the best vacuum tube computers of the 1950s averaged
a maximum consecutive running time of ten hours (or thirty-six thousand
seconds) before experiencing a vacuum tube failure, a computer as large
as 246737 ENIACs would probably run for only thirty-six thousand seconds
divided by 246737, or one-seventh of a second, before one of its
4310000000 vacuum tubes would fail.
(6)
See Jaxton Van Derbeken, Demian Bulwa, and Erin Allday, “SF
Plane Crash: Crew Tried to Abort Landing.” San
Francisco Chronicle, July 8, 2013.
(7)
See International Technology
Roadmap for Semiconductors, 2010, Overall Technology Roadmap
Characteristics. 2010 Update,
8–14.
(8)
See John Hultsman and William Harper, “The Problem of
Leisure Reconsidered,” in Journal of American
Culture 16, issue 1 (2004), 47–54.
(9)
See Edgardo Sica, “International Tourism: A Driving Force
for Economic Growth of Commonwealth Countries,” The Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meeting
2007.
(10)
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
Population Division, International Migration
Report 2013, 11–17.
(11)
See Lewis et al., eds., Ethnologue:
Languages of the World, 17th ed.,
2014.
الفصل العاشر: عالمنا على حافة الهاوية
(1)
Frank Borman, Countdown: An
Autobiography (New York: Silver Arrow Books, 1988),
212.
(2)
Nancy Atkinson, “A Conversation with Jim Lovell, Part 2: Looking
Back,” UniverseToday.com,
September 27, 2010. Available at:
http://www.universetoday.com/74396/a-conversation-with-jim-lovell-part-2-looking-back/.
Accessed 6/12/14.
(3)
Due to their small size and immense distance from Earth, no
planet outside of our own solar system has ever been observed directly.
Instead, their existence is inferred from “wobbles” in the stars
themselves, caused by the gravitational pull of the planets revolving
around them.
(4)
Light travels at the speed of 670616629 miles per hour.
Multiplied by 24 hours in a day, this is 16094799096 miles per day.
Multiplied by 365 days in a year, this is 5874601670040 miles per year.
Sixteen light-years is thus 93993626720640 miles. At 450000 miles per
hour, it would require 208874726 hours, which equals 8703114 days or
23844 years to cover the distance from the earth to Gliese 832
c.
(5)
The term “biosphere” was coined by the Austrian geologist
and paleontologist Eduard Suess in 1875 to describe the total mass of
living things that inhabit the surface of the earth. Since the
environments that support life are all found only on the earth’s
surface, the physical mass of living organisms on our planet takes the
shape of a sphere—hence the term “biosphere.” The same logic was used in
the 1600s, when the Greek word atmos,
meaning “vapor,” was combined with the earth’s spherical shape to create
the word “atmosphere.”
(6)
Biosphere 1 was not an earlier version of this experiment
but was actually the Biospherians’ name for the earth’s natural
ecosystem, or biosphere.
(7)
Paratrechina
longicornus, the “longhorn crazy ant,” is one of the most
common species of ants and is found in human habitations throughout the
world. Its name is derived from its long antennae and its habit of
running erratically at high speeds in all
directions.
(8)
Joel E. Cohen and David Tilman, “Biosphere 2 and
Biodiversity: The Lessons So Far,” Science 274, no. 5290, November 15, 1996,
1151.
(9)
Although Israel has never publicly acknowledged the
existence of its nuclear weapons program, it has never denied its
existence either. In 2002, Robert S. Norris and his colleagues described
the Israeli nuclear program as follows:
After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the
Straits of Tiran in 1953, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion
began development of nuclear weapons and other unconventional
munitions. His protégé, Shimon Peres, played a central role in
securing an agreement with France in 1956 for a nuclear research
reactor. Physicist Ernst David Bergmann, director of the Israeli
Atomic Energy Commission, provided early scientific direction … With
French assistance, Israel built a nuclear weapons facility at Dimona
in the Negev desert. The Dimona site has a plutonium/tritium
production reactor, an underground chemical separation plant, and
nuclear component fabrication facilities.
(10)
A summary of world nuclear weapons stockpiles is available
at:
http://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report.
Accessed 6/3/14.
(11)
In 1976, there were 102 Stage 1 smog alerts in the Los
Angeles Basin, while in 1998 there were only twelve Stage 1 alerts. See
“Pollution in Los Angeles County,” RabbitAir, 2014. Available at:
http://www.rabbitair.com/pages/pollution-in-los-angeles-county.
Accessed 6/18/2014.
(12)
See William Laurance, “China’s Appetite for Wood Takes a
Heavy Toll on Forests,” Yale Environment
360, November 17, 2011.
(13)
Huang Wenbin and Sun Xiufang, “Tropical Hardwood Flows in
China: Case Studies of Rosewood and Okoumé, Forest Trends, December 2013, 5.
