Wild Free and Happy Sample 30

[Note: This is the thirtieth 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.] 

Horse

The first species of the horse genus (Equus) emerged in North America about 4.5 million years ago.  Over time, some migrated to South America, and others crossed the land bridge to Eurasia, and spread as far as Western Europe.  Maybe 15,000 years ago, hunters from Siberia discovered America, home to many horses.  Over the following centuries, a surge of megafauna extinctions occurred.  The last horse in the Americas died in Patagonia about 7000 B.C.  In 1493, Spaniards brought domesticated horses to the Americas, and by 1550, there were 10,000 of them rediscovering their ancestral homeland.

Graham Harvey noted that horses are fine tuned for grassland living.  They can run at a sustained gallop of 43 mph (70 km/h).  Sheep and cattle have complicated digestive tracts, so they need to rest after grazing.  Horses can eat and run.  They can go up to four days without water, so they can utilize grasslands farther from water sources.

Dixie West added that horses are able to efficiently digest a high fiber diet, so they can live on a daily intake of just 22 pounds (10 kg) of vegetation.  They are better able to survive on low quality forage, and they require less pampering than other livestock.  Prior to winter, herders had to gather and store hay for feeding cattle and sheep.  Horses were able to feed themselves throughout the cold months.  They also grew warm coats. 

Food Critters

Horses and hominins have had a long relationship.  As mentioned earlier, Neanderthals were trapping and killing horses at the Roche de Solutré site in France about 55,000 years ago.  Later, around 37,000 years ago, humans killed many horses at the same location.  West noted that, when panicked, horses flee in a single file, rather than rapidly scattering in every direction.  This made it easier to drive herds into traps. 

Over time, hunters got too good at trapping and killing horses.  Pita Kelekna wrote an excellent book on the history of the horse-human relationship.  She noted that by the Neolithic era (8000–4500 B.C.), the once plentiful wild horses had disappeared across most of Europe.  Some were able to survive in small pockets of Spain and central Europe. 

To the east, large numbers of wild horses thrived on the vast wide open steppes, where there was no brush or trees to conceal hungry hunters.  The placement of a horse’s eyes gives them a 300° range of vision — they can see in almost every direction.  The flat landscape lacked ravines or valleys into which herds could be conveniently driven, trapped, and killed.

Humans have been eating horses for tens of thousands of years.  Today, folks in many nations continue enjoying lunch dates with horses.  In the top eight horse loving nations, 4.7 million are eaten every year. 

Domestication

Long before horses were enslaved, sheep, goats, and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East.  Horses remained wild and free until maybe 4000 B.C.  They had thrived on the steppes, which were northern shortgrass prairies that spanned a 5,000 mile (8,046 km) range from Hungary to Manchuria.  Several scholars have speculated that domestication probably saved horses from extinction, because it transformed them from wild and free into private property — my horsy!

Wild horses were strong, fast, intelligent, and aggressive.  They were not easy to domesticate.  When cornered, they aggressively stomp, kick, and bite.  Swift kicks could be fatal.  Zebras, their Equus cousins, have never been tamed, despite countless attempts — the older they get, the meaner.

The domestication of horses was a revolutionary event in the human saga — like fire, agriculture, metallurgy, fossil energy, nuclear technology, and so on.  Countless highly destructive new trends did not become possible until after their domestication.  Sometimes it’s interesting to play “what if.”  What if evolution had selected for untamable zebras, rather than horses? 

Kelekna described, at great length, the huge impacts that domesticated horses had on the course of both human and environmental history.  At first, domesticated horses were kept for meat, milk, and hides.  Eventually folks learned how to effectively utilize horse power, greatly reducing society’s heavy dependence on human muscles.  Horses could pull stuff like plows, wagons, logs, and battle chariots.  They could carry heavy loads.  They could be ridden.  A herder with a dog could oversee 150 to 200 sheep, but a mounted herder could manage 500. 

Horses enabled humans to quickly travel long distances, a huge boost to human mobility.  They made it far easier to hunt large animals, or to raid enemies.  Trade networks could extend much farther, and transport larger cargoes of goods back and forth.  Long distance travel could also transfer technologies, religions, ideas, infectious diseases, and invasive exotics over long distances.  Horse domestication promoted the expansion of farming and herding, spurring population growth and conflict.

