THESE SUGGESTIONS ARE FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN READING further. Hence, in addition to key books and papers, I have favored references that provide comprehensive listings of the earlier literature. A journal title (in italics) is followed by the volume number, followed after a colon by the first and last page numbers, and then the year of publication in parentheses.

Prologue

Among references relevant to most chapters of this book is an enormous compendium of human gene frequencies entitled The History and Geography of Human Genes, by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). This remarkable book approximates a history of everything about everybody, because the authors begin their accounts of each continent with a convenient summary of the continent’s geography, ecology, and environment, followed by the prehistory, history, languages, physical anthropology, and culture of its peoples. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francisco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), covers similar material but is written for the general reader rather than for specialists.

Another convenient source is a series of five volumes entitled The Illustrated History of Humankind, ed. Göran Burenhult (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993–94). The five individual volumes in this series are entitled, respectively, The First Humans, People of the Stone Age, Old World Civilizations, New World and Pacific Civilizations, and Traditional Peoples Today.

Several series of volumes published by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England, various dates) provide histories of particular regions or eras. One series consists of books entitled The Cambridge History of [X], where X is variously Africa, Early Inner Asia, China, India, Iran, Islam, Japan, Latin America, Poland, and Southeast Asia. Another series is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of [X], where X is variously Africa, China, Japan, Latin America and the Caribbean, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa, and India, Pakistan, and adjacent countries. Still other series include The Cambridge Ancient History, The Cambridge Medieval History, The Cambridge Modern History, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, and The Cambridge Economic History of India.

Three encyclopedic accounts of the world’s languages are Barbara Grimes, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 13th ed. (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1996), Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and C. F. Voegelin and F. M. Voegelin, Classification and Index of the World’s Languages (New York: Elsevier, 1977).

Among large-scale comparative histories, Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–54), stands out. An excellent history of Eurasian civilization, especially western Eurasian civilization, is William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The same author’s A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), despite its title, also maintains a focus on western Eurasian civilization, as does V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954). Another comparative history with a focus on western Eurasia, C. D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), is by a biologist who recognizes some of the same links between continental history and domestication that I discuss. Two books by Alfred Crosby are distinguished studies of the European overseas expansion with emphasis on its accompanying plants, animals, and germs: The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), and Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, eds., Evolution and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), are comparative histories from the perspective of cultural anthropologists. Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (New York: Holt, 1911), is an example of earlier efforts to study geographic influences on human societies. Other important historical studies are listed under further readings for the Epilogue. My book The Third Chimpanzee (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), especially its chapter 14, on the comparative histories of Eurasia and the Americas, provided the starting point for my thinking about the present book.

The best-known or most notorious recent entrant into the debate about group differences in intelligence is Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

Chapter 1

Excellent books about early human evolution include Richard Klein, The Human Career (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer, eds., The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered (New York: Doubleday, 1992), D. Tab Rasmussen, ed., The Origin and Evolution of Humans and Humanness (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1993), Matthew Nitecki and Doris Nitecki, eds., Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans (New York: Plenum, 1994), and Chris Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). Three popular books dealing specifically with the Neanderthals are Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals (New York: Knopf, 1993), and Ian Tattersall, The Last Neanderthal (New York: Macmillan, 1995).

Genetic evidence of human origins is the subject of the two books by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al. already cited under the Prologue, and of chapter 1 of my book The Third Chimpanzee. Two technical papers with recent advances in the genetic evidence are J. L. Mountain and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, “Inference of human evolution through cladistic analysis of nuclear DNA restriction polymorphism,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91:6515–19 (1994), and D. B. Goldstein et al., “Genetic absolute dating based on microsatellites and the origin of modern humans,” ibid. 92:6723–27 (1995).

References to the human colonization of Australia, New Guinea, and the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes, and to extinctions of large animals there, are listed under further readings for Chapter 15. In particular, Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (New York: Braziller, 1995), discusses those subjects in clear, understandable terms and explains the problems with claims of very recent survival of extinct big Australian mammals.

The standard text on Late Pleistocene and Recent extinctions of large animals is Paul Martin and Richard Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). More recent updates are Richard Klein, “The impact of early people on the environment: The case of large mammal extinctions,” pp. 13–34 in J. E. Jacobsen and J. Firor, Human Impact on the Environment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), and Anthony Stuart, “Mammalian extinctions in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Eurasia and North America,” Biological Reviews 66:453–62 (1991). David Steadman summarizes recent evidence that extinction waves accompanied human settlement of Pacific islands in his paper “Prehistoric extinctions of Pacific island birds: Biodiversity meets zooarchaeology,” Science 267:1123–31 (1995).

Popular accounts of the settlement of the Americas, the accompanying extinctions of large mammals, and the resulting controversies are Brian Fagan, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), and chapter 18 of my book The Third Chimpanzee, both of which provide many other references. Ronald Carlisle, ed., Americans before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1988), includes a chapter by J. M. Adovasio and his colleagues on pre-Clovis evidence at the Meadowcroft site. Papers by C. Vance Haynes, Jr., an expert on the Clovis horizon and reported pre-Clovis sites, include “Contributions of radiocarbon dating to the geochronology of the peopling of the New World,” pp. 354–74 in R. E. Taylor, A. Long, and R. S. Kra, eds., Radiocarbon after Four Decades (New York: Springer, 1992), and “Clovis-Folson geochronology and climate change,” pp. 219–36 in Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov, eds., From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptations (New York: Plenum, 1993). Pre-Clovis claims for the Pedra Furada site are argued by N. Guidon and G. Delibrias, “Carbon-14 dates point to man in the Americas 32,000 years ago,” Nature 321:769–71 (1986), and David Meltzer et al., “On a Pleistocene human occupation at Pedra Furada, Brazil,” Antiquity 68:695–714 (1994). Other publications relevant to the pre-Clovis debate include T. D. Dillehay et al., “Earliest hunters and gatherers of South America,” Journal of World Prehistory 6:145–204 (1992), T. D. Dillehay, Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Site in Chile (Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), T. D. Dillehay and D. J. Meltzer, eds., The First Americans: Search and Research (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1991), Thomas Lynch “Glacial-age man in South America?—a critical review,” American Antiquity 55:12–36 (1990), John Hoffecker et al., “The colonization of Beringia and the peopling of the New World,” Science 259:46–53 (1993), and A. C. Roosevelt et al., “Paleoindian cave dwellers in the Amazon: The peopling of the Americas,” Science 272:373–84 (1996).