(14)
For an eloquent description of the Białowieża Puszcza (pronounced “bialoVIESKa PUSHta”),
see chapter 1, “A Lingering Scent of Eden,” in The World Without Us by Alan Weisman,
9–16.
(15)
See Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity
of Life and Niles Eldredge, Life
in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis. For
an excellent article explaining the difficulty of accurately estimating
the rates of extinction, see Vânia Proença and Henrique Miguel Pereira,
“Comparing Extinction Rates: Past, Present, and Future,” in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, vol. 2,
167–176.
(16)
The epidemic of infestation in frog populations has been
caused by several strains of the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or “BD,” and is
especially troubling since it has affected frogs on every continent and
has already been linked to the extinction of dozens of species.
Nevertheless, biologists have reported limited success in helping some
species of frogs to develop an immunity to BD. See Carl Zimmer, “Hope
for Frogs in Face of a Deadly Fungus,” New York
Times July 9, 2014.
(17)
The annual extent of global carbon emissions have been
painstakingly compiled by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For details on how this
information is compiled, see G. Marland, T. A. Boden, and R. J. Andres,
“Global, Regional, and National Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions,” in Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global
Change (Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Carbon Dioxide Information
Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of
Energy). Available at:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview. Detailed
annual emissions data since 1751 is available at:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html.
(18)
Marine isotope stages (MIS), also known as “oxygen isotope
stages (OIS),” refer to periods in the earth’s geological history when
global temperatures became either warmer or cooler than they had been
during the preceding time period. These stages are determined by
measuring the ratio of two isotopes of oxygen—oxygen-16 and oxygen-18—in
the shells of marine organisms that were buried at different geologic
times in the sea floor. As the oceans become warmer, the proportion of
oxygen-18 in the shells decreases; as the oceans become cooler, the
proportion of oxygen-18 increases. There have been twenty-two of these
stages during the past million years, reflecting the alternating states
of global warming and global cooling as the ice ages have advanced and
retreated. Odd numbered stages, including MIS 1 (the past eleven
thousand years) and MIS 11 represent the warm periods, while even
numbered stages represent cold periods, including all of the major ice
ages that have occurred over the past million
years.
(19)
See William R. Howard, “Palaeoclimatology: A Warm Future in
the Past,” in Nature 388 (1997),
418-419, and Alberto V. Reyes, Anders E. Carlson, Brian L. Beard, Robert
G. Hatfield, Joseph S. Stoner, Kelsey Winsor, Bethany Welke, and David
J. Ullman, “South Greenland Ice-Sheet Collapse
during Marine Isotope Stage 11,” Nature 510 (2014), 525–528.
(20)
Climate scientists are still struggling to understand
exactly why the several most recent ice ages have begun with uncanny
regularity every one hundred thousand years, but the prevailing
consensus is that this phenomenon is related to irregularities in the
earth’s orbit around the sun. See John Imbrie, A. Berger, E. A. Boyle,
S. C. Clemens, A. Duffy, W. R. Howard, G. Kukla, J. Kutzbach, D. G.
Martinson, A. Mcintyre et al., “On the Structure and Origin of Major
Glaciation Cycles: 2. The 100000-Year Cycle,” Paleoceanography 8, no. 6 (1993),
699–735.
(21)
See Toby Tyrrell, John G. Shepherd, and Stephanie Castle,
“The Long-Term Legacy of Fossil Fuels,” in Tellus B, vol. 59 (2007), 664672, and also Fred Hoyle
and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “On the Cause of Ice-Ages,” Cambridge-Conference Network, July 1999.
Available at:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce120799.html.
(22)
See United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs, Population Division, World Population
Prospects: The 2012 Revision (New York: United Nations,
2014).
(23)
The exact number of nation-states is not only frequently
changing but is also subject to interpretation. For example, thirty new
nations came into being in the seven years between 1956 and 1963, when
the colonies of Africa achieved independence from Europe and became
independent nations. And the total number of nation-states increased
again by five during the 1990s, when a single nation-state, the former
Republic of Yugoslavia, fissioned into six independent nations: Serbia,
Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Moreover, it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether a given
political and geographical entity is in fact a nation-state in its own
right. For example, is Palestine a nation—as the Palestinians themselves
asserted in their Declaration of Independence in 1988—or is it a United
Nations mandate without any status as an independent nation, as the
Israeli government currently maintains? There is no consensus on this
point.
(24)
Between 1901 and 2000, no less than 177 new nation states
were created. See Philip G. Roeder, Where
Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of
Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), 10.
(25)
Of the 150 Nobel Prizes awarded in physics, chemistry, and
medicine during the fifty years beginning in 1964 and ending in 2013,
eighty-two, or 55 percent, were awarded to international teams. See
Wikipedia, List of Nobel Laureates,
2014.