Nomadic Pastoralists

Bridle, saddle, and stirrup innovations eventually enabled humans to ride horses, at high speed, while effectively using deadly weapons to kill game or enemies.  Military campaigns could travel farther, and strike fast and hard.  Horses enabled the emergence of large nomad empires, and the spilling of oceans of blood.  Kelekna said that horsepower greatly benefitted the pursuit of “bloodshed, massacres, deportations, enslavement, amputation, beheadings, torture, incineration, rape, castration, famine, pestilence, and destruction.”

Nomadic herders did not need to trade with agricultural societies in order to acquire food.  They enjoyed an independent lifestyle.  Seed-bearing grasses were common on the steppe, and nomads simply gathered the wild grain.  Herds provided milk, blood, and meat.  Nomads were likely better nourished than most of the hungry dirty peasants and slaves in farm country.

Paul Shepard wrote that around 1800 B.C., mounted warriors with iron weapons opened the door to a new and super bloody chapter in the human saga.  Sudden surprise attacks from hordes of nomad warriors shattered or destroyed many civilizations, which were plump sitting ducks that were irresistibly tempting to plunder.  These attacks inspired the construction of a variety of defensive fortifications — wooden palisades, massive stone walls, moats, drawbridges, and so on.  Traditional population management services formerly provided by man-eating predators were now shifting to warriors, starvation, and epidemics.

It was no longer safe to live in many regions.  An old Bedouin proverb declares, “Raids are our agriculture.”  Describing tribes of horse-worshipping German herders in A.D. 98, Tacitus wrote that fighting was better than farming.  “They even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.”  Shepard noted that these mounted nomadic raiders developed a culture of “hierarchy, theft, rebellious sons, and competitive use of the earth.” 

Our wild hunter-gatherer ancestors were egalitarian, no leaders, all were equal.  The secret to their tens of thousands of years of success was sharing, cooperation, and an intimate relationship with the land.  Nomads had an entirely different worldview, one that favored patriarchy, raiding, conquering, accumulating personal wealth, and competing for status.  Primary components of their worldview continue to be the foundation in modern cultures.

Horses and Wheels

David Anthony wrote that wheeled vehicles first appeared in the Old World around 3300 B.C., and were of great benefit to herders.  Carts made it much easier to move families, food, tents, and water to greener pastures, for extended stays, to better keep their herds well fed.  He said that horses and carts enabled nomads to intensify their exploitation of the steppes, which had previously been little used by humans.

To better appreciate the impact of horses and wheels in the Old World, it’s interesting to look at the Americas.  In the New World, the llamas and alpacas of Peru were the only large animals domesticated, and neither was capable of carrying an adult rider.  In the Old World, the diabolical invention of the wheel greatly accelerated agriculture, deforestation, population growth, empire building, and on and on.  Industrial civilization could not exist in a world without wheels.  In the New World, the only wheels were those found on tiny clay toys.  Without horses, the pampas and prairies of the Americas had wee populations, and little or no agriculture.

Having no carts or wagons, the Inca civilization in Peru did not need to build smooth roads.  They did build bridges, dig tunnels, and cut steps up steep hillsides.  Pack trains of llamas could travel up to 12 miles per day (19 km), with each animal carrying up to 101 pounds (46 kg).  Speedy long-distance communication was provided by messages relayed from one Inca runner to the next.  This was much slower than Genghis Khan’s pony express system, which could move messages 248 miles (400 km) per day.

In Mesoamerica, the pack animals were two legged primates.  On a good day, a healthy lad might carry 50 pounds (23 kg) for 13 to 17 miles (21 to 28 km).  Without carts or pack animals, Mesoamericans could not create vast sprawling empires like Rome.  While the Mayans built some roads, hiking in Mexico was via dirt paths, where they existed.  Military adventures were restricted in the New World.  Each soldier had to carry his own provisions, which limited the load size and distance travelled.  Thus, if supplies could not be snatched from villagers along the way, campaigns would have been limited to round trips of eight days or so. 

