Published:
1992 by Vintage
2012 by 上海译文
Index
- Prologue
- Part One: Just Another Species of Big Mammal
- Three: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
- SEVENTEEN: THE GOLDEN AGE THAT NEVER WAS
Prologue
The overall genetic distance between us and chimps is even smaller than the distance between such closely related bird species as red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, or willow warblers and chiffchaffs.
Part One: Just Another Species of Big Mammal
The visible differences between breeds of dogs such as great danes and pekinese are far greater than those between chimps and ourselves. Yet all dog breeds are interfertile, breed with each other (insofar as it is mechanically feasible) when given the opportunity, and belong to the same species.
Three: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
- copulate
- fertility
- cholesterol
- intertwined
- carnivore
- prowess
- deficient
- berry
- dugout canoe
- forage
- orangutan
- oestrus
- sired
- exertion
- consort
- accommodate
- promiscuous
- paternity
- gull
SEVENTEEN: THE GOLDEN AGE THAT NEVER WAS
page 299 / 329
The support for this view of ancient environmental destruction comes from sources such as contemporary accounts and archaeological evident. Yet a few sequences of photographs would constitute more decisive tests than all that anecdotal evidence combined. If we had snapshots of the same Greek hillside taken at thousand-year intervals, we could identify the plants, measure the ground cover, and calculate the shift from forest to goat-proof shrubs. We could thereby put numbers on the extent of environmental degradation.
Enter middens to the rescue again. While the Mideast does not have packrats, it does have rabbitsized, marmot-like animals called hyraxes that build middens in the same way as packrats. (Surprisingly, the closest living relatives of hyraxes may be elephants.) There Arizona scientists — “atricia Fall, Cynthia Lindquist, and Steven Falconer — studied hyrax middens at Jordan’s famous lost city of Petra, which typifies the paradox of ancient Western civilization. Petra is now especially familiar to movie-going aficionados of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, whose turn Indian Jones and the Last Crusade shows Scan Connery and Harrison Ford searching for the Holy Grail in Petra’s magnificent rock tombs and temples amidst the desert sand. Anyone who sees those scenes of Petra must wonder how such a wealthy city could have arisen and supported itself in such a bleak landscape. In fact, there was already a Neolithic village near the site of Petra before 7000 BC, and farming and herding appeared there soon after. Under the Nabataean kingdom, of which it was the capital, Petra thrived as a commercial centre controlling trade between Europe, Arabia, and the Orient. The city grew even larger and richer under Roman, then Byzantine, control. Yet it was subsequently abandoned and so completely forgotten that its ruins were not rediscovered until 1812. What caused Petra’s collapse?