The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [180]
p. 122 ‘The biologist Lee Silver’. Lee Silver, personal communication.
p. 123 ‘For Adam Smith capital is “as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion”.’ Smith, A. 1776. The Wealth of Nations.
p. 124 ‘At one remarkable site, Ohalo II’. Piperno, D.R., Weiss, E., Holst, I. and Nadel, D. 2004. Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis. Nature 430:670–3.
p. 124 ‘One study notes an “extreme reluctance to shift to domestic foods”’. Johnson, A.W. and Earle, T.K. 2000. The Evolution of Human Societies: from Foraging Group to Agrarian State. Stanford University Press.
p. 125 ‘The probable cause of this hiatus was a cold snap’. Rosen, A.M. 2007. Civilizing Climate: Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. Rowman AltaMira.
p. 126 ‘the survivors took to nomadic hunter-gathering again’. Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, Memes and Human History. Thames & Hudson.
p. 126 ‘Peru by 9,200 years ago’. Dillehay, T.D. et al. 2007. Preceramic adoption of peanut, squash, and cotton in northern Peru. Science 316:1890–3.
p. 126 ‘millet and rice in China by 8,400 years ago’. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2001. Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. American Antiquity 66:387–411.
p. 126 ‘maize in Mexico by 7,300 years ago’. Pohl, M.E.D. et al. 2007. Microfossil evidence for pre-Columbian maize dispersals in the neotropics from San Andrés, Tabasco, Mexico. PNAS 104: 11874–81.
p. 126 ‘taro and bananas in New Guinea by 6,900 years ago’. Denham, T.P., et al. 2003. Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of New Guinea. Science 301: 189–93.
p. 126 ‘This phenomenal coincidence’. Recent scholarship has made the coincidence much more striking. Until recently, agriculture in Peru, Mexico and New Guinea was believed to have started much later.
p. 127 ‘agriculture was impossible during the last glacial, but compulsory in the Holocene.’ Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2001. Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. American Antiquity 66(3): 387–411. Incidentally, there is a fascinating parallel between the sudden appearance of farming at the end of the last ice age and the sudden appearance of multicellular life after the mother of all ice ages, the snowball-earth period between 790 and 630 million years ago, when from time to time even the tropics lay under thick ice sheets. The isolated pockets of shivering bacterial refugees upon snowball earth found themselves so inbred, goes one ingenious argument, that individuals clubbed together as a ‘body’ and delegated breeding to specialised reproductive cells. See Boyle, R.A., Lenton, T.M., Williams, H.T.P. 2007. Neoproterozoic ‘snowball Earth’ glaciations and the evolution of altruism. Geobiology 5:337–49.
p. 127 ‘It is no accident that modern Australia, with its unpredictable years of drought followed by years of wet, still looks a bit like that volatile glacial world’. Lourandos, H. 1997. Continent of Hunter-Gatherers. Cambridge University Press.
p. 127 ‘One of the intriguing things about the first farming settlements is that they also seem to be trading towns’. Sherratt, A. 2005. The origins of farming in South-West Asia. ArchAtlas, January 2008, edition 3, http://www.archatlas.org/OriginsFarming/Farming.php, accessed 30 January 2008.
p. 128 ‘Jane Jacobs suggested in her book The Economy of Cities’. Jacobs, J. 1969. The Economy of Cities. Random House.
p. 128 ‘In Greece, farmers arrived suddenly and dramatically around 9,000 years ago.’ Perles, C. 2001. The Early Neolithic in Greece. Cambridge University Press.
p. 128 ‘so the genetic evidence suggests’. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Cavalli-Sforza, E. C. 1995. The Great Human Diasporas: the