In Eurasia, huge Mongol cavalries could zoom across the steppe at 68 miles (110 km) per day.  The Eurasian steppes experienced century after century of the rise and fall of numerous hordes of horse-mounted nomads like the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks.  Mongol empires grew with explosive speed.  They peaked between 1279 and 1350, when they inhabited Iraq, Iran, central Asia, most of Russia, and all of China.  This was the largest contiguous empire in human history.  Later, the British Empire controlled more territory, but in many scattered regions.

Beasts of Burden

Paul Shepard was the opposite of a horse lover, because of the many new imbalances that domesticated horses enabled.  Compared to hand labor, the introduction of horses to agriculture allowed farm production to double.  This, of course, led to population growth, which often increased faster than the endlessly busy Grim Reaper could keep up with.  Agriculture’s faithful shadow is soil destruction.  We’re essentially eating soil.  The skin is being torn off of Mother Earth.  This has no long term future.

Clive Ponting wrote that before 1800, animals provided just 25 percent of the work energy, and humans did most of the rest (many serfs couldn’t afford work animals).  We used very little energy from windmills or waterwheels.  Feeding a horse required at least 6 acres (2.5 ha) of grassland, oxen a bit less.  In those days, most land suitable for crops was needed to grow food for humans, because agriculture was far less productive than today.

Consequently, prior to 1800, since people couldn’t afford a horse, they walked.  In that era, about 95 percent of humans in farming societies were peasants.  We have soft lives today, but Ponting reminds us that “Until about the last two centuries in every part of the world nearly everyone lived on the edge of starvation.”  My grandmother never tossed out apple cores, because the entire apple was food, seeds and all.

William McNeill noted that another troublesome cargo that domesticated beasts delivered into human society was deadly pathogens.  When human communities were brought into constant close contact with animals, it was far easier for diseases and parasites to leap from one species to another.  Over time, different diseases emerged in different regions.  Eventually, long distance travel for trade or warfare carried diseases from their place of origin to virgin populations that had zero immunity to them.  From A.D. 1200 to 1500, isolated regional disease pools eventually combined to form a large pool of civilized diseases.

The Black Death likely arose in China around 1331.  From there, by and by, it spread in every direction.  It hitched rides on merchant ships, armies, and trade caravans, and eventually appeared in Crimea by 1346.  From there, it proceeded to sail to Italy, rapidly visit much of Europe, and promptly delete about a third of the population.

Horses Return Home

Horses originally evolved in the Americas, and then blinked out in 7000 B.C.  In 1493, after an absence of 8,500 years, Spaniards brought domesticated horses back to the Americas.  Reintroduction eventually had dramatic effects on the western U.S. plains.  In 1598, Spanish colonists brought domesticated horses and other livestock to New Mexico.  One way or another, plains Indians acquired some of these animals. 

Richard White discussed how the acquisition of horses impacted the entire plains ecosystem.  Horses quickly became popular with many tribes.  Horses were trade commodities, the target of raids, and the inspiration for many bloody conflicts.  With horses, it became easy for hunters to kill far more buffalo.  With access to more food, population grew, tribal rivalries intensified, and warfare increased.  Horse stealing became a normal activity among the people of the plains.  Living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure, and corn growing villages were especially vulnerable to sudden raids.

Samuel Gwynne noted that prior to horses, the southern plains were lightly populated.  The region wasn’t well suited for agriculture, and hunting buffalo, antelope, and elk on foot was far from easy.  The prey was much speedier than the hunters.  A buffalo can sprint at 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  The acquisition of horses revolutionized buffalo hunting.  A number of tribes abandoned farming, and became hunters.  With easier access to food, more people could be fed.

As American colonists began moving away from the Atlantic coast, into a wilderness of forests, prairies, and wetlands, travelling on horseback was difficult or impossible.  There were paths, but not roads suitable for wagons or carts.  At that time, Indians in the eastern U.S. travelled by footpath and canoe, via predictable routes, where colonists could ambush them.  Tribes that raised corn were far more vulnerable than nomadic hunters.  When settlers found villages, they burned them.  Stored food went up in smoke.

When colonists moved west of the Mississippