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This paper aims to present a meta‐analysis of available statistical data and literature for gender‐related practices concerning women in business and education across countries, comparing the patriarchal belt and South Asian countries in the belt to the rest of the world. The purpose of the project is to investigate the progress of enhancement of opportunities for women to engage in non‐agricultural work in the belt, and, as women’s participation in tertiary education is touted as an impetus in enhancing women’s opportunities, investigate its effect.

The existence of a belt of countries from North Africa through Bangladesh and rural China is well known, with societies demonstrating a consistent pattern of restriction and suppression of women. No development of theory treating the patriarchal belt as a whole has been published. The authors earmark this as a future endeavour. They employ ten years of statistical summaries of percent of women in the non‐agricultural labour force and ratios of women to men in tertiary education provided by the United Nations in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals to compare changes in these activities in countries in the patriarchal belt, South Asia, and the rest of the world. The method is to carry out statistical comparisons of trends derived from annual averages for the two measures.

The literature review indicates that for millennia in the patriarchal belt societal practices have institutionalised women’s lack of access to participation in the labour market and generally from participating in much of public life. The analyses indicate that participation in non‐agricultural employment has decreased over the past decade in the belt compared to the rest of the world. Opportunities for women to participate in tertiary education have on average been increasing during this period for most countries of the world including those in the patriarchal belt. However, this circumstance has not led to increased participation in the non‐agricultural work force.

The practical implications seen are that the UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) are important to improving the lot of individuals, some goals that purport to lead to improvements in human and gender rights in regions such as the patriarchal belt may have no real effect, and other, more useful goals need to be investigated. Economically, the exclusion of women from voluntary productive labour as detrimental to the development of a nation is seen.

In the patriarchal belt societal practices institutionalise negative discrimination concerning women, often codified in laws that prohibit women from participating in much of public life or fully competing in the labour market. The evaluation of these conditions using European and North American standards proposes that these women are abused and denied their rights. Nonetheless, initiatives such as agreements on the UNMDG appear to have no effect, and other solutions need to be pursued.

The originality and value of this paper is that it investigates the complete set of patriarchal belt countries, across countries that include both Muslim and Hindu majorities. It concludes that while religions tenets are employed to justify patriarchal practices, long‐standing tribal practices appear to be far more influential.

This chapter is about the theories explaining the transition from foraging to farming. It aims to establish which links exist between the traditional theories – based on push/pull models – and the micro-founded approaches developed since the 1980s. More precisely, it asks how the latter may contribute, as the former did, to defining a macro-narrative of the transition to farming.

While they were providing a global narrative of the Neolithic revolution, the push and pull models have been progressively dismissed. Recent research is diverse, but it is all based upon human behaviour or micro-founded. We critically examine three of these approaches which focus either on foraging behaviour, or on the initial domestication of plants and animals, or on the evolution of social institutions related to ownership.

We demonstrate that these recent micro-founded approaches only provide a partial vision of the transition to farming. Despite this limit, they conciliate push and pull explanations in a single framework. Moreover, they confirm a conclusion held by tenants of pull models: the transition to farming is more likely to have occurred in a resource-rich environment such as the one associated with complex hunter-gatherers. Some archaeological evidence from the Levant is provided to support our claim.

This research chapter provides a useful overview of the differing approaches to the behavioural, environmental and economic factors that led to the shift to farming from foraging. Its value lies in the way it presents and evaluates differing positions derived from differing scales of analysis and types of evidence.

This essay provides evidence that the invention of agriculture was not a dramatic technological advance in the history of humankind and that agriculture was quite consistent with nomadic hunting and gathering. The available clues also suggest that exact origins of agriculture do not seem important. Rather, the crucial question is why certain societies dramatically increased their dependency on agriculture for subsistence two to ten millennia ago. Unfortunately, most of the major theories purporting to explain the neolithic revolution – either the origins or the spread of agriculture – are either untestable or inconsistent with the available evidence. What is at stake for economic historians is to rethink the process of the adoption of agriculture using a multi-causal approach.

The question of violence in hunter-gatherer society has animated philosophical debates since at least the seventeenth century. Steven Pinker has sought to affirm that civilization, is superior to the state of humanity during its long history of hunting and gathering. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon a series of recent studies that assert a baseline of primordial violence by hunters and gatherers. In challenging this position the author draws on four decades of ethnographic and historical research on hunting and gathering peoples.

At the empirical heart of this question is the evidence pro- and con- for high rates of violent death in pre-farming human populations. The author evaluates the ethnographic and historical evidence for warfare in recorded hunting and gathering societies, and the archaeological evidence for warfare in pre-history prior to the advent of agriculture.

The view of Steven Pinker and others of high rates of lethal violence in hunters and gatherers is not sustained. In contrast to early farmers, their foraging precursors lived more lightly on the land and had other ways of resolving conflict. With little or no fixed property they could easily disperse to diffuse conflict. The evidence points to markedly lower levels of violence for foragers compared to post-Neolithic societies.

This conclusion raises serious caveats about the grand evolutionary theory asserted by Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and others. Instead of being “killer apes” in the Pleistocene and Holocene, the evidence indicates that early humans lived as relatively peaceful hunter-gathers for some 7,000 generations, from the emergence of Homo sapiens up until the invention of agriculture. Therefore there is a major gap between the purported violence of the chimp-like ancestors and the documented violence of post-Neolithic humanity.

This is a critical analysis of published claims by authors who contend that ancient and recent hunter-gatherers typically committed high levels of violent acts. It reveals a number of serious flaws in their arguments and use of data.

Human societies can be conceptualized as natural systems satisfying four basic system criteria: Ordered wholeness; negative feedback deviation‐reducing capability; positive feedback deviation‐amplifying, self‐evolving capacity; and dual‐structural adaptation to sub‐ as well as suprasystems. While societies are obviously governable in stable, relatively organized situations, whether in totalitarian or fully participatory ways, it is concluded they are also governable during “crucial epochs” that are characterized by unstable, provisionally disorganized and unpredictable states—although different modes of governance prevail during these periods of rapid self‐evolution, when control is exercised by rapidly shifting and selectively amplifying peripheral movements. Analysis of the forms of transition governance during crucial epochs in self‐evolving social systems is important for suppressing totalitarian trends and consciously amplifying humanistic peripheral movements.

In the beginning, long before there had arisen a creature which could be considered as human, there existed both society and the environment. The society was a hominid society, derived from a more ancient primate form of social organisation. The environment, although variable, had always existed, and provided those selective pressures which determined the nature of this particular form of animal social organisation. The relationship between society and its environment is the most basic of all the relationships. It is animal. It is primal.

The ideal of greater equality has been an important part of America's self‐image. From the time of the U.S. revolution, when equality was a component in our battle cry for freedom, various political movements have held the ideal of greater equality as central to their programs. More than mere political rhetoric, reducing inequality has been the goal of a broad array of public measures. Yet despite all efforts, wealth and income distribution have changed relatively little in U.S. history.