2.) The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition:

Childe argued As landscape becomes more desiccated both animals and people would have had to congregate in oases around diminishing numbers of springs and streams Childe, 1936: 78 quote

"If he just realises the advantage of having a group of such half tamed beasts hanging around the fringes of his settlement.. he will be on his way to domestication".

Richerson points out how the Holocene weather extremes have significantly affected agricultural production (Lamb 1977). But this is not to negate the impact of the Pleistocene quote

"It is hard to imagine the impact of the qualitatively greater variation that characterized the Pleistocene."

What does Sherratt see as the stimulus to food production? quote

"It was the cyclical nature of the climatic process (carrot/stick/carrot) which provided the stimulus."

Sherratt (1997) quote on the effects of the Younger Dryas

"This instability triggered the shift to wheat-farming in western Asia, and a comparable decrease in monsoonal rainfall may have had similar effects in initiating rice- farming in eastern Asia as well"

Describe Sherratt's (1997) 'Saharan pump'

"successively sucking in human occupants and then expelling them...an important factor in propel- ling successive hominid populations out of Africa"

Jebel Sabaha suffers from effects of the

'Wild Nile':

The Younger Dryas has been characterised as a a ...... for people and a a trigger for developing

'crunch point' food-production

American theory of ???? associated with the names of Binford and Flannery, that appeared in about 1970.

'marginal zones',

(Brian Hayden) Resource diversification is reflected in many aspects of materials related to subsistence: 6 changes in 'Research and Development in the Stone Age: Technological Transitions among Hunter- Gatherers Brian Hayden' 1981

(1) More varied and often smaller animals were exploited. (2) A ground-stone tool assemblage, probably used for processing seeds and other materials, emerge (3) Fishing techniques improved (4) shellfish regularly exploited in some areas (5) The bow and arrow and the dog contributed to greater hunting effectiveness. (6) There was widespread burning of f

Clovis dates

(11,200-10,900 BP)

"No one can yet estimate the risks we are taking of a rapid return to colder, drier, more variable environment with less CO2, nor evaluate exactly the threat such conditions imply for the continuation of agricultural production. Nevertheless, the intrinsic instability of the Pleistocene climate system, and the degree to which agriculture is dependent upon the unusually long Holocene stable period, should give one pause" who said this

(Broecker 1997).

Childe, 1936:66 quotes

- "After the end of the Ice Age man's attitude to his environment underwent a radical change....(he began) to control nature" - "The first revolution that transformed human economy gave man control over his own food supply"

The broad (European) pattern

- 13 kya retreat of continental and montane icesheets underway; Gulf Stream's flow toward northwest Europe re-established - 12 kya - mild cooling - 11 kya - sudden, severe cold: the Younger Dryas stadial - 10,300 BP - rapid, continuing rise in temperature and glacial retreat - 8 kya - postglacial climatic 'optimum'; temperatures +2˚C

What did Braidwood find at Jarmo? compare and contrast with other sites?

- an early farming village dating to about 9,000 B. P. - Analyses of plant and animal remains suggested that the process of domestication was underway. - Using much the same seed processing technology as their immediate gathering predecessors, - BUT the Jarmo people no longer moved their residences with the seasons.

Why is Childe's Oasis theory wrong?

- argued that desiccation occurred at the start of the postglacial and pushed people to water sources - BUT instead desiccated world applies to the preceding glacial period - within which there were further contrasts between relatively wetter or dryer phases

Sherratt (1997) argues the Younger Dryas, (11,000-9,500 BC) pushed people into food production.... how?

- this large-scale oscillation de- stabilized the new balance - would have required an increasingly interventionist attitude in the face of suddenly declining returns from gathering wild cereals

ANDREW SHERRATT (1997) "Temporary climatic deterioration may well have forced populations to.......

..... cultivate artificially the calorie-providing species normally collected from the wild, at places where their production could be expanded."

Brian Hayden (1981) "Resource bases were constantly fluctuating throughout the Pleistocene......

...... This periodic resource stress was the most important motive for patterned, directional change-i.e., toward minimizing the immediate effects of resource shortage and insta- bility."

ANDREW SHERRATT (1997) "Temporary climatic deterioration may well have forced populations to cultivate artificially the calorie-providing species normally collected from the wild, at places where their production could be expanded........

.....When conditions ameliorated, the way of life so created was able to expand."

KEY Themes to mention in essay about The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition

1)Changes in regional demography (habitat loss; colonisation) 2)Human role in faunal extinctions 3) Innovation of new technologies 4) Manipulation of plant and animal resources 5) Changes in social organisation (cemeteries, warfare, exchange networks, socio-political institutions etc.)

Agriculture was independently invented ~??? times in the Holocene

10

The Younger Dryas climate was appreciably more variable than the preceding Allerød-Bølling and the succeeding Holocene (Grafenstein, et al. 1999; Mayewski, et al. 1993). The?? how many ?? abrupt, short, warm-cold cycles that punctuate the Younger Dryas ice record were probably felt as dramatic climate shifts all around the world.

10

...(how many).. Clovis points have been discovered, scattered in ...(how many).. locations throughout most of North America; Clovis points, or something similar, have turned up as far south as Venezuela

10,000 1,500

The Younger Dryas dates

11,000-10,300 BP

The Pleistocene-Holocene Transition: Dates: Broadly speaking

12,000-8000 radiocarbon years ago (BP)

The effects of the 'Wild Nile': contrasting archaeological records for the lower Nile Valley at what two date ranges

13.0-11.5 and11.5-10.0 kya

Sherratt (1997) " A flush of species became more widely available in the southern Levant, beginning as early as ....DATE..... at the onset of the ????????

15,000 BC, Late Glacial

Last Glacial Maximum

18 kya - generally cold, dry

Charred plant remains, ???? years old, were uncovered at Ohalo II on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. The wild barley and other edible grasses and fruits found suggest, by their ripening seasons, that the site was occupied at least during spring and autumn.

19,000

RICHERSON 2007 During the last glacial period, seed yields may have been something like ??? of Holocene yields.

2/3s

RICHERSON 2007 the CO2 content of the atmosphere was about 190 ppm during the last glacial, rising to about ??? ppm at the beginning of the Holocene

250

Cohen's argument fails to explain why pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer intensification and the transition to agriculture began in numerous locations after 11,600 years ago (Hayden 1995). Assuming that humans were essentially modern by the Upper Paleolithic, they would have had ??? years to build up a population necessary to generate pressures for intensification.

30,000

The issue is when the settling in process began. settling in could only begin in the latest Pleistocene and at the beginning of the Holocene. However, if we interpret his argument to be that the settling in process began with the evolution of behaviorally modern humans, the time scale is wrong again. There is no evidence that people were making any progress at all toward agriculture for ???? years, and Braidwood's excavations at Jarmo show that more like 4,000 years was enough to go from a plant-light hunting and gathering subsistence system to settled village .

30,000

New world extinctions Paul Martin: ... genera American large mammals extinct in the late Pleistocene

38

Jebel Sabaha, shrinks by what percent? how many people murdered ?

40% 59

Monte Verde is located...... miles south of the Bering Strait. Such a considerable distance was probably unreasonable to trek by foot, especially on ice.

8,000

Ice core evidence suggests that the Younger Dryas was significantly colder and more variable than the ....

Allerød-Bølling and the Holocene

the date of the initiation of agriculture varies quite widely. In the Near East, Natufian peoples lived in settled villages and exploited the wild ancestors of wheat, barley beginning in the............ and then reverted to mobile hunting and gathering during the sharp, short

Allerød-Bølling warm period (14,500 -12,900 B.P.), Younger Dryas (12,500-11,500 B.P.),

Before the discovery of Monte Verde, the most popular and widely accepted theory was the overland route, which speculates that the first American inhabitants migrated from

Asia across the Bering Strait and then spread throughout North America.

As CO2 levels rose, climate variability decreased, and rainfall increased, human populations in several parts of the world began to turn to the exploitation of locally abundant plant resources, but only during the so-called ???? period of near interglacial warmth and stability.

