The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture
384
The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture
384Paperback
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Overview
Over the course of five million years, our primate ancestors evolved from a modest population of sub-Saharan apes into the globally dominant species Homo sapiens. Along the way, humans became incredibly diverse in appearance, language, and culture. How did all of this happen? In The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Peter Bellwood synthesizes research from archaeology, biology, anthropology, and linguistics to immerse us in the saga of human evolution, from the earliest traces of our hominin forebears in Africa, through waves of human expansion across the continents, and to the rise of agriculture and explosive demographic growth around the world.
Bellwood presents our modern diversity as a product of both evolution, which led to the emergence of the genus Homo approximately 2.5 million years ago, and migration, which carried humans into new environments. He introduces us to the ancient hominins—including the australopithecines, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals, and others—before turning to the appearance of Homo sapiens circa 300,000 years ago and subsequent human movement into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas. Bellwood then explores the invention of agriculture, which enabled farmers to disperse to new territories over the last 10,000 years, facilitating the spread of language families and cultural practices. The outcome is now apparent in our vast array of contemporary ethnicities, linguistic systems, and customs.
The fascinating origin story of our varied human existence, The Five-Million-Year Odyssey underscores the importance of recognizing our shared genetic heritage to appreciate what makes us so diverse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691258812 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2024 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 551,604 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface xv
How an Archaeologist Discovered Languages and Genes xvi
Reconstructing the Past from Multiple Sources xix
On "Prehistory" xxi
1 The Odyssey Revealed 1
Five Million Years of Hominin Achievement 1
Brains, Cultural Creations, and Population Numbers 4
Hominin Evolution as a Four-Act Drama 8
Population Growth and Migration: Why They Mattered 11
Our World as the Stage 12
How Old Is It? Dating the Past 14
2 The Odyssey Begins 17
How Did Hominins Come into Existence? 17
What Was an Early Hominin? 18
The "Missing Link" and the Elusive Common Ancestor of Hominins and Panins 23
On the Panin/Hominin Split 25
Beyond the Nest: The First Hominins Emerge 27
Pliocene Ancestors: The Australopithecines 28
"Man the Tool-Maker"? 31
Big Strides after 2.5 Million Years Ago: Early Homo 32
The Origins of Human Behavior 36
3 Out of Africa 40
Pleistocene Chronology: The Basics 43
The Pleistocene Glacial-Interglacial Cycles, and Hominin Migration to Asia 44
Escaping the Homeland 46
Early Exits from Africa: How Many? 47
Early Pleistocene Homo Reaches North Africa and Asia 48
Homo erectus: Getting to China and Java 51
The Enigma of Flores Island 53
Luzon, the Philippines 57
The Handiwork of Homo erectus and Its Contemporaries 58
4 New Species Emerge 60
Understanding the Course of Human Evolution 63
Homo antecessor in Europe 66
The Mysterious Homo heidelbergensis 67
The Acheulean 69
The "Big Three" Species of the Later Middle Pleistocene 71
The Neanderthals 72
The Denisovans and the Harbin Human Group 76
Neanderthals and Denisovans: Braving the Cold and Painting the Walls? 79
What about the Other Middle Pleistocene Hominins? 82
5 The Mysterious Newcomer 85
Here Comes Homo sapiens 87
The Riddle of Early Homo sapiens 89
The Emergence of Homo sapiens: Skulls and Genes 90
Beyond Africa, with a Mystery 92
The Emergence of Homo sapiens: Archaeology 95
The Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia 97
Homo sapiens and the Extinction of the Neanderthals 99
The Spread of Homo sapiens toward Eastern Eurasia 101
Onward to Sahul 102
When Was Australia Settled? 104
How Was Australia Settled? 105
How Many First Australians? 107
A Beyond-Africa Scenario 109
Lingering Mysteries: A Personal Tale 110
6 Stretching the Boundaries 112
Braving More Cold: Northeast Asia and the Americas 112
Upper Paleolithic Japan 118
A Japanese Origin for the First Americans? 121
Getting to America 123
Evidence for the First Americans 124
Languages and the First Americans 127
Genetics and the First Americans 128
Population Y? 129
South of the Ice 131
The Holocene Settlement of Arctic Canada: Paleo-Inuit and Thule Inuit 133
7 How Food Production Changed the World 136
What Was Ancient Food Production? 137
The Advantages of Food Production 138
The Ancient Domesticated Species That Still Feed Us Today 140
The Homelands of Food Production 141
Coincidence? 144
What Did Humans Do to Plants and Animals in Order to Make Them Domesticated? 145
Did the First Farmers Promote Plant and Animal Domestication Deliberately? 146
