I just finished Brian Fagan’s book, Cro-Magnon, which describes
an important segment of my family history.
The happy news is that there have been three studies of the
mitochondrial DNA of modern Europeans, and their genes are primarily
indigenous. The invading farmers from
the Fertile Crescent did not exterminate the natives. The genes of the eastern immigrants are
somewhere between 15% and 28% of the modern European DNA.
It staggers the imagination to contemplate the astonishing
wildness, beauty, and vitality of Ice Age Europe. It’s heartbreaking — and illuminating — when
these grand memories remind us of what we are not now. After reading the book, I feel a much
stronger connection to the ancient cave paintings. Those artists were my ancestors, and their
images belong in the family album. My people
once lived in lands inhabited by wooly mammoths, aurochs, bison, and vast herds
of reindeer. They lived beside streams
that thundered during salmon runs. This
gave me a sense of homecoming, a powerful remembering.
Fagan does a nice job of describing the world of the Ice Age,
and the wild swings of the climate — growing glaciers & melting
glaciers. When the climate warmed, the
hunters and their game moved north, and when frigid times returned, they moved
south. The hunters followed the meat,
and the meat followed the grass.
“There were at least fifteen to twenty short-term events when
temperatures were up to 44.5 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) warmer than
during the intervening colder intervals.”
The climate could swing from pleasant to freezing over the course of a
lifetime. Siberia was once a tropical
forest, the Sahara once had lakes and grasslands, and there was a time when you
could walk from France to England.
The sad news is that the hunting tribes of Europe became
farmers. This may have been similar to
the spread of corn from Mexico to the tribes of the north — an amazing innovation
that bit us on the ass, and cast wicked shadows on the unborn generations. Fagan helped me to better understand the
transition to agriculture, in which ongoing innovation in hunting technology
played a leading role.
All hominids have African ancestors. Some of them migrated to Asia, where Neanderthals
first walked onto the stage. Some
Neanderthals moved to Europe maybe 300,000 years ago, where they hung out in
cool temperate forests. Their primary
weapon was a heavy thrusting spear with a sharp fire-hardened tip. These were great for killing large slow-moving
animals.
Fagan believes that the Neanderthals were luckless dullards,
because they displayed almost no innovative cleverness over vast spans of
time. They were simple and stable, and
their dance on this planet may have been far longer than ours will turn out to
be — and they didn’t destroy paradise.
What dreary bores!
“Cro-Magnon” refers only to the Homo sapiens clans that inhabited
Europe, but our species originally emerged in Africa, maybe 170,000 years ago. Around 45,000 years ago, some moved into
Europe, and within 5,000 years, they lightly inhabited much of the continent. Cro-Magnons left us the gorgeous painted
caves, magic peepholes into fairyland. Neanderthals
went extinct about 30,000 years ago, for unknown reasons.
The trademark weapon of Cro-Magnons was the lightweight
throwing spear, tipped with stone or antler.
It was excellent for hunting on open land, and it could kill from a
distance. It made it easier to kill a
wider variety of prey, like deer and reindeer.
Thus, there was more meat on the table, more bambinos in the nursery,
and more spear-chuckers running around the bloody countryside. Even during warm eras, European summers were
short, and plant foods were limited, so meat was the core source of
nourishment. Homo sapiens have been purebred hunters
since day one in Africa.
Later, the bow and arrow arrived. Bows may have been used 18,000 years ago,
based on circumstantial evidence, but the oldest bow found so far was from
10,800 BC. The bow was a diabolically
powerful weapon. It could be fired from
any angle, and quickly reloaded. It
could kill critters large and small from a long distance. It was great for forest hunting. Nets, traps, and barbed fish spears also came
into use. Rabbits, birds, and rodents
now appeared on the menu — more meat, bambinos, and hunters — and less and less
wildlife. Our consumption of plant foods
and shellfish increased.
Around 12,900 years ago, the Younger Dryas period brought
frigid weather back again, for a thousand years. It brought severe droughts to the Near East,
and the humans adapted by harvesting and planting grass seeds. And the rest, as they say, is history. The combination of excess cleverness,
deficient family planning, and climate change put us on a bullet train to
global catastrophe.
“Within a surprisingly few generations, the people of the
Near East and southeastern Turkey were entirely dependent on farming. When wetter conditions returned at the end of
the Younger Dryas, the new economies spread like wildfire across Anatolia and
into southeast Europe, where they were well established before eight thousand
years ago.”
What we know about human evolution and Ice Age Europe is
quite fragmentary. Time, glaciers, and
civilization have taken a big toll on the meager evidence. The timeline is full of holes, the dates are
controversial, the theories are controversial, and the research continues. Fagan’s book also has some holes, which can
be filled by a visit to Wikipedia.
Annoyingly, he inserted a number of ideas unsupported by hard
evidence, based on speculation. For
example, Neanderthals probably didn’t have complex language because they
persisted in living in a simple manner.
Their primitive brains may have lacked the neural circuits necessary for
feverish innovation and pathological ecocide.
Fagan is the captain of the Homo sapiens cheerleading squad. He gushes with praise for our unbelievably
clever species. “Effective technology,
an acute self-awareness, and an intimate relationship with the environment made
the Cro-Magnon personality practically invincible.” In frigid regions of Europe, they “adapted effortlessly
to the ever-colder conditions.”
I’m glad that I read this book, because I learned a lot from
it, and I will not forget it. The entire
era of civilization has existed during an unusually long period of warm and
stable weather. Our food production
system is fine-tuned for this climate, and it’s going to have tremendous
problems as the planet gets hotter and hotter.
Fagan helps us remember the scary roller coaster of climate history, and
how it mercilessly hammers the unlucky, over and over again, big brains and
all.
Given the fact that we’re currently beating the stuffing out
Big Mama Nature, the gushing praise for human intelligence and innovation emits
a noxious cloud of stinky funk. Where is
the line between brilliant innovation and idiotic self-destruction? Are they the same? Is it possible that simple and stable do not
mean stupid? These questions should not
be swept under the rug. We really,
really need to remember what we are not now.
We need to discover the long lost treasure.
The next book on my voyage is The Humans Who Went Extinct, by Clive
Finlayson, who is far more sympathetic to our Neanderthal relatives. Sounds interesting. Stay tuned.
Fagan, Brian, Cro-Magnon
– How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, Bloomsbury
Press, New York, 2010.
2 comments:
Humans are unusually successful for a species. Of course the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.
Well, ants, rats, roaches, and starlings are successful. But they have the instinctual wisdom to faithfully obey the laws of nature.
Indeed, humans are unusual animals. Maybe everyone in the world can agree on that.
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