Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
first in order to make them easier to flake and work. Trade over great distances
(hundreds of kilometres) became more common and the exchange of goods allowed
social networks and reciprocal alliances to be developed, providing essential insurance
for desert dwellers in times of drought. The LSA tool-kits are highly diverse and often
very specialised.
Two items in the Upper Palaeolithic/LSA tool-kit were later to have important
repercussions for humanity as a whole, namely, sickles and grindstones. The sickles
were used to harvest wild cereal grasses, and consisted of a handle (of bone, wood
or antler) and small, sharp worked flakes, or
microliths
, attached to the sickle handle
with gum, resin or other adhesive. The grindstones generally consisted of a lower
grindstone shaped from a wide, upwardly concave slab of sandstone or other suitable
rock and a smaller upper grinder that was often roughly cylindrical in cross-section.
An alternative to stone grinders, and one still widely used in the drier regions of
Africa and Asia, consists of a deep, hollowed-out wooden mortar fashioned from a
tree branch or trunk and a solid length of polished wood about 10 cm in diameter and
up to 1.5 m long used as a pestle to grind roots and seeds. A third innovation that
appeared towards the end of this period, in what is variously called the
Mesolithic
,or
Epi-Palaeolithic
, was the discovery of firing clay to make earthenware pots that could
be used to store food items safely away from rodents or to cook food. The significance
of these three items lies in the roles they played in pre-adapting human societies to
the eventual harvesting and storage of domesticated cereal grains - the signature of
the Neolithic.
The
Neolithic
, or 'new stone age', began about 11,000 years ago and is characterised
by the independent domestication of plants and animals at a few key localities in
the Near East (the so-called 'Fertile Crescent'), China, India-Pakistan, West Africa,
Mexico and South America. Once human societies began to domesticate and herd
suitable animals, such as goats, sheep and cattle (
Figure 17.4
), the practice spread
very rapidly and, within a few thousand years, cultivating crops and herding domestic
animals became the norm in most parts of the world, including the deserts and
desert margins (Clark and Brandt,
1984
; Diamond,
1998
). To go from collecting and
storing wild cereal grains to harvesting and storing their domesticated equivalents
is relatively straightforward, as Ann Stemler pointed out more than thirty years ago
(Stemler,
1980
). The prerequisites are, first, an efficient harvesting tool, which was
already in use at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic/LSA in the form of the sickle.
Second, early farmers needed to collect, store and later sow the heads of mutant wild
plants in which the abscission zone at the base of the inflorescence fails to function
and leaves the cereal grains or wild grass seeds on the plant until late in the growing
season instead of releasing them intermittently, as befits the reproductive survival
strategies of wild grasses.
The herds of domestic animals provided the Neolithic inhabitants of the arid and
semi-arid lands of Eurasia, Africa and South and Central America with milk and
