The Smart Neanderthal



Clive Finlayson is especially fascinated by two things, Neanderthals and birds.  Since 1989, he has been excavating caves in Gibraltar, on the north shore of the Mediterranean, where Neanderthals lived from 127,000 to 32,000 years ago.  Gibraltar is the place where the last Neanderthals tearfully bid farewell to this magnificent planet.  Later, after they were gone, Homo sapiens lived in these caves, beginning maybe 30,000 years ago.  There is no evidence of them being in living contact at the Gibraltar site.

For decades, many scholars have adopted the belief that we Homo sapiens were superior to Neanderthals.  They imagine that when humans invaded Neanderthal territory, the inferior species was helplessly overwhelmed and exterminated.  This belief is known as the replacement model, which assumed that we could never meet other humans without wiping them out.  History is loaded with replacement stories.

Beliefs are based on assumptions, which are sometimes daffy balderdash.  Over time, beliefs that pass from one generation to the next can mutate into illusions that are perceived to be certain truths.  Human supremacists really annoy Finlayson, and he has written three books to spank them — Neanderthals and Modern Humans (2004), The Humans Who Went Extinct (2009), and The Smart Neanderthal (2019).  The new book is an enjoyable, well written mystery story, in which the brainy hero (Finlayson) confronts the dodgy beliefs held by many mainstream scholars.

It’s not surprising that folks who have spent more than 30 years studying Neanderthals actually accumulate a lot of experiences and insights.  They learn things that scholars in faraway college towns never do.  The myth of progress is only a few centuries old, and it perceives that all previous generations were inferior — especially our prehistoric relatives.  The human supremacists in academia have generated a list of advanced characteristics that Neanderthals lack.  In his new book, Finlayson examines this list, item by item, and presents evidence to the contrary.  He concludes that humans and Neanderthals were equally intelligent, but not equally lucky in the survival lottery.

Of all the prehistoric hominins, we know Neanderthals best, because we have discovered a number of sites where they lived in Eurasia.  In caves, evidence of days past is far less likely to be blown or washed away, and more likely to be preserved and found.  Over time, layers of stuff build up, with newer ones covering the old.  Scientists assign dates to each layer, and document the artifacts found.

What makes the book especially interesting is that he uses his love of birds to support a number of his arguments.  The caves at Gibraltar contain the remains of 160 species of birds.  The region was once a wonderland for the winged ones, but not now.  “Their world has been destroyed by civilized man in a few centuries.”

Human supremacists assert that dimwitted Neanderthals were incapable of catching speedy prey, like birds or hares.  So Finlayson visited Spain, and watched an old gent attract 300 large vultures by putting out some carrion.  They surrounded him, and happily took food from his hand.  Another time, he went to an island off the coast of Scotland, where it was the breeding season for 150,000 gannets.  None took flight as he strolled through them, instead they pecked his legs bloody.

Some birds respond to danger by flying away.  Others, like the stone curlews, have natural coloration that provides excellent camouflage.  When danger appears, they freeze, and become nearly invisible to predators.  They only take flight if the intruder makes a sudden movement.  Finlayson has calmly walked right past frozen curlews, and could have easily snatched them.  Sometimes speedy hares will freeze in the presence of danger, allowing their camouflage to render them invisible.  Finlayson has walked very close to frozen hares.

The 300,000+ year saga of Neanderthals was an era of roller coaster climate shifts.  Most of their time on Earth was colder than average.  Some climate shifts happened suddenly and sharply.  Children were sometimes born in a steppe habitat which, decades earlier, had been woodland when their grandparents lived there. 

Between the Arctic, and the Mediterranean, there were several climate zones — ice, tundra, steppe, and woodland.  When the climate plunged into frigid periods, glaciers and ice sheets expanded in the north, which compressed the zones to the south.  There were times when the ice sheet extended from Scandinavia to northern Germany, and covered most of the British Isles.  At times, large areas of France were tundra.  The Mediterranean Sea, a large body of warm water, moderated the climate of southern Europe, so the temperature swings were less intense in Gibraltar, and wild foods remained abundant.

One indicator of climate shifts is the types of bones found at various time periods in the layers of cave crud.  The layers associated with Neanderthals usually indicated warm, moist, woodland or forest.  Woodland conditions were identified by the bones of aurochs, red deer, boar, cave bear, leopard, giant deer, and temperate rhinoceros. 

It’s important to understand that the more recent sites, which are associated with humans, often indicate steppe-tundra conditions, when the land was cold, dry, open, and treeless.  Steppe-tundra conditions were identified by the bones of woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, musk ox, ibex, moose, Artic fox, and reindeer.

The human supremacists regularly ridicule Neanderthals for displaying little innovation.  For 300,000+ years, their primary weapon was the thrusting spear.  Obviously, a stable and functional way of life was glaring evidence of low intelligence!  But Neanderthals were woodland creatures who excelled at ambush hunting.  For them, a thrusting spear was the perfect tool.  For humans, who lived in steppe-tundra habitat, it was the opposite of excellent, because a wide open landscape had no trees or brush to conceal their presence.  Their weapon was the javelin.

The latest technology is giving archaeologists the ability to extract more information from the stuff they dig up.  For example, plant pollen.  Long ago, hyenas ravenously devoured carcasses, including their intestines, which contained pollen from the surrounding vegetation.  Fossilized hyena turds (coprolites) have preserved this pollen, allowing scientists to discover the mix of plants in the ecosystem during different time windows.  This indicated current climate conditions.

Finlayson dismisses the notion that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by humans, and wonders if they may have resisted human expansion.  He believes that an increasingly cold climate was shrinking their traditional woodland habitat, and fragmenting their population.  After surviving numerous eras of cold, the latest one pushed them a bit too hard — bad luck drove them extinct.

One point Finlayson doesn’t mention is that Neanderthals emerged 300,000+ years ago in Eurasia, where they evolved in a temperate climate.  Their bodies were stockier to give them better cold tolerance.  Humans emerged in Africa maybe 300,000 years ago.  They evolved in a tropical climate, where they developed better tolerance of heat, and became skilled at grassland hunting. 

When humans wandered into the grasslands of Eastern Europe 36,000 years ago (the “European Serengeti”), their tropical bodies were not fine-tuned for freezing weather.  At this point, their choices were to either to turn around and return to home sweet home, or innovate like crazy and struggle to survive in a hostile climate where large game was abundant.

The human supremacists shout that the humans were simply too smart to fail.  They claim that a miracle occurred 50,000 years ago, when genetic mutations caused human intelligence to skyrocket.  This was called the Great Leap Forward, or the Cognitive Revolution.  Finlayson says “Bullshit!”  Genetic research has found zero evidence of this.

What genetic research has found is clear evidence that Neanderthals and non-African humans interbred.  East Asians have 2.3 to 2.6 percent Neanderthal DNA, and Western Eurasians have 1.8 to 2.5 percent.  Markers of these hot romances are as old as 100,000 years ago, and as recent as 37,000 years.  Today, humans of various ancestries carry different segments of Neanderthal DNA.  Thus, up to 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome might still exist, scattered throughout the vast human herd.

Supremacists assert that only humans were brilliant enough to dine on marine life.  Oddly, the Neanderthals at Gibraltar ate mollusks, seals, dolphins, herbivorous mammals, tortoises, and birds.  But, but, but… only humans were smart enough to paint caves and make ornaments.  Recent research is raising doubts (someone was apparently painting caves 64,800 years ago).  Indeed, humans likely learned many tricks from the Neanderthals. 

To make claims of cognitive superiority based on the artifacts of material culture is silly.  The writing tools I used in 1970 were extremely crude compared to the laptop I’m using now.  Has my brain become far more powerful?  Compared to my grandparents, is my brain actually better?

Uncomfortable doubts are growing, with regard to the ultimate value of intelligence.  Neanderthals lived for 300,000+ years, in a manner that had the appearance of genuine sustainability.  They have not been associated with megafauna extinctions.  Following the human colonization of Europe, there was a wave of megafauna extinctions, which occurred between 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. 

Since then, aggressive cultures of our godlike species have blindsided every ecosystem on Earth.  The supremacists leap to their feet, clapping, cheering, and celebrating the wonders of perpetual growth and progress.  Big Mama Nature laughs and laughs, as she prepares some potent surprises to rubbish our illusions of grandiosity.  Soon she’ll be serving us an all-you-can-eat banquet of humble pie.

Finlayson, Clive, The Smart Neanderthal, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019.

Pleistocene Hunting in Europe



Humankind is confronted with an enormous and perplexing riddle.  We’ve developed a way of life that is ecologically super-idiotic (but look at our awesome phones!), and pounding the vitality of the natural world (and soon we’ll have self-driving cars!).  The great riddle is how did we get into this mess?  Can we get out of it?  Who are we?  Where did we come from?

Many books reveal important clues.  Bonobo described our closest living relatives, a species that has remained sustainable for millions of years.  The Art of Tracking revealed our ancient roots as bipedal hunters and scavengers, which kept our ancestors alive for several million years.  Hunters of the Recent Past examined the communal hunting practiced by Homo sapiens who struggled to adapt to living in temperate and subarctic climates, during the last 15,000 years or so. 

Now, I want to peek at life from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago.  This peek looks at the Homo sapiens who had recently moved into Europe — the ancestors of many white skinned folks who are reading my words in English.  In those days, Europe enjoyed an astonishing abundance of wildlife.  Peek at the fantastic cave paintings of Chauvet or Lascaux.

For my tropical primate ancestors to survive in a challenging non-tropical climate, they had to live like moon explorers, with weatherproof shelters, warm clothing, blazing hearths, and a well-stocked food locker for the deep freeze months.  The giant hyenas, cave bears, cave lions, and saber-tooth cats refused to join PETA, and took great delight in brutally killing the delicious primates in fur coats.  Eventually, groups that were clever and lucky figured out ways to exist for a while, riding a scary climate change roller coaster.

Roche de Solutré

At the Roche de Solutré site, near Mâcon, France, archaeologists have found the remains of up to 100,000 horses.  Prior to 1866, when experts realized the bones were prehistoric, local farmers had been hauling them away for many years, using them for fertilizer.  In some places, the surface of the ground was paved with ancient horse bones.  The valley was a common route for the migrations of animal herds.  In the summer months, herds grazed at higher elevations to avoid heat and insects.  Winter months were spent grazing on the warmer floodplain of the Saône River.

The bone beds were located fairly close to the bottom of a steep limestone cliff.  For years, folks theorized that the horses had been killed by driving them over the edge.  At this site, a more likely scenario was that hunters drove the animals into natural rock corrals, or box canyons, where they were trapped.  Once cut off from escape, they were killed, butchered, dried, and smoked.  Wild horses were extremely dangerous prey.  Big strong stallions would aggressively attack hunters, and stomp them to bloody bits.

The oldest bones are 55,000 years old, horses killed by Neanderthals.  They were covered by six feet (1.8 m) of sterile soil.  The next layer is deep, containing the remains of animals killed by Homo sapiens between 37,000 and 10,000 years ago.  Prior to 22,000 years ago, the majority of bones were horses.  After that, reindeer bones were dominant.  This was an era of climate shifts.

Předmostí

Předmostí is near the city of Přerov, in the Czech Republic.  It is located at the southern end of the Moravian Gate, a narrow corridor that passes between the Carpathian Mountains to the east, and the Sudeten range in the west, linking southern Poland and Moravia.  It has long been a strategic trade and communications route.  Naturally, it was also a route for the seasonal migrations of game animals in the Pleistocene, including mammoths.

Předmostí has the largest mammoth bone accumulations in central Europe.  The skeletons of more than a thousand have been uncovered so far.  Mammoth bones were used in the construction of their huts.  Excavations have found hearths, a cemetery, stone and bone tools, and carvings made from mammoth ivory.  One carving has been named the Venus of Předmostí. 

Folks inhabited Předmostí between 27,000 and 25,000 years ago, and again later, about 20,000 years ago.  During this time period, at many locations in central Europe, numerous Venus figurines have been found.  HERE are some examples.  The figurines inspired archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to imagine a paradise of goddess worshipping people that preceded the dark arrival of patriarchy and bloody warfare… a pleasant dream.

Dolní Věstonice

Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov are small neighboring villages north of Mikulov, in the Czech Republic.  In the twentieth century, when a villager decided to dig a cellar, he discovered the remains of a large dwelling built with mammoth bones and tusks.  Multiple excavation sites in these villages have revealed fascinating details about Pleistocene hunters, who lived there from 29,000 to 24,500 years ago.  They lived on terraces overlooking the river, where they had an excellent view of the vast treeless steppe below.  These huts were common in central Europe.  HERE is a map of them, and HERE are many images of mammoth bone huts.

At one camp, four huts were located close together, and the small settlement was surrounded by a low wall made of mammoth bones and rocks, covered with brush and turf.  The huts were something like teepees, covered with animal skins.  They had a circular foundation made of rocks and heavy bones.  Between the huts was a large outdoor fire pit.  Up the hill was a small hut containing a kiln for baking clay.  This is the earliest evidence of making ceramics (they did not make pottery).  They created a variety of figurines, including the heads of bears, foxes, and lions, and female figurines with bulging breasts and buttocks.  These may be the earliest art.

At a nearby location, the largest lodge was 50 feet long (15 m) by 20 feet wide (7 m), and had five hearths.  At one hearth, two long mammoth bones were stuck in the ground, to support a roasting spit.  Southeast of the lodge were piles of bones, including about 100 mammoths, mostly young.  There were also bones of horses, reindeer, hares, wolves, and foxes.  At one dig, they found the remains of a child wearing a necklace with 27 fox teeth.  The skull was covered with red ochre, and the body was covered with the shoulder blades of mammoths. 

Artists have studied the skulls found in the area, and made paintings of what the people would have looked like in life.  When exhibited in Prague, the portrait of a prehistoric wild woman embarrassed the public — because she looked too modern, not like a dirty primitive beast — she looked like the proper and dignified ladies in the gallery (gulp!).  Many awesome paintings can be found HERE.

Great Leap Forward

The sites mentioned above existed prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (20,000 to 15,000 years ago), an era of intense cold that froze out many species of flora and fauna.  Some human supremacists see these mammoth hunters as a glorious breakthrough in the human saga, when we finally ceased being ordinary animals — dumb brutes unable to sing, speak, reason, make ornaments, paint caves, invent deities, or become entranced by smart phones.  They call this transition the Great Leap Forward — a miraculous advance as important as the Industrial Revolution.  (Of course, this could only take place in Europe, home of the most brilliant humans of all.)

The Pleistocene epoch spanned from 2.6 million years ago, to 11,700 years ago, and it included many intense ice ages.  At the end of the Pleistocene, there was a surge of extinctions; a large number of megafauna species vanished in North America, mostly between 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.  Some experts blame humans for overhunting, others blame climate change, and many blame a combination.

In Europe, fewer extinctions occurred, and they took place over a longer period of time.  Many of the species that went extinct were giant-sized, compared to their modern relatives.  Cave bears and European hippos vanished around 24,000 years ago — both species had been around for over a million years.  Homotherium, a genus of saber-tooth cats, existed for five million years before vanishing 28,000 years ago.  European cave lions vanished 10,000 years ago, after 1.9 million years.  Cave hyenas were gone by 11,000 years ago, after 3.5 million years.  Irish elk were gone by 8,000 years ago, after 400,000 years in Europe.  Woolly mammoths were gone by 14,000 years ago, after 400,000 years.  Woolly rhinoceros vanished 10,000 years ago, after 3.6 million years in Eurasia.

Was the Great Leap Forward a great booboo?  Did overhunting encourage the emergence of agriculture and civilization?  Should we have stayed in tropical Africa, and skipped our nightmarish experiment in technological innovation?  Why don’t bonobos need psych meds?  Good luck with the riddle!  Have a nice day!

Image at top by Libor Balák.

Fagan, Brian, Cro-Magnon:  How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010.

Kurtén, Björn, Pleistocene Mammals of Europe, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1968.

Svoboda, Jiri, and Vojen Lozek, Hunters Between East and West: The Paleolithic of Moravia, Springer Science, New York, 1996.

Stringer, Chris, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, Times Books, New York, 2012.

Ward, Peter D., The Call of Distant Mammoths, Copernicus, New York, 1997.

HERE are paintings of life in central Europe from 20,000 to 12,500 years ago.

HERE is a large collection of photos and random notes describing the Kostenki sites along the Don River in Russia.  Kostenki is notable for the mammoth bone huts found there.

HERE is a large collection of interesting photos, maps, and random notes describing the Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov sites in the Czech Republic. 

Mao’s War Against Nature

When I was young, I discovered pictures from China, where the streets were filled with people riding bicycles.  I was overwhelmed by this display of human intelligence.  Had they learned from our mistakes and taken a higher path, or had their culture taught them to respect life?  I was living in Kalamazoo, where the streets were a nightmare, jammed with impatient nutjobs in speeding wheelchairs.  The air was thick with methylene chloride, and the river was a PCB cesspool.  If only our leaders were Chinese… sigh!  Like I said, I was young.

In 1949, Mao Zedong led a revolution that overthrew the Chinese government.  The victors created the People’s Republic of China, a communist state.  China had suffered from a long era of exploitation by foreign powers.  Mao was eager to create a prosperous industrial utopia as rapidly as possible, by any means necessary.

In 1972, Richard Nixon visited Mao and reestablished relations between the U.S. and China.  Judith Shapiro was among the first Americans allowed to work there.  She taught English.  The outside world knew little about Red China, but Shapiro soon learned that the Maoist era had been a turbulent freak show.  She described this period in her book, Mao’s War Against Nature.

Every environmental history book is a horror story, describing how clever humans survived by using technology and aggression to devour nonrenewable resources, deplete renewable resources, ravage ecosystems, and leave the bills for their children.  Shapiro’s book stands out, because it examines an era of unbelievable ecocide.  Maoist China repeated the classic mistakes of other civilizations, but in fast forward mode.

Mao’s high-speed modernization project was called the Great Leap Forward (1958-60).  He wanted to produce more steel than Great Britain within 15 years.  Peasants rapidly constructed several million primitive backyard furnaces.  A hundred million people worked day and night melting tools, pots, and scrap into blobs of useless metal.  Most of the furnaces were wood-fired, and deforestation was widespread.  In those days, the peasants still believed the dream — that their heroic efforts would bring a new era with powerful tractors and railroads.  They worked enthusiastically.

At the same time, there was a huge drive to increase grain production via bone-headed strategies.  They were told that if they planted ten times as many seeds in a field, the yield would be ten times higher.  Sadly, the densely grown plants rotted.  But local leaders were deeply engaged in a competition to report astonishing gains in grain production, and their claims were far in excess of reality. 

Because it would have been impossible to store all the grain reported, folks were ordered to make steel.  The 1958 crop largely rotted in the fields, while the steel-making peasants consumed their grain reserves.  In 1959, drought arrived, and the Great Famine began.  Between 35 and 50 million died by 1961 — the biggest manmade famine in history.

The war on nature had another front, the Four Pests — rats, sparrows, flies, and mosquitoes.  Sparrows were an enemy of the people because they ate too much grain.  Schoolchildren ran around the countryside, destroying their nests and smashing their eggs.  They banged pots whenever a sparrow landed.  Before long, there were far fewer sparrows, and far more of the insects they used to eat.  Farmers soon realized that sparrows were great allies.  The birds were removed from the pest list, and replaced by bedbugs.

A core component of the Mao era was disregard for expertise.  Mao hated intellectuals, scientists, and anyone else who questioned his fantasies.  “Mao and his followers all too often fell into the trap of believing that because they declared something possible or true, it would be so.”  Time-proven ideas were annoying superstitions that obstructed the fast lane to utopia.  Knowledgeable people who voiced doubts about stupid ideas were promoted to exciting new careers in breaking rocks, exterminating forests, or worse.

When the president of Beijing University warned about the danger of rapid population growth, he was denounced and relieved of his responsibilities.  Overpopulation could only be a problem in evil capitalist societies — never in a socialist paradise.  China was already overpopulated in 1949, and it grew with spooky speed.  Mao refused to believe the census numbers.  In 1958, family planning programs were ended, and not resumed until 1971.  Mao died in 1976, and in 1979, the one-child policy was implemented.

When a respected engineering professor at Qinghua University warned that the planned Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River was stupid, and would promptly fill with silt, he was denounced and relieved of his responsibilities.  The dam was built, and the reservoir filled with silt two years later, flooding a nearby town.  Mao rushed to build thousands of dams, of which 2,976 had collapsed by 1980.  Many were built with soil alone, by untrained peasants.  Floods caused by two dam failures in 1975 killed an estimated 230,000 people.

Rubber was a strategic resource, and Mao did not want to rely on imports from capitalists.  During the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of thousands of educated urban youths from bad families (i.e., intellectuals, rightists, capitalists) were shipped to the virgin rainforests north of Laos.  This region was too far north for rubber, but the experts understood it was dangerous to protest.  So, ancient forest was cleared, and planted with rubber.  Much of it died during the winter of 1974-75.  They replanted, and the trees died again.  They replanted a third time, with the same result.

Looking at this era from the outside, it’s easy to see the foolishness.  The only news the peasants got came from government sources — propaganda.  The culture had a long tradition of obedience to superiors.  Free speech and dissent were not cool.  “Political campaigns so distorted human relationships that family members were driven to denounce and beat each other, neighbors spied on neighbors, schoolchildren drove teachers to suicide, and the world was turned upside down for countless millions.”

As I read, I couldn’t help but contemplate how foolish our own culture would appear to intelligent outsiders.  How much of our news stream is truthful?  What stories are missing?  Why do we disregard the warnings of climate scientists?  How can a “well-educated” population remain so ecologically illiterate?  It’s 2015, the polar bears are dying, and the streets of Kalamazoo are still jammed with speeding wheelchairs.  Why?

The Chinese were manipulated to pursue an ideology, and the program resulted in enormous environmental harm.  It seems like consumer societies are manipulated via advertising and peer pressure to cause enormous harm via lifelong competition for status.  We must continually acquire more impressive homes, cars, televisions, and on and on.  A couple years ago, it was awesomely trendy to wear clothing printed with skull motifs.  The following year, the skulls vanished, and the trend robots rushed to fill their wardrobes with the latest new fashions.

Anyway, Shapiro’s book is stunning.  Mao is dead, and so is his ideology.  The new game is the high speed pursuit of personal wealth.  She mentions a few signs of hope, but it seems clear that the post-Mao era is causing far more environmental harm.  The population is still growing.  The pollution is horrendous.  In every nation, the war on nature is winning.  What would intelligent people do?

Shapiro, Judith, Mao’s War Against Nature, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001.

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

I’ve been living like a hermit for 19 months now, reading dozens of powerful books, and writing weekly blogs.  I’m not the same person I was when I started.  My perception of reality has gone through some changes.  I’ve been sharing what I learned with the world.  I hope that seekers will find it, and I hope that my work will be helpful to them.  I’ll be publishing this material in book form shortly.

Genuine sustainability, of course, is the holy destination — a way of life that is healthy, satisfying, and has a long-term future.  Getting there, of course, will be an enormous challenge, requiring enormous changes, enormous wisdom, enormous luck, and probably a century or three, at least.

What we are today is the result of many choices and changes — stone tools, projectile weapons, fire, complex language, consciousness, directed thinking, cultural evolution, civilization, industrialization, the domestication of plants, animals, and minerals, and so on. 

At the time of the Great Leap Forward, 40,000 years ago, the megafauna were still abundant, and perhaps we were still sustainable.  But these cave painters were quite different from the far simpler hominids who roamed in Africa 500,000 years ago.  The high-tech cave painters were much more vulnerable to falling out of balance, which is exactly what happened.  Infants born today are still pure wild animals, ready to grow up in an advanced tribe of cave painters, or a primitive tribe of early Africans.  As Prince Charles says, we are what we are surrounded by.

Obviously, the safest and most conservative ideal would be to return to tropical regions.  Back in Africa, we didn’t need clothing, fire, shelters, or tools.  We lived much like chimps.  Food was readily available year round.  People enjoyed abundant leisure, and good health.  Perhaps climate change will come to our rescue here, by expanding tropical regions, and dealing a deathblow to agriculture.

But some predict that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Those who foresee near term extinction (NTE) perceive me to be a delusional moron for contemplating the possibility that any humans will exist 100 years from now.  Rapid heating will destroy agriculture and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  Oceans will become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.  Coal burning will cease with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be deflected by pollution, and the warming process will accelerate.  When the power goes out, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods at 430+ nuclear power plants will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse.  What the survivors choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for taking action to protect their wellbeing, to the best of my ability.  We all are.

Collapse will blow away many obstructions that currently block our return to sustainability, but not all of them.  In theory, we are smart enough to choose a new path, and deliberately strive to return to a sustainable way of life.  What we do today to encourage this return, before the lights go out, may make a big difference in the coming years.  It feels right to try.

Five hundred years ago, large portions of the planet were still inhabited by humans living in a relatively sustainable manner.  Four thousand years ago, even more.  But these nature-based societies had no long-term future because there were pockets of dark energy emerging on the planet, something like cancer tumors, and their plan was perpetual growth, by any means necessary.

In his parable of the tribes, Schmookler warned us that once a bully entered the playground, the fun and games were over.  Only power can stop power.  He believed that this problem could be cured by creating a global civilization that was guided by wisdom.  Jack Forbes called it the cannibal disease, and he thought that this disease could be eliminated by spiritual rebirth on a global scale.  There is no fast-acting, silver bullet cure for the growing predator energy.  It’s a formidable challenge to the healing process.  In theory, we can outgrow it.

Another serious problem is a lack of foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears don’t have this problem, because they hunt with tooth and claw, and this works just fine. 

Dilworth, Crosby, and Wright changed the way I think.  I used to believe that our problems began with domestication.  They taught me that our problems began with tool making.  Imagine what a paradise this world would be if prehistoric toolmakers had had foresight, immediately abolished their dangerous profession, and pursued careers in singing, dancing, and storytelling. 

At the dawn of the last century, there was loud and abundant opposition to automobiles, but the wise voice of conservatism was foolishly ignored — a huge mistake!  Two centuries ago, we failed to listen carefully to the ultraconservative Luddites, and what a mess we have now, Lord Almighty!  The problem really isn’t a lack of foresight, it’s a lack of stability.  Stable species have no need for foresight.  They live entirely in the here and now, and do so beautifully.  Domesticated humans are the exception.  We’re the loose cannons of the animal world.

Likewise, Shepard, Wells, Ehrlich, and Livingston warned us about the dangers of cultural evolution.  This is the same problem: a lack of stability.  Culture does not become toxic until it falls out of harmony with wildness, freedom, and the laws of nature — until it crosses the line and becomes unsustainable, a dead end.

It all boils down to remembering who we are, and how to live like human beings.  It’s about living as lightly as possible, and contributing the healing process to the best of our ability.

Thank you!  This has been fun!  Have an honorable life!  Best wishes!

Pandora’s Seed

Spencer Wells is a geneticist who gathers DNA samples from around the world and uses them to analyze evolutionary history.  Mutations occur from time to time, and they provide landmarks in our genetic history.  Following a mutation, the new characteristic is passed along to future generations.  A region where the new characteristic is found in unusual density is marked as its place of origin.  Wells can also distinguish old mutations from recent ones, based on how common they are.  So, each mutation is marked with a time stamp and a place stamp.  Using these markers, and your DNA, Wells can go to a world map and plot the meandering journey of your ancestors’ migration out of Africa. 

Genetic historians perceive the journey of humankind in a unique manner.  Based on gene markers, they have theorized that humans nearly went extinct around 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, dwindling down to 2,000 to 10,000 individuals.  This corresponds with the huge eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra, which spewed massive amounts of dust into the atmosphere.  Global temperatures dropped from 9° to 27° F, and the weather stayed cool for 1,000 years.

The ancestors of Neanderthals moved to Europe about 500,000 years ago, and they overspecialized for life in temperate forests.  Our ancestors migrated out of Africa 60,000 years ago, and arrived in Europe 35,000 years ago.  A few thousand years later, the Neanderthals were gone.  Europe was in an ice age 35,000 years ago, and the forests had changed to grasslands and tundra.  Neanderthals were not well suited for hunting on open ground.  The humans had better weapons, better hunting skills, and travelled in larger groups. 

Our tool-making skills increased significantly around 60,000 years ago, and we may have been pushed out of Africa by population pressure.  The arrival of the cave painting era, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, provides clear evidence that we had acquired abstract thought.  This era of big changes has been called the Great Leap Forward.  Recent evidence suggests that this era of advance may have started as early as 70,000 years ago. 

Moving out of Africa presented us with a radically different survival game, and this encouraged us to be innovative and adaptable.  So did the wild mood swings of the climate.  Wells, who sees the world through gene-colored glasses, suspects that abstract thinking was the offspring of one or more genetic mutations.  Once we had acquired this dangerous juju, we were able to jump onto the high-speed train of cultural evolution.  Sadly, we have yet to be blessed with mutations that provide the powers of foresight or wisdom. 

So, for 60,000 years we’ve been stuck in a vicious cycle of out-of-control innovation, and this madness kicked on turbo thrusters about 10,000 years ago, with the Neolithic Revolution — the dawn of farming and civilization.  We entered into a long era of unusually warm and stable weather, which opened the floodgates to many new possibilities, and many new mistakes.

At this point, the feces hit the fan, in impressive quantities.  Everything that had worked pretty well for tens of thousands of years got blown out of the water.  The quality of our diet plummeted.  Our teeth began rotting from a grain-based diet.  Our enslaved animals generously shared their disease pathogens with us, shooting us off into an era of catastrophic pandemic disease.  Growing population led to growing empires and growing warfare.  We got shorter, sicker, and died younger.  We lost our ancient freedom and became “a group of worker bees with looming deadlines to meet.” 

Well’s book, Pandora’s Seed — The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, does not present us with a miraculous epic of progress.  Agriculture totally changed our relationship with nature, and not for the better.  We quit finding food, and started creating it.  “Instead of being along for the ride, we climbed into the driver’s seat.”  Our numbers exploded, but our quality of life declined. 

Today, at the zenith of our tool-making juggernaut, we’re killing ourselves with a high-calorie crap diet, and an addiction to motorized transport.  A wide variety of degenerative diseases, rare in earlier centuries, have become quite popular.  We tend to be obese, and our rates of mental illness are rising sharply.  The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, mental illness will be the second most common cause of death and disability, following heart disease. 

The book gets wobbly near the end, as it contemplates solutions.  Wells clearly understands that our current way of life is a dysfunctional disaster, and he hopes that we can find a sustainable long-term solution, but his recommendations get dodgy.  This is a normal problem with any book that attempts to sneak as much cool technology as possible into a “sustainable” tomorrow.  Many have tried, none have succeeded. 

“I’m not advocating a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, of course….”  Why not?  At some point in our collapse, if we’re lucky, hunting may once again become a real possibility.  He doesn’t reveal how we’ll be able to indefinitely continue agriculture as water supplies are rapidly being depleted, as erosion continues the process of converting cropland into wasteland, and as the end of the cheap energy bubble is leading us toward the end agriculture as we know it.

Writing in the months prior to the Fukushima disaster, Wells thought it was time for a second look at nuclear energy, “as nuclear waste disposal methods become increasingly sophisticated and power plants become safer and more efficient.”  Better electric cars are coming out all the time.  If we don’t develop new forms of energy, our only alternative would be radical change. 

We are never more innovative than when we are up against the wall.  Maybe we’ll come up with some cool ideas.  The bottom line is that we need a new worldview, followed by a new lifestyle.  We need to live far slower, and waste far less.  Great!

Finally, Wells reveals his biggest fear, a nightmare future where fundamentalists try to take over the world.  Both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists detest modern life, and want to return to the good old days, by any means necessary.  Here on the west coast, Christian fundamentalism is far from putting a stranglehold on society.  But Wells was born in Georgia, raised in Texas, and schooled at Harvard, so his paranoia is understandable.

Wells, Spencer, Pandora’s Seed — The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, New York, 2010.