Page 208 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

production and reproduction 1509

maintenance. Bands never wandered aimlessly; rather, spear shafts), development of the atlatl or spear-thrower,
they circulated within a home range of possibly 150 sewn clothing, and constructed housing and at some
square kilometers in extent, moving seasonally from one time after 15,000 BCE the bow and arrow. In the colder
familiar campsite to another. Violence between bands, northern latitudes humans left behind tropical diseases
hunting injuries, and other accidents also helped to and found abundant herds of subarctic herbivores. Mov-
reduce populations. Low productivity and mobility kept ing into northeasternmost Asia some bands after about
population growth at nearly zero. 15,000 BCE found their way across the great Beringian
Population growth was nearly zero, but not quite. Dur- Plain to the Americas, where they swept across the con-
ing the many thousands of years of the foraging (Pale- tinents, full of large animals with no prior experience of
olithic) era, populations did grow by tiny percentages. human predators.
For example, a Homo sapiens population of twenty thou- Climate change may explain why some communities
sand persons in eastern south Africa in 200,000 BCE that made a transition from foraging to agriculture. The mil-
increased by .00005 per year would double in twenty lennia from 9000 to 6000 BCE featured multiple points
thousand years. Doubling again each twenty thousand where transitions to agriculture occurred.The first was in
years would give about 2.5 million people by 20,000 southwest Asia, in the highlands overlooking the Medi-
BCE, a high estimate for the world near the end of the last terranean to the west and rimming the Mesopotamian
great ice age. basin formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In these
Population growth disrupted equilibrium. Like most upland plateaus strains of barley and wheat grew wild,
successful species, humans had the potential for many and several communities had become semipermanent by
more babies than they usually produced.Where food was gathering these grains and hunting gazelles, wild sheep
plentiful, constraint on the natural human propensity to and goats, and other animals. By about 9000 BCE several
reproduce was relaxed. As bands grew, they split off to communities—now known as “villages,” meaning rela-
form new bands, which could then move into unpopu- tively permanent settlements—had become dependent
lated territories rich in forage. Growth therefore was on planting stands and harvesting grain and had domes-
most rapid among peoples moving into frontier zones. ticated sheep, goats, cattle, and asses. Most continued to
These frontier zones first were along waterways. Some hunt and gather, but increasingly they depended on
time after 100,000 BCE Homo sapiens sapiens went on a grown foods. In northeast Asia on the loess (an unstrat-
long migratory expansion from coastal east Africa across ified, usually buff to yellowish brown loamy deposit) soils
the Red Sea—evidently by crossing the sea itself—to the of the Huang (Yellow) River valley, a semiarid and cool
Arabian Peninsula, thence to southern and southeastern temperate zone, foraging communities developed culti-
Asia. Living by a mix of hunting and fishing, along coasts vation of millet, which they combined with domesticated
and islands, they developed watercraft—canoes, rafts, pigs and chickens, and became agricultural villages.
and so forth—and crossed open water to Australia per- In moist and tropical southeastern Asia communities
haps as early as 60,000 BCE and certainly not later than who gathered wild rice in marshes and foraged in the
50,000 BCE and to islands in southeast Asia and the forests developed rice cultivation, in combination with
western Pacific. domestication of pigs, chickens, water buffalo, and a vari-
As coastal areas became populated, multiplying bands ety of fruits, particularly bananas, coconuts, and sugar-
pushed inland, which meant northward into Eurasia cane. In lightly forested regions of the upper Congo
after about 45,000 BCE.They experienced dramatic tech- River basin of west Africa the ancestors of Bantu peoples
nological and biological changes. These changes cultivated oil palm trees and root crops and domesti-
involved development of microlithic tool making (using cated goats, adding millet and other grains as they
small flakes of flint and obsidian mounted on slight expanded eastward. On the other side of the world in