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.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 09

[Note: This is the ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

The Dance of Hominin Evolution

Experts have endless lively disputes about many aspects of hominin evolution.  There were many predecessors to Homo sapiens, but an accurate lineage of the hominin family tree does not exist, and probably never will.  The physical evidence discovered so far is extremely incomplete.  It’s like a million piece jigsaw puzzle where more than 99 percent of the pieces are missing, and most of these have disintegrated over time.

Evolution does not resemble automobile assembly plants, where production of 2018 models completely ends on a fixed date, and the process of building new and improved 2019 models begins.  The transition from one species to the next is a blurry process that can take hundreds of thousands of years, and isolated groups of the same species can evolve in significantly different ways. 

In addition to arguments over the branches of the family tree, the dates assigned to specific events are also controversial and inconsistent.  Technology for dating specimens has advanced over the years, and different technologies often produce very different dates for the same bone or artifact.  Also, ongoing field work continues to make new discoveries.  So, did Homo sapiens emerge 190,000 years ago, or 300,000?  Did they arrive in Europe 50,000 years ago or 36,000?  And so on.  Numbers are slippery.

If we step back a bit, and disregard numeric dates, there is general agreement on a number of big picture trends.  Homo erectus is much older than Neanderthal, and both are older than Homo sapiens.  Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and Neanderthals did not.  Erectus and Neanderthals are not associated with megafauna extinctions, but our species certainly is.  For the purposes of this book, the trajectory of trends is important — event A preceded event B.  All numeric dates presented here are controversial.

Although the Earth Crisis has roots much older than Homo sapiens, our species is playing a starring role in this catastrophic tragedy.  For this reason, the following chapters will primarily focus on humans, and the emergence and expansion of some highly destructive cultures.  But first, a few comments on two notable cousins.

Erectus and Neanderthal

Homo erectus emerged maybe 1.9 million years ago, and eventually spread across some of the warmer regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe.  They may have been an early ancestor of modern humans.  Erectus hunted, gathered, and used stone tools.  They were the first hominins to evolve a larger than average brain, and they may have been the first to domesticate fire.  Erectus maybe walked off the stage somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.  Their long era of existence does not correspond to extinction spasms or serious ecological injuries.  Erectus apparently lived on Earth much longer than Neanderthals did.

Neanderthals probably evolved north of the Mediterranean, not in Africa.  Their remains have been found in Siberia, the Middle East, and Europe.  The earliest discoveries date to maybe 350,000 years ago.  We share up to 99.9 percent of our DNA with them.  Because they lived in non-tropical regions, they evolved thick bodies with large bones that provided greater strength and better cold tolerance.  Elizabeth Kolbert noted that modern humans have up to four percent Neanderthal DNA. 

Erectus, on average, had 1,000 cc brains.  Neanderthals were the brainiest hominins, at 1,600 cc.  Sapiens averages a modest 1,350 cc.  Could our smaller brains be the result of having access to cutting edge new technology (javelins, harpoons, bows and arrows, etc.)? 

Kathleen McAuliffe reported on research finding that human brains have shrunk about 10 percent in the last 20,000 years.  The Homo sapiens with the biggest brains lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.  They were the Cro-Magnons, who had to overcome the many new challenges of surviving in snowy ecosystems, while fending off hungry cave lions, cave hyenas, and saber-tooth cats.  The shrinking brain trend has been found in China, Europe, Africa, and even Australia, which remained Stone Age until 1788.  Why?  Perplexed experts propose some theories, but they don’t know for sure. 

One study found that brains get smaller as population density increases.  Tim Flannery suggests that modern consumers live like cattle on a feedlot, all our needs conveniently provided.  We no longer have the skills or knowledge to survive in the wild.  Thirty species of animals have been domesticated, and for every one of them their brain volume was 10 to 15 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Some think that humans domesticated themselves.

Anyway, the trademark Neanderthal weapon was a heavy thrusting lance.  Hunters had to slowly, silently, and very skillfully approach the prey undetected, then suddenly charge the animal, firmly gripping the spear with both hands, and ram it deep into its flesh.  Readers who have hunted hippos with wooden thrusting spears know that this can be very dangerous.  One site in Croatia contained the remains of 75 Neanderthals, and none were older than 35.  Many of their bones had healed fractures, suggesting painful accidents or encounters with fierce animals.  Dying of old age was unlikely.

The climate of the Neanderthal era was like a roller coaster.  In Europe, they were pounded by an era of extreme cold maybe 70,000 years ago.  From maybe 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, the climate was a spastic freak show.  Clive Finlayson noted that the climate often flip-flopped between warm periods and intensely frigid.  Radical shifts could arrive suddenly, and last hundreds or thousands of years, all across Eurasia.  Youngsters might grow up in a chilly steppe ecosystem that used to be a comfortable forest in the days of their grandparents.