Chapter 2

Two outstanding books explicitly concerned with cultural differences among Polynesian islands are Patrick Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and the same author’s The Wet and the Dry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Much of Peter Bellwood’s The Polynesians, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), also deals with this problem. Notable books dealing with specific Polynesian islands include Michael King, Moriori (Auckland: Penguin, 1989), on the Chatham Islands, Patrick Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), on Hawaii, Patrick Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), also on Hawaii, Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Easter Island (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), and Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Island (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992).

Chapter 3

My account of Pizarro’s capture of Atahuallpa combines the eyewitness accounts by Francisco Pizarro’s brothers Hernando Pizarro and Pedro Pizarro and by Pizarro’s companions Miguel de Estete, Cristóbal de Mena, Ruiz de Arce, and Francisco de Xerez. The accounts by Hernando Pizarro, Miguel de Estete, and Francisco de Xerez have been translated by Clements Markham, Reports on the Discovery of Peru, Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., vol. 47 (New York, 1872); Pedro Pizarro’s account, by Philip Means, Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru (New York: Cortés Society, 1921); and Cristóbal de Mena’s account, by Joseph Sinclair, The Conquest of Peru, as Recorded by a Member of the Pizarro Expedition (New York, 1929). The account by Ruiz de Arce was reprinted in Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia (Madrid) 102:327–84 (1933). John Hemming’s excellent The Conquest of the Incas (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) gives a full account of the capture and indeed of the whole conquest, with an extensive bibliography. A 19th-century account of the conquest, William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (New York, 1847), is still highly readable and ranks among the classics of historical writing. Corresponding modern and classic 19th-century accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs are, respectively, Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), and William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1843). Contemporary eyewitness accounts of the conquest of the Aztecs were written by Cortés himself (reprinted as Hernando Cortés, Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor [New York: Norton, 1969]) and by many of Cortés’s companions (reprinted in Patricia de Fuentes, ed., The Conquistadors [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993]).

Chapters 4–10

References for these seven chapters on food production will be combined, since many of the references apply to more than one of them.

Five important sources, all of them excellent and fact-filled, address the question how food production evolved from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: Kent Flannery, “The origins of agriculture,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 2:271–310 (1973); Jack Harlan, Crops and Man, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis.: American Society of Agronomy, 1992); Richard MacNeish, The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (San Diego: Academic Press, 1984); and Bruce Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995). Notable older references about food production in general include two multi-author volumes: Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, eds., The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), and Charles Reed, ed., Origins of Agriculture (The Hague: Mouton, 1977). Carl Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952), is a classic early comparison of Old World and New World food production, while Erich Isaac, Geography of Domestication (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), addresses the questions of where, when, and how regarding plant and animal domestication.

Among references specifically about plant domestication, Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), stands out. It provides the most detailed account of plant domestication available for any part of the world. For each significant crop grown in western Eurasia, the book summarizes archaeological and genetic evidence about its domestication and subsequent spread.

Among important multi-author books on plant domestication are C. Wesley Cowan and Patty Jo Watson, eds., The Origins of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), David Harris and Gordon Hillman, eds., Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and C. Barigozzi, ed., The Origin and Domestication of Cultivated Plants (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1986). Two engaging popular accounts of plant domestication by Charles Heiser, Jr., are Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Of Plants and People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). J. Smartt and N. W. Simmonds, ed., Evolution of Crop Plants, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1995), is the standard reference volume summarizing information about all of the world’s major crops and many minor ones. Three excellent papers describe the changes that evolve automatically in wild plants under human cultivation: Mark Blumler and Roger Byrne, “The ecological genetics of domestication and the origins of agriculture,” Current Anthropology 32:23–54 (1991); Charles Heiser, Jr., “Aspects of unconscious selection and the evolution of domesticated plants,” Euphytica 37:77–81 (1988); and Daniel Zohary, “Modes of evolution in plants under domestication,” in W. F. Grant, ed., Plant Biosystematics (Montreal: Academic Press, 1984). Mark Blumler, “Independent inventionism and recent genetic evidence on plant domestication,” Economic Botany 46:98–111 (1992), evaluates the evidence for multiple domestications of the same wild plant species, as opposed to single origins followed by spread.

Among writings of general interest in connection with animal domestication, the standard encyclopedic reference work to the world’s wild mammals is Ronald Nowak, ed., Walker’s Mammals of the World, 5th ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Juliet Clutton-Brock, Domesticated Animals from Early Times (London: British Museum [Natural History], 1981), gives an excellent summary of all important domesticated mammals. I. L. Mason, ed., Evolution of Domesticated Animals (London: Longman, 1984), is a multi-author volume discussing each significant domesticated animal individually. Simon Davis, The Archaeology of Animals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), provides an excellent account of what can be learned from mammal bones in archaeological sites. Juliet Clutton-Brock, ed., The Walking Larder (London: Unwin-Hyman, 1989), presents 31 papers about how humans have domesticated, herded, hunted, and been hunted by animals around the world. A comprehensive book in German about domesticated animals is Wolf Herre and Manfred Röhrs, Haustiere zoologisch gesehen (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990). Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild (New York: William Morrow, 1992), is a popular account of how animal domestication evolved automatically from relationships between humans and animals. An important paper on how domestic animals became used for plowing, transport, wool, and milk is Andrew Sheratt, “Plough and pastoralism: Aspects of the secondary products revolution,” pp. 261–305 in Ian Hodder et al., eds., Pattern of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Accounts of food production in particular areas of the world include a deliciously detailed mini-encyclopedia of Roman agricultural practices, Pliny, Natural History, vols. 17–19 (Latin text side-by-side with English translation in the Loeb Classical Library edition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961]); Albert Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), analyzing the spread of food production from the Fertile Crescent westward across Europe; Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Alasdair Whittle, Neolithic Europe: A Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), for Europe; Donald Henry, From Foraging to Agriculture: The Levant at the End of the Ice Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), for the lands bordering the eastern shore of the Mediterranean; and D. E. Yen, “Domestication: Lessons from New Guinea,” pp. 558–69 in Andrew Pawley, ed., Man and a Half (Auckland: Polynesian Society, 1991), for New Guinea. Edward Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), describes the animals, plants, and other things imported into China during the T’ang dynasty.

