The Last 73,400 Years: Social Relations in Prehistory... Of the thousands of species which have visited the Earth, less than 4 percent have survived; and all members of the genus Homo have vanished, except for one physically unimposing species: Homo sapiens. How did we survive and manage to thrive during the unimaginably treacherous climate of the last ice age? Explanations of our very peculiar survival commonly cite possession of language, which would facilitate coordination for attack and defense, or our capacity to construct complex tools. However, others in frustration simply suggest that it was good fortune, beating the odds by simple chance. But in this new book, a reexamination of this issue is presented, starting with our near extinction 73,400 years ago, after the super-eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra. We know that having complex tools and language failed to assure survival because most humans disappeared with the ecological destruction of that event. The Last 73,400 Years interrogates the social relations of those who have survived to the present. Rather than persisting in the conventional assumption of a world of abundance with very few people, The Last 73,400 Years confronts the reality of endemic competition imposed by high fertility among hunter-gatherers in a world of highly variable and often dangerously collapsing ecologies, where effective claims on territorial resources were generally essential to survival. While embracing recent findings in archaeology, genetics and climatology, it provides a radically new understanding of the contemporary Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa and for the first time presents an image of the social structures associated with two cultures in Africa, 73.4 to 59 thousand years ago, and several cultures in Europe, 36.5 to 12 thousand years ago. The book concludes with a discussion of issues in contemporary Chinese archaeology. It is fully unlike anything published heretofore. This book should be read by every person with an interest in the social structures and social relations of our Pleistocene ancestors. In the Forward Professor Douglas R. White says that "it should be an interesting read for the general public, as well as for academic scholars and students. It effectively and powerfully reopens and refocuses a number of fundamental issues which were considered 'settled' for most of the 20th century. And now it is clear that those issues were settled quite prematurely." For scholars and students of prehistory, archaeology and anthropology, The Last 73,400 Years throws down the gauntlet, in the face of which a wide range of new studies should emerge. New life has now been injected into a range of important issues, providing students and academics, alike, with a new set of conceptual targets toward which to aim research initiatives. The author, Duran Bell, is professor emeritus of economics (and anthropology) at the University of California, Irvine.