Bølling-Allerød

the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic - name a cave and date

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc - 30,000 ya

ANDREW SHERRATT's very important 1997 paper

Climatic cycles and behavioural revolutions: the emergence of modern humans and the beginning of farming

Meltzer argues that the "apparent chronological correlation" between extinction of megafauna and the appearance of Clovis may not exist. He further further argues that, as defined by Martin, the hypothesis requires

Clovis to be the first human culture in North America

However, the early dates associated with Monte Verde appear to weaken this theory. Prior to 13,000 BP, the ????? (name of) Glacier (which covered much of present-day Canada) had not yet melted enough to reveal an ice-free corridor for people to reasonably journey by foot.

Cordilleran Glacier

Another example of Demographic change at low latitudes (not Sahul)

Eclipse of the Sahara

Rising seas, moving forests: an Australian example.....

Effective abandonment of southwestern Tasmania as forest advances; island isolation Sahul (Australia + Tasmania + New Guinea) shrinks by 15%

Robert Braidwood (Braidwood, et al. 1983) pioneered the systematic study of agricultural origins. from what did Braidwood infer that the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains was likely a locus of early domestication

From the known antiquity of village sites in the Near East and from the presence of wild ancestor species of many crops and animal domesticates in the same region,

name an archaeologist who favors the "overkill" theory that the impact of prehistoric human hunting was the crucial factor in the large mammal extinction in America

Gary Haynes,

Evidence for Eclipse of the Sahara

Giraffe engravings northern Niger A broad-spectrum foraging economy

The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by ??? date ????

Jacques Cauvin, 2001

The downside of climate change example

Jebel Sabaha

Earliest known archaeological evidence of Americans found in

Monte Verde, Chile

At least in favorable localities, appreciable use seems to have been made of plant foods, including large-seeded grasses, well back into the Pleistocene (Kislev et al. 1992). name site, location

Ohalo II the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel

Richerson quote on intensive subsistence system

Once a more intensive subsistence system is possible, it will, over the long run, replace the less intensive subsistence system that preceded it. The reason is simple: all else equal, any group that can use a tract of land more efficiently will be able to evict residents that use it less efficiently.

The Origins of Agriculture as a Natural Experiment in Cultural Evolution 2007 by

Richerson

evidence for scale of change

Rising seas, moving forests (Shift in species distributions of oak and lime)

where does Sherratt (1997) say is there the largest example of such effects (the Climatic reversions like the Allerprd/Younger Dryas oscillation)

Sahara desert

Changes in resources in Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (Brian Hayden)

Shift to r-resources

After 11,600, the Holocene period of relatively very warm, wet, stable, CO2 rich environments began. what followed. ??

Subsistence intensification and eventually agriculture

Finish this Sherratt 1997 quote "Climatic reversions like the Allerprd/Younger Dryas oscillation are thus an important component of the explanation of agricultural origins....

Such cycles, tempting human populations to expand and then lowering the ceiling, were typical of the Pleistocene."

Resolution of events lasting little more than a decade is possible in ice 90,000 years old, improving to monthly after 3,000 years ago. During the last glacial, the ice core data show that the climate was highly variable on time scales of centuries to millennia. It shows what about the last glacial period?

The last glacial period was arid and extremely variable compared to the Holocene.

Sherratt (1997) "The Natufian... reflects the early peak of productivity with the onset of interglacial conditions. This trend was reversed, however, by the WHAT, WHEN ???

Younger Dryas, 11,000-9,500 BC

symbolic material, beginning in the Khiamian of the tenth millennium BC, stratigraphically preceded the emergence of an agricultural economy in the Near East in the ninth millennium. This leads us automatically to propose......

a cognitive change which anticipates the economic change and becomes manifest within it.

The term 'Neolithic Revolution' was coined by Gordon Childe who emphasized as its key feature the beginnings of

a productive economy based on agriculture and stock-breeding.

Instead, Cauvin argues that primacy should be accorded to ....

a restructuring of human mentality from the thirteenth to the tenth millennium BC, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols.