Would Neanderthals have become the modern global primate if Homo sapiens had blinked out in Africa?  I sometimes wonder if real estate was a significant limiting factor.  Caves were luxurious addresses during glacial centuries, compared to hide-covered teepees or huts.  The primo caves were south (sun) facing, and ideally overlooked the seasonal migration routes of animal herds.  But there was a limited number of caves, and many were not vacant.  Neanderthals were always welcome dinner guests when they stumbled into caverns inhabited by hungry, jumbo-sized cave lions, cave hyenas, and cave bears.

In warmer and wetter periods, glaciers retreated, and tundra transformed into forest and grassland, habitat for critters like red deer, horses, and moose.  In colder and drier periods, glaciers advanced, forest retreated, and tundra returned, as did mammoths, woolly rhinos, and reindeer.  Neanderthals listened to their growling tummies, and went where the meat was.  They migrated northward in warmer eras, and retreated south when blast freezers returned.  The last Neanderthals died on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, in Gibraltar, maybe 40,000 to 28,000 years ago.  This was definitely after the arrival of humans in Western Europe, and before the spasm of megafauna extinctions on the continent.

Our human supremacist culture routinely preaches that Neanderthals were pathetic dullards.  During their long vacation in Europe, maybe 270,000 years, Neanderthal technology didn’t change much.  From the supremacist perspective, Neanderthals’ 350,000 year era of stable, low impact, ecological sustainability was indisputable proof of low intelligence. 

Elizabeth Kolbert absolutely disagreed.  Neanderthals lived in Europe for a very long time while affecting their ecosystem no more than any other large mammals.  Flannery noted that, for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals coexisted with straight-tusked elephants, mammoths, and woodland rhinos — without driving them extinct.  If humans had never wandered in from the Middle East, Europe might still be a wild, free, and happy celebration of Neanderthals, Irish elk, saber-tooth cats, straight tusk elephants, and aurochs.  What’s wrong with that?

Everything!  The supremacists leap to their feet, jump up and down, spitting, shouting, smashing bottles.  Humans are blessed by incredible intelligence, brilliant innovation, complex hunting weapons, sophisticated language skills, artistic creativity, decorative ornaments, and the powerful ability to invent totally irrational beliefs, accept them as absolute truth, and exterminate large numbers of nonbelievers.  Ancient mystical stories invented by Homo sapiens proudly assert that Homo sapiens is the absolute Crown of Creation, and the rest of the family of life was provided for our sustenance, amusement, and assorted perversions.

OK.  Stop right here.  Reread the list of human blessings in the previous paragraph.  For the most part, these are not characteristics of species that managed to live sustainably for more than a million years, like the chimps, baboons, lions, horses, and on and on — “ordinary animals” in other words.  In the big picture, it’s not irrational to conclude that the unusual intelligence we have acquired is powerful, dangerously irrational and destructive, and has become the primary threat to our continued existence.

For 150+ years, it has been a normal and respectable tradition for scholars and theologians to line up and urinate on the stupid Neanderthals.  European intellectuals were quite sure that the Garden of Eden was located rather close to London.  They were stunned and bewildered by the growing evidence that the ancestors of all hominins trace back to Mother Africa.  All Homo sapiens living 50,000 years ago had beautiful dark skins.   Oh my God!  It can’t be true!  Horror!

In 2014, Paola Villa and Wil Roebroeks reexamined the traditional beliefs in Neanderthal inferiority, to see if the latest archaeological research still supported them.  They did not find compelling data.  They also pointed out that the traditional beliefs of human superiority in language, symbolic communication, cognitive abilities, and abstract thinking were impossible to prove via archaeological data.  These were the biased opinions of supremacist imaginations.  Science is not required to be rational, and very often isn’t.

Sustainability Doesn’t Suck

Anyway, Neanderthals demonstrated that bipedal primates with huge brains can live sustainably for several hundred thousand years, in extremely challenging conditions, without agriculture, metal making, animal enslavement, fish mining, deforestation, or writing.  In fact, stability is not a problem or flaw.  Stability sounds like a fun and healthy alternative to mindless perpetual growth, fanatical eco-destruction, and devastating hurricanes of irrational illusions.

Clive Finlayson reminded us that no animal species can foretell the future.  When life is comfortable, and the ecosystem is not being ravaged, the safe and intelligent option is to be conservative, and remain on the well-worn time-proven path.  But when the <bleep> hits the fan, and traditions totally fail, innovation might be a less dangerous option.  The path of innovation is risky, often leading to unintended consequences and bloody surprises.  In worst case scenarios, innovation can backfire spectacularly, as 7+ billion people are now painfully discovering.  Yikes!

