The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [176]
p. 81 ‘causing the anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers to puzzle’. Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, Memes and Human History. Thames & Hudson.
p. 81 ‘Shell beads had been moving long distances across Australia since at least 30,000 years ago.’ Balme, J. and Morse, K. 2006. Shell beads and social behaviour in Pleistocene Australia. Antiquity 80: 799–811.
p. 81 ‘The best stone axes travelled up to 500 miles from where they were mined.’ Flood, J. 2006. The Original Australians: the Story of the Aboriginal People. Allen & Unwin.
p. 81 ‘In contrast to Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego’. Heinrich, J. 2004. Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses – the Tasmanian case. American Antiquity 69:197–214.
p. 82 ‘The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections.’ Incidentally, the story of the Greenland Norse, or of the inhabitants of Easter Island, told so eloquently as tales of ecological exhaustion in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, probably say as much about isolation as ecology. Isolated from Scandinavia by a combination of the Black Death and the worsening climate, the Greenland Norse could not sustain their lifestyles; like the Tasmanians, they forgot how to fish. Easter Island Diamond may have partly misread: some argue that its society was possibly still flourishing, despite deforestation, when a holocaust of slave traders arrived in the 1860s – see Peiser, B. 2005. From genocide to ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui. Energy & Environment 16:513–39.
p. 82 ‘This may explain why Australian aboriginal technology, although it developed and elaborated steadily over the ensuing millennia, was lacking in so many features of the Old World’. 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.
pp. 82–3 ‘The “Tasmanian effect” may also explain why technological progress had been so slow and erratic in Africa after 160,000 years ago’. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2009. Cultural innovations and demographic change. Human Biology 81:211–35; Powell, A., Shennan, S. and Thomas, M.G. 2009. Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behaviour. Science 324:1298–1301.
p. 83 ‘As the economist Julian Simon put it’. Simon, J. 1996. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton University Press.
p. 84 ‘Tasmanians sold women to the sealers as concubines’. Flood, J. 2006. The Original Australians: the Story of the Aboriginal People. Allen & Unwin.
Chapter 3
p. 85 ‘Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed’. Ferguson, N. 2008. The Ascent of Money. Allen Lane.
p. 85 Homicide rate graph. Spierenburg, P. 2008. A History of Murder. Polity Press. See also Eisner, M. 2001. Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective The British Journal of Criminology 41:618-638.
p. 85 ‘Greenstreet whispers to Bogart’. Siegfried, T. 2006. A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature. Joseph Henry Press.
p. 86 ‘As the economist Herb Gintis puts it’. http://www.reason.com/news/show/34772.html.
p. 86 ‘people in fifteen mostly small-scale tribal societies were enticed to play the Ultimatum Game’. Henrich, J. et al. 2005. ‘Economic man’ in crosscultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:795–815.
p. 87 ‘costly punishment of selfishness may be necessary’. Fehr, E. and Gachter, S. 2000. Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments. American Economic Review, Journal of the American Economic Association 90: 980–94; Henrich,