Richerson argues

agriculture was impossible under last-glacial conditions

Richardson "Almost all trajectories of subsistence intensification in the Holocene are progressive and eventually agriculture became the dominant strategy in .....

all but marginal environments."

dates for A green Sahara (largely savanna)

c. 10,000-6000 BP

Monte Verde, a rare clearly Pre-Clovis site, date

c.13,000 BP

Childe argued that ???? was responsible for the initial steps that led to domesticated crops

climate change accompanying the end of the Pleistocene

Jaques Cauvinn " My own theory, by contrast, highlights the importance of ?????, as the principal motivation for the Neolithic Revolution"

cognitive factors, and the socio-cultural changes which result therefrom

Richardson " In the Holocene, agriculture is, in the long run....

compulsory."

The case for human contribution to extinction is now much better supported by chronology (both radiometric and based on trace fossils like fungal spores), mathematical simulations, paleoclimatology, paleontology, archaeology, although the blitzkrieg model which assumes Clovis-first can be thoroughly rejected by

confirmation of pre-Clovis sites. e.g. monte verde

The central mechanism of Hayden's cultural evolutionary scheme is a "resource-stress model" involving a notion of continuous feedback between nutritional stress, induced by

cyclical fluctuations in natural resources,

The Pleistocene geological epoch is characterized by

dramatic glacial advances and retreats.

Childe's model has not been confirmed by subsequent climatological data, since they do not indicate

dry conditions during the period in question.

Recent data from ice core climate proxies show that last glacial climates were extremely hostile to agriculture - why?

dry, low in atmospheric CO2, and extremely variable on quite short time scales

Robert Braidwood (1960) argued a "settling in" hypothesis to the effect that once humans acquired what???......, they naturally turned to them as a more efficient source of calories.

enough familiarity with plant resources

Finish Sherratt 1997 quote " Desiccation precipitated modern behavi-our, which (after some dampness and then a little more desiccation) precipitated.....

farming subsistence system which thereafter spread like an epidemic."

The new dates supplied by Monte Verde have made the site a key factor in the debate over the.........

first migration route from Asia to North America

The Younger Dryas was a ......phenomenon (Europe, Atlantic, Pacific, North America, New Zealand, South Africa etc.)

globally recognisable

An agricultural frontier will tend to expand at the expense of ?? as rising population densities on the farming side of the frontier motivate pioneers to invest in acquiring land from less efficient users.

hunters and gatherers

The correlation between human immigration into the Americas, the invention of Clovis spear points and the extinctions of megafauna (large mammals exceeding 44 kg) at the end of the Pleistocene has caused many to ....

implicate human hunting in the large mammal extinction in America

Richerson quote "agriculture was ...

impossible in the Pleistocene"

what does Sherratt (1997) say "one may envisage " in the east Mediterranean

intensified collecting and habitat-enhancement for carbohydrate crops as well as a (more speculative) development of high-value crops that were perhaps traded

Cohen imagines that subsistence intensification is driven by increases in population density, and that a long, slow buildup of population gradually drove people to .....

intensify subsistence systems to relieve shortages caused by population growth, eventually triggering a move to domesticates

what is Clovis culture

is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture

Brian Hayden (1981) "Early domestication and horticulture can most profitably be viewed as ........., as can many of the subsequent and con- temporary changes in subsistence technology."

logical extensions of the strategy of increasing resource reliability

Richerson The large step change in environment at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition set off the trend of subsistence intensification of which.....

modern industrial innovations are the latest examples.

Richerson "The Pleistocene-Holocene transition was a massive environmental change that was followed by more or less unchanged environmental conditions for the last 11,500 years. In response, human cultural evolution has generated a macroevolutionary trend towards ...

more efficient production per unit land area."

Cohen's (1977) influential book argued

population pressure was responsible for the origins of agriculture beginning at the 11,600 B.P

Amelioration starts

post-16 kya southern hemisphere post-13 kya northern hemisphere

what does Sherratt (1997) say happened in the east Mediterranean

rainfall became more abundant,

how does Sherratt describe the climatic cycles

small cycles of amelioration were set within the larger Milankovitch cycles of glaciation and deglaciation

During the last glacial, at least, people lived under environmental conditions that almost certainly made heavy dependence on food plants unattractive. As CO2 levels rose, rainfall increased, and climatic variability dramatically moderated in the shift to Holocene conditions, conditions became rapidly propitious for .....

subsistence intensification leading to agriculture.

