Wild Free and Happy Sample 23

[Note: This is the twenty-third 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 202 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.]

 Super Grass

I previously mentioned the notion that humans are creatures of the grass.  Recently, I stumbled on information that added a deeper dimension to this theme.  It all began when I read that the area of global forest cover has been sharply reduced since the early Miocene Epoch.  This stimulated my curiosity, and led to an exciting wild factoid chase.  The Miocene spanned from 23 to 5.3 million years ago.  It seems that the early Miocene was wet and warm, and many ecosystems were forests.  I was surprised to learn that as late as 20 million years ago, much of Antarctica was covered with temperate forests.

Anyway, later in the Miocene, maybe 6 to 8 million years ago, it got cooler and dryer, and a new type of major ecosystem emerged — grasslands.  They can thrive where it’s too dry for trees.  Over time, expanding grassland displaced large areas of forest.  This shift was an important turning point in the human saga.  As forests shrank, there was less habitat for tree-dwelling primates, causing a number of species to tumble off the stage.  Some primates moved out onto the savannah, and figured out how to survive in open country as ground-dwelling primates.  They included the ancestors of baboons and humans. 

So, it was a gradual but substantial shift in climate patterns and ecosystems that made it possible for our ancestors to invent a new career path as hunters of large herbivores.  As the climate got cooler and dryer, grass species more tolerant of arid conditions rose in importance.  At this point, we need to take a brief side trip into some technical stuff.  I’ll keep it as short and simple as possible.

The entire family of life is solar powered.  Incoming solar energy is received by green plants, who use it to produce sugar.  This process is photosynthesis.  It converts solar energy into a form of chemical energy that plants and animals must have in order to survive.  Some animals acquire it directly by eating plant material, and others get it indirectly by dining on plant-eating animals.  Thus, photosynthesis is the foundation of life on Earth.

The process begins by splitting water molecules (H₂O) into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.  Then, in a fancy magic act, hydrogen is stirred together with CO₂ to make sugar (C₆H₁₂O₆).  The process results in some leftover oxygen atoms, which are released to the atmosphere.  Notice that animals exhale the CO₂ that plants must have, and plants exhale the oxygen needed by animals, a sacred circle dance.  Plants can use the sugar to fuel their growth, or they can convert it to starch, and save it for later.  Plants can also make fat, protein, and vitamins.  They’re much smarter than they look.

The act of snatching carbon from the air, and incorporating it into living plant tissues, is called carbon fixation, or carbon sequestration.  As more carbon gets sequestered into the plants and surrounding topsoil, then less of it remains in the atmosphere.  This is great, because too much carbon in the atmosphere can lead to catastrophic climate juju, like the freaky changes we’re now just beginning to experience.

I should also mention that petroleum and coal are substances made of sequestered carbon that accumulated over the course of 500 million years.  Big Mama Nature wisely stored it away in a safe place deep underground, where it could cause no mischief.  Unfortunately, it has become very trendy for ignorance-powered societies to retrieve enormous quantities of this ancient carbon and foolishly burn it up, in order to indulge in a decadent joyride of self-destructive childish whimsy.  Big brains can make big mistakes.  It’s so embarrassing!

And now, (gasp!) the plot thickens.  There are two categories of plant species, based on the mode of photosynthesis they use: C₃ or C₄.  C₃ produces a compound that has three carbon atoms, and C₄ produces a compound that has four carbon atoms.  Both types are very old, but the shift to a cooler and dryer climate greatly boosted the expansion of C₄ species.  Maybe 85 percent of the plant species on Earth are C₃.  Their method of carbon fixation is simpler and less efficient than C₄. 

Elizabeth Kellogg studied C₄ plants.  In one experiment she found that, under ideal conditions, C₃ plants could theoretically capture and store up to 4.6 percent of the solar energy they received, while C₄ plants could get up to 6 percent (i.e., 30 percent more than C₃).  While only 3 percent of flowering plant species are C₄, they account for 23 percent of all carbon fixation in the world.  In other words, they produce much more of the precious chemical energy (sugar) that the family of life depends on.  Kellogg calls the C₄ process a turbocharger.

There are four conditions under which C₄ plants have a big advantage — high temperature, high light, low moisture, and low nutrients.  Because they use much less water, C₄ plants better conserve soil moisture.  They also produce more root biomass, which increases their tolerance for drought and fire.  Of the 12,000 grass species, 46 percent of them are C₄, and they include corn (maize), sugar cane, millet, and sorghum.  (Mad scientists are now trying to alter DNA to make rice C₄ too.)

When critters consume C₄ grasses, this diet leaves behind physical tracks.  Spencer Wells wrote that the bones of Native Americans revealed whether they were corn farmers or hunter-gatherers.  Because corn is a C₄ grass, the bones of corn eaters contained molecular C₄ markers.  Baz Edmeades talked about the ferocious dirk-tooth cats (Dinofelis), a species that went extinct about 1.4 million years ago.  We know they were creatures of the savannah, not the forest, because analysis of their tooth enamel indicated that they dined on herbivores that ate C₄ grasses.

And now, dear reader, at long last, we are ready to proceed to the exciting conclusion of this tedious jabber.  It’s time to turn the spotlight on the heroes of this story, the C₄ grass species.  Kellogg noted that in the last 8 million years, as climate change drove the retreat of tropical forests, the domain of C₄ grasses has greatly expanded.  They are now significant components of major grasslands around the world.

C₃ grasses were better adapted to moist forest floors and limited sunlight.  They were less able to thrive on arid grasslands.  Out on the savannah, conditions were ideal for C₄ grasses, because they needed less water to enjoy a happy life.  Here they moved from the sidelines to the center stage.  Receiving many hours of direct sunlight every day, they were able to manufacture generous amounts of chemical energy (sugar), and this gave them the ability to grow rapidly. 

And so, these highly nutritious grasses became a highly desirable food source for the animals that were able to digest them, which required some adaptations.  Baz Edmeades noted that the blades of these grasses were tough, highly fibrous, and coated with abrasive silica.  Evolution responded by providing some animals with new and improved teeth that were more tolerant of abrasion, and better able to pulverize the plant fibers.  Other critters were issued new and improved digestive tracts, populated with bacteria that were fine-tuned for chemically breaking down fibrous glop.  The critters that succeeded in adapting to the new banquet made big gains in size and diversity.