Chris Stringer reminded us that the myth of progress is a new idea.  The notion of utopia-bound continuous improvement is a bit over 200 years old.  Civilization was imagined to be an upward spiral. 

But in earlier civilizations, mobs of loonies were furiously mowing down ancient forests, triggering landslides, flash floods, and harbors choked with silt.  Each new generation inherited an ecosystem that was obviously in worse condition.  The passage of time was seen as a downward spiral of decay and decline, an inevitable one-way descent into social and ecological Armageddon. 

Hesiod, an ancient Greek thinker, described the glorious days of his venerable ancestors as the Golden Age, when men were pure and lived like gods.  It was followed by a descent into the Silver Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and finally the Iron Age, when men were violent, foul-mouthed, and fascinated by every form of evil.

Stringer noted that the wizards of modern society are possessed by an overwhelming and irrational blind faith in progress and perpetual growth.  We are far more advanced than Neanderthals, and they were better than Erectus.  You and I are lucky to enjoy the amazing pinnacle of billions of years of evolution.  Stringer does not see this as proof of divine destiny.  He believes that the fact that Neanderthals blinked out, and we didn’t, was largely a result of chance.  We survivors were assisted by the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

For example, about 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, the Mount Toba super volcano erupted on the island of Sumatra, spreading enormous amounts of ash.  In some regions of India, up to 19 feet (6 m) of ash accumulated.  Much incoming sunlight was blocked, and global temperatures may have dropped by 3° to 5°C for several years.  Others imagine an intense thousand year instant ice age.  Still others suspect far less global impact.  One theory, presented by geneticists, asserts that the human population plunged to 5,000 to 10,000 individuals — implying that we nearly went extinct.  Others point out that there is no evidence of extinction spasms among mammals at this time.  It’s not easy being an expert on days long past.

Anyway, Stringer suggests that if a similar eruption had happened closer to Africa, instead of Sumatra, it could have been game over for our species, but maybe not Neanderthals, who resided north of Africa.  Or, today might look very different if the rollercoaster of ice ages had occurred in a slightly different pattern over the last 200,000 years.  The outcome could have easily been quite different.  Chance is powerful juju.  Stringer is not a member of the progress cult.  He believes that our long-term future is entirely unpredictable.   I agree.

The Rise of Homo Sapiens



The Rise of Homo Sapiens, by Frederick Coolidge (psychologist) and Thomas Wynn (anthropologist), is a book about the evolution of human cognition.  It describes the seven million year voyage that resulted in the magnificent mind that’s throbbing between your ears right now.  This voyage began with the first hominins — bipedal (two legged) apes who were either our direct ancestors, or our long lost cousins.

Note that the details of human evolution are the cause of endless barroom brawls among rowdy paleoanthropologists and archaeologists.  They constantly argue about the members of our family tree, the transitions between one species and the next, and the dates when changes happened.  To keep it simple here, the first brainy hominin was Homo erectus, who arrived on the African stage 1.8 million years ago.  Erectus probably evolved into Homo heidelbergensis, who was maybe the common ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens (our hero!).  Neanderthals are our cousins, not our direct ancestors (we share at least 99.5 percent of our DNA).

The authors believe that there were two significant surges in cognition, (1) Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago, and (2) Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago.  Erectus had a large brain, knapped stone tools, and was the first to move beyond woodland habitats.  They were able to survive in everything from dry savannahs to tropical rainforests.  From Africa, they spread to southern Europe and much of Asia.  Around 1.5 million years ago, they invented a major advance in stone tools — biface knapping.  These were hand axes and cleavers that had two cutting edges.  For the first time, folks could now effectively butcher large animals — an ability that greatly expanded their food resources.

Razor sharp stone tools were revolutionary.  Great apes, monkeys, and other mammals can only cut and chop with their teeth.  This book made me appreciate, for the first time, the huge importance of stone tools.  Cutting is big juju!  Imagine a world in which teeth were the only cutting edges for any purpose.  Civilization would be impossible, and you and I would be naked wild things on a sunny African savannah.

Another revolutionary technological discovery was the domestication of fire, which kicked open the gate to life as we know it.  The earliest evidence of fire was found in an African cave, dating to 1.4 million years ago.  Erectus was probably a fire user.  Prior to manufactured tools and domesticated fire, our ancestors were still ordinary animals, like baboons — wild, free, and happy.  These two changes shoved them outside the community of all other animals, and put them on an ominous new path.

In the million years following the invention of biface cutters, Homo erectus artifacts reveal no evidence of further innovation.  Maybe they now had everything they needed, and life was grand.  But the book’s authors live in a culture that is constantly disrupted by hurricanes of innovation.  To them, a million years of stability and sustainability is glaring evidence of feeblemindedness. 

Both authors are shameless out-of-the-closet human supremacists, and their book is a flag-waving celebration of human brilliance.  They write, “Homo sapiens has transformed the natural world into one of culture and civilization that our distant ancestors, let alone members of other species, possibly could not imagine.”  No kidding! 

The authors are also masters at the mysterious art of academic writing.  Behold: “The allometric trajectory that best distinguished anatomically modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals was a tendency towards klinorhynchy or globularity in modern humans.”  The book was not a pleasure read for a general reader like me.  I was not the intended audience.

In the book, hominins are essentially presented as being biological machines.  Much attention is devoted to brain size, brain components, brain processes, and genetic evolution.  Subjects include decision making, planning, memory, learning, abstract thinking, language, communication.  Bones and artifacts reveal little or nothing about stuff like thinking, memory, or speaking, so the book indulges in a lot of speculating, which could get quite frisky, sometimes hopping over the fence of credibility.

Homo sapiens maybe emerged around 200,000 years ago.  Somewhere around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, there is evidence of a significant shift that is often referred to as the Great Leap Forward.  It was an era of breathtaking cave paintings, decorative ornaments, ceramics, carvings, and innovation in hunting technology.  The authors make the highly controversial assertion that this big shift “developed because of an additive genetic mutation or epigenetic event that affected the neural organization of the brain.”  And so, a new and turbulent chapter in the human saga was the result of random genetic juju that scrambled our thinkers.

Far less attention is devoted to significant factors that were external to the brain machines and their magic genes.  By the time of the Great Leap, folks had struggled to overcome a number of major challenges.  They had figured out how to survive in a chilly temperate climate — warm clothing, secure shelters, food storage.  Utilizing the latest state of the art technology, they had become highly skilled at team hunting.  They lived in regions having abundant game.  People who are struggling to survive are not going to have time to fool around with nonessential amusements.  But people living in times of prosperity, like the Baby Boomers, or the cave painters, can indulge in fanciful excesses and extravagances.

In the Great Leap era, the world was unimaginably alive and a spectacular, breathtaking miracle.  Modern folks would eagerly pay big money, and get on a 40-year waiting list to experience a pure, thriving wilderness filled with mammoths, lions, aurochs, and buffalo.  To gasp with wonder at vast clouds of birds filling the skies with beautiful music and motion.  To listen to rivers thrashing with countless salmon.  To see, hear, and feel the powerful vitality of the reality in which our species evolved, the type of world that the genes of every newborn baby expects to inhabit — a healthy, sane, beautiful, wild paradise.

Craig Dilworth wrote that the cave painting tribes were the luckiest humans of all, because they lived at the zenith of the entire human experience.  A number of revolutionary innovations had provided them with a temporary opportunity to experience a magnificent way of life.  But the road ahead was a rough one.  Another ice age was approaching, and Europe would get colder than it had been in 100,000 years.  Large game would become less abundant due to habitat change, and to the long-term consequences of, century after century, killing a few too many big critters that did not breed like bunnies.

Technological innovation has a regular habit of sharply biting its clever inventors, and their societies, on the ass.  Patching up the damage caused by the unintended consequences of progress typically inspires even more innovation, leading to even more unintended consequences, resulting in a treacherous downward spiral. 

Humans have retained some characteristics of ordinary animals — our minds are focused on the here and now, our capacity for acute foresight is flaccid, and we often become prisoners of habitual thoughts and behaviors.  Over time, human numbers grew, and food resources diminished.  Storms of devastating cleverness eventually led to the domestication of plants and animals, a transition that many anthropologists refer to as the Great Leap Backward. 

And now, dear reader, here we are, standing in the growing shadow of an era of climate change helter-skelter, a painful withdrawal from a total addiction to energy guzzling, and the eventual obliteration of life as we know it.  And, here we are talking about a book that celebrates the miracle of human cognition.  Oy!

A year ago, I spent a few hours with this book, and set it aside.  Recently, I looked at it again, because I was interested in some anthropological information.  I contemplated reviewing it, but decided not to.  Then, my muse gave me a dope slap (SMACK!).  The book is perfect!  It’s a haunting mug shot of the mindset that is engaged in a full-scale war against all life — yet refuses to notice it, or care.

This is the mindset in which educated brains are thoroughly marinated from childhood onward.  Like standing in front of a curvy funhouse mirror, the distorted reflection we see is Superman or Superwoman, powerful beings of greatness and goodness.  Thus, the notion of superheroes knowingly engaging in pathological mass destruction is perfectly ridiculous.  We much prefer the flattering portrait to the lost and confused critter behind the mask.  This may not be the path to a happy ending.

One passage noted that, “excepting humans,” today’s great apes are in decline (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans).  Could their big brains have doomed them?  “Large brains are expensive and have profound life-history consequences.  If they no longer yield a competitive edge, their owners will, predictably, go extinct.”  Do you think that humans truly are the exception?  Is our ever-growing cleverness rotting out our competitive edge, as it undermines the ecosystems that make our existence possible?  Will our superhero brains ever snap out of their trance, open their eyes, and become fully present in reality?  Stay tuned.  And now, a message from our sponsor…

Coolidge, Frederick L., and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo Sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, U.K., 2009.

Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers

 

 

Colin Tudge wrote Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers, a book that presents his theories on the dawn of progress and perpetual growth, focusing on how agriculture really began.  At the time, he was employed by the London School of Economics, an institution focused on capitalism, not ecological sustainability.

The book vibrates with cognitive dissonance.  Tudge has been studying agriculture for many years.  On one hand, it was a magnificent achievement that threw open the door to the wonders of modernity.  On the other hand, modernity has become a victim of its own success, with seven billion humans dangerously rocking the boat.  As Pandora once discovered, some magnificent achievements are best left in the box.

For most of the human journey, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, whom Tudge likens to bandits.  They lived by their wits, snatched what the ecosystem had to offer, and had plenty of leisure time in their lives.  The prudent path was to live within the carrying capacity of their ecosystem.  If they had been ambitious and hard working, they would have wiped out their prey and starved.

Farmers were ambitious, hard working control freaks.  They manipulated the ecosystem to increase its carrying capacity, temporarily, via soil mining.  More work produced more rewards, and more food could feed more people.  Wild critters frequently molested their precious crops, so farmers responded with pest control — overhunting.  Eventually, the human mob got large, wildlife became scarce, wild land became cropland, and returning to hunting was no longer an option.

Agriculture emerged independently in at least six widely scattered locations.  It was not invented in Uruk by a demented genius.  It began maybe 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.  Tudge suggests that it developed gradually, as proto-farming, starting maybe 40,000 years ago.  Even primitive yokels could see that plants grew from seeds, and that clearing other vegetation away from food plants promoted their growth.  Proto-farming was done on a small scale, a pleasant hobby that left behind no enduring evidence for scientists to discover thousands of years later.

In Europe, Neanderthals had been big game hunters for hundreds of thousands of years.  While surviving a roller coaster of climate shifts, they lived within carrying capacity and did not wipe out the game.  Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that later migrated into Europe, maybe 45,000 years ago.  Tudge theorizes that these foreign immigrants were proto-farmers.  Because they could produce their own food, they were less vulnerable to the consequences of overhunting.  Big game species began blinking out.  This eliminated the food supply for the Neanderthals, who were forced off the stage into oblivion.  (Stringer and Finlayson have other views on Neanderthals.)

By and by, proto-farming metastasized into a more virulent form, agriculture.  The economists leap to their feet with enthusiastic applause and cheering.  Civilization, here we come!  Whee!  The fuse was lit for a joyride of skyrocketing growth — onward to ten billion!  Well, this is the schoolbook version that everyone knows, and most believe.  (See Cohen on the shift to agriculture.)

Now, the plot thickens.  A growing number of scholars have been poking holes in the glorious myth of growth and progress.  Farming was miserable backbreaking work.  While hunter-gatherers benefitted from a diverse and highly nutritious diet, the farmer’s diet was the opposite, majoring in a few staple foods.  Farmers were shorter and less healthy.  In their remains, we find that “the toes and knees are bent and arthritic and the lower back is deformed.”

Tudge acknowledges the revisionists.  “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”  Here’s my favorite line in the book: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adapt agriculture but why anyone took it up at all when it was obviously so beastly.”

He believes that overhunting was the sole cause of the megafauna extinctions.  Native Americans had little self-restraint when it came to hunting mammoths and mastodons.  There is no evidence that climate change played any role in the die-off, he says.  But, at the end of the ice age, as the land warmed up, large areas of tundra were gradually replaced with dense forests.  This put the squeeze on species adapted to living on the tundra.

Did scruffy rednecks with homemade spears really hunt the speedy horses of North America to extinction — but not the bison, elk, and deer?  We’ll never know the full story, but I would be wary of dismissing the impact of radical climate swings, or the importation of Old World pathogens for which the American fauna had zero immunity.  (See Kolbert on extinction.)

Anyway, agriculture took root, because it worked more often than it failed.  Population gradually grew, which required more and more cropland and pasture.  Each expansion raised carrying capacity a bit, while soil depletion reduced it.  The growing mob had to work harder, and grow more.  In the cult of economists, “growth” is the god word.  Unfortunately, perpetual growth becomes a vicious spiral.  Tudge winces at the paradox.  “To condemn all of humankind to a life of full-time farming, and in particular arable farming, was a curse indeed.”  (See Montgomery, Manning, Dale, and Postel on agriculture’s drawbacks.)

Animal domestication, on the other hand, greatly benefitted the critters we enslaved, says Tudge.  For example, wild wolves are vanishing, but domesticated dogs have zoomed past a half billion.  Similarly, domesticated sheep can breed far more when well fed and defended.  If the population of a critter explodes, this is called biological success.  Dogs are a great success story, but their luckless wolf relatives keep smacking into bullets, stepping in traps, and eating poisoned bait.  Oddly, neither dogs nor sheep could survive in the wild, apart from humans.  (See Shepard on animal enslavement.)

It’s a great tragedy of history that the wild folks who adapted to their ecosystem, and lived within its carrying capacity, have been unable to withstand the constant pressure from growing mobs of farmers.  When Tudge wrote, we were approaching six billion.  The spectacular success of growth and progress was beginning to look like a Pyrrhic victory.  We might actually have real limits!  (See Bourne and Cribb on Peak Food.)

Clouds of doubt swirled in his head.  “Our earliest hunting ancestors must have been lazy, as lions are.  Perhaps we should learn from them.”  It’s touching and illuminating to watch the poor lad struggle with the conflict between powerful cultural myths and his growing awareness of reality.  This struggle is a necessary challenge on the path to growth and healing.  We must stand against the strong current.

The book is just 53 pages, and easy to read.  It would be a good text for courses in eco-psychology, environmental ethics, and critical thinking.

Postscript.  In a recent online video, Tudge reveals his grand solution, Enlightened Agriculture — small organic family farms raising a wide variety of crops.  By 2050, 9.5 to 10 billion will be coming to dinner.  Can we feed them?  “The answer is a resounding yes!”  We can feed them for decades, maybe indefinitely.  Profit-driven, energy-guzzling monoculture agriculture is fantastically unsustainable.  All we need is simply a total revolution in how we live, think, breed, and produce food — as soon as possible, please.

Tudge, Colin, Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers — How Agriculture Really Began, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.





How Did Things Get To Be This Way?



 

Ojibway elder Basil Johnston said that a good life is impossible for people disconnected from their history.  We must know who we are.  The venerable historian William Cronon was the son of a history professor.  One day, his father gave him the magic key for understanding the world.  He told his son to carry one question on his journey through life: “How did things get to be this way?”

Sometime, when you’re feeling a bit bored, eager for thrills and excitement, get a library card and spend the next 20 years reading.  Search for answers to Cronon’s question.  Read 500 books on environmental history, ecology, anthropology, night after night, year after year, and type thousands of pages of notes.

It’s a mind-altering experience, a spiritual journey.  In the process, you become something like a shaman, with the ability to pass through the veil, and discover important information in a non-ordinary state of consciousness.  When you return to the ordinary reality, you can share what you have learned, and guide your people closer to the path of healing — in theory. 

More commonly, finding real answers to Cronon’s question turns you into a notorious dolt, a filthy and disgusting pariah.  Doomer!  Go away!  You’re crazy!  Most folks prefer to remain in a world of illusions, a realm that has little in common with the power visions of the history shaman.  Illusions are comfortable.  The economy is recovering.  We’re zooming toward Utopia.  The best is yet to come.  Right?

Conservation writer Charles Little has given many lectures on tree death in America.  He is often asked one question: “A hand will be raised at the back of the room.  ‘But what can we do?’ the petitioner will ask.  Do?  What can we do?  What a question that is when we scarcely understand what we have already done!”  Indeed!  How can the human journey avoid one more cycle of repeated mistakes when we fail to understand most of the mistakes?

Biologist Paul Ehrlich once spent time among the Inuit of Hudson Bay, Canada.  He was shocked to discover that the entire knowledgebase of their cultural information was known by everyone — how to hunt seals, tan pelts, weave a net, sew a coat, and so on.  Yet, in our advanced civilization, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information.  You can get a PhD from Stanford and never learn anything about agriculture.  Food is one thing we truly need.  What is the plan for feeding eleven billion?  Is it possible?

Meanwhile, mainstream society has invented a comical joyride in magical thinking — if we simply call something “sustainable” enough times, then it is!  In the blink of the eye, forest mining becomes Sustainable Forestry™ and soil mining becomes Sustainable Agriculture™.  In a barrage of oxymorons, business as usual is kept on life support, by any means necessary, for as long as possible.  What should we do about this?  How can we revive the original meaning of sustainability?

In Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization, Richard Manning writes, “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  He says, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  In Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, geologist David Montgomery concurs.  “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Contrary to common beliefs, history shamans have a hard time finding examples of genuinely sustainable agriculture.  Have you seen recent images of Uruk, the magnificent city of King Gilgamesh?