The following are accounts of plant domestication and crops in specific parts of the world. For Europe and the Fertile Crescent: Willem van Zeist et al., eds., Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1991), and Jane Renfrew, Paleoethnobotany (London: Methuen, 1973). For the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, and for the Indian subcontinent in general: Steven Weber, Plants and Harappan Subsistence (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1991). For New World crops: Charles Heiser, Jr., “New perspectives on the origin and evolution of New World domesticated plants: Summary,” Economic Botany 44(3 suppl.): 111–16 (1990), and the same author’s “Origins of some cultivated New World plants,” Annual Reviews of Ecology and Systematics 10:309–26 (1979). For a Mexican site that may document the transition from hunting-gathering to early agriculture in Mesoamerica: Kent Flannery, ed., Guilá Naquitz (New York: Academic Press, 1986). For an account of crops grown in the Andes during Inca times, and their potential uses today: National Research Council, Lost Crops of the Incas (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989). For plant domestication in the eastern and / or southwestern United States: Bruce Smith “Origins of agriculture in eastern North America,” Science 246:1566–71 (1989); William Keegan, ed., Emergent Horticultural Economies of the Eastern Woodlands (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1987); Richard Ford, ed., Prehistoric Food Production in North America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1985); and R. G. Matson, The Origins of Southwestern Agriculture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). Bruce Smith, “The origins of agriculture in the Americas,” Evolutionary Anthropology 3:174–84 (1995), discusses the revisionist view, based on accelerator mass spectrometry dating of very small plant samples, that the origins of agriculture in the Americas were much more recent than previously believed.

The following are accounts of animal domestication and livestock in specific parts of the world. For central and eastern Europe: S. Bökönyi, History of Domestic Mammals in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadö, 1974). For Africa: Andrew Smith, Pastoralism in Africa (London: Hurst, 1992). For the Andes: Elizabeth Wing, “Domestication of Andean mammals,” pp. 246–64 in F. Vuilleumier and M. Monasterio, eds., High Altitude Tropical Biogeography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

References on specific important crops include the following. Thomas Sodestrom et al., eds., Grass Systematics and Evolution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), is a comprehensive multi-author account of grasses, the plant group that gave rise to our cereals, now the world’s most important crops. Hugh Iltis, “From teosinte to maize: The catastrophic sexual transmutation,” Science 222:886–94 (1983), gives an account of the drastic changes in reproductive biology involved in the evolution of corn from teosinte, its wild ancestor. Yan Wenming, “China’s earliest rice agricultural remains,” Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 10:118–26 (1991), discusses early rice domestication in South China. Two books by Charles Heiser, Jr., are popular accounts of particular crops: The Sunflower (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) and The Gourd Book (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).

Many papers or books are devoted to accounts of particular domesticated animal species. R. T. Loftus et al., “Evidence for two independent domestications of cattle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 91:2757–61 (1994), uses evidence from mitochondrial DNA to demonstrate that cattle were domesticated independently in western Eurasia and in the Indian subcontinent. For horses: Juliet Clutton-Brock, Horse Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), Richard Meadow and Hans-Peter Uerpmann, eds., Equids in the Ancient World (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1986), Matthew J. Kust, Man and Horse in History (Alexandria, Va.: Plutarch Press, 1983), and Robin Law, The Horse in West African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). For pigs: Colin Groves, Ancestors for the Pigs: Taxonomy and Phylogeny of the Genus Sus (Technical Bulletin no. 3, Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University [1981]). For llamas: Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus, and Robert Reynolds, The Flocks of the Wamani (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989). For dogs: Stanley Olsen, Origins of the Domestic Dog (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). John Varner and Jeannette Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), describes the Spaniards’ use of dogs as military weapons to kill Indians during the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Clive Spinnage, The Natural History of Antelopes (New York: Facts on File, 1986), gives an account of the biology of antelopes, and hence a starting point for trying to understand why none of these seemingly obvious candidates for domestication was actually domesticated. Derek Goodwin, Domestic Birds (London: Museum Press, 1965), summarizes the bird species that have been domesticated, and R. A. Donkin, The Muscovy Duck Cairina moschata domestica (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1989), discusses one of the sole two bird species domesticated in the New World.

Finally, the complexities of calibrating radiocarbon dates are discussed by G. W. Pearson, “How to cope with calibration,” Antiquity 61:98–103 (1987), R. E. Taylor, eds., Radiocarbon after Four Decades: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (New York: Springer, 1992), M. Stuiver et al., “Calibration,” Radiocarbon 35:1–244 (1993), S. Bowman “Using radiocarbon: An update,” Antiquity 68:838–43 (1994), and R. E. Taylor, M. Stuiver, and C. Vance Haynes, Jr., “Calibration of the Late Pleistocene radiocarbon time scale: Clovis and Folsom age estimates,” Antiquity vol. 70 (1996).

Chapter 11

For a gripping account of the impact of disease on a human population, nothing can match Thucydides’ account of the plague of Athens, in book 2 of his Peloponnesian War (available in many translations).

Three classic accounts of disease in history are Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), Geddes Smith, A Plague on Us (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1941), and William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976). The last book, written by a distinguished historian rather than by a physician, has been especially influential in bringing historians to recognize the impacts of disease, as have been the two books by Alfred Crosby listed under the further readings for the Prologue.

Friedrich Vogel and Arno Motulsky, Human Genetics, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1986), the standard textbook on human genetics, is a convenient reference for natural selection of human populations by disease, and for the development of genetic resistance against specific diseases. Roy Anderson and Robert May, Infectious Diseases of Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), is a clear mathematical treatment of disease dynamics, transmission, and epidemiology. MacFarlane Burnet, Natural History of Infectious Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), is a classic by a distinguished medical researcher, while Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes (New York: Putnam, 1995), is a recent popular account.

Books and articles specifically concerned with the evolution of human infectious diseases include Aidan Cockburn, Infectious Diseases: Their Evolution and Eradication (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1967); the same author’s “Where did our infectious diseases come from?” pp. 103–13 in Health and Disease in Tribal Societies, CIBA Foundation Symposium, no. 49 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977); George Williams and Randolph Nesse, “The dawn of Darwinian medicine,” Quarterly Reviews of Biology 66:1–62 (1991); and Paul Ewald, Evolution of Infectious Disease (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Francis Black, “Infectious diseases in primitive societies,” Science 187:515–18 (1975), discusses the differences between endemic and acute diseases in their impact on, and maintenance in, small isolated societies. Frank Fenner, “Myxoma virus and Oryctolagus cuniculus: Two colonizing species,” pp. 485–501 in H. G. Baker and G. L. Stebbins, eds., Genetics of Colonizing Species (New York: Academic Press, 1965), describes the spread and evolution of Myxoma virus among Australian rabbits. Peter Panum, Observations Made during the Epidemic of Measles on the Faroe Islands in the Year 1846 (New York: American Public Health Association, 1940), illustrates how the arrival of an acute epidemic disease in an isolated nonresistant population quickly kills or immunizes the whole population. Francis Black, “Measles endemicity in insular populations: Critical community size and its evolutionary implication,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 11:207–11 (1966), uses such measles epidemics to calculate the minimum size of population required to maintain measles. Andrew Dobson, “The population biology of parasite-induced changes in host behavior,” Quarterly Reviews of Biology 63:139–65 (1988), discusses how parasites enhance their own transmission by changing the behavior of their host. Aidan Cockburn and Eve Cockburn, eds., Mummies, Diseases, and Ancient Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), illustrates what can be learned from mummies about past impacts of diseases.

As for accounts of disease impacts on previously unexposed populations, Henry Dobyns, Their Number Became Thinned (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), marshals evidence for the view that European-introduced diseases killed up to 95 percent of all Native Americans. Subsequent books or articles arguing that controversial thesis include John Verano and Douglas Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Ann Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and Dean Snow, “Microchronology and demographic evidence relating to the size of the pre-Columbian North American Indian population,” Science 268:1601–4 (1995). Two accounts of depopulation caused by European-introduced diseases among Hawaii’s Polynesian population are David Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), and O. A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993). The near-extermination of the Sadlermiut Eskimos by a dysentery epidemic in the winter of 1902–3 is described by Susan Rowley, “The Sadlermiut: Mysterious or misunderstood?” pp. 361–84 in David Morrison and Jean-Luc Pilon, eds., Threads of Arctic Prehistory (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994). The reverse phenomenon, of European deaths due to diseases encountered overseas, is discussed by Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Among accounts of specific diseases, Stephen Morse, ed., Emerging Viruses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), contains many valuable chapters on “new” viral diseases of humans; so does Mary Wilson et al., eds., Disease in Evolution, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 740 (New York, 1995). References for other diseases include the following. For bubonic plague: Colin McEvedy, “Bubonic plague,” Scientific American 258(2): 118–23 (1988). For cholera: Norman Longmate, King Cholera (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966). For influenza: Edwin Kilbourne, Influenza (New York: Plenum, 1987), and Robert Webster et al., “Evolution and ecology of influenza A viruses,” Microbiological Reviews 56:152–79 (1992). For Lyme disease: Alan Barbour and Durland Fish, “The biological and social phenomenon of Lyme disease,” Science 260:1610–16 (1993), and Allan Steere, “Lyme disease: A growing threat to urban populations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91:2378–83 (1994).

For the evolutionary relationships of human malarial parasites: Thomas McCutchan et al., “Evolutionary relatedness of Plasmodium species as determined by the structure of DNA,” Science 225:808–11 (1984), and A. P. Waters et al., “Plasmodium falciparum appears to have arisen as a result of lateral transfer between avian and human hosts,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 88:3140–44 (1991). For the evolutionary relationships of measles virus: E. Norrby et al., “Is rinderpest virus the archevirus of the Morbillivirus genus?” Intervirology 23:228–32 (1985), and Keith Murray et al., “A morbillivirus that caused fatal disease in horses and humans,” Science 268:94–97 (1995). For pertussis, also known as whooping cough: R. Gross et al., “Genetics of pertussis toxin,” Molecular Microbiology 3:119–24 (1989). For smallpox: Donald Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); F. Vogel and M. R. Chakravartti, “ABO blood groups and smallpox in a rural population of West Bengal and Bihar (India),” Human Genetics 3:166–80 (1966); and my article “A pox upon our genes,” Natural History 99(2): 26–30 (1990). For monkeypox, a disease related to smallpox: Zdenk Jeek and Frank Fenner, Human Monkeypox (Basel: Karger, 1988). For syphilis: Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For tuberculosis: Guy Youmans, Tuberculosis (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1979). For the claim that human tuberculosis was present in Native Americans before Columbus’s arrival: in favor, Wilmar Salo et al., “Identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA in a pre-Columbian Peruvian mummy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91:2091–94 (1994); opposed, William Stead et al., “When did Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection first occur in the New World?” American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine 151:1267–68 (1995).

Chapter 12

Books providing general accounts of writing and of particular writing systems include David Diringer, Writing (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), I. J. Gelb, A Study of Writing, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Geoffrey Sampson, Writing Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), John DeFrancis, Visible Speech (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), Wayne Senner, ed., The Origins of Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), and J. T. Hooker, ed., Reading the Past (London: British Museum Press, 1990). A comprehensive account of significant writing systems, with plates depicting texts in each system, is David Diringer, The Alphabet, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1968). Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Robert Logan, The Alphabet Effect (New York: Morrow, 1986), discuss the impact of literacy in general and of the alphabet in particular. Uses of early writing are discussed by Nicholas Postgate et al., “The evidence for early writing: Utilitarian or ceremonial?” Antiquity 69:459–80 (1995).

Exciting accounts of decipherments of previously illegible scripts are given by Maurice Pope, The Story of Decipherment (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Yves Duhoux, Thomas Palaima, and John Bennet, eds., Problems in Decipherment (Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters, 1989), and John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman, “A decipherment of epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing,” Science 259:1703–11 (1993).

Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s two-volume Before Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) presents her controversial reconstruction of the origins of Sumerian writing from clay tokens over the course of nearly 5,000 years. Hans Nissen et al., eds., Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), describes Mesopotamian tablets that represent the earliest stages of cuneiform itself. Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet (Leiden: Brill, 1982), traces the emergence of alphabets in the eastern Mediterranean region. The remarkable Ugaritic alphabet is the subject of Gernot Windfuhr, “The cuneiform signs of Ugarit,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 29:48–51 (1970). Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, Writing without Words (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), describe the development and uses of Mesoamerican writing systems. William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1994), and the same author’s “Early Chinese writing,” World Archaeology 17:420–36 (1986), do the same for China. Finally, Janet Klausner, Sequoyah’s Gift (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), is an account readable by children, but equally interesting to adults, of Sequoyah’s development of the Cherokee syllabary.

Chapter 13

The standard detailed history of technology is the eight-volume A History of Technology, by Charles Singer et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954–84). One-volume histories are Donald Cardwell, The Fontana History of Technology (London: Fontana Press, 1994), Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and Trevor Williams, The History of Invention (New York: Facts on File, 1987). R. A. Buchanan, The Power of the Machine (London: Penguin Books, 1994), is a short history of technology focusing on the centuries since A.D. 1700. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), discusses why the rate of development of technology has varied with time and place. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), presents an evolutionary view of technological change. Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983), summarizes modern research on the transfer of innovations, including the QWERTY keyboard. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), dissects the relative contributions of blueprint copying, idea diffusion (by espionage), and independent invention to the Soviet atomic bomb.

Preeminent among regional accounts of technology is the series Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), of which 5 volumes in 16 parts have appeared since 1954, with a dozen more parts on the way. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald Hill, Islamic Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and K. D. White, Greek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), summarize technology’s history for those cultures.

Two conspicuous examples of somewhat isolated societies adopting and then abandoning technologies potentially useful in competition with other societies involve Japan’s abandonment of firearms, after their adoption in A.D. 1543, and China’s abandonment of its large oceangoing fleets after A.D. 1433. The former case is described by Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun (Boston: Hall, 1979), and the latter by Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). An essay entitled “The disappearance of useful arts,” pp. 190–210 in W. H. B. Rivers, Psychology and Ethnology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), gives similar examples among Pacific islanders.

Articles on the history of technology will be found in the quarterly journal Technology and Culture, published by the Society for the History of Technology since 1959. John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), analyzes the papers in its first twenty years.

Specific fields providing material for those interested in the history of technology include electric power, textiles, and metallurgy. Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), discusses the social, economic, political, and technical factors in the electrification of Western society from 1880 to 1930. Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York: Walker, 1995), describes the development of John Harrison’s chronometers that solved the problem of determining longitude at sea. E. J. W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), sets out the history of cloth in Eurasia from its beginnings more than 9,000 years ago. Accounts of the history of metallurgy over wide regions or even over the world include Robert Maddin, The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Theodore Wertime and James Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), R. D. Penhallurick, Tin in Antiquity (London: Institute of Metals, 1986), James Muhly, “Copper and Tin,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 43:155–535 (1973), and Alan Franklin, Jacqueline Olin, and Theodore Wertime, The Search for Ancient Tin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978). Accounts of metallurgy for local regions include R. F. Tylecote, The Early History of Metallurgy in Europe (London: Longman, 1987), and Donald Wagner, Iron and Steel in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1993).

Chapter 14

The fourfold classification of human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states owes much to two books by Elman Service: Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962) and Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975). A related classification of societies, using different terminology, is Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967). Three important review articles on the evolution of states and societies are Kent Flannery, “The cultural evolution of civilizations,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematic 3:399–426 (1972), the same author’s “Prehistoric social evolution,” pp. 1–26 in Carol and Melvin Ember, eds., Research Frontiers in Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1995), and Henry Wright, “Recent research on the origin of the state,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6:379–97 (1977). Robert Carneiro, “A theory of the origin of the state,” Science 169:733–38 (1970), argues that states arise through warfare under conditions in which land is ecologically limiting. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), relates state origins to large-scale irrigation and hydraulic management. Three essays in On the Evolution of Complex Societies, by William Sanders, Henry Wright, and Robert Adams (Malibu: Undena, 1984), present differing views of state origins, while Robert Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), contrasts state origins in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.

Among studies of the evolution of societies in specific parts of the world, sources for Mesopotamia include Robert Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 1992); for Mesoamerica, Richard Blanton et al., Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, Zapotec Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); for the Andes, Richard Burger, Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization (New York, Thames and Hudson, 1992), and Jonathan Haas et al., eds., The Origins and Development of the Andean State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); for American chiefdoms, Robert Drennan and Carlos Uribe, eds., Chiefdoms in the Americas (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987); for Polynesian societies, the books cited under Chapter 2; and for the Zulu state, Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).

Chapter 15

Books covering the prehistory of both Australia and New Guinea include Alan Thorne and Robert Raymond, Man on the Rim: The Peopling of the Pacific (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1989), J. Peter White and James O’Connell, A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea, and Sahul (Sydney: Academic Press, 1982), Jim Allen et al., eds., Sunda and Sahul (London: Academic Press, 1977), M. A. Smith et al., eds., Sahul in Review (Canberra: Australian National University, 1993), and Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (New York: Braziller, 1995). The first and third of these books discuss the prehistory of island Southeast Asia as well. A recent account of the history of Australia itself is Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, rev. ed. (Sydney: Collins, 1989). Some additional key papers on Australian prehistory are Rhys Jones, “The fifth continent: Problems concerning the human colonization of Australia,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 8:445–66 (1979), Richard Roberts et al., “Thermoluminescence dating of a 50,000-year-old human occupation site in northern Australia,” Nature 345:153–56 (1990), and Jim Allen and Simon Holdaway, “The contamination of Pleistocene radiocarbon determinations in Australia,” Antiquity 69:101–12 (1995). Robert Attenborough and Michael Alpers, eds., Human Biology in Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), summarizes New Guinea archaeology as well as languages and genetics.

