The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [174]
p. 63 ‘A sexual division of labour would exist even without childcare constraints.’ It is reasonable to wonder if a hundred thousand years of doing different things have not left their mark on at least some of the modern leisure pursuits of the two sexes. Shopping for shoes is a bit like gathering – picking out the perfect item in a crowd of possibilities. Playing golf is a bit like hunting – aiming a ballistic projectile at a target in the great outdoors. It is also noticeable how much more carnivorous most men are than most women. In the West, female vegetarians outnumber male ones by more than two to one, but even among non-vegetarians it is common to find men who take only a token nibble at the vegetables on their plate, and women who do the same with meat. Of course, it is part of my case that in the Stone Age men supplied gathering women with meat and women supplied hunting men with veg, so both sexes were omnivores, but perhaps when it came to ‘stopping for lunch’, the women would eat the nuts they had gathered while elsewhere the men cooked up a tortoise or cut a steak off their first kill. Such speculation is not, I admit, very scientific.
p. 63 ‘It is as if the species now has two brains’. Joe Henrich first made this point to me late at night in a bar in Indiana.
p. 63 ‘men seem to strive to catch big game to feed the whole band’. Bliege Bird, R. and Bird, D. 2008. Why women hunt: risk and contemporary foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal community. Current Anthropology 49:655–93.
p. 63 ‘Hadza men spend weeks trying to catch a huge eland antelope’. Hawkes, K. 1996. Foraging differences between men and women. In The Archaeology of Human Ancestry (eds James Steele and Stephen Shennan). Routledge.
p. 63 ‘men on the island of Mer in the Torres Strait’. Bliege Bird, R. 1999. Cooperation and conflict: the behavioural ecology of the sexual division of labour. Evolutionary Anthropology 8:65–75.
p. 64 ‘Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner think that modern, African-origin Homo sapiens had a sexual division of labour and Neanderthals did not’. Kuhn, S.L. and Stiner, M.C. 2006. What’s a mother to do? A hypothesis about the division of labour and modern human origins. Current Anthropology 47:953–80.
p. 64 ‘first advocated by Glyn Isaac in 1978’. Isaac, G.L. and Isaac, B. 1989. The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glyn Isaac. Cambridge University Press.
p. 65 ‘To paraphrase H.G. Wells’. Wells, H.G. 1902. ‘The Discovery of the Future’. Lecture at the Royal Institution, 24 January 1902, published in Nature 65:326–31. Reproduced with the permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.
p. 66 ‘to land, probably around 45,000 years ago, on the continent of Sahul’. O’Connell, J.F. and Allen, J. 2007. Pre-LGM Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) and the archaeology of Early Modern Humans. In Mellars, P., Boyle, K., Bar-Yosef, O. et al., Rethinking the Human Revolution, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 395–410.
p. 66 ‘genetics tell an unambiguous story of almost complete isolation since the first migration’. Thangaraj, K. et al. 2005. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders. Science 308: 996; Macaulay, V. et al. 2005. Single, rapid coastal settlement of Asia revealed by analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes. Science 308:1034–6; Hudjashov et al. 2007. Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis. PNAS. 104: 8726–30.
p. 67 ‘Jonathan Kingdon first suggested’. Kingdon, J. 1996. Self-Made Man: Human Evolution from Eden to Extinction. John Wiley.
p. 67 ‘All along the coast of Asia, the beachcombers would have found fresh water’. Faure, H., Walter, R.C. and Grant, D.E. 2002. The coastal oasis: Ice Age springs on emerged continental shelves. Global and Planetary Change 33:47–56.
p. 68 ‘so louse genes suggest’. Pennisi, E. 2004. Louse DNA suggests close contact between Early Humans. Science 306:210.
p. 68 ‘conceivably even close enough to acquire a smattering of