Of course, too much of a good thing will have consequences.  If herds got way too large, the vitality of the grassland would be degraded, leading to starvation.  So, evolution came to the rescue by promoting a variety of big strong bloodthirsty carnivores, who delighted in inviting large herbivores to join them at lunchtime.  To make this sacred dance more sporting, evolution also encouraged the development of herbivores who could boogie across the grassland at high speeds.

Edmeades concluded that the rise of highly productive C₄ grasses radically changed the world.  It spurred the evolution and spread of an astonishing variety of grassland herbivores and their predators.  It led to the emergence of spectacular Serengeti-like ecosystems in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas — fantastic wonderlands of abundant life.

Graham Harvey noted that the herds of grass-eating critters benefitted the grasses.  Grazing actually stimulated plant growth.  In a brilliant design, new blades of grass emerge from growing points located close to the ground, where they are less likely to be damaged by hungry teeth.  The faster that grasses can send up new blades, the more sunlight they can capture, the more sugar they can make, and the happier the whole ecosystem becomes.

Grazing also benefitted grasses by regularly nipping off the rising shoots of woody vegetation.  If trees and brush were allowed to grow and spread, they would compete with the grass plants.  Then, the herds of hungry herbivores would have less to eat, and so would the carnivores that adored red meat.  Herds religiously offered their deep gratitude to the grass people by lovingly depositing nutrient rich manure and urine all over the place.

The big picture here is that the shift to a cooler dryer climate encouraged the substantial expansion of grassland, which boosted the expansion of C₄ grass species, which propelled the evolution and expansion of large grazers and carnivores, which boosted the global tonnage of living meat.  These megafauna migrated and settled on five continents (not Australasia).  Around the world we find species of horses, bison, elephants, antelope, deer, hyenas, wolves, bears, and so on.  The moral of this story is that climate change can radically alter the face of the planet, and the family of life.

Later in this amazing transformation, another powerful agent of radical change joined the cast of the grassland soap opera.  These critters walked on two legs, and resembled what you see in the mirror.  They eventually assumed the role of apex predators, something that no other primate had ever attempted.  Our ancestors did not wait patiently for evolution to provide them with the speed, strength, fangs, and claws that are customary for natural born carnivores.  Instead, they invented hunting weapons, learned how to make fire, and began experimenting with a way of life that no other animal in the history of the planet had ever attempted.  It’s notable that every other animal species continues to live like they did a million years ago — ultra-conservative, and perfectly sustainable.

The advance of the new critters marked the emergence of an extremely spooky, highly contagious, multi-drug resistant virus known as cleverness fever.  For a few million years, its mind-altering effects gradually intensified.  Ten thousand years ago, they surged.  Today they are skyrocketing.  Humankind is now engaged in full scale warfare against the entire family of life, including itself.  A lively and entertaining soap opera has shape shifted into the mother of all horror shows.  Will the current swing to a much warmer climate provide the miraculous silver bullet cure for the mass hysteria of cleverness fever?  Stay tuned.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 18

[Note: This is the eighteenth 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 201 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.] 

Megafauna Pioneers

Every continent has regions of grasslands — savannahs, steppes, prairies, and so on.  Grasslands provide the nutritious greenery that can nourish herds of large herbivores.  Forest or desert ecosystems are far less ideal for grazing animals.  Meat provides nutrients that are essential for good health — nutrients much harder to acquire from wild grassland vegetation.  Hunters prefer to kill a large animal, rather than numerous rodents, grubs, worms, and so on.

Naturally, the existence of large herbivores needs to be kept in balance by the existence of hungry carnivores.  Too many grass eaters can turn grasslands into barren wastelands.  Large herbivores and large carnivores are both megafauna.  Megafauna are animals weighing more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  (Outside of America, more than 50 kg.)

Many families of megafauna species have expanded across five continents: Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and South America.  During glacial cycles, some regions currently separated by water became connected by dry land, as sea levels dropped.  Land bridges allowed megafauna on both sides to cross over into new habitats.  Australia has mostly been isolated from the other five continents.  It has its own unique story of herbivores, carnivores, and megafauna extinction spasms.

Buried under downtown London, construction crews have discovered the remains of hippos, elephants, Irish elk, aurochs, and lions.  North America was the original homeland for the ancestors of horses, bears, rhinos, camels, and others.  Horses and bears spread across the five continents.  Camels expanded into Asia and Africa.  Rhinos vanished from America five million years ago.

Mother Africa was the homeland for the saber-tooth cat group, which later expanded across Eurasia, and then to North America and South America.  Africa was also where the elephant-like family began, which eventually colonized the five continents, diversifying into many forms over millions of years, including mammoths and mastodons.  Until 13,000 years ago, mammoth country ranged from Western Europe, across Siberia, and down into Mexico.  In the Americas, before hunters from Siberia arrived, there were seven elephant-like species.

On nutrient rich grasslands, a major trend in evolution was to encourage herbivores to gradually expand to jumbo-sized proportions, a trait that increased their odds for survival.  Bigger was better — thicker hide, stronger, and more dangerous.  Size mattered.  For example:

Giant beavers could grow to 7.6 feet (2.3 m) long, and weigh up to 276 pounds (125 kg) — about the size of a black bear.

Giant ground sloths could grow as large as elephants.  They could stand erect up to 20 feet (6 m) tall, and weigh 2,204 pounds (1,000 kg).

Giant armadillos were mammals that had an armor of bony plates.  Some weighed more than 1,000 pounds (454 kg).

Short-faced bears were among the largest land dwelling mammalian carnivores.  They could weigh over 1,500 pounds (680 kg).

Irish elk were giant deer that could weigh more than 2,500 pounds (1,133 kg).  Their enormous antlers weighed more than the animal’s skeleton.  They could spread up to 13 feet (4 m) across.

Of course, the rise of jumbo herbivores encouraged evolution to also select for larger carnivores.  Grasslands were home to a continuous evolutionary arms race, the ancient sacred dance of eaters and eaten.

Later, when skilled teams of hominin hunters became prominent, jumbo size eventually became a huge liability.  (Jumbo herbivores became as vulnerable as whales did when primates began harpooning them from boats.)  Jumbo herbivores were easy to see, and they did not excel at high speed getaways.  To hungry hunters, they were slow moving giant meatballs.

In 1961, Colin Turnbull noted that a Mbuti pygmy hunter could singlehandedly kill an elephant with a short handled spear.  This deadly spear technology was available to African hunters two million years ago.

Overkill?