As for the prehistory of Northern Melanesia (the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes, northeast and east of New Guinea), discussion will be found in the above-cited books by Thorne and Raymond, Flannery, and Allen et al. Papers pushing back the dates for the earliest occupation of Northern Melanesia include Stephen Wickler and Matthew Spriggs, “Pleistocene human occupation of the Solomon Islands, Melanesia,” Antiquity 62:703–6 (1988), Jim Allen et al., “Pleistocene dates for the human occupation of New Ireland, Northern Melanesia,” Nature 331:707–9 (1988), Jim Allen et al., “Human Pleistocene adaptations in the tropical island Pacific: Recent evidence from New Ireland, a Greater Australian outlier,” Antiquity 63:548–61 (1989), and Christina Pavlides and Chris Gosden, “35,000-year-old sites in the rainforests of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea,” Antiquity 68:604–10 (1994). References to the Austronesian expansion around the coast of New Guinea will be found under further readings for Chapter 17.

Two books on the history of Australia after European colonization are Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Knopf, 1987), and Michael Cannon, The Exploration of Australia (Sydney: Reader’s Digest, 1987). Aboriginal Australians themselves are the subject of Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982), and Henry Reynolds, Frontier (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987). An incredibly detailed history of New Guinea, from the earliest written records until 1902, is the three-volume work by Arthur Wichmann, Entdeckungs-geschichte von Neu-Guinea (Leiden: Brill, 1909–12). A shorter and more readable account is Gavin Souter, New Guinea: The Last Unknown (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964). Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York: Viking, 1987), movingly describes the first encounters of highland New Guineans with Europeans.

For detailed accounts of New Guinea’s Papuan (i.e., non-Austronesian) languages, see Stephen Wurm, Papuan Languages of Oceania (Tübingen: Guntet Narr, 1982), and William Foley, The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and of Australian languages, see Stephen Wurm, Languages of Australia and Tasmania (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), and R. M. W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

An entrance into the literature on plant domestication and origins of food production in New Guinea can be found in Jack Golson, “Bulmer phase II: Early agriculture in the New Guinea highlands,” pp. 484–91 in Andrew Pawley, ed., Man and a Half (Auckland: Polynesian Society, 1991), and D. E. Yen, “Polynesian cultigens and cultivars: The question of origin,” pp. 67–95 in Paul Cox and Sandra Banack, eds., Islands, Plants, and Polynesians (Portland: Dioscorides Press, 1991).

Numerous articles and books are devoted to the fascinating problem of why trading visits of Indonesians and of Torres Strait islanders to Australia produced only limited cultural change. C. C. Macknight, “Macassans and Aborigines,” Oceania 42:283–321 (1972), discusses the Macassan visits, while D. Walker, ed., Bridge and Barrier: The Natural and Cultural History of Torres Strait (Canberra: Australian National University, 1972), discusses connections at Torres Strait. Both connections are also discussed in the above-cited books by Flood, White and O’Connell, and Allen et al.

Early eyewitness accounts of the Tasmanians are reprinted in N. J. B. Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines 1802 (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1983), N. J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966), and Edward Duyker, The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janszoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, 1642 and 1772 (Hobart: St. David’s Park Publishing, 1992). Papers debating the effects of isolation on Tasmanian society include Rhys Jones, “The Tasmanian Paradox,” pp. 189–284 in R. V. S. Wright, ed., Stone Tools as Cultural Markers (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977); Rhys Jones, “Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish?” pp. 11–48 in R. Gould, ed., Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978); D. R. Horton, “Tasmanian adaptation,” Mankind 12:28–34 (1979); I. Walters, “Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish?: A theoretical consideration,” Artefact 6:71–77 (1981); and Rhys Jones, “Tasmanian Archaeology,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 24:423–46 (1995). Results of Robin Sim’s archaeological excavations on Flinders Island are described in her article “Prehistoric human occupation on the King and Furneaux Island regions, Bass Strait,” pp. 358–74 in Marjorie Sullivan et al., eds., Archaeology in the North (Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, 1994).

Chapters 16 and 17

Relevant readings cited under previous chapters include those on East Asian food production (Chapters 4–10), Chinese writing (Chapter 12), Chinese technology (Chapter 13), and New Guinea and the Bismarcks and Solomons in general (Chapter 15). James Matisoff, “Sino-Tibetan linguistics: Present state and future prospects,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 20:469–504 (1991), reviews Sino-Tibetan languages and their wider relationships. Takeru Akazawa and Emoke Szathmáry, eds., Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Dennis Etler, “Recent developments in the study of human biology in China: A review,” Human Biology 64:567–85 (1992), discuss evidence of Chinese or East Asian relationships and dispersal. Alan Thorne and Robert Raymond, Man on the Rim (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1989), describes the archaeology, history, and culture of Pacific peoples, including East Asians and Pacific islanders. Adrian Hill and Susan Serjeantson, eds., The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), interprets the genetics of Pacific islanders, Aboriginal Australians, and New Guineans in terms of their inferred colonization routes and histories. Evidence based on tooth structure is interpreted by Christy Turner III, “Late Pleistocene and Holocene population history of East Asia based on dental variation,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 73:305–21 (1987), and “Teeth and prehistory in Asia,” Scientific American 260 (2): 88–96 (1989).

Among regional accounts of archaeology, China is covered by Kwangchih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), David Keightley, ed., The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and David Keightley, “Archaeology and mentality: The making of China,” Representations 18:91–128 (1987). Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), examines China’s history since its political unification. Convenient archaeological accounts of Southeast Asia include Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); for Korea, Sarah Nelson, The Archaeology of Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for Indonesia, the Philippines, and tropical Southeast Asia, Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (Sydney: Academic Press, 1985); for peninsular Malaysia, Peter Bellwood, “Cultural and biological differentiation in Peninsular Malaysia: The last 10,000 years,” Asian Perspectives 32:37–60 (1993); for the Indian subcontinent, Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); for Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific with special emphasis on Lapita, a series of five articles in Antiquity 63:547–626 (1989) and Patrick Kirch, The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (London: Basil Blackwell, 1996); and for the Austronesian expansion as a whole, Andrew Pawley and Malcolm Ross, “Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 22:425–59 (1993), and Peter Bellwood et al., The Austronesians: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Canberra: Australian National University, 1995).

