Author: Michael D. Petraglia
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 904812719X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
The romantic landscapes and exotic cultures of Arabia have long captured the int- ests of both academics and the general public alike. The wide array and incredible variety of environments found across the Arabian peninsula are truly dramatic; tro- cal coastal plains are found bordering up against barren sandy deserts, high mountain plateaus are deeply incised by ancient river courses. As the birthplace of Islam, the recent history of the region is well documented and thoroughly studied. However, legendary explorers such as T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, and St. John Philby discovered hints of a much deeper past during their travels across the subcontinent. Drawn to Arabia by the magnifcent solitude of its vast sand seas, these intrepid adventurers learned from the Bedouin how to penetrate its deserts and returned with stirring accounts of lost civilizations among the wind-swept dunes. We now know that, prior to recorded history, Arabia housed countless peoples living a variety of lifestyles, including some of the world’s earliest pastoralists, c- munities of incipient farmers, fshermen dubbed the “Ichthyophagi” by ancient Greek geographers, and Paleolithic big-game hunters who were among the frst humans to depart their ancestral homeland in Africa. In fact, some archaeological investigations indicate that Arabia was inhabited by early hominins extending far back into the Early Pleistocene, perhaps even into the Late Pliocene.
Author: Michael D. Petraglia
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402055625
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 463
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is the first volume of its kind on prehistoric cultures of South Asia. The book brings together archaeologists, biological anthropologists, geneticists and linguists in order to provide a comprehensive account of the history and evolution of human populations residing in the subcontinent. New theories and methodologies presented provide new interpretations about the cultural history and evolution of populations in South Asia.
Author: Michael D. Petraglia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 464
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Nicole Boivin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316738264
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 573
Get Book Here
Book Description
How have humans colonised the entire planet and reshaped its ecosystems in the process? This unique and groundbreaking collection of essays explores human movement through time, the impacts of these movements on landscapes and other species, and the ways in which species have co-evolved and transformed each other as a result. Exploring the spread of people, plants, animals, and diseases through processes of migration, colonisation, trade and travel, it assembles a broad array of case studies from the Pliocene to the present. The contributors from disciplines across the humanities and natural sciences are senior or established scholars in the fields of human evolution, archaeology, history, and geography.
Author: Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108470971
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 575
Get Book Here
Book Description
A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.
Author: Nicholas Wade
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698163796
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.
Author: Mukhtar Ahmed
Publisher: Amazon
ISBN: 1495490475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ancient Pakistan - An Archaeological History deals with the prehistory of Pakistan from the Stone Age to the end of the Indus Civilization. This particular volume, The Stone Age, concerns with the first appearance of man in northern Pakistan more than a million years ago and traces his cultural history up to the emergence of agriculture and sedentary living in this region. The book is written for students of ancient history, anthropology, and archaeology. The material is generously illustrated with a large number of maps, tables, drawings, and colored photographs. Each Section is provided with extensive references to the text and a comprehensive bibliography is provided for those who want to dig deeper into the subject. Although the book primarily deals with the Greater Indus Valley, its scope is much wider: the subject has been discussed in context with the paleolithic of India, Central Asia, and Iran. The story of human evolution provides a constant background.
Author: Nicole Boivin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107164141
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 573
Get Book Here
Book Description
A unique, interdisciplinary and up-to-date treatment exploring human migration and its role in creating novel ecosystems over the long term.
Author: Elise K. Burton
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution. Genetic Crossroads is an unprecedented history of human genetics in the Middle East, from its roots in colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. It illuminates how scientists from Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, transformed genetic data into territorial claims and national origin myths. Burton shows why such nationalist appropriations of genetics are not local or temporary aberrations, but rather the enduring foundations of international scientific interest in Middle Eastern populations to this day.
Author: Wesley Muhammad
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365525457
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Get Book Here
Book Description
Bilad al-Sudan is a companion volume to Black Arabia and the African Origin of Islam. A collection of distinct essays written since the publication of Black Arabia, Bilad al-Sudan offers:Further evidence that the Arabs of the first Muslim community of 7th century Arabia were an Africoid people.A correction to the mistaken belief that the pre-Islamic Arabs were white and racist, as seen by their alleged treatment of Bilal, Companion of the Prophet Muhammad.A refutation of recent Muslim attempts to defend the White Supremacist paradigm in Islam.A critical analysis of Afrocentric discourse on Islam.An introduction to a new paradigm: Ma'atic Islam.Dr. Wesley Muhammad is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and author of several books. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Religious Studies from Morehouse College as well as a Masters Degree and PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan. Dr. Muhammad is currently a scholarly aide to The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.
