Istwa Nou

As people spread through the Americas the large animals went. In North America, between roughly twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago, thirty-five genera disappeared: ground sloths, dire wolves, the saber cat, the American lion, along with horses, camels, mammoths and mastodons. South America lost another fifty-two genera over the same stretch, close to four fifths of its megafauna, though three animals held on longer. The giant armadillo, the giant ground sloth and a saber-toothed cat may still have been alive two or three thousand years after 9700 BCE. The same thing had already happened in Eurasia. Australia lost fourteen genera by 30,000 BCE. Africa is the exception, and the reason is that African elephants, rhinos, hippos and big cats had grown up alongside humans and had time to learn us. Everywhere else our arrival was an ecological event of the first order. The idea that people lived lightly on the earth until industry arrived does not survive the extinction tables.

When the Younger Dryas ended around 9700 BCE, climate shifted across much of the world, natural environments changed with it, and people had to rework how they obtained food. The response that defines the following four millennia was a slow, cumulative turn toward deliberately protecting and tending particular food sources. That meant the first cultivation of food plants, and in several regions the protection and herding of animals. The change did not begin in one place and radiate outward. It began independently in Africa, in the Levant, in China, in New Guinea and in Mesoamerica, everywhere for the same reason: the old way of feeding people had stopped working and something had to replace it. The Holocene did not arrive bearing abundance. It arrived bearing disruption, and the largest transformation in the history of the species came out of it. The people who made it were feeding their families in a world whose rules had changed under them.