# The 10,000 Year Explosion - a book review **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 22, 2011, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355 "2011-04-22T14:17:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2011, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/61 "2011-04-23T12:07:35Z")
> [@sh1bu1](#): > > Evolution works more quickly in small, isolated populations. Favorable mutations are rare, and many of those that do occur are lost by chance. In the small human populations of the Old Stone Age, establishing such mutations typically took hundreds of thousands of years. It’s not that it took that long for favorable mutations to spread - the problem was generating them in the first place. But as the human population sizes increased, particularly with the advent of agriculture, favorable mutations occurred more and more often. Sixty thousand years ago, before the expansion out of Africa, there were something like a quarter of a million modern humans. By the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago, that number was roughly 60 million. Favorable mutations that had previously occurred every 100,000 years or so were now showing up every 400 years. - Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, from The 10,000 Year Explosion, Chapter 3, “Agriculture: the Big Change,” page 65 ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2011, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/62 "2011-04-23T13:27:25Z")
> [@gcochran](#): > > Moreover, we have a strange situation in which someone can be acclaimed by the general public as an expert on evolution without knowing jack about population genetics or quantitative genetics. Gould, for example, didn’t. Ernst Mayr didn’t. This is a whole lot like having a supposed expert on the future of the Solar System who doesn’t know F = MA or Kepler’s laws (let alone relativity) - but that’s the way it goes. > > The fraction of people outside the field who know enough to recognize the empty suits is fairly small: they have to have some mathematical chops, and how many people in public life can say that? Paul Krugman does: he got interested, which went pretty easily because evolutionary genetics has fair overlap with microeconomics. He concluded that Gould was the John Kenneth Galbraith of evolutionary biology - **a blowhard who couldn’t do the math and had no real respect in the profession**. Someone really doesn’t like Gould. …Greg, “accelerated evolution” has got to be **the least** controversial and speculative thing in that book of yours. Criticisms of your book come largely from people questioning: your repeated use/support of human racial divisions, the stress of race’s genetic importance, the linkage of (vaguely understood) complex behavioural traits (such as cognitive ability) to a speculative relationship of unknown genes. So lets do a quick recap, 1. you stress the importance of genetics to racial divisions (commonly rejected in biology). 2. you stress the importance of genetics to cognitive ability (highly speculative). 3. you directly link cognitive ability to racial divisions through the concept of accelerated evolution (highly questionable). Here is a quote from your book that seems to cover all three points. [QUOTE=The 10,000 Year Explosion] It has been said that the differences between human populations are superficial, consisting of surface characteristics such as skin color and hair color rather than changes in liver function or brain development. (snip) Of course, since experts can easily determine race from skeletal features, it appears that those skin-deep differences go all the way to the bone. In fact, recent work has shown that there are population differences in genes affecting brain development, which we’ll mention in Chapter 4. It was natural for previous generations of physical anthropologists to concentrate on differences in easily observed characteristics, but that never implied that all differences would be easily observable. It was the scientists that were superficial, not the differences. [/QUOTE] **NND** (the person who started this thread), uses your book/theories to cobble together a loosely connected theory on the behavioural nature of “the races.” [QUOTE=New Deal Democrat] If one wants to believe that race is a social construct, that “we’re all the same under the skin,” that IQ differences don’t matter, and that there are no significant racial differences in average aptitude and behavior, one needs to believe that little or nothing has changed since the races differentiated 40,000 years ago. If one acknowledges persistent differences in performance and behavior between the races, one has to disagree. [/QUOTE] I’m curious, what is your opinion of his theories? ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2011, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/63 "2011-04-23T14:20:11Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > The Australian Aborigines did not deforest Australia. They did not practice farming. Utterly wrong, yet again. Why do you insist on pontificating on subjects of which you are clearly grossly ignorant? ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2011, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/64 "2011-04-23T16:12:04Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > The Australian Aborigines did not deforest Australia. They did not practice farming. > [@Blake](#): > > Utterly wrong, yet again. > > Why do you insist on pontificating on subjects of which you are clearly grossly ignorant? It is quite difficult to find hunter-gather groups that have had no contact with agrarian societies. Where there are such hunter-gatherers they do not seem to understand that plants grow from seeds. **The Australian Aborigines** were quite familiar with the seeds of various grasses, but they **seemed to be unaware that the grasses and other plants grow from seeds**. (Elkin, 1974, 51). [http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/rochelle.f/The-Discovery-of-Agriculture.html](http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/rochelle.f/The-Discovery-of-Agriculture.html) The main food source for the early Aborigines came from the sea. Their boats were made by cutting a long oval of bark from an eucalyptus tree and binding both ends. A fire was kept in the bottom of the boat, on clay, so that the fish could be cooked and eaten at sea. The fragility of these boats suited the nomadic way of life as they were easy to carry and just as easy to replace. The men hunted emus, kangaroo, lizards, and geese, with spears, stone axes, and a fire stick. The women did their vegetable/fruit collecting with digging sticks. They also gathered turtles, insects, nuts and honey. The only semidomestic animals were the wild, young dingos, who probably migrated with the original natives. Water holes and rain pools were the source of water. **There was no indication of planned agriculture.** > **[Australian Aborigines](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/australia/aborigines.htm)** As the late Pleistocene processes of plant selection and environmental modification towards agriculture unfolded in the New Guinea region of the Sahul continent, the Australian Aboriginal economy of hunting and gathering was maintained, seemingly without any participation in, or diffusion of, this agricultural innovation to the north. [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+development+of+Sahul+agriculture+with+Australia+as+bystander.-a017845241](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+development+of+Sahul+agriculture+with+Australia+as+bystander.-a017845241) It has long bee remarked that Australia remained a nation of nomadic hunter-gatherers while most people in the rest of the world, including New Guinea, became cultivators. Other traits of the Neolithic period, such as the domestication of animals and the use of pottery, likewise were never adopted in Australia these traits never penetrated the fifth continent… Possible reasons put forward to explain why Australian Aborigines did not become farmers have been lack of contact with agricultural groups, cultural conservatism, hostility to newcomers, lack of suitable plants and animals to domesticate, and deliberate choice. [http://www.janesoceania.com/australia\_aboriginal\_agriculture/index1.htm](http://www.janesoceania.com/australia_aboriginal_agriculture/index1.htm) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/65 "2011-04-24T00:05:18Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > To give an example that does not extend by too much the restraints of political correctness, when dingos entered Australia over five thousand years ago marsupial wolfs became extinct. Marsupial wolves occupied the same ecological niche as dingos, and looked surprisingly similar to wolves, but they were less evolved, and could not compete with the dingos. > > [Thylacine - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial_wolf) “Less evolved” and “could not compete” are not the same thing. One again: **There is no “ladder of evolution.”** ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/66 "2011-04-24T00:52:17Z")
Why does he keep posting all these links with no comments? ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/67 "2011-04-24T00:58:56Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Well they’re mongoloids so they’re practically black. They must be genetically predisposed to be inferior.:rolleyes: Amazing how the false ideology of Social Darwininsm, that has tens of millon killings in its record, is still very dominant in thought of the Western Culture. And it surprised me that this ideology is still published in so many books. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/68 "2011-04-24T01:01:18Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Why does he keep posting all these links with no comments? It would help if instead of you telling him he’s wrong, tell him what he’s wrong about and why. I get your comment on agriculture. There might have been some, but not much in Australia pre-European contact. As for “deforestation”, I know the Aboriginals used fire to drive prey, but did that actually cause “deforestation”? I’m sure it cause some, but how much? And yeah, the comment about the marsupial wolf going extinct because of the dingo is a pretty wild claim, especially since his own cites contradict that claim. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/69 "2011-04-24T01:08:05Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > It has long bee remarked that Australia remained a nation of nomadic hunter-gatherers while most people in the rest of the world, including New Guinea, became cultivators. Other traits of the Neolithic period, such as the domestication of animals and the use of pottery, likewise were never adopted in Australia these traits never penetrated the fifth continent… > > Possible reasons put forward to explain why Australian Aborigines did not become farmers have been lack of contact with agricultural groups, cultural conservatism, hostility to newcomers, lack of suitable plants and animals to domesticate, and deliberate choice. > [http://www.janesoceania.com/australia\_aboriginal\_agriculture/index1.htm](http://www.janesoceania.com/australia_aboriginal_agriculture/index1.htm) Yes, the people of the mountain New Guinea are farmers, but theirs agriculture was limited to taro. Although aboriguines had sporadical contacts with New Guineans, I bet the reason why agriculture didn’t spread to Australia was that taro didn’t addapt to Australia. People become farmers when they found suitable plants to grow. As far as I know, Australia didn’t have suitable plants at all. And with respect to domestic animals, we should remember Australia only had marsupials. As far as I know, there aren’t marsupial equivalents to cows, goats, horses or llamas at all. The only domestic animal aboriguins had were dogs, and they didn’t have anything more where to chose. So, the problem with the development of Australia was the poverty of the land. Today all the agricultural produce and farm animals of Australia is immigrant. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/70 "2011-04-24T01:45:19Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > It would help if instead of you telling him he’s wrong, tell him what he’s wrong about and why. Where would I start? Somebody corrected him regarding the concept of “more evolved” in the second post, and he is still repeating it. And that is the least of his errors. > [@](#): > > As for “deforestation”, I know the Aboriginals used fire to drive prey, but did that actually cause “deforestation”? I’m sure it cause some, but how much? Conservatively they removed at least 60% of the forest cover of the entire continent. Realistically it was closer to 90%. > [@](#): > > And yeah, the comment about the marsupial wolf going extinct because of the dingo is a pretty wild claim, especially since his own cites contradict that claim. Like I said, where do you start? ---