In Here on Earth, Tim Flannery said that we are like sheep in a pasture.  We no longer need big brains, because our shepherds take care of us.  We have become “helpless, self-domesticated livestock.”  “While we sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry like cattle in a feedlot without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy, we only hasten the destruction — in the long term — of our kind.”  Won’t it be a healthy change when the lights go out, and we are once again required to be fully present in reality?

Flannery said that our ice age ancestors had bigger brains than we have now — 10 percent larger in men, and 14 percent in women.  In Lone Survivors, Chris Stringer noted that the people of today have brains that average 1350 cc in size, and this is ten percent smaller than the average size of Homo sapiens brains 20,000 years ago.  The average Neanderthal brain was 1600 cc — much bigger than ours.  Could that imply something?

Anthropocentric scholars are fond of dismissing Neanderthals as dullards, because their tool kit changed little over 350,000 years.  For 350,000 years, they lived by killing megafauna, but failed to wipe them out.  Flannery noted, “Mammoths, straight-tusked woodland elephants, and two species of woodland rhinoceros coexisted with Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years.”  What was wrong with our incompetent cousins?

Today, every newborn that squirts out of the womb is a wild animal, with genes fine-tuned for life on a healthy tropical savannah.  Infants only become consumers by being raised in consumer society.  If we had been raised in a Neanderthal culture, would we live in balance? 

In The Tender Carnivore, Paul Shepard wrote that when scientists raised chimps in their home, along with their own children, the chimps were at least as intelligent as children, until the children were three or four, learned language, and left the chimps in the dust.  Different intelligence allows us to better comprehend the complexity of the world, but it also enables us to better destroy it.  Much of our cultural information will be lost forever when climate change pulls the curtains on life as we know it.  How can we preserve the tiny portion of this knowledge that is needed for a return to the path of good life?

Recently, I’ve become fascinated by our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos.  We share something like 99 percent of our genes with them.  Their ancestors have inhabited the same place for millions of years, without trashing it.  Imagine that!  They still enjoy a healthy life in a healthy place.  Is that really so terrible?  Once upon a time, our ancestors lived in the same region, in much the same way.  What happened?

Chimps and bonobos did not make serious weapons, wage war against ape-eating predators, spread around the world, invent agriculture, explode in numbers, live in filth, and die by the millions from infectious diseases.  They did not wage war against infectious diseases, soar into extreme overshoot, load the atmosphere with crud, and blindside the planet’s climate.  Instead, they inhabit a niche in their ecosystem, and live as they have for millions of years, without rocking the boat.  Is there something we could learn from their example?

Is it time to burn our Superman and Superwoman uniforms, apologize to the family of life for our furious rampages, return to the tropics, abandon words, clothes, and spears, and try to remember who we are?  Can we recover a mode of enduring simplicity and stability that would no longer require a history to guide us?  Can we someday heal so well that we never again have to ask “How did things get to be this way?”

Lone Survivors

A million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors consisted of maybe 20,000 breeding individuals, according to wizards who speculate on the hidden secrets of DNA.  This is similar to the current population of chimpanzees or gorillas.  The ancestors lived in scattered pockets of Africa, at a time when Earth was a paradise of abundant life.  From these ancient roots, a number of hominid species evolved, but only Homo sapiens still survives, at seven-point-something billion and growing.  The chimps and gorillas continue to live in a manner similar to their ancestors of a million years ago.  What happened to us?

Chris Stringer is one of the venerable grandfathers in the study of human evolution.  He’s read the papers, attended the conferences, examined the skulls, and had a ringside seat at the noisy catfights.  This field of knowledge is far from finished.  New specimens continue to be found, and new technology provides deeper insights.  Stringer’s book, Lone Survivors, discusses some primary issues, and the scholarly disputes surrounding them, as they stood in 2012.  He does a pretty good job of providing an overview to a huge and complex subject, but readers with little background are advised to wear life preservers.

I learned a lot about Neanderthals.  They survived 400,000 years on a climate change roller coaster.  They hung out with hippos in warm forests near Rome, and they chased wooly mammoths on frigid treeless tundras.  They had short, stocky bodies that were good for preserving heat, but which required more calories.  Males and females were about the same size, suggesting little division of labor, everyone joined in the hunt. 

The Neanderthal diet majored in the flesh of large game.  Readers who have hunted hippos with wooden thrusting spears know that his is very dangerous.  One site in Croatia contained the remains of 75 Neanderthals, and none were older than 35.  In their clans, there were probably many orphans and few grandparents.  The scarcity of elders, and the small size of their groups, sharply restricted the flow of cultural information from one generation to the next, and from clan to clan.

Some say that Neanderthals lacked shoes and close-fitting clothing.  When Darwin visited chilly Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America, he was shocked to see natives wearing little or no clothing and sleeping naked in the open.  Stringer noted that modern Europeans seem to be poorly adapted to the cold, physiologically.

Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that moved into Europe maybe 45,000 years ago.  European Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000 years ago.  Neanderthals went extinct in the Middle East, Siberia, Gibraltar, and Britain at different times, probably for different reasons.  This was an era of frequent climate zigzags.  When temperatures plummeted, habitable territories shrank, and fewer folks could be fed.

Cro-Magnons apparently had footwear and warm, fitted clothing.  They had better tools for hunting, so their diet was more diverse and dependable.  They were able to extract more nutrients from an ecosystem, so they could survive in places where Neanderthals could not.  They lived in larger groups, and more of them survived to middle age or old age, so more cultural information could be passed to the young.

Large populations are better at preserving cultural knowledge, acquiring new information from outsiders, and generating innovations.  More busy minds interact, exchange ideas, compete, and imagine cool ways for living even farther out of balance.  Witness the city of Los Angeles, where 14 million animals with hunter-gatherer DNA are temporarily able to survive because of a highly complex system of innovative technology.  Note that this innovation has no relationship to foresight or wisdom.  Time is running out on Los Angeles.

On the other hand, less innovation occurs in smaller simpler groups, and that’s often a blessing.  Innovators can be dangerous loose cannons, introducing risky new ideas that result in horrid unintended consequences — like cell phones, automobiles, or agriculture.  Nothing is more precious than a stable, sustainable, time-proven way of living, where the secret to success is simply imitating your ancestors, conforming to the norm, and enjoying life, like the chimps and gorillas do.

When the planet heated up 14,000 years ago, rising sea levels submerged the land link between Australia and Tasmania, terminating the exchange of people, ideas, and gadgets.  Tasmania’s traditional way of life was also squeezed as the warmer climate spurred the expansion of heavy forest.  The natives experienced a cultural meltdown.  “Tasmanians appear to have led an increasingly simplified life, forgoing apparently valuable skills and technologies, such as bone and hafted tools, nets and spears used to catch fish and small game, spear throwers and boomerangs, and anything but the simplest of skin clothing.”

Will climate change have a similar effect on industrial civilization in the coming decades?  Will it slash food production, sharply reduce population, eliminate travel between regions, pull the plug on modern technology, and erase lots of obsolete and unsustainable cultural information?  Could collapse have a silver lining?

Climate change can derail any culture, and drive species to extinction.  It can also produce beneficial conditions, like the unusually favorable climate of the last 10,000 years.  Natural selection rewards species that can adapt to change, and it deletes those that fail.  There is another important variable that is often overlooked — genetic drift — mutations that happen all the time when slight boo-boos occur during cell division.  These tiny defects can provide a barrel of surprises.

We are repeatedly taught that humans are nature’s flawless masterpiece, the glorious conclusion of three billion years of evolution.  But, if Big Mama Nature had experienced slightly different moods over the eons, we might be Neanderthals or Denisovans today (or maybe slime mold).  Climate change and genetic drift are purely random.  The fact that Homo sapiens is the lone survivor among the hominid species is not absolute proof of superiority, but it does indicate a temporary streak of good luck.

Homo heidelbergensis was an ancestor that lived 500,000 years ago.  They had brains ranging in size from 1100 to 1400 cc (modern brains average 1350 cc).  The average Neanderthal brain was 1600 cc — much bigger than ours.  Stringer noted that our brains today are ten percent smaller than our Homo sapiens ancestors of 20,000 years ago.  Is there a message here?

Without words, chimps and gorillas can express contentment, affection, irritation, excitement.  But without complex language, they are more trapped within themselves.  Language took us “into new and shared worlds that were unknown to our ancestors.”  We can talk about the here and now, the past, the future, abstract concepts, feelings, imaginary worlds, and so on.

Later, innovative geniuses invented the use of symbols.  Now we can convert words into patterns of squiggly lines, for example: “computer.”  Writing enables us to communicate with folks in faraway places.  I can read words written by Julius Caesar, and so might the generations yet-to-be-born, in theory.  Industrial civilization cannot exist without symbols — numbers, graphs, pictures, status symbols.  Progress abounds with powerful and dangerous juju.

Stringer is a mild mannered humanist.  And so, he portrays the human journey as one of admirable advancement (the chimps fall down laughing).  On the last page, he confesses a profound doubt.  “Sometimes the difference between failure and success in evolution is a narrow one, and we are certainly on a knife edge now as we confront an overpopulated planet and the prospect of global climate change on a scale that humans have never faced before.  Let’s hope our species is up to the challenge.” 

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