Page 185 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1486 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
• Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834)

of Australia between 60,000 and 40,000 BCE and the Settled communities also formed at other locations,
catching of fish in deep water as well as immediately off- where seasonal harvests of game or of grain sufficed to
shore.The monsoon seas of Southeast Asia seem to have feed a community throughout all, or most, of the year.
been where this new mode of life first flourished. For example, once methods for preserving meat had
Fishermen needed sheltered places to bring their boats been invented (perhaps by smoking or drying), Mag-
ashore, and whenever fishing at sea began to feed local dalenian hunters could live year round by slaughtering
populations, human communities probably settled down herds of reindeer, caught in corrals built along their
permanently at suitable shoreline locations. But begin- routes of migration.This, in turn, gave them lots of spare
ning about 16,000 years ago, a warmer climate melted time to decorate caves in southern France with their
so much glacial ice that former shorelines are now deep famous wall paintings between about 14,000 and
under water, so no one can be sure. Nevertheless, when- 11,000 BCE. Nets and weirs to catch migrating salmon
ever fishermen started to come ashore at the same place freed up time for the Amerindians of the river banks
regularly, they probably began to build more substantial along the Pacific coast of North America, who used their
shelters for the night, whereupon women and children spare time to erect lofty lodges and totem poles until the
made their foraging for vegetable food more efficient by nineteenth century. Or again, in Southwest Asia arche-
growing especially useful plants close by. A settled style ologists have discovered traces of so-called Natufian vil-
of tropical gardening thus arose, and it continued to exist lages, whose inhabitants harvested wild wheat with flint
(with innumerable later changes) in remote parts of sickles and hunted antelope in their spare time in the
Southeast Asia and New Guinea until the present. 13,000–11,000 BCE period.
Drier climate perhaps with-
ered the stands of wild wheat
that supported the Natufians.
At any rate, their villages were
abandoned by the time grain
agriculture started in suitably
moist locations in South-
west Asia about 10,000 BCE.
Across the next five thousand
years, other grains and roots
became staple crops for other
farming villagers, and wher-
ever harvests had to be stored,
people were compelled to set-
tle down and remain year-
round in the same place.This

Population sprawl is shown in this view from Corcovado overlooking the Lagoa Rodrigo
de Freitas and the neighborhood of Ipanema on the Atlantic Coast of Brazil. Ipanema was
immortalized in the song, The Girl from Ipanema, and is one of Rio’s most desirable
neighborhoods. The area developed after the equally famous Copacabana beach area,
to the north, in the 1950s.