Paul Martin stimulated much controversy in the study of megafauna extinctions.  In the 1960s, he was surprised to discover that in Africa, about 1.4 million years ago, a cluster of megafauna species went extinct.  The number of elephant-like species dropped from twelve to eight.  Three species of sabertooth cats, adapted for preying on large animals like the elephant family, also vanished from Africa.  These cats had two long upper teeth that were useful for stabbing through the very thick hides of elephants.  When the elephants declined, the huge incisors became a fatal handicap.

Baz Edmeades notes that this time period corresponds to when hominin hunters developed the larger and more complex Acheulean class of tools.  Apparently, hominins were getting better at competing against the sabertooths for jumbo-sized prey.  As the prey populations declined, so did the cats that ate them.  Hominins can survive on a far wider variety of foods.  When elephants are scarce, they can feast on eggs, grubs, or lizards.

The notion of hominin-caused extinctions 1.4 million years ago did not sit well with those who proposed the Great Leap Forward theory.  While Jared Diamond accepted the notion of the more recent overkill in North America 13,000 years ago, the far earlier date clashed with his belief that humans were essentially cute chimp-class primates until 40,000 years ago, when the miracle of turbocharged cognitive abilities arrived.  (This date also corresponds to the start of the human migration into snow country.)

Later, Martin grated even more nerves when he presented his research on the megafauna extinctions in North America.  He framed them as a rapid thousand year “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) of overkill.  Following World War II, there was a golden age of anthropology, when scholars visited many lands, and learned that most wild folks were not stupid, fiendish, bloody savages.  In fact, they had many admirable traits.  In fact, in many ways their lives were far healthier and saner than those of the anxious stressed out consumers of industrial civilization.

It became trendy to issue shining halos to wild people, because they were clearly not relentless maniacal planet thrashers.  Indeed, compared to modern consumers, their eco-impacts can seem close to insignificant.  But, as centuries pass, even modest impacts can gradually snowball into embarrassing blunders that hurl numerous species off the stage.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that most or all techno-innovations have unintended consequences (even fire drills and wooden spears).  These consequences can often outweigh the benefits.  Also, the combined consequences of numerous innovations can swirl into bad juju hurricanes that can sharply impact the stability of entire ecosystems, even the planet’s atmosphere and climate systems.

It’s important to put these impacts into proper perspective.  Compared to modern consumers, whose whirlwind lives have staggering eco-impact, the lives of those Pleistocene ancestors were much closer to ecologically sustainable.  Walter Youngquist reported that in just the last few hundred years, highly educated civilized people have dug up and burned 500 million years of safely sequestered carbon, most of it during the lifetime of the baby boomer generation — me and my peers.  Look, it took 1,400,000 years to finally drive all sabertooth cats extinct on five continents.  It took just 40 years for greed-crazed American yahoos, with their rifles and railroads, to exterminate something like 60 million buffalo, and waste most of their meat.  Technology matters.

At the same time, paying careful attention to reality leads to far less cognitive dissonance than indulging in magical thinking.  Dan Flores prodded the romantics.  If the Paleolithic was such a long wonderful era of harmony, why did our ancestors abandon it?  Why, in the last 50,000 years, did they fan out across the world?  Why does the pattern of megafauna extinction spasms correspond to the geographical pattern of human expansion?

It’s always embarrassing to compare the human saga to our ancestral baseline.  Chimps and bonobos have continued to live sustainably, in the same way, in the same place, for several million years, without swerving off to dangerous experiments in technological innovation.  We seem to be the one and only living species that has wandered off the traditional path.  Many cultures have foolishly succeeded at monopolizing the exploitation of resources in their territories — a perfectly insane joyride of ecological self-destruction that will not have a happy ending.

Now, I must confess that I find it a bit difficult to effortlessly believe the overkill theory without a doubt.  I mean, how could a modest population of hunters, travelling on foot, armed with spears, exterminate all of the horses in all of North America, over the course of a dozen centuries or so, while the bison and others survived?  Many readers who have hunted wild horses with spears will find this idea hard to swallow.  To get a deeper understanding of this extinction tragedy, it’s time to pull on our waders, slog down bloody Megafauna Lane, and take a bunch of selfies.

Trail of Tears

Hominins have been around for maybe 2.8 million years.  During our visit on Earth, there have been several spasms of megafauna extinctions.  The spasms during the hominin era began in Africa about two million years ago, when the hominin predecessors of Homo sapiens were romping around on the savannah. 

Our species emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, and eventually expanded eastward, across tropical Asia.  Around 50,000 years ago, folks arrived in Australasia, setting off a wave of large animal extinctions.  Over the course of several thousand years, 17 out of 18 genera of megafauna blinked out.

What’s a genera?  It’s the plural of genus.  A genus is a category of closely related species.  For example, the Homo genus includes the species Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and so on.

Around 40,000 years ago, humans wandered into Europe, where the extinctions were less extreme because the local megafauna had already been living with dangerous armed primates (Neanderthals and others) for maybe 500,000 years.  The megafauna had learned the hard way that primates were not their good little buddies.  In the European spasm, 21 of 37 genera vanished.

Eventually folks expanded across northern Asia (Siberia), and crossed into the Americas, where the extinction spasm was rapid and intense.  Asia lost 24 of 46 genera, North America lost 45 of 61, and South America got hammered hard, with 58 of 71.

Finally, on many isolated islands, extinctions happened much later, when humans arrived.  For example, 4,700 years ago in Cuba, 1,500 years ago in Madagascar, 500 years ago in New Zealand, and so on.

Attentive readers will perceive that this series of extinction spasms clearly corresponds to the expansion of humans into new regions.  [Martin’s chart]  It is also absolutely clear that the pattern of extinctions does not correspond to patterns in climate history.  Most or all of the genera that blinked out had been in existence for at least several million years, and had survived numerous glacial cycles.

Fernando Fernandez summed up the extinctions more broadly.  Between 50,000 years ago, and A.D. 1500, about two thirds of the world’s megafauna species went extinct.  In this process, of the 150 genera of large mammals, at least 97 went extinct.  This statistic does not include the extinctions in Africa prior to 50,000 years ago.  When we take a moment to reverently sniff reality’s butt, it’s easy to see that, in the long run, innovation is not a good little buddy of the family of life.  Our magnificent standard of living has mindlessly created a global gas chamber.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 15

[Note: This is the fifteenth 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 201 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.]

Smashing Limits

Fearless prey was a lucky but temporary windfall jackpot for migrating hominins.  Another major asset was our ability to digest a highly diverse diet of plant and animal substances.  Because we aren’t fussy eaters, we can survive changing conditions better than many other species.  This advantage was greatly expanded by our unique ability to cook foods.  We can nourish ourselves in chilly Greenland, steamy Amazon rainforests, and the scorching Sahara.  In recent times, humans have also become the top carnivore in marine ecosystems, despite the fact that we don’t even live in the water. 

Over the span of millions of years, animal species of all types and sizes evolved time-proven anti-predator strategies for self-defense — flying, fleeing, swimming, climbing trees, diving into burrows, injecting venom, counterattack, camouflage, and so on.  These ancient strategies worked fairly well, but not every time.  Predators needed sustenance too.  Ideally, predators and prey lived in relative balance.  This encouraged wild ecosystems to maintain a state of long term sustainability.  Perfect!  It discouraged population explosions that can become ecological hurricanes.  Hooray!

When musk oxen were attacked by wolves, the group backed up together into a circle, butt to butt, with their horns facing outward, and patiently waited for the hungry predators to give up and have a good cry.  When raccoons, squirrels, or bear cubs were attacked by predators, they zipped up the nearest tree and giggled at the frustrated killers.  These excellent time-proven strategies failed when heavily armed hominins arrived with their deadly projectiles.

For many grassland herbivores, speed was an essential predator defense strategy.  Pronghorn antelopes can run for more than 20 miles (32 km).  They can flee at speeds up to 70 miles per hour (112 km/h), for up to two miles (3.2 km).  Pronghorns originally evolved high speed flight to outrun hungry cats — species that went extinct maybe 12,000 years ago.  Today, wolves and coyotes are way too slow.  Sadly, ranchers have installed some fencing on the prairie, and pronghorns can’t leap fences.  The fence prevents escape, the animals pile up, and enable mass kills.

When bison are attacked by natural predators, grazing stops, and running begins — the whole herd following the leader.  Slower animals, like calves, the elderly, and the sick or injured become the main course at lunch time.  This strategy worked well for millions of years until Neanderthals and humans organized communal hunts, and chose locations where fleeing herds could be guided into traps or off cliffs.  In this situation, follow the leader escapes could be disastrous.

For eons, sea birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals found security by living on islands.  This advantage was diminished by the invention of canoes, kayaks, harpoons, and so on.  Many of these island animals lived in a way that made them highly vulnerable when hungry aliens washed up on shore.  Many had a hard time fleeing or hiding.

Critters that found security in camouflage or concealment became far more vulnerable when hominin hunters set fire to the grass.  Excellent camouflage lost its advantage when enslaved dogs joined the hunt.  Their powerful sense of smell enabled them to quickly find prey that were difficult to see.  Critters that evolved the ability to make high speed escapes became more vulnerable when hunters began riding enslaved horses.  When hunters used both horses and dogs, game was far less likely to survive.

Evolving to jumbo size was another very effective anti-predator strategy.  Big, strong, healthy, mature elephants, rhinos, and hippos had little reason to fear wild carnivores.  Size mattered.  Predators preferred to kill their youngsters, because they were less dangerous, and easier to kill.  Jumbo size species have far lower rates of reproduction.  Wee critters, like mice, bunnies, and insects, are popular items on the menus of many animals.  Consequently, they reproduce like champions. 

Unfortunately, when hominins adapted spear technology, jumbo size became a serious handicap.  Elephants were big, slow, easy to find, and had lots of meat.  Hunting large game was energy efficient.  Killing a mammoth required far fewer hours and calories than killing a thousand bunnies.  Around the world, 50,000 years ago, the land rumbled under the feet of countless megafauna, every continent a Serengeti.

Stephen Wroe summed it all up.  Over millions of years, many animals developed anti-predator strategies that were good enough to keep their species in existence.  Tragically, the arrival of tropical primates armed with specialized high-tech hunting technology radically altered the rules of predation.  Advanced kill power, combined with fearless prey, sparked a revolutionary shift.  In the new paradigm, animals had to move beyond traditional anti-predator strategies, and strive to develop new and different anti-predator strategies that were hominin-specific.  Species unable to make this transition were more likely to blink out.

Technological crutches enabled our ancestors to become direct competitors with wolves, big cats, and other carnivores.  Wherever hominins expanded, they had the ability to destabilize long running ecosystem relationships.  Crutches also made us less vulnerable to man-eating predators.  Spears enabled our ancestors to better repel the predators that could help keep hominin populations stable and healthy.  This rubbished the laws of nature.  Imagine rabbits inventing tools that allowed them to kill foxes — soon there might be seven billion bunnies staring at cell phones (gasp!).

Colonizing Snow Country

Obviously, tropical primates evolved to survive in tropical ecosystems, which were warm all year round.  By and by, some hominins migrated out of tropical regions, and into temperate ecosystems, which had four seasons, including snow.

When tropical primates began wandering into regions with frigid winters they were confronted with new and serious challenges to survival.  They were presented with a painful warning similar to modern highway signs: Wrong Way!  Do Not Enter!  But, instead of cautiously turning around, and going back to more comfortable lands, some proceeded deeper into the domain of the frost giants, and discovered many super-cool new ways to die prematurely.  The game rules radically changed.  Warm clothing, protective shelter, new tools, and food storage boosted the odds for survival.

Outsmarting Evolution

A bedrock theme in this book is that the ecosystems which move through the millennia guided by genetic evolution tend to make transitions in a fairly graceful manner.  Ungraceful ecosystem transitions are far more common when the hominin residents naively develop a never-ending abusive relationship with the super-sticky tar baby of cultural evolution and technological innovation.

Japanese snow monkeys slowly and smoothly adapted to a temperate climate via genetic evolution.  Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, when the hominin drama was already heavily dependent on cultural evolution (fire, weapons, stone tools, etc.).  Our homeland in Mother Africa had a tropical climate, and genetic evolution had provided our species with better heat tolerance.  Human genes have not made extensive changes in 300,000 years.  We remain able to live happily in tropical lands, but still can’t survive in snow country without a load of prosthetic technology. 

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 downward from 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 for the remaining Neanderthals.

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.  The ideal weapon for woodland ambush hunting was the thrusting spear, and it remained the perfect tool for 400,000+ years.

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.  In steppe-tundra habitat, the wide open landscape had no trees or brush for hunters to hide in.  So, their preferred weapon was the javelin, which could kill from a distance.

When humans wandered into the steppe grasslands of Eastern Europe 36,000 years ago (the “European Serengeti”), their tropical bodies were not fine-tuned for freezing weather, nor had they evolved the clever trick of hibernation.  Moving into a winter wonderland was something like colonizing Mars.  At this point, their choices were: (1) give up and freeze to death, (2) turn around and return to home sweet home, or (3) innovate like crazy and struggle to survive in a hostile climate where large game was abundant.

Health Advantages

Aside from stuff like frostbite, winter hunger, and respiratory issues from smoke filled shelters, there may have been significant health benefits to colonizing temperate ecosystems.  Our African homeland was tropical, with a climate that ranged from warm to hot year round.  Tropical ecosystems have the highest biodiversity of plant and animal species, including the entire spectrum from elephants to microbes.  The colder the ecosystem, the lower the biodiversity, because many species have not evolved the ability to survive months of intense cold.

Pathogenic tropical parasites include malaria, schistosomiasis, and sleeping sickness.  Some regions in Africa are uninhabitable due to the high risk of sleeping sickness.  Tropical viral diseases include yellow fever, and three hemorrhagic fevers: Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa.  A warm climate is also home to more species of disease transmitting insects, many of which have poor cold tolerance.

The tropics are home to numerous other species of monkeys and apes, with whom humans are more likely to swap diseases.  For example, AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, which is probably a mutation of the SIV virus that is carried harmlessly by chimps.  Today, chimps, gorillas, and humans are dying from Ebola.  It is likely that tropical diseases had far less impact 50,000 years ago, long before deforestation, bushmeat hunting, agriculture, herding, irrigation, high mobility, and explosive population growth.  A later chapter will devote more attention to disease.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 14

[Note: This is the fourteenth 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 200 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.] 

Expansion and Limits

William Rees noted that every species has two traits.  (1) They will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, if conditions allow their survival.  On the other hand, negative feedback can discourage new expansion, or encourage retreats.  The climate might be hostile.  Food or water resources might be scarce.  Powerful predators or hostile people might live there.  So might disease agents, like tsetse flies, malarial mosquitoes, or parasitic worms.

For walking critters, the area accessible for expansion has limits.  People with domesticated horses or camels have greater potential for long distance expansion.  The same is true for folks having watercraft that can travel on rivers, or move across seas and oceans.  Also, folks with flying machines, or driving machines.  Critters that know how to make fire and sew warm clothing can expand into snow country, far beyond the normal and appropriate habitats for tropical primates.

(2) When critters expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources — until they smack into limits, and have to back off.  This is no big deal for animals that live as they naturally evolved to live — without complex tools.  When a resource becomes scarce, they can switch to a substitute, if any, or they can move elsewhere, or they can turn into cat food.

Technology can expand what resources are available.  A mammoth is not a resource that an empty handed hominin can utilize, but a hominin with a thrusting spear, stone blade, and fire drill can.  Fishing with a hand net is one thing, a motorized trawler is another.  Hunter-gatherers did not mine and smelt ores, fabricate machines, drill oil wells, or replace wilderness with mega farms growing millions of tons of corn — but industrial civilizations do.

As you can see here, there are limits to expansion.  Innovation and technology can push back narrow limits, sometimes to a huge degree.  For example, 10,000 years ago, the human population was maybe 10 million.  Today, it’s seven-point-something billion, thanks our ability to cleverly bypass countless limits, our feeble ability to foresee the unintended consequences, and our reluctance to question reality when we’re enjoying regular meals. 

This artificially swollen carrying capacity can only be temporary, because it is fantastically unsustainable.  Modern folks, the most educated generation ever, have a fervent blind faith in the ridiculous idea that we have no limits.  They’ve been angrily pissing on Thomas Malthus for almost 200 years for suggesting the logical and rational ‘heresy’ that unlimited growth is impossible.

Technological innovation is the fruit of diabolically clever genius.  But… it seems that genius and wisdom rarely, if ever, meet.  Wisdom is almost invisible in our culture, a ghost, a will-o-wisp.  All the spotlights are on geeky genius, as it enthusiastically tap-dances across the stage, like a whirlwind of nerve gas.

Genius designs and builds 440 nuclear power plants — before giving any serious consideration to the enormous challenge of how to permanently store countless tons of radioactive wastes that can remain highly toxic for a million years.  Wisdom cries.  Wisdom recommends turning off the lights, turning on your thinker, converting your Mercedes into a chicken coop, and discovering the evolutionary purpose of those mysterious five-toed thingees at the ends of your legs. 

Genius, the hyper-ambitious idiot savant, gives us automobiles, cell phones, hydrogen bombs, plastic diapers, landfills, and a severely rubbished ecosystem.  The bottom line is that healthy, sustainable, ordinary animals like chimps have zero need for wisdom, or genius, or foresight, or technological innovation.  They live in the manner for which they evolved, period.  Imagine that.

Unlike wild chimps, we are not free.  Industrial civilization keeps us in cages.  Miles Olson pointed out that we are essentially enslaved by the powers that control the technology we are addicted to for survival — corporations that provide energy, transportation, food production, and so on.  Chimps would not notice if all of these corporations went bankrupt next week.

Hominin Wanderers

Anyway, hominins emerged in Mother Africa, and eventually expanded around the world.  This was not unique.  Long before hominins appeared, many “ordinary” animals travelled widely — mammoths, horses, wolves, salmon, bears, bison, migratory birds, and so on.  These species did so gradually, allowing evolution to fine tune them for new conditions — with zero dependence on technological crutches.

Much later in the hominin saga, Homo sapiens emerged, maybe 300,000 years ago.  In Africa, this era is sort of a black hole in the archaeological record.  Minimal evidence has been found.  Paul Jordan wrote that the geologic chemistry of African caves was lousy for preserving bones, while the limestone caves of Europe were excellent.

By and by, our human ancestors wandered out of Africa, and entered the Middle East somewhere around 130,000 and 100,000 years ago.  Clive Finlayson suggested that this was not an exodus to escape problems, and it was not purposeful — brave pioneers eager to explore the unknown.  Folks just gradually moved into new regions over the span of many generations, like roaming herds of bison, going where their stomachs led them.

The early pilgrims were probably small groups, and there were likely multiple expeditions over the centuries.  They wandered eastward, across tropical regions of Asia, and arrived in Australia maybe 50,000 years ago.  Humans began migrating into Eastern Europe about 36,000 years ago, and arrived in Portugal 2,000 years later.  Finally, we wandered into the Americas maybe 13,000 years ago.

Moving through the tropical regions of Asia was not a daunting challenge for critters that evolved in tropical Africa.  They didn’t need clothing or warm shelters.  Meat and plant-based foods were available year round.  They may have left some African pathogens behind, and they may have discovered some new pathogens in Asia.  Tropical ecosystems are home to high biodiversity, including pathogens.

In Asia, as well as Africa, they remained vulnerable to man-eating predators that were big, strong, fast, smart, and armed with sharp teeth and claws.  In both continents, our ancestors were at a distinct disadvantage — smaller, weaker, slower, and wimpy in the teeth and claws department.  Back then, the notion that we would someday become the dominant animal on Earth seemed hilarious.

Self-defense was a primary challenge.  Folks likely kept a fire burning all night, with someone staying awake on guard duty.  They used spears, clubs, rocks, and impolite suggestions to discourage unwelcome visits from their hungry carnivorous neighbors.  In those days, being a plump juicy walking meatball 24 hours a day inspired folks to constantly pay acute attention to the sights, sounds, smells, and patterns of the surrounding reality (unlike today’s cell phone zombies).  Like all other animals, it was not common for humans to die from old age.  The other primary challenge was regularly acquiring food.  Cold turkey withdrawal from a serious addiction to food is unpleasant, often fatal.

Fearless Prey

OK, now pretend that it is 75,000 years ago, and you are a huge, powerful, ass-whooping aurochs munching on the greenery along a river in tropical India.  One fine day, a few strange animals appear in the meadow — brown, hairy, stinky, fairly small, oddly walking on two legs, and carrying long sticks.  What the <bleep> are those?  You sense no danger and continue grazing.  Healthy mature aurochs fear no other animals.  Large carnivores prefer to attack game that is less likely to tear them to bloody shreds.  Suddenly, the gang of alien critters charge and ram their sticks into you.  Game over. 

Thanks to predator control programs run by the U.S. government, wolves ceased living in the Tetons for a while.  By and by, new generations of elk and moose lost their memory of wolves.  Later, some wolves from Yellowstone began drifting back in.  They were delightfully surprised to discover herds of delicious animals that had absolutely no instinctive fear of them.  William Stolzenburg wrote that wolves could simply stroll into a herd and snatch away their calves.  Eventually, animals realized that wolves were dangerous predators, and promptly rewrote their survival manuals.

Back in Mother Africa, no critters ever forgot that lions, leopards, hyenas, and humans were vicious serial killers.  Life on the savannah was an endless crime wave, the bloody sacred dance of life.  When human pioneers wandered away from their original African home, into the great unknown, they regularly encountered (and ate) a wide variety of animals that had no fear of them — at first.

In 1921, Knud Rasmussen’s arctic expedition made a winter camp on Danish Island.  Out on a walk, “we encountered a hare so amazingly tame that we were tempted actually to essay his capture with our bare hands.  Soon afterward, we spied a lonely caribou who at once was all curiosity and came running toward us to investigate these strange visitors.  Never before had I encountered from animals such a friendly greeting.”

Tim Flannery wrote about the elephant seals that lived on Tasmania’s King Island.  Some weighed up to four tons.  When hunters found them, the seals calmly watched as the animals around them were killed.  It was a surreal experience.  The hunters felt like gods.  In 1802, when European explorers arrived at Kangaroo Island, off the south coast of Australia, the fearless kangaroos could be calmly approached and shot in the eye, or smacked with a club.

In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition was crossing into Montana, Lewis wrote, “The buffalo, elk, and antelope are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without appearing to excite any alarm among them, and when we attract their attention, they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are, and in some instances pursue us a considerable distance apparently with that view.”

On numerous islands, the first explorers found that the wildlife was incredibly tame.  Birds could be killed with a stick, and many islands were home to enormous bird communities.  Thriving colonies of fish knew nothing about hooks or nets.  When legions of sea turtles came to nest, they were sitting ducks.  For a while, newcomers to islands enjoyed an easy life of feasting —until limits began raining on the party.

Surplus Killing

Sometimes hungry predators kill more prey than they need, and abandon what they can’t use.  Often surplus carcasses are simply abandoned, tasty offerings for the local scavengers.  Surplus killing is common with many species including badgers, wolves, red foxes, leopards, lions, spotted hyenas, bears, coyotes, lynx, feral dogs, house cats, and humans.

A pack of 19 spotted hyenas once attacked a herd of Thompson’s gazelles, killing 82, and severely injuring 27.  Only 16 percent of them were eaten. 

During a severe Minnesota winter, when the snow was very deep, the deer had a hard time moving.  Wolves killed every one they found, leaving many uneaten. 

Sometimes surplus killing is deliberate and purposeful.  Weasels kill voles as winter approaches, and leave them in burrows for later dining.  In Alaska, a wolf pack killed 17 caribou in early February.  Over the next three months, they returned, dug up carcasses, and continued dining on them.

Barry Lopez spent time with native Alaskan hunters, and wrote a book about wolves.  When a wolf chases and confronts a caribou or moose, their eyes meet, and their spirits communicate, in what Lopez calls the conversation of death.  The prey can chose to resist, which sometimes works, or they can attempt to flee, which sometimes works.  A sick or elderly prey might indicate surrender — take me, let my healthy comrades live.  Or, the wolves might suddenly end the confrontation and walk away.  If there is to be a death, both predator and prey choose this outcome during their spirit-to-spirit ceremony, wrote Lopez.

Wolves and moose have coevolved for a very long time, and both comprehend the sacred power of the life and death encounter.  They are fully aware of what is happening.  Wolves know that a strong, healthy, mature moose can splatter their skulls with a swift kick.  When wolves are desperately hungry, the risk of injury is secondary to the risk of starvation.

Domesticated animals are a different story.  Many have had their wild intelligence bred out of them, rendering them passive and infantile.  So, when the hungry predator confronts them, and it’s time for the conversation of death, the wild spirit of the prey is absent — the lights are out, nobody is home, a truly pathetic situation. 

In South Africa, one leopard killed 51 sheep in a single attack.  There are a number of stories of wolves killing 20 or 30 sheep and just eating 2 or 3.  If a herd of prey makes no effort to flee, or are helplessly trapped, predators sometimes keep killing them.  In the family of life, predators evolved to be natural born killers.  Their sacred mission is to discourage population outbursts in prey species, and the consequent ecosystem impacts.  They help maintain balance.

It’s daunting to contemplate the ongoing expansion of highly skilled human hunters into new regions outside of Mother Africa, where they certainly encountered fearless prey.  Did the human hunters instinctively treat fearless critters the way hungry wolves treat clueless sheep?  As humans entered Australasia, Eurasia, and the Americas, large animal extinctions followed.  They were the most desired prey, and they had not coevolved with heavily armed tropical primates.

Cradle of Humankind



East Africa is called the Cradle of Humankind because it’s where our ancestors originated.  As noted in an earlier post, two to four million years ago, the region became cooler and dryer.  Forests shrank.  The ancestors of baboons and humans moved out of the forest and adapted to savannah ecosystems (grasslands with scattered trees).

In this new habitat, male baboons evolved large canine teeth, to better deflect predator attacks.  All baboons retained the physique for scampering up trees.  Baboons still live sustainably, as they have for millions of years, because they continue to live in the manner for which evolution fine-tuned them.  They adapted to their ecosystem without altering it.  They did not make weapons and hunt animals larger than they were but, on happy days, they could mob a leopard and disassemble it.

Our ancestors evolved into critters that stood on two legs (bipedal).  They became furless, sweaty, long distance runners who, in a hot climate, could chase animals until they collapsed from exhaustion.  Heavy sweating kept them cool whilst jogging for hours.  With these traits, evolution created a new mode of offense, but it was weirdly stingy about providing defensive assets like speed, strength, teeth, or claws.  These ancestors were less agile at zooming up trees.  Over the eons, many species of bipedal apes have evolved, but only one still survives.

In the early days, the ancestors acquired new abilities very slowly, via evolution.  At the same time, other species were also busy evolving new abilities for countering our advances, and maintaining the balance.  For large animals like apes, genetic evolution can take thousands of years to stabilize a new and improved trait.  Evolution does not always mean progress.  We’re discovering that big brains can be more trouble than they’re worth.

With our transition to tool making, we began gaining new abilities by inventing them, a much faster process.  Spears enabled our ancestors to impede the man-eating predators that had kept their populations neat and tidy.  This rubbished the laws of nature.  Imagine rabbits inventing tools that allowed them to overpower foxes.  With spears, we could also kill large game, acquire abundant meat, and feed more bambinos.

By becoming tool freaks, our ancestors stumbled into the dangerous juju of cultural evolution, a painful experiment that has achieved enormous momentum and speed.  There are now seven-point-something billion of us.  We are the best-educated generation ever, the most destructive, we know it, and don’t seem to care much.  There is an important lesson here, summed up by Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Here’s a happy idea.  Genetic evolution is the result of a process that constantly generates billions of random mutations in every species of flora and fauna.  Most mutations are maladaptive and promptly blink out.  When mutations survive and continue, we call this natural selection.  William E. Rees reminds us that cultural evolution is also subject to something like natural selection.  Maladaptive cultural mutations, like soil mining or forest mining, are unsustainable.  Natural selection has no mercy for cultures that refuse to learn the dope slap lessons of repeated mistakes.  In the long run, the family of life will always trump self-destructive cultures, in a messy and merciless manner.

Rainforests are a paradise for biodiversity, providing a pleasant home for huge numbers of species.  Savannahs support far less biodiversity, but provide excellent habitat for many large animal species.  A square mile of rainforest contains tons of biomass in its trees, far more biomass than a square mile of grassland, but grassland can produce more new biomass every year, primarily during the wet season.  This nutritious vegetation grows close to the ground, a convenient location for grazing animals.

The biological productivity of grasslands (savannahs, prairies, and steppes) enabled the emergence of large herbivores and their predators in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas.  For grassland herbivores, size and speed are evolutionary assets, because they discourage predators.  Lions scatter when menaced by uppity elephants.  Elephants live longer than bunnies.  Size matters.  Bigger is better.

Some species use simple tools like sticks, stones, or blades of grass, but our ancestors took the fabrication and use of tools to new levels.  They learned how make blades, projectile tips, scrapers, and axes by chipping flakes off stones.  Confronted with an organized gang of hungry apes with spears, giant size lost its advantage, and became a serious handicap.  Cultural evolution trumped genetic evolution.

In addition to getting extremely clever with tools, our ancestors also learned how to make and use fire, an ability that helped keep man-eating predators at bay.  Fire allowed us to inhabit the entire planet, and disrupt the balance of ecosystems wherever we went.  Cooked foods were easier to digest, so we could extract more nutrients.  Cooking also enabled us to digest formerly inedible materials.  Thus, our food resources were greatly expanded.

Stephen Pyne is the world’s expert on fire history.  He described excavations at Swartkrans Cave in South Africa.  At the oldest layers, the pre-fire level, no charcoal is found.  There are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including hominids — cats were the top predator.  Charcoal is found in newer layers, the fire age.  Here are found complete hominid skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats — hominids had become the top predator in the cave.

Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  Combined with fire, our ability to make spears, javelins, hammers, choppers, baskets, nets, and so on propelled our blastoff into outer space, far beyond Africa.  Maybe fire and tool making are the reason that evolution didn’t bother enhancing our defenses.

Baz Edmeades is a specialist in megafauna extinction, and he notes that our ancestors were not masters of sustainable living.  Africa was loaded with megafauna species at the dawn of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years ago, but many were gone by 1.4 million years ago.  At the Olduvai Gorge site in Tanzania, in 1.8 million year old deposits, they have found the butchered bones of rhinos, hippos, elephants, antelopes, and buffalo.  Elsewhere, evidence suggests that our ancestors were tending fires 1.6 million years ago.

In the good old days, Africa had nine species of big cats (three today), nine species of elephants (one today), and four hippos (one today).  There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, and giant baboons — all gone.  Primary suspects include an Australopithecus species and Homo erectus.  Homo sapiens emerged much later, maybe 100,000 years ago.

Edmeades emphasizes that during this wave of extinctions, there were not corresponding extinction blips in Siberia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas.  In these other regions, most megafauna species thrived for another million years — including many species that blinked out in Africa and South Asia.  If climate change was the primary cause of megafauna extinction, the northern hemisphere should have been hammered harder, because it was the region most affected by glaciation.

Lars Werdelin is a specialist in the evolution of mammalian carnivores.  He ponders the current efforts to designate a new era of geologic time, the Anthropocene, the period when humans began causing irreversible impacts.  When did it start?  Some think 1945, or the Industrial Revolution.  Others say the dawn of soil mining and animal enslavement.  Paleontologists like Werdelin observe reality from a perspective that embraces a much broader sweep of time.

He notes that between 3.5 million years ago, and 2 million years ago, the number of large carnivore species in Africa was reduced by half.  Today, only two percent of the African large carnivore species still survive.  This transition does not correspond to what is known about climate patterns — similar extinctions did not occur in other regions at this time.  A more likely suspect is the appearance of an early species in the Homo genus.  With regard to the kickoff date for the Anthropocene, Werdelin notes, “Humans have had the ability to affect ecosystems on a major scale for the past two million years.”

Björn Kurtén was an expert on the fauna of Pleistocene Europe.  The megafauna included varieties of mammoths, rhinos, horses, aurochs, reindeer, giant hippos, giant deer, giant musk ox, giant hyenas, giant bears, giant cheetahs, giant cave lions, saber-tooth cats, leopards, antelopes, goats, and many others.  Many of these species survived in Europe until the Late Pleistocene (which ended 10,000 years ago), but are now gone.

Kurtén concluded, “The mass death can hardly be ascribed to climatic causes alone, for there was no similar mass extinction in earlier interglacials.  It seems fairly certain that modern man has played a dominant role in the wiping out of many species, although perhaps by indirect influence as much as by actual hunting.”

Edmeades notes that, in Europe, warmth-loving megafauna species, like the straight-tusked elephant, hippos, and woodland rhinos, went extinct by 25,000 years ago, around the time of the last glaciation.  There were many glaciations during the Pleistocene, and some were more severe than the last one.  The last glaciation corresponds to the time when Homo sapiens colonized Eurasia.  Cold-tolerant mammoths and wooly rhinos survived in Western Europe until 12,000 years ago.

In North America, prior to human colonization, Edmeades says the ecosystem remained comparable to Africa 1.8 million years ago.  There were condor-like birds with 16-foot wingspans (4.8 m), mammoths, and mastodons.  In addition to cheetahs, “No less than five other kinds of big cat were living on an extravagant assortment of camel, llama, deer, horse, musk ox, bison, goat and sheep species.  With its giant bears, giant beavers, giant armadillo-like species, giant tortoises, and its giant ground-sloth species, North America was, without exaggeration, a super-Serengeti containing many more big-animal species than present-day Africa.”

“The population of every organism on Earth,” he writes, “is limited by collisions with the wall of limited resources.”  Baboon numbers are limited by the availability of nutrients they can acquire with their bare hands.  Specialized meat eaters like lions are limited by the availability of prey animals.  Both lions and baboons live as evolution fine-tuned them.  Food may be abundant one season, and scarce the next.  When abundant, populations increase.  Starvation is perfectly normal and natural.

Our ancestors had the added benefit of being omnivores.  When hunting was bad, they could dine on roots, nuts, and fruits.  This dietary safety net provided a huge strategic advantage over specialized meat eaters.  Of course, even omnivores can experience mass starvation.  All life requires nutrients, and all nutrients are finite.

The ancestors also benefitted by having cutting edge technology like fire, javelins, lances, harpoons, nets, snares, boats, and warm clothing.  Modern humans have blindsided the planet by converting many wild ecosystems into freaky food production plantations, dramatically increasing their nutrient resources — as long as the soil remains fertile, and pests, viruses, droughts, deluges, and frosts don’t nuke the plan.

Everyone agrees that, once upon a time, many species of megafauna inhabited every continent, and that most are now extinct.  Everyone agrees that the extinctions did not occur at the same time, around the world.  There were not major spasms of extinctions in places where our ancestors had not yet arrived.  The extinct species had previously survived multiple eras of global and local climate swings, which were sometimes sudden and severe.  Climate shifts do alter the flora and fauna of affected ecosystems, and this contributed to regional extinctions, like the hippos of London.

When it comes to success at long-term sustainability, the chimps, bonobos, baboons, and every other non-human species, get high scores.  When the food supply in their ecosystem declines, they starve and die.  Our lineage took a different path.  Instead of starving, they increased their food supply via innovation.  Wild and free chimps, without technology, would struggle to survive beyond their current habitat.  They live where evolution fine-tuned them to live.

The creature you see in the mirror has the body of a meat-eating hunter.  It is bipedal, designed to be a long-distance runner in a hot climate.  Its hands, arms, and shoulders are fine-tuned for hurling projectiles (killing from a distance), and making and using tools.  Our ancestors were hunters more than a million years before Homo sapiens appeared.

Daniel Quinn wrote Ishmael, a best-selling novel that defined two classes of human societies, Takers (naughty) and Leavers (nice).  The fall of humankind was the transition to agriculture and civilization.  The book torpedoed sacred cultural myths and blew my mind.  Hunter-gatherers certainly have far less impact than civilized folks, but the history of megafauna extinctions is important. 

So is the fact that plant and animal domestication emerged independently in several regions.  Some groups of hunter-gatherers chose to increase their food supply rather than rely completely on the fickle luck of the hunt — or become masterful at family planning.  They cleverly began displacing the wild ecosystem to produce plant and animal foods — a transition that had Earth-shaking unintended consequences.

Worse, by producing far more food, their population bloated.  There is strength in numbers.  For thousands of years, mobs of hungry dirty farmers and herders have been steamrolling wild societies, helpless deer in the headlights of progress.  This is a real pisser!  High impact societies routinely trump low impact ones.  Consumer culture has become a monster factory where students are entranced by dark juju sermons on Sustainable Development™.  This feels like the Mother of All Predicaments.

The good news is that Big Mama Nature will not allow this tragic game to continue forever.  Highly educated consumers are consuming nonrenewable resources at a growing rate, blissfully ignorant of the existence of limits — a wall that they will slam into.  At the same time, centuries of progress are destabilizing the climate that has enabled the existence of civilization.  Wildlife populations are severely depleted and plummeting.  We are getting very close to the peak of our batshit crazy joyride of turbocharged foolishness.  An era of healing is coming.

Meanwhile, on the rainforest sidelines, are the chimps and bonobos, our closest living relatives, who have lived in the same place for millions of years without leaving scars on the habitat.  Imagine that!  Humans are animals, an extremely embarrassing fact that most of us adamantly deny.  I have no brilliant solutions to offer today.  My humble suggestion is to think like an animal.  Thinking like a consumer is pushing us toward the coffin of humankind.  All the best!

Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna — First Victims of the Human-caused Extinction, 2013.  This fascinating manuscript has been withdrawn from its home location (megafauna.com) for updates.  An earlier version is available HERE.

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

Pyne, Stephen J., Fire: A Brief History, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001.

Rees, William E., Is Humanity Fatally Successful?, Vancouver Institute, British Columbia, 2003 (Download).

Werdelin, Lars, Hominids, Carnivores, and the Origin of the Anthropocene, Swedish Museum of Natural History, 2015 (50 min video).