The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [172]
p. 45 ‘asks Geoffrey Miller’. Miller, G. 2009. Spent. Heinemann.
Chapter 2
p. 47 ‘He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor.’ McEwan, I 2005. Saturday. Jonathan Cape. The person taking the shower is Perowne, the surgeon at the centre of the plot.
p. 47 Life expectancy graph. World Bank Development Indicators.
p. 48 ‘One day a little less than 500,000 years ago, near what is now the village of Boxgrove’. Potts, M. and Roberts, M. 1998. Fairweather Eden. Arrow Books.
p. 49 ‘a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history’. Klein R.G. and Edgar B. 2002. The Dawn of Human Culture. Wiley.
p. 49 ‘Its brain was almost as big as a modern person’s’. Rightmire, G.P. 2003. Brain size and encephalization in early to Mid-Pleistocene Homo. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 124: 109–23.
p. 51 ‘the erectus hominid species’. For simplicity, I am going to call all the species of hominid that lived between about 1.5 million and 300,000 years ago ‘erectus hominid’ after the longest-established and most comprehensive name used for hominids of this period. The current fashion is to include four species within this group: H. ergaster earliest in Africa, H. erectus a little later in Asia, H. heidelbergensis coming out of Africa later into Europe and its descendant, H. neanderthalensis. See Foley, R.A. and Lahr, M.M. 2003. On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:109–22.
p. 51 ‘it was a natural expression of human development’. See Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005. Not by Genes Alone. Chicago University Press: ‘Perhaps we need to entertain the hypothesis that Acheulean bifaces were innately constrained rather than wholly cultural and that their temporal stability stemmed from some component of genetically transmitted psychology.’
p. 51 ‘Meat enabled them to cut down on the huge gut’. Aiello, L.C. and Wheeler, P. 1995. The expensive tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Current Anthropology 36:199–221.
p. 52 ‘the toolkit was showing signs of change as early as 285,000 years ago’. McBrearty, S. and Brooks, A. 2000. The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39:453–563. Morgan, L.E. and Renne, P.R. 2008. Diachronous dawn of Africa’s Middle Stone Age: New 40Ar/39Ar ages from the Ethiopian Rift. Geology 36:967–70.
p. 52 ‘by at least 160,000 years ago’. White T.D. et al. 2003. Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423:742–7; Willoughby, P. R. 2007. The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa: a Comprehensive Guide. Rowman AltaMira.
p. 52 ‘Pinnacle Point in South Africa’. Marean, C.W. et al. 2007. Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 449:905–8.
p. 53 ‘a few slender-headed Africans did begin to colonise the Middle East’. Stringer, C. and McKie, R. 1996. African Exodus. Jonathan Cape.
p. 53 ‘at Grottes des Pigeons near Taforalt in Morocco’. Bouzouggar, A. et al. 2007. 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. PNAS 2007 104:9964–9; Barton R.N.E., et al. 2009. OSL dating of the Aterian levels at Dar es-Soltan I (Rabat, Morocco) and implications for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens. Quaternary Science Reviews. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.03.010.
p. 53 ‘obsidian may have begun to move over long distances’. Negash, A., Shackley, M.S. and Alene, M. 2006. Source provenance of obsidian artefacts from the Early Stone Age (ESA) site of Melka Konture, Ethiopia. Journal of Archeological Science 33:1647–50; and Negash, A. and Shackley, M.S. 2006. Geochemical provenance of obsidian artefacts from the MSA site of Porc Epic, Ethiopia. Archaeometry 48:1–12.
p. 54 ‘Lake Malawi, whose level dropped 600 metres’. Cohen, A.S. et al. 2007. Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene