James Blaut's Critique of Diffusionism through a Neolithic Lens: Early Animal Domestication in the Near East

摘要

How have Jim's ideas held up in the rapidly evolving literature on the earliest domestications? Jim's first hypothesis has held up quite well in some ways and not so well in others. More species have been pushed into the 9000-11,000 BP time frame that Jim specified. Pig and cattle domestication have been pushed back in time as far back as sheep and goats (10,000-11,000 BP for pigs [Rosenberg et al 1998] and 10,000-10,800 BP for cattle, with North Africa emerging as an early center for their domestication; (Hanotte et al 2002)). Many animal species thus appear to have been domesticated virtually simultaneously throughout the Near East and North Africa. Also supporting Jim's first hypothesis in this region are the rather far-flung earliest signs of goat husbandry about 10,000 years ago in western Iran (Zeder and Hesse 2000) and barley domestication about 9500 BP in the Jordan Valley in the Levant (Badr et al 2000), while cattle may have been domesticated in northeast Africa (Hanotte et al 2002). Jim expected that independent innovations would be going on throughout a large region and then rapidly disseminated through crisscross diffusion.