The Rational Optimist (43 page)

p. 55 ‘a fortuitous genetic mutation triggered a change in human behaviour’. Klein, R.G. and Edgar, B. 2002.
The Dawn of Human Culture
. John Wiley.

p. 55 ‘FOXP2, which is essential to speech and language in both people and songbirds’. Fisher, S.E. and Scharff, C. 2009. FOXP2 as a molecular window into speech and language.
Trends in Genetics
25:166–77.doi:10.1016/j.tig.2009.03.002 A.

p. 55 ‘the mutations even change the way mice pups squeak’. Enard, W. et al. 2009. A humanized version of FOXP2 affects cortico-basal ganglia circuits in mice.
Cell
137:961–71.

p. 55 ‘Neanderthals share the very same two mutations’. Krause, J. et al. 2007. The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neandertals.
Current Biology
17:1908–12.

p. 57 ‘as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it’. Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. 1992. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In
The Adapted Mind
(eds J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby). Oxford University Press.

p. 57 ‘In Adam Smith’s words’. Both Adam Smith quotes are from book 1, part 2, of
The Wealth of Nations
(1776).

p. 57 ‘In the grasslands of Cameroon’. Rowland and Warnier, quoted in Shennan, S. 2002.
Genes, Memes and Human History
. Thames & Hudson.

p. 59 ‘The primatologist Sarah Brosnan tried to teach two different groups of chimpanzees about barter’. Brosnan, S.F., Grady, M.F., Lambeth, S.P., Schapiro, S.J. and Beran, M.J. 2008. Chimpanzee autarky. PLOS ONE 3(1):e1518. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001518.

p. 59 ‘Chimpanzees and monkeys can be taught to exchange tokens for food’. Chen, M.K. and Hauser, M. 2006. How basic are behavioral biases? Evidence from capuchin monkey trading behavior.
Journal of Political Economy
114:517–37.

p. 59 ‘not even a hint of this complementarity is found among nonhuman primates.’ Wrangham, R. 2009.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
. Perseus Books.

p. 60 ‘Birute Galdikas reared a young orang utan’. Galdikas, B. 1995.
Reflections of Eden
. Little, Brown.

p. 60 ‘fire itself is hard to start, but easy to share’. Ofek, H. 2001.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 61 ‘males and females specialise and then share food’. Low, B. 2000.
Why Sex Matters: a Darwinian Look at Human Behavior
. Princeton University Press.

p. 61 ‘men hunt, women and children gather’. Kuhn, S.L. and Stiner, M.C. 2006. What’s a mother to do? A hypothesis about the division of labour and modern human origins.
Current Anthropology
47:953–80.

p. 61 ‘making strikingly different decisions about how to obtain resources within that habitat’. Kaplan, H. and Gurven, M. 2005. The natural history of human food sharing and cooperation: a review and a new multi-individual approach to the negotiation of norms. In
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests
(eds H. Gintis, S. Bowles, R. Boyd and E. Fehr). MIT Press.

p. 62 ‘Martu women in western Australia hunt goanna lizards’. Bliege Bird, R. 1999. Cooperation and conflict: the behavioural ecology of the sexual division of labour.
Evolutionary Anthropology
8:65–75.

p. 62 ‘Women demand meat as their social right, and they get it – otherwise they leave their husbands, marry elsewhere or make love to other men’. Biesele, M. 1993.
Women Like Meat
. Indiana University Press.

p. 62 ‘In the Mersey estuary near Liverpool’. Stringer, C. 2006.
Homo Britannicus
. Penguin.

p. 63 ‘In the Alyawarre aborigines of Australia’. Bliege Bird, R. and Bird, D. 2008. Why women hunt: risk and contemporary foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal community.
Current Anthropology
49:655–93.

p. 63 ‘A sexual division of labour would exist even without childcare constraints.’ It is reasonable to wonder if a hundred thousand years of doing different things have not left their mark on at least some of the modern leisure pursuits of the two sexes. Shopping for shoes is a bit like gathering – picking out the perfect item in a crowd of possibilities. Playing golf is a bit like hunting – aiming a ballistic projectile at a target in the great outdoors. It is also noticeable how much more carnivorous most men are than most women. In the West, female vegetarians outnumber male ones by more than two to one, but even among non-vegetarians it is common to find men who take only a token nibble at the vegetables on their plate, and women who do the same with meat. Of course, it is part of my case that in the Stone Age men supplied gathering women with meat and women supplied hunting men with veg, so both sexes were omnivores, but perhaps when it came to ‘stopping for lunch’, the women would eat the nuts they had gathered while elsewhere the men cooked up a tortoise or cut a steak off their first kill. Such speculation is not, I admit, very scientific.

p. 63 ‘It is as if the species now has two brains’. Joe Henrich first made this point to me late at night in a bar in Indiana.

p. 63 ‘men seem to strive to catch big game to feed the whole band’. Bliege Bird, R. and Bird, D. 2008. Why women hunt: risk and contemporary foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal community.
Current Anthropology
49:655–93.

p. 63 ‘Hadza men spend weeks trying to catch a huge eland antelope’. Hawkes, K. 1996. Foraging differences between men and women. In
The Archaeology of Human Ancestry
(eds James Steele and Stephen Shennan). Routledge.

p. 63 ‘men on the island of Mer in the Torres Strait’. Bliege Bird, R. 1999. Cooperation and conflict: the behavioural ecology of the sexual division of labour.
Evolutionary Anthropology
8:65–75.

