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Pastimes : Let’s Talk About Our Feelings about the Let’s Talk About Our -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (4550)	1/13/2008 11:28:24 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5290

Descent of Man, Pt. III by Thomas Fleming Chapter 7: Settlement Rather than offer a summary of the chapter, I am going merely to mention a few points. 1) After the Last Glacial Maximum, 20-15,000 years ago, life including human life began to move back north, though a second cold snap sent them back south for 1300 years. “By 11,500 years ago the world was launched on the Holocene, the inter-ice-age period that still persists.” Conclusion: Global Warming is A Good Thing. 2) Sedentism—settling down on a home base—developed about in the Holocene and began to spread through Europe about 10,000 years ago. This was not the result of the development of agriculture, but preceded it and may have been partly the cause. Settlements caused inequality of rank and wealth to develop, as Wade would put it, though the evidence suggests to me unequivocally that inequality is inherent in the human condition. Let us be content with “rapidly increase.” He also believes, without much evidence, that sedentism changes the human mind. I think he and Colin Renfrew make much too much of the slow pace of development. We simply do not know how long it takes to figure out how to keep grain—a vital component of of sedentary civilization, because it allows surpluses to be stored for the off-season. [Note from TJF: The stage at which pre-civilized men simply heaped up grains and let it rot is unknown to us, but storage in holes is attested. The trouble with this method is that dampness allows rot and encourages mold, and the holes can be tunneled into by insects and moles. At some time they learned to coat the holes with mud that dried naturally and someone must have noticed that a fire built into the mud hardened it. From there it was a small step to taking the fired vase out of the hole. That is my own just-so story, though it is based on early Middle Eastern evidence.] 3) Sedentism leads gradually to domestication of animals, beginning with the dog, and cereal grains. This is a long and technical story and he does not do a good job of telling it, though his dog stories are entertaining. 4) Studies of lactose tolerance suggest the possibility that such a genetically controlled trait would have emerged at a time when men were domesticating cattle, sheep, etc.—more proof, he thinks, of continuing human “evolution” though a more modest term like adaptation might be preferable. Milk-and-butter peoples like the Dutch and Swedes are 99% tolerant, while among Africans only 25%. What we really would like to know is how tolerant non-milk drinking/non-cheese-eating Chinese are. This brings us down to the dawn of civilization. chroniclesmagazine.org