Jacques emphasises

symbolic material, beginning in the Khiamian of the tenth millennium BC, stratigraphically preceded the emergence of an agricultural economy in the Near East in the ninth millennium.

what term did Sherratt (1997) come up with do describe effects in Sahara desert?

the 'Saharan pump'

Richerson 2007 points out No plant rich intensifications are known from the Pleistocene, even from the late Pleistocene. why is this surprising? -> human populations were otherwise quite sophisticated. -> evidence?

the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic

One last siege of glacial climate, ???? from 12,900 yrs B.P. until 11,600 yrs B.P., probably reversed these adaptive trends seen in the preceding Bølling-Allerød (e.g., Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen 1998).

the Younger Dryas

John Alroy argues that what makes the overkill hypothesis plausible

the coincidence of evidence for large human populations in the Americas by at least 13,400 years before present and confirmation of human hunting of at least some megafauna

what does Sherratt (1997) say The Natufian, reflects??

the early peak of productivity with the onset of interglacial conditions

Clovis characterized by

the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools

Richerson QUOTE "Post-Natufian cultures began to domesticate the same species virtually.......

the moment warm and stable conditions returned after the Younger Dryas, around 11,600 B.P."

archaeologists have proposed three prominent internal hypotheses climate change, population growth and cultural evolution, to explain the timing of the origin event. They were formulated before what? As pointed out by (MacNeish 1991). but are still the hypotheses most widely entertained by archaeologists

the nature of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition was understood,

Area where Sherratt argues these climatic cycles " opened up a much wider range of plant- collecting opportunities- especially the high- yielding species adapted to seasonal stress by food-storage."

the southern Levant

Richerson " The Holocene (the last relatively warm, ice free 11,600 years) has been a period of very stable climate, at least by ...

the standards of the last glacial"

Richardson "The quite abrupt final amelioration of the climate was followed immediately by the beginnings of plant intensive resource use strategies in some areas, although......

the turn to plants was much later elsewhere"

Vavilov and Sauer in the 1920s and 30s argued that agriculture originated in locations where.....

the wild ancestors of later crop species attracted the attention of hunters and gatherers, leading eventually to domestication.

Binford and Flannery held that the earliest Natufian cereal harvesters of the twelfth-eleventh millennia BC had pushed outwards their expanding population. At the margins of the optimal zones (the areas rich in wild cereals), those excluded would have had to invent agriculture in order artificially to re-establish their traditional food resources. BUT

there are farming villages in the Levant and eastern Anatolia from the ninth millennium BC distributed throughout the whole of this nuclear zone and not only on its fringes where the chance nature of discovery had hitherto placed them.

recent advances in our understanding of environmental change have placed particular emphasis on the cold Younger Dryas episode, at the end of the last Ice Age. The impact of this sudden reversal of climate warming on the complex Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Levant may, it is argued, have forced or encouraged these communities to explore novel subsistence modes. Not everybody accepts such a chain of reasoning, however, in The Birth of Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin rejects

this emphasis on ecology and environment as the cause of change.

Richerson The Origins of Agriculture as a Natural Experiment in Cultural Evolution 2007. sees what as fundamental to agriculture ?

timing- namely the arrival of the Holocene

Childe also developed explanatory theories (today one would call them models) in which he attributed the new economy to

to a decline in resource availability resulting from an increasingly arid climate in the Near East.

The Monte Verde radiocarbon dates are before the glacial melt once more could the vast, desolate, icy landscape of much of the Americas have permitted enough ....

vegetation to sustain traveling people or herded animals?

Cohen's argument fails to explain what? as pointed out by Hayden ....

why pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer intensification and the transition to agriculture began in numerous locations after 11,600 years ago (Hayden 1995).