I got a mail about some new books, one of them: "Neanderthals, Bandits
and Farmers, How Agriculture Really Began" by Colin Tudge. The mail says
the following:
" Tradition has it that agriculture began in the Middle East around
10,000 years ago, that once people realized the advantages of farming,
it spread rapidly to the furthest outposts of the world, and that this
led to the Neolithic Revolution and the end of the hunting-gathering
lifestyle. In this book Colin Tudge argues that agriculture in some
form was in the repertoire of our ancestors for thousands of years
before the Neolithic farming revolution: people did not suddenly invent
agriculture and shout for joy but instead drifted or were forced into
it over a long period. What we see in the Neolithic Revolution is not
the beginning of agriculture, says Tudge, but the beginning of agriculture
on a large scale, in one place, with refined tools.
Drawing on a wide range of evidence from fossil records to the Bible,
Tudge offers a persuasive hypothesis about a puzzling epoch in our past.
In so doing, he provides new insights into the Pleistocene overkill,
the demise of the Neanderthals, the location of the biblical Eden,
and much more."
- Hans
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