Cannibals and Kings Read Online Free PDF

Lowered rates of coitus in older women might further reduce the number to five. Spontaneous abortions and infant mortality caused by disease and accidents might bring the potential reproducers down to four—roughly two more than the number permissible under a system of zero population growth. The “extra” two births could then be controlled through some form of infanticide based on neglect. The optimal method would be to neglect only the girl babies, since the rate of growth in populations that do not practice monogamy is determined almost entirely by the number of females who reach reproductive age.
    Our stone age ancestors were thus perfectly capable of maintaining a stationary population, but there was a cost associated with it—the waste of infant lives. This cost lurks in the background of prehistory as an ugly blight in what might otherwise be mistaken for a Garden of Eden.

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The Origin of Agriculture
    The period from 30,000 to 12,000 years ago marked the climax of millions of years of slow technological evolution during which our stone age ancestors gradually perfected the tools and techniques for making a living by hunting large land animals. There are Old World habitation sites dating back hundreds of thousands of years at which archaeologists have found remains of a few pachyderms, giraffes, and buffalo, but these animals probably died natural deaths or were trapped or wounded by nonhuman predators. During this time our ancestors may have scavenged rather than hunted the meat from big game. But by 30,000 years ago the situation had changed, and bands of hunter-collectors in both the Old and New Worlds possessed the means for killing and butchering even the largest animals on a routine basis.
    In Europe and Asia vast herds of reindeer, mammoth, horses, bison, and wild cattle grazed on lush grasses fed by glacial melt waters. The pursuit of these creatures came to dominate the food quest. Hunters rounded up their prey by setting fires, drove them over cliffs, and dispatched them with an arsenal of stone and bone projectile points, spears, darts, long knives, and bows and arrows. For thousands of years human predators and animal prey remained in ecological balance.
    Then, about 13,000 years ago, a global warmingtrend signaled the beginning of the terminal phase of the last ice age. The glaciers that had covered much of the Northern Hemisphere with mile-high sheets of ice began to back away toward Greenland. As the climate became less severe, forests of evergreens and birches invaded the grassy plains which nourished the great herds. The loss of these grazing lands in combination with the toll taken by the human predators produced an ecological catastrophe. The woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, steppe bison, giant elk, European wild ass, and a whole genus of goats suddenly became extinct. While horses and cattle survived, their numbers in Europe sharply decreased. Other species like the saiga antelope and the musk ox survived only in scattered pockets in the far north. Scientists do not agree about the relative impact of the climatological changes and human predation in bringing about the extinction of these animals. Human predation definitely played a role because elephants and rhinos had managed to survive several earlier wanning trends caused by previous glacial retreats.
    The collapse of the big-game hunting cultures in northern Europe was followed by the mesolithic period (or middle stone age), during which people obtained their proteins from fish, shellfish, and forest deer. In the Middle East (what is now southern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Israel), where the age of the big-game hunters had come to an end much earlier than in the north, the pattern of subsistence became even more diversified. Here people turned from hunting giant wild cattle and red deer to preying on smaller species such as sheep, goats, and antelope and paid increasing attention to fish, crabs and other shellfish, birds,