BIO 358 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Three Steps, Barcode, Chaco Culture National Historical Park
BIO 358
Lecture 19
Topic: The bow and Neolithic “agricultural” revolutions
Slide 1
-Agriculture- domesticated plants
-Adaptive staircase- continue to look at scientific exploration of history
-Second step- behaviorally modern human revolution as result of Atlatl
-Agricultural and Neolithic revolution- 11,000- 1,000 years ago
-Looking for novel weapon that preceded next level of adaptive sophistication – focus
exactly what we are looking for
Slide 2
Increased adaptive sophistication
-Look for industrial scale harvesting of food- takes tremendous cooperative resources and
tremendous amount of specializations
-Agriculture- domesticated animals and wild resources
-larger scale of social cooperation as far as sedentary villages / expanded scale of trade
networks
-more sophisticated tools- indicative of specializations
-What can be exchanged can be stolen- have to be careful not to reverse cause and effect
here
Slide 3
Large stockpiles of goods – lot of investment from lot of different people as far as time,
resources, tools
-Can’t have transient protection as we did with Atalal- we now need everyday protection
and everyday law enforcement
Slide 4
Cause and effect- can’t be reversed
-Weapon capable of managing COI on next scale- above scale of atalal
-Evidence of when and where bow shows up
-Looking at where it went/where is adaptive sophistication- do they follow each other?
-Atlal was originally invented in Africa and then exploded- humans are everywhere
-Looking for where was bow first invented, where did it spread to, and then increased
scales of social cooperation and increased adaptive sophistication- bow preceded it
Slide 5
-If we have access to new coercive technology, we get the same trick just that ever
increasing scales- diff representation of that same trick- each increases in scale gives bump
in adaptive sophistication
-each bump and scale must be caused by local introduction of new coercive technologies
Slide 6
Rice, wheat, soy beans, potatoes and corn
-Take these major crops= 95-97 percent of all the calories. Few percent are marine fish, etc
-Because they are so central to our survival, if these plants went away, we would go from 7
billion to 70 million because we have to rely on wild foods
-Understanding archaeology and history of origin of domesticated plants, these plants are
altered by human selection in the same way that dogs were produced by wolves
-Early archaeology- expressed agricultural evolution
-People argue that domestication of plants and animals led to agricultural revolution – they
think these are effects of expanded scale of social cooperation allowing increase
specialization
Slide 7
-New weapon – responsible for agricultural revolution
-People lived as behaviorally modern humans- hunter gatherers for somewhere between
30-40000 years
-Argued that in Asia and Africa, bow arises and agricultural revolution explodes
-Bow expands – get a whole bunch of independent opportunities to test this
Slide 8
-Modern bow- most pieces are perishable but the points are not
-Stone points can be used to date their weapon- first want to look at the properties
-Bow and arrow is difficult to make but easy to use- has low individual opportunity cost
Slide 9
Atlal and bow and arrow
-Bow has a larger sense of range- not dominant effect
-Two fold increase in scale of social cooperation
-As alluded to in video, there is factory of opportunity cost which leads to day after day low
enforcement
Slide 10
Australian aborigines
-Using atlatl model – Aborginines at European context used atlatl value
-We have ethnography
-From those things, what do we see?
-Because of high opportunity cost of atlatl, atlatl bearing cultures disperse along landscape
and gather around four times a year and for a week or so, they practice with atalal- takes so
much time so skills Deterioted over the years
Slide 11
-Bow societies don’t care about that- once shown basic techniques, you can put arrow after
the other- lethal weapon and you can turn 12 year old child into lethal threat
-Made possible for first time is sedentary settlement- with coming of the bow
-Can also store food and protect it in larger storage because you are sitting in one place- all
the food grown grows only for about 2 percent of the population
-Extreme individual sophistication
Document Summary
Adaptive staircase- continue to look at scientific exploration of history. Second step- behaviorally modern human revolution as result of atlatl. Agricultural and neolithic revolution- 11,000- 1,000 years ago. Looking for novel weapon that preceded next level of adaptive sophistication focus resources, tools exactly what we are looking for. Look for industrial scale harvesting of food- takes tremendous cooperative resources and tremendous amount of specializations. Larger scale of social cooperation as far as sedentary villages / expanded scale of trade networks. What can be exchanged can be stolen- have to be careful not to reverse cause and effect here. Large stockpiles of goods lot of investment from lot of different people as far as time, Can(cid:495)t have transient protection as we did with atalal- we now need everyday protection and everyday law enforcement. Weapon capable of managing coi on next scale- above scale of atalal. Evidence of when and where bow shows up.
