Page 111 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1412 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Kirch, P.V. (2000). On the road of the winds. Berkeley: University of Cal- systematists, molecular and population geneticists,
ifornia Press. archaeologists, evolutionary biologists of various kinds,
Latinis, D. K. (2000).The development of subsistence system models for
Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania: The nature and role of and a host of others. The notion of paleoanthropology
arboriculture and arboreal-based economies. World Archaeology 32, as an essentially collaborative area of science dates back
41–67.
McGlone, M. S., & Wilmshurst, J. M. (1999). Dating initial Maori envi- to the early 1960s, when Louis Leakey (earlier in his
ronmental impact in New Zealand. Quaternary International 59, 5–16. career the very exemplar of the traditional “lone pale-
McGrail, S. (2001). Boats of the world: From the Stone Age to Medieval ontologist”) and his wife Mary brought together spe-
times. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Moy, C. M., Seltzer, G. O., Rodbell, D. T., & Anderson, D. M. (2002). cialists of various kinds to investigate the hominid-
Variability of El Niño/Southern oscillation activity at millennial bearing deposits of Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania. Clark
timescales during the Holocene epoch. Nature 420, 162–165.
Steadman, D. W. (1995). Prehistoric extinctions of Pacific island birds: Howell, then of the University of Chicago, soon there-
Biodiversity meets zooarchaeology. Science 267, 1123–1131. after made the multidisciplinary approach definitive in
Worthy, T. H., Anderson, A. J., & Molnar, R. E. (1999). Megafaunal his explorations of the fossil-rich sediments of the Omo
expression in a land without mammals—the first fossil faunas from
terrestrial deposits in Fiji. Senckenbergiana biologica 79, 337–364. basin in southern Ethiopia. Since that time virtually all
intensive human evolutionary field investigations have
included a diversity of experts and have involved col-
laborations with many outside specialists.

Pacifism The Nature
of the Evidence
See Nonviolence; Peace Making in the Modern Era; Peace The archive of human biological evolution is the fossil
Projects record. Fossils consist of the remains of dead creatures
that have been preserved in the accumulating geologi-
cal record. Almost invariably, such remains consist of
bones and teeth, since these are the hardest elements of
Paleoanthropology the body and best resist decay and other forms of

destruction. The destructive processes themselves are
aleoanthropology is the broad field of science de- the specialty of taphonomists, who study how remains
Pvoted to understanding the biological and cultural are scattered and broken postmortem, and how fossil
evolution of our own species Homo sapiens, and of the assemblages are accumulated. Fossils of land creatures
zoological family Hominidae to which it belongs. Hom- are preserved within the sedimentary rocks that result
inidae is the family (sometimes recognized only at the from the deposition of eroded particles, principally by
lower taxonomic levels of subfamily, or tribe) of pri- water in lakes and rivers. Such sediments are laid down
mates that contains the living Homo sapiens and its in sequences within which later deposits overlie earlier
close fossil relatives (those that are not more closely ones, a process that is reconstructed by the geologists
related by descent to the living great apes: the chim- known as stratigraphers. The place of fossils in a rock
panzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans). Central to sequence can tell you their relative age (older than this,
the practice of paleoanthropology are hominid paleon- younger than that), but the determination of absolute
tologists, scientists who study the fossil record that com- ages (in years) is the province of geochronologists. In
prises the direct biological evidence of humanity’s past; their efforts to quantify the time that has elapsed since
but the field is fleshed out by scientists of many differ- a particular event (the cooling at the surface of a lava
ent kinds, including stratigraphers, geochronologists, flow, for instance), geochronologists most frequently
taphonomists, functional and comparative anatomists, take advantage of the fact that unstable, “radioactive,”