Why Domestication? 146
8 Homelands of Plant and Animal Domestication 152
The Fertile Crescent 153
The Natufian 157
The Fertile Crescent Neolithic 158
Cyprus 163
A Land of Demographic and Cultural Growth 164
The Transformation of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic 165
Early Farmers in East Asia 167
Millets and Rice 169
Major Trends in the East Asian Neolithic 170
The East Asian Neolithic Population Machine 173
The African Sahel and Sudan 174
The Saharan Humid Phase 176
Farmers and Herders from the Fertile Crescent 177
Savanna and Parkland 178
The Domesticated Economy behind the Bantu Migrations 179
Highland New Guinea 180
An Equatorial Homeland of Agriculture 183
The American Homelands of Agriculture 184
America's First Farmers 187
South America: The Andes and Amazonia 191
Mesoamerica 192
The Eastern Woodlands of the United States 194
The Story So Far 196
9 Voices from the Deep Past 197
The Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis 197
Understanding the Human Past through Language 199
Why Are Language Families Important for Reconstructing Prehistory? 202
Do Language Families Equate with "People"? 207
The Origins of Language Families 208
The Spreads of Language Families: A Comparative Perspective from Recent History 210
Did Elite Dominance Spread Languages? 216
Onward toward a Global Prehistory of Human Populations 219
10 The Fertile Crescent and Western Eurasia 220
Early Fertile Crescent Villagers 221
Neolithic Migration across Europe, 7000 to 4000 BCE: The Archaeology 224
Neolithic Migration across Europe: The Genetics 228
Migrations from the Eastern Fertile Crescent 229
Early Farmers in South Asia 231
Europe and the Steppes 235
The Contentious Prehistory of the Indo-European Language Family 237
Did Yamnaya People from the Pontic Steppes Spread the Oldest Indo-European Languages? 242
South Asia beyond the Indus Valley 245
South India and the Dravidian Language Family 247
What Happened Next in Southwest Asia? 249
11 Asia-Pacific Adventures 251
Ancient Human Populations of East Asia and Sahul 254
Plotting the Course of Transeurasian Dispersal 255
The Yellow River and the Sino-Tibetan Language Family 259
Southern China and the Neolithic Settlement of Mainland Southeast Asia 261
The Austroasiatic Mystery 264
The Austronesians 266
Lessons from the Austronesians 269
Malayo-Polynesians and Papuans 270
The Settlement of Polynesia 273
Rice versus Yams? 276
12 Africa, Australia, and the Americas 278
The African Continent 278
Afro-Asiatic Migrations from the Southern Levant into North Africa 279
The Transformation of Sub-Saharan Africa 281
The Bantu Diaspora 283
The Australian Continent 286
The American Continents 293
Holocene Migrations in the Americas 293
North American Hunter-Gatherers on the Move 294
Farming Spreads in the Americas: Some Examples 298
Algonquians and Uto-Aztecans 300
13 Ape to Agriculture 305
Did Food Production Change the Rules? 310
Acknowledgments 315
Notes 317
Index 349
What People are Saying About This
“An entertaining introduction to deep human history that avoids Eurocentric perspectives and draws on Bellwood’s firsthand experience through six decades of transformation in archaeology.”—Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art“Peter Bellwood is the foremost expert on the spread of farming and peoples around the world. In this wonderful book, he tells the story of humans and protohumans during the past five million years, since our ancestors and chimpanzees’ ancestors parted evolutionary company. Bellwood’s comprehensive, balanced, and fascinating account is a masterpiece of making complicated events understandable. Put this book at the top of your reading pile!”—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel“Five million years of humanity unlocked by combining multiple lines of evidence, not only from the archaeological record but also from human genes and families of related languages. Peter Bellwood gives a rich and lucid account of where we come from and how our migrations shaped the modern world. A brilliant book that deserves a place on your nightstand.”—Martine Robbeets, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History“An engaging and insightful tour of human evolution and cultural history from our origins more that five million years ago to the global spread of modern humans and the beginnings of agriculture. Bellwood masterfully weaves together the wealth of scientific evidence from paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics to elucidate our evolutionary trail and how we got to be us.”—Terry Harrison, New York University“A magisterial account of the history of our species on its long journey from small-brained ape-like creatures to the people we understand ourselves to be. Peter Bellwood is a giant in his field, and he brings a breadth and depth of knowledge to this book that is marvelous to behold, deftly unrolling five million years of human evolution—both physical and cultural—with consummate authority and skill. A grand tutorial for anyone interested in the deep history of humankind.”—Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia