Megafaunal extinction in the late Quaternary and the global overkill hypothesis

The global blitzkrieg hypothesis explains differential rates of megafaunal extinction between the world's landmasses in the late Quaternary based on a proposed leap in predation efficiency enjoyed by colonising societies. It is characterised by appealing simplicity. Selective over hunting, facilitated by naiveté to human predation, produced rapid mass extinctions of large animals wherever subsistence societies colonised new landmasses. Taken at face value the circumstantial case for blitzkrieg is compelling and despite a paucity of direct evidence it has gained considerable support. Our review of the model suggests that it overlooks much contradictory data and rests on simplistic interpretations of complex biogeographicat and anthropological phenomena. These interpretations and assumptions do not account for major differences between the biotas, ecologies and human cultures of the landmasses involved. The assertion that responses of remote island species to human predation provide realistic models for those of continental taxa is poorly founded, exaggerating the likely predation efficiency of humans colonising continents. An absence of terrestrial predators over evolutionarily significant periods, together with restricted ranges and small populations, renders island faunas uniquely vulnerable to invaders. The argument, that climate cannot explain these phenomena because previous Glacial Maxima did not cause comparable extinctions, presupposes that their local effects were at least as severe as those of the Last Glacial Maximum. This has yet to be demonstrated and at most it would indirectly support a role for anthropogenic influence, not overkill per se. Overlooked or underplayed are the influences of translocated and other invading species. Similarly, differences in the origins, technologies and traditions of colonising human societies are rarely considered. These factors strongly impact on the predation efficiency, density and range of human populations, critically affecting the outcomes of predator-prey modeling. When a fuller constellation of influences and constraints is considered it is reasonable to posit that rapid mass extinction through selective human predation may largely describe megafaunal extinctions on remote islands, but the argument is not convincing for continents. This is especially so regarding Australia. Because even the largest Australian species were prey to endemic carnivores, their responses to human predation would not have been comparable to those of oceanic island species. No kill-sites or specialized big-game hunting/butchering tools are known and, on the basis of ethnographic and archaeological data, it is probable that predation efficiency, population density and range of the first Australians were insufficient to effect rapid mass extinction. Chronologies of human arrival and the disappearance of megafauna remain poor, but the most recent estimates for human-megafaunal coexistence in Australia range from 10,000 to 43,000 years. Although human predation may have been a contributing factor in megafaunal extinctions, rapid overkill is unlikely to describe the actual mechanism in most instances. The role of human predation and its significance relative to competing factors, human and otherwise, varied considerably between landmasses, as did the speeds with which extinctions occurred. Blitzkrieg and other mono-factorial models are heuristically valuable devices, but a growing body of evidence suggests that extinction can rarely, if ever, be attributed to a single cause.     

Hegel's critique of the enlightenment

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.     

Social critique and aesthetics in Schopenhauer

Although Schopenhauer is usually described as a philosopher of pessimism, this article examines the extent to which The World as Will and Representation is concerned, not only with metaphysics, but also with social critique; and the positive, indeed ‘optimistic’, implications such a reading might have for an understanding of Schopenhauer's aesthetics. Schopenhauer's philosophy contains a moral or ethical element, which means that, even if he regarded life as ‘an unpleasant business’, it would be wrong to conclude that he had no appreciation of the world as a locus for practical activity. Thanks to the cultural impact of Weimar Classicism and its controversy with the Romanticism of Jena and elsewhere, as well as through his personal acquaintance with Goethe, Schopenhauer inevitably came into contact with Schiller's aesthetic theories, which provide an indispensable background to understanding what is at stake in Schopenhauer's own aesthetics. Schopenhauer's emphasis on the impermanency of pleasure can be seen to underscore the ethical imperative to pay attention to our own life, and to question, in the most concrete, down-to-earth terms, our representation of our life and what, in life, we will.     

A critique of freedom and equality

The study of historiography is undergoing a revolution akin to that which took place in the history of political thought in the 1960s, and the work of J.G.A. Pocock is central to both. Pocock's continuing exploration, in Barbarism and Religion (1999-), of the intellectual contexts of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is central to this enterprise, and this essay situates the origins of his own work within a pre-‘Cambridge School’ Cambridge and its experience of what might be called the Butterfieldian moment. That was marked by a desire to treat religion seriously as a driving force in history; and the same concern is applied here to further understanding an eighteenth-century controversy in which history and religion were dramatically involved, and which profoundly affected Gibbon's own historical and religious views. The work of Conyers Middleton and John Jortin is critically examined from this perspective. These preludes to Gibbon lead to a series of postludes examining the particular contexts in which Victorian and twentieth-century historians and writers, from Henry Hart Milman to Evelyn Waugh, variously appreciated and interpreted Gibbon. The whole is to be seen as a reflexive engagement with Pocock's vitally illuminating studies in eighteenth-century historiography.     

Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus

Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

     

Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene hunters and gatherers in the eastern Sudan

Excavations by the joint University of Khartoum/Southern Methodist University Butana Project in the area just north of Khashm el Girba on the upper Atbara River have uncovered a series of preceramic and early ceramic occupations by hunters and gatherers which date fromca 10,000 bp toca 6200 bp. The earlier sites show no direct relations with those of similar age in the northern Sudan, while the later, early ceramic sites show only minor similarities with contemporary occurrences in the central Nile Valley. Thus, it appears that the upper Atbara River Valley played no role in the development of the Khartoum Mesolithic and that Nilotic influences were late reaching the eastern Sudan.

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Résumé Des fouilles entreprises par le projet Butana dirigé en commun par l'université de Khartoum et le Southern Methodist University dans la région juste au nord de Khashm el Girba sur le cours supérieur de l'Atbara, ont découvert une série d'occupations précéramiques et céramiques anciennes de chasseurs-cueilleurs, qui datent deca 10,000 bp àca 6200 bp. Les gisements les plus anciens ne semblent pas avoir eu de relations directes avec ceux de la même période dans le nord du Soudan, tandis que les gisements plus tardifs à céramiques ne montrent que de petites analogies avec des occupations contemporaines dans la vallée centrale du Nil. Il semble donc que la haute vallée de l'Atbara n'a joué aucun rôle dans le développement du Mésolithique de Khartoum et que des influences nilotiques n'atteignirent que bien plus tard le Soudan oriental.

     

On anthropological epistemology: Praxis and critique

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. xv + 205 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00 cloth, $13.00 paper.

Ulin, Robert C. Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984. xvii + 200 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95 cloth.     

A new Jungle-fowl from the Pleistocene of Europe

The domesticated Red Jungle-fowl G. gallus is believed to have been dispersed by man from India during the Holocene. The distal end of a radius from the Ipswichian Interglacial deposits at Crayford, Kent, was indistinguishable from that of the wild form of Red Jungle-folw. A coracoid from the early Middle Pleistocene of N Norfolk was also very similar to that species but showed differences comparable with those found between different species of Gallus. At least one species referable to Gallus is known from the Pliocene of South-eastern Europe. Extrapolating from zoogeographical speciation patterns it would be possible for a Gallus species to have evolved through Pleistocene speciation in the European region. The species might have become extinct during a glaciation or have been exterminated by early man. A new species Gallus europaeus is described with the coracoid as a holotype, and the radius from Kent is tentatively referred to it.     

The Pleistocene art of Asia

While the Pleistocene art of Europe has been described, discussed, analyzed and explained in thousands of publications, that of Asia has attracted almost no interest at all. This paper is a brief summary of all known Ice Age art of Asia, both rock art and portable art. The current evidence is critically reviewed, region by region, and hundreds of specimens purported to be art are rejected by the author. Those considered to be authentic are often extremely isolated, in both time and space. It is argued that this record can only be explained effectively as having been greatly distorted by several factors. The geographical distribution, for instance, is clearly conditioned by such factors as intensity of research activities and local preservation conditions. Thus the pronounced paucity of available evidence is, at least in part, imposed by taphonomic biases of various types.     

Pleistocene sites in southern Yemen

In the autumn months of 1992 a small team conducted an archaeological survey in southwest Yemen in search of Pleistocene sites dating back to the early colonisation of the Arabian peninsula. The survey focused on those escarpments and terraces with exposed Pleistocene sediments. The team discovered thirty-seven sites, most of them multicomponent, with sixteen having a pebble-tool industry called Mode 1 and twenty-seven with a bifacial industry called Mode 2. Both industries were represented side by side on some sites. These thirty-seven sites, together with others found in northern Arabia and eastern Yemen, contribute to the growing recognition of a Pleistocene occupation of the Arabian peninsula.     

Presence of xiphodont crocodilians in the Tertiary and Pleistocene of Australia

The presence of two types of xiphodont crocodiles is reported for the first time from Australia. Crocodiles with this xiphoid type of tooth morphology were previously unknown anywhere in the world since the Miocene except for isolated xiphoid teeth noted by Plane (1967) from a Pliocene deposit in New Guinea.