Publisher's Synopsis
The Last 73,400 Years: Social Relations in Prehistory... Of the thousands of species which have visited the Earth, less than 4 percent have survived; and all members of the genus Homo have vanished, except for one physically unimposing species: Homo sapiens. How did we survive and manage to thrive during the unimaginably treacherous climate of the last ice age? Explanations of our very peculiar survival commonly cite possession of language, which would facilitate coordination for attack and defense, or our capacity to construct complex tools. However, others in frustration simply suggest that it was good fortune, beating the odds by simple chance. But in this new book, a reexamination of this issue is presented, starting with our near extinction 73,400 years ago, after the super-eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra. We know that having complex tools and language failed to assure survival because most humans disappeared with the ecological destruction of that event. The Last 73,400 Years interrogates the social relations of those who have survived to the present. Rather than persisting in the conventional assumption of a world of abundance with very few people, The Last 73,400 Years confronts the reality of endemic competition imposed by high fertility among hunter-gatherers in a world of highly variable and often dangerously collapsing ecologies, where effective claims on territorial resources were generally essential to survival. While embracing recent findings in archaeology, genetics and climatology, it provides a radically new understanding of the contemporary Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa and for the first time presents an image of the social structures associated with two cultures in Africa, 73.4 to 59 thousand years ago, and several cultures in Europe, 36.5 to 12 thousand years ago. The book concludes with a discussion of issues in contemporary Chinese archaeology. It is fully unlike anything published heretofore. This book should be read by every person with