Geoffrey Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonization of the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), is an account of Polynesian voyaging, navigation, and colonization. The dating of the settlement of New Zealand and eastern Polynesia is debated by Atholl Anderson, “The chronology of colonization in New Zealand,” Antiquity 65:767–95 (1991), and “Current approaches in East Polynesian colonisation research,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 104:110–32 (1995), and Patrick Kirch and Joanna Ellison, “Palaeoenvironmental evidence for human colonization of remote Oceanic islands,” Antiquity 68:310–21 (1994).

Chapter 18

Many relevant further readings for this chapter will be found listed under those for other chapters: under Chapter 3 for the conquests of the Incas and Aztecs, Chapters 4–10 for plant and animal domestication, Chapter 11 for infectious diseases, Chapter 12 for writing, Chapter 13 for technology, Chapter 14 for political institutions, and Chapter 16 for China. Convenient worldwide comparisons of dates for the onset of food production will be found in Bruce Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995).

Some discussions of the historical trajectories summarized in Table 18.1, other than references given under previous chapters, are as follows. For England: Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London: Batsford, 1987). For the Andes: Jonathan Haas et al., The Origins and Development of the Andean State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Moseley, The Incas and Their Ancestors (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992); and Richard Burger, Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992). For Amazonia: Anna Roosevelt, Parmana (New York: Academic Press, 1980), and Anna Roosevelt et al., “Eighth millennium pottery from a prehistoric shell midden in the Brazilian Amazon,” Science 254:1621–24 (1991). For Mesoamerica: Michael Coe, Mexico, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), and Michael Coe, The Maya, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984). For the eastern United States: Vincas Steponaitis, “Prehistoric archaeology in the southeastern United States, 1970–1985,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 15:363–404 (1986); Bruce Smith, “The archaeology of the southeastern United States: From Dalton to de Soto, 10,500–500 B.P.,” Advances in World Archaeology 5:1–92 (1986); William Keegan, ed., Emergent Horticultural Economies of the Eastern Woodlands (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1987); Bruce Smith, “Origins of agriculture in eastern North America,” Science 246:1566–71 (1989); Bruce Smith, The Mississippian Emergence (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); and Judith Bense, Archaeology of the Southeastern United States (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994). A compact reference on Native Americans of North America is Philip Kopper, The Smithsonian Book of North American Indians before the Coming of the Europeans (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986). Bruce Smith, “The origins of agriculture in the Americas,” Evolutionary Anthropology 3:174–84 (1995), discusses the controversy over early versus late dates for the onset of New World food production.

Anyone inclined to believe that New World food production and societies were limited by the culture or psychology of Native Americans themselves, rather than by limitations of the wild species available to them for domestication, should consult three accounts of the transformation of Great Plains Indian societies by the arrival of the horse: Frank Row, The Indian and the Horse (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), John Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), and Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986).

Among discussions of the spread of language families in relation to the rise of food production, a classic account for Europe is Albert Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), while Peter Bellwood, “The Austronesian dispersal and the origin of languages,” Scientific American 265(1): 88–93 (1991), does the same for the Austronesian realm. Studies citing examples from around the world are the two books by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza et al. and the book by Merritt Ruhlen cited as further readings for the Prologue. Two books with diametrically opposed interpretations of the Indo-European expansion provide entrances into that controversial literature: Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). Sources on the Russian expansion across Siberia are George Lantzeff and Richard Pierce, Eastward to Empire (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1973), and W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (New York: Random House, 1994).

As for Native American languages, the majority view that recognizes many separate language families is exemplified by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, The Languages of Native America (Austin: University of Texas, 1979). The opposing view, lumping all Native American languages other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene languages into the Amerind family, is presented by Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

Standard accounts of the origin and spread of the wheel for transport in Eurasia are M. A. Littauer and J. H. Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1979), and Stuart Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).

Books on the rise and demise of the Norse colonies in Greenland and America include Finn Gad, The History of Greenland, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1971), G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Christopher Morris and D. James Rackham, eds., Norse and Later Settlement and Subsistence in the North Atlantic (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1992). Two volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison provide masterly accounts of early European voyaging to the New World: The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). The beginnings of Europe’s overseas expansion are treated by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London: Macmillan Education, 1987). Not to be missed is Columbus’s own day-by-day account of history’s most famous voyage, reprinted as Oliver Dunn and James Kelley, Jr., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

As an antidote to this book’s mostly dispassionate account of how peoples conquered or slaughtered other peoples, read the classic account of the destruction of the Yahi tribelet of northern California and the emergence of Ishi, its solitary survivor: Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). The disappearance of native languages in the Americas and elsewhere is the subject of Robert Robins and Eugenius Uhlenbeck, Endangered Languages (Providence: Berg, 1991), Joshua Fishman, Reversing Language Shift (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1991), and Michael Krauss, “The world’s languages in crisis,” Language 68:4–10 (1992).

Chapter 19

Books on the archaeology, prehistory, and history of the African continent include Roland Oliver and Brian Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, 5th ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1978), Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), Thurstan Shaw et al., eds., The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals, and Towns (New York: Routledge, 1993), and David Phillipson, African Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Correlations between linguistic and archaeological evidence of Africa’s past are summarized by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky, eds., The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The role of disease is discussed by Gerald Hartwig and K. David Patterson, eds., Disease in African History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978).

As for food production, many of the listed further readings for Chapters 4–10 discuss Africa. Also of note are Christopher Ehret, “On the antiquity of agriculture in Ethiopia,” Journal of African History 20:161–77 (1979); J. Desmond Clark and Steven Brandt, eds., From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Art Hansen and Della McMillan, eds., Food in Sub-Saharan Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1986); Fred Wendorf et al., “Saharan exploitation of plants 8,000 years B.P.,” Nature 359:721–24 (1992); Andrew Smith, Pastoralism in Africa (London: Hurst, 1992); and Andrew Smith, “Origin and spread of pastoralism in Africa,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 21:125–41 (1992).