p. 64 ‘Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner think that modern, African-origin
Homo sapiens
had a sexual division of labour and Neanderthals did not’. Kuhn, S.L. and Stiner, M.C. 2006. What’s a mother to do? A hypothesis about the division of labour and modern human origins.
Current Anthropology
47:953–80.

p. 64 ‘first advocated by Glyn Isaac in 1978’. Isaac, G.L. and Isaac, B. 1989.
The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glyn Isaac.
Cambridge University Press.

p. 65 ‘To paraphrase H.G. Wells’. Wells, H.G. 1902. ‘The Discovery of the Future’. Lecture at the Royal Institution, 24 January 1902, published in
Nature
65:326–31. Reproduced with the permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.

p. 66 ‘to land, probably around 45,000 years ago, on the continent of Sahul’. O’Connell, J.F. and Allen, J. 2007. Pre-LGM Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) and the archaeology of Early Modern Humans. In Mellars, P., Boyle, K., Bar-Yosef, O. et al.,
Rethinking the Human Revolution
, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 395–410.

p. 66 ‘genetics tell an unambiguous story of almost complete isolation since the first migration’. Thangaraj, K. et al. 2005. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders.
Science
308: 996; Macaulay, V. et al. 2005. Single, rapid coastal settlement of Asia revealed by analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes.
Science
308:1034–6; Hudjashov et al. 2007. Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis.
PNAS
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p. 67 ‘Jonathan Kingdon first suggested’. Kingdon, J. 1996.
Self-Made Man: Human Evolution from Eden to Extinction
. John Wiley.

p. 67 ‘All along the coast of Asia, the beachcombers would have found fresh water’. Faure, H., Walter, R.C. and Grant, D.E. 2002. The coastal oasis: Ice Age springs on emerged continental shelves.
Global and Planetary Change
33:47–56.

p. 68 ‘so louse genes suggest’. Pennisi, E. 2004. Louse DNA suggests close contact between Early Humans.
Science
306:210.

p. 68 ‘conceivably even close enough to acquire a smattering of their cousins’ genes’. Svante Paabo, personal communication. See also Evans, P.D. et al. 2006. Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage.
PNAS
103:18178–83.

p. 69 ‘driven to the brink of extinction by human predation’. Stiner, M. C. and Kuhn, S. L. 2006. Changes in the ‘connectedness’ and resilience of palaeolithic societies in Mediterranean ecosystems.
Human Ecology
34:693–712.

p. 69 ‘in the Mojave desert of California, ravens occasionally kill tortoises for food’. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/E/usgs398.html.

p. 70 ‘shells, fossil coral, steatite, jet, lignite, hematite, and pyrite were used to make ornaments and objects’. Stringer, C. and McKie, R. 1996.
African Exodus
. Jonathan Cape.

p. 70 ‘A flute made from the bone of a vulture’. Conard, N.J., Maline, M. and Munzel, S.C. 2009. New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany.
Nature
46:737–740.

p. 71 ‘jewellery made of shells from the Black Sea and amber from the Baltic’. Ofek, H. 2001.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 71 ‘This is in striking contrast to the Neanderthals, whose stone tools were virtually always made from raw material available within an hour’s walk of where the tool was used’. Stringer. C. 2006.
Homo Britannicus
. Penguin: ‘Whereas virtually all Neanderthal stone tools were made from raw materials sourced within an hour’s walk from their sites, Cro-Magnons were either much more mobile or had exchange networks for their resources covering hundreds of miles’.

p. 73 ‘say the evolutionary biologists Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace’. Pagel, M. and Mace, R. 2004. The cultural wealth of nations.
Nature
428:275–8.

p. 73 ‘Ian Tattersall remarks’. Tattersall, I. 1997.
Becoming Human
. Harcourt.

p. 73 ‘It is such a human a thing to do, and so obvious an explanation of the thing that needs explaining: the capacity for innovation’. See for example Horan, R.D., Bulte, E.H. and Shogren, J.F. 2005. How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: the Neanderthal enigma revisited and revised.
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
58:1–29.

p. 75 ‘defined by the stockbroker David Ricardo in 1817’. Ricardo, D. 1817.
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
. John Murray.

p. 75 ‘It is such an elegant idea that it is hard to believe that Palaeolithic people took so long to stumble upon it (or economists to define it)’. It is also surprising how hard it is for many intellectuals to grasp its essentials. For a catalogue of its misrepresentations, see Paul Krugman’s essay ‘Ricardo’s Difficult Idea’: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm.

pp. 75–6 ‘Insect social life is built not on increases in the complexity of individual behaviour, “but instead on specialization among individuals”.’ Holldobbler, B. and Wilson, E.O. 2008.
The Superorganism
. Norton.

p. 77 ‘Even Charles Darwin reckoned’. Darwin, C. R. 1871.
The Descent of Man
. Quoted in Ofek, H. 2001.
Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 77 ‘According to the anthropologist Joe Henrich’. Heinrich, J. 2004. Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses – the Tasmanian case.
American Antiquity
69:197–214.

p. 78 ‘The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania’. Heinrich, J. 2004. Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses – the Tasmanian case.
American Antiquity
69:197–214.

p. 79 ‘it was not that there was no innovation; it was that regress overwhelmed progress’. Diamond, J. 1993. Ten thousand years of solitude.
Discover
, March 1993.

p. 80 ‘The Tasmanian market was too small to sustain many specialised skills’. Heinrich, J. 2004. Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses – the Tasmanian case.
American Antiquity
69:197–214.

p. 81 ‘On Kangaroo Island and Flinders Island, human occupation petered out, probably by extinction, a few thousand years after isolation’. Bowdler, S. 1995. Offshore island and maritime explorations in Australian prehistory.
Antiquity
69:945–58.