"'It is the High Stone Age people, the big game hunters, arriving between the Cary and Mankato substages of the Wisconsin glaciation, as the Ice Age itself drew to a close, it is they who properly populated the two continents. The forerunner folk were killed off or crowded out. If some did interbreed - captive women, perhaps - that was seldom and their blood was swamped, lost.'" (pp. 166-167)
I thought that that concentrated chunk of prehistory deserved to be recorded. Wanda Tamberly encounters the human details, e.g., a captive woman.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Ir I recall correctly, the High Stone Age or Neolithic was characterized by a rapid burst of innovations with the invention of things like spear throwers, archery, perhaps even the first attempts at making use of metals. And did it end with the Agricultural Revolution as men began to grow their food, rather than depending on hunting and gathering?
Ad astra! Sean
Agriculture arose in a number of places at the -end- of the last glacial period, probably caused by subsistence stress during the shifts of rainfall patterns.
Note that early agriculture involved more work for less food -- heights shrank by 4 inches after farming replaced hunting and gathering in most places.
Agriculture spread because it made higher population densities possible; farmers were runty, badly-nourished and disease-ridden compared to the hunter-gatherers, but there were far more of them, and their disease environment was deadly to nomads.
"Quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin used to say.
The myth of the Fall.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I remember reading about that from other writers, how deleterious early agriculture was for many people.
Paul: NOT a myth, when it is so PATENTLY plain how flawed, imperfect, and prone to folly, error, and wickedness mankind is.
Ad astra! Sean
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