**Author:** ![gcochran](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7feea3/32.png) [@gcochran](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gcochran)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/71 "2011-04-24T02:25:19Z")
“the marsupial wolf going extinct because of the dingo is a pretty wild claim” ``` Not at all. The arrival of the dingo in mainland Australia is believed to have caused the extinction of the thylacine (tasmanian wolf), the Tasmanian devil, and the Tasmanian native hen. The dingo showed up about 4000 years ago on the mainland, and thylacines went extinct (on the mainland) about 2000 years ago. The dingo never reached Tasmania and thylacines survived there until after European settlement. I would call it likely, but there could conceivably have been other reasons. ``` A parallel: up until about 2 million years ago, most of the fair-sized predators in South America were marsupials or close relatives of marsupials. They somewhat resembled the Tasmanian Devil. When the isthmus of Panama formed, canines and felids show up, and the borhyaenids all went extinct. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/72 "2011-04-24T02:31:37Z")
Indeed. And when men entered the America, large part of the megafauna went extinct, including Mamuts that lived as south into the Western Hemisphere as Chile and Argentina. Horses, natives of the New World, also went extinct by that time. A similar pattern is observed in the Pacific islands. Man destroyed the environment everywhere. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/73 "2011-04-24T03:30:29Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Like I said, where do you start? Well, you could start with something like [Aboriginal people and their plants by Philip A. Clarke](http://books.google.com/books?id=BrQdF-uBCXgC&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=australians+aborigines+deforestation&source=bl&ots=iAPhAtQeWC&sig=6xcfvUh6TiX2i8zvMxWAoixk1gU&hl=en&ei=wJazTba8K8LogQfc4IHGCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=14&ved=0CGwQ6AEwDQ#v=onepage&q&f=false), p. 63 ff., an examination of Australian Aboriginal peoples and their fire uses. Some of us like reading cites. Also, for people who might be wondering, Mamuts is Spanish for mammoths. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/74 "2011-04-24T03:36:38Z")
Yeah. Mammoths I meant. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/75 "2011-04-24T06:21:48Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Also, for people who might be wondering, Mamuts is Spanish for mammoths. I though he meant David. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/76 "2011-04-24T07:59:37Z")
> [@orcenio](#): > > 1. you stress the importance of genetics to cognitive ability (highly speculative). Nothing speculative about the importance of genetics to cognitive ability. If you think otherwise try teaching your dog to read. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/77 "2011-04-24T08:26:23Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Nothing speculative about the importance of genetics to cognitive ability. If you think otherwise try teaching your dog to read. Try teaching your dog to dance. That proves that genetics must be important to dancing ability too. Right. Those blacks really do have natural rhythm. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/78 "2011-04-24T09:38:53Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > It is highly unlikely that they would have made a concerted effort to exterminate the marsupial wolves. Prove it. Your own cite says they actively hunted them. “Rock paintings from the Kakadu National Park clearly show that thylacines were hunted by early humans.” But even if they didn’t do it deliberately to drive them into extinction (which wasn’t my assertion), it is[just as likely](http://thylacine.psu.edu/papers/johnson2003.pdf) that humans played a larger role than dingoes. Or that there was a three-way synergy with climate change. > [@](#): > > No effort was made to exterminate the dingoes. No efforts were made to exterminate dogs in Britain, either. For pretty much the same reason, I expect. > [@](#): > > Also, before the coming of the whites the human population density of Australia was much smaller than in Britain when the wolves were exterminated. So what? It doesn’t necessarily take a very high population density to wipe out species. Look at the Americas. All it takes is a combination of environmental stress and active hunting. And you don’t have to hunt every last member of a species to wipe them out, either. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 10:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/79 "2011-04-24T10:25:32Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Try teaching your dog to dance. That proves that genetics must be important to dancing ability too. Right. Yes. btw. are you going to deny _“the importance of genetics to cognitive ability”_? Which was the comment I was addressing. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2011, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355/80 "2011-04-24T10:53:25Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Prove it. Your own cite says they actively hunted them. “Rock paintings from the Kakadu National Park clearly show that thylacines were hunted by early humans.” > > But even if they didn’t do it deliberately to drive them into extinction (which wasn’t my assertion), it is[just as likely](http://thylacine.psu.edu/papers/johnson2003.pdf) that humans played a larger role than dingoes. Or that there was a three-way synergy with climate change.No efforts were made to exterminate dogs in Britain, either. For pretty much the same reason, I expect.So what? > > It doesn’t necessarily take a very high population density to wipe out species. Look at the Americas. All it takes is a combination of environmental stress and active hunting. And you don’t have to hunt every last member of a species to wipe them out, either. You are getting far from my original point. My original point was that a large gene pool is likely to evolve faster than a small gene pool, and that this is one of the reasons human evolution has accelerated since 8,00 BC. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-10-000-year-explosion-a-book-review/579355.md?page=5)