Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis
Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis
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DOI：
10.2307/2694241
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发表时间：
2001-07
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
P. Richerson;R. Boyd;R. Bettinger
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
P. Richerson;R. Boyd;R. Bettinger
几个独立的生存集约化的轨迹，往往导致农业，在全新世开始。从更新世开始，甚至从更新世晚期开始，人类人口在其他方面都相当复杂的时候，也没有发现植物丰富的集约化。最近的冰和海洋核心气候代理数据表明，末次冰期气候非常不利于农业-干燥，大气中二氧化碳含量低，在很短的时间尺度上变化极大。我们假设农业在末次冰期的条件下是不可能的。在气候突然最终改善之后，一些地区立即开始实施植物密集型资源利用战略，尽管在其他地方转向植物要晚得多。几乎所有的生存集约化的轨迹在全新世是渐进的，最终农业成为主导战略，但边缘环境。我们假设，在全新世，农业是，从长远来看，强制性的。我们使用数学分析来论证，集约化轨迹的限速过程通常必须是生存技术或与生存相关的社会组织的创新速度。按照观察到的创新速度，人口增长将始终足够快，足以维持高水平的人口压力。有几个过程似乎将文化进化的速度减慢到我们在最有利的情况下观察到的最大值以下。
Several independent trajectories of subsistence intensification, often leading to agriculture, began during the Holocene. No plant-rich intensifications are known from the Pleistocene, even from the late Pleistocene when human populations were otherwise quite sophisticated. Recent data from ice and ocean-core climate proxies show that last glacial climates were extremely hostile to agriculture—dry, low in atmospheric CO2, and extremely variable on quite short time scales. We hypothesize that agriculture was impossible under last-glacial conditions. The quite abrupt final amelioration of the climate was followed immediately by the beginnings of plant-intensive resource-use strategies in some areas, although the turn to plants was much later elsewhere. Almost all trajectories of subsistence intensification in the Holocene are progressive, and eventually agriculture became the dominant strategy in all but marginal environments. We hypothesize that, in the Holocene, agriculture was, in the long run, compulsory. We use a mathematical analysis to argue that the rate-limiting process for intensification trajectories must generally be the rate of innovation of subsistence technology or subsistence-related social organization. At the observed rates of innovation, population growth will always be rapid enough to sustain a high level of population pressure. Several processes appear to retard rates of cultural evolution below the maxima we observe in the most favorable cases.