Recent discoveries have suggested that the invention of microliths, tiny slivers of stone used as tools (pictured at left), may have contributed to a population explosion 35,000 years ago:
Thirty-five thousand years before nanotechnology became a buzzword, a different kind of diminutive innovation transformed India. The advent of stone microblades set the stage for the subcontinent’s explosive population growth, new research suggests.
The easy-to-manufacture tools – also known as microliths – were a vast improvement over larger stone flake tools used previously, says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the study. Because microblades could be cut from stone more quickly and in higher volumes than flakes, hunting probably became a vastly more efficient endeavour.
“It allows people to more reliably and more cheaply slaughter animals,” says Lawrence Guy Straus, a paleoanthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who was not involved in the study.
Petraglia and his colleagues contend that the beginnings of a global ice age pushed ancient populations of Indians into closer contact – and competition – with one another. “They need to develop new strategies to produce new resources. They invent microlithic technology and it spreads very rapidly.”
Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds
That brings up an interesting possibility. It’s been believed for some time through the work of Robert and Linda Braidwood and others, cf. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, that a population explosion in prehistory lead to the depletion of food supplies which in turn lead to human beings adopting a sedentary lifestyle to practice agriculture which in turn has resulted in the development of everything that we know in our daily lives. Did the invention of the microlith cause the population explosion?
Another candidate might be the lifting of the limitations imposed on populations by the Ice Age.
However, this discovery adds an interesting piece to the puzzle. It may be that the more efficient tools allowed populations to expand, expanding populations consumed the readily available food supplies and came more into competition with each other, and some populations, impelled by a combination of necessity and preference, settled down and began to grow their food rather than living off the frequently unreliable natural supplies.
Good thing PETA and their sympathetic constituencies weren’t around to protest microliths…………….
nyuk, nyuk, nyuk……..