For information about Madagascar, two starting points are Robert Dewar and Henry Wright, “The culture history of Madagascar,” Journal of World Prehistory 7:417–66 (1993), and Pierre Verin, The History of Civilization in North Madagascar (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1986). A detailed study of the linguistic evidence about the source for the colonization of Madagascar is Otto Dahl, Migration from Kalimantan to Madagascar (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991). Possible musical evidence for Indonesian contact with East Africa is described by A. M. Jones, Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Important evidence about the early settlement of Madagascar comes from dated bones of now extinct animals as summarized by Robert Dewar, “Extinctions in Madagascar: The loss of the subfossil fauna,” pp. 574–93 in Paul Martin and Richard Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). A tantalizing subsequent fossil discovery is reported by R. D. E. MacPhee and David Burney, “Dating of modified femora of extinct dwarf Hippopotamus from Southern Madagascar,” Journal of Archaeological Science 18:695–706 (1991). The onset of human colonization is assessed from paleobotanical evidence by David Burney, “Late Holocene vegetational change in Central Madagascar,” Quaternary Research 28:130–43 (1987).

Epilogue

Links between environmental degradation and the decline of civilization in Greece are explored by Tjeerd van Andel et al., “Five thousand years of land use and abuse in the southern Argolid,” Hesperia 55:103–28 (1986), Tjeerd van Andel and Curtis Runnels, Beyond the Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Curtis Runnels, “Environmental degradation in ancient Greece,” Scientific American 272(3): 72–75 (1995). Patricia Fall et al., “Fossil hyrax middens from the Middle East: A record of paleovegetation and human disturbance,” pp. 408–27 in Julio Betancourt et al., eds., Packrat Middens (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), does the same for the decline of Petra, as does Robert Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), for Mesopotamia.

A stimulating interpretation of the differences between the histories of China, India, Islam, and Europe is provided by E. L. Jones, The European Miracle, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), describes the power struggle that led to the suspension of China’s treasure fleets. The further readings for Chapters 16 and 17 provide other references for early Chinese history.

The impact of Central Asian nomadic pastoralists on Eurasia’s complex civilizations of settled farmers is discussed by Bennett Bronson, “The role of barbarians in the fall of states,” pp. 196–218 in Norman Yoffee and George Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).

The possible relevance of chaos theory to history is discussed by Michael Shermer in the paper “Exorcising Laplace’s demon: Chaos and antichaos, history and metahistory,” History and Theory 34:59–83 (1995). Shermer’s paper also provides a bibliography for the triumph of the QWERTY keyboard, as does Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983).

An eyewitness account of the traffic accident that nearly killed Hitler in 1930 will be found in the memoirs of Otto Wagener, a passenger in Hitler’s car. Those memoirs have been edited by Henry Turner, Jr., as a book, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Turner goes on to speculate on what might have happened if Hitler had died in 1930, in his chapter “Hitler’s impact on history,” in David Wetzel, ed., German History: Ideas, Institutions, and Individuals (New York: Praeger, 1996).

The many distinguished books by historians interested in problems of long-term history include Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1943), Patrick Gardiner, ed., Theories of History (New York: Free Press, 1959), Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Henry Hobhouse, Forces of Change (London: Sedgewick and Jackson, 1989).

Several writings by the biologist Ernst Mayr discuss the differences between historical and nonhistorical sciences, with particular reference to the contrast between biology and physics, but much of what Mayr says is also applicable to human history. His views will be found in his Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), chap. 25, and in Towards a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), chaps. 1–2.

The methods by which epidemiologists reach cause-and-effect conclusions about human diseases, without resorting to laboratory experiments on people, are discussed in standard epidemiology texts, such as A. M. Lilienfeld and D. E. Lilienfeld, Foundations of Epidemiology, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Uses of natural experiments are considered from the viewpoint of an ecologist in my chapter “Overview: Laboratory experiments, field experiments, and natural experiments,” pp. 3–22 in Jared Diamond and Ted Case, eds., Community Ecology (New York: Harper and Row; 1986). Paul Harvey and Mark Pagel, The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), analyzes how to extract conclusions by comparing species.

2003 Afterword

Two articles and one book summarize discoveries of the last half-dozen years about domestication of plants and animals, spreads of language families, and the relation of the spreads of language families to food production: Jared Diamond, “Evolution, consequences and the future of plant and animal domestication,” Nature 418:34–41 (2002); Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, “The first agricultural expansions: archaeology, languages, and people,” Science, in press; and Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew, Examining the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2002). Those two articles and that book give references to the detailed recent literature. A recent book-length account of the role of agricultural expansion in the origins of the modern Japanese people is Mark Hudson’s Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).

For a detailed account of New Zealand’s Musket Wars, see the book by R.D. Crosby, The Musket Wars: a History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806–45 (Auckland: Reed, 1999). Those wars are summarized much more briefly but placed in a larger context in two books by James Belich: The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1986) and Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders (Auckland: Penguin, 1996).

Two recent efforts by social scientists to identify proximate causes behind Europe’s and China’s divergence include an article by Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescences and economic growth in world history: rethinking the ‘rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13:323–89 (2002), and a book by Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). The opposite approach, the search for ultimate causes, is exemplified by a recent article by Graeme Lang, “State systems and the origins of modern science: a comparison of Europe and China,” East-West Dialog 2:16–30 (1997), and by a book by David Cosandey, Le Secret de I’Occident (Paris: Arléa, 1997). Those articles by Goldstone and by Lang are the sources of my quotations above.

The two papers analyzing the connection between economic indicators of modern wealth or growth rate, on the one hand, and long history of state societies or agriculture, on the other hand, are: Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs, “Biogeography and long-term economic development,” in press in European Economic Review; and Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman, “States and markets: the advantage of an early start,” Journal of Economic Growth 7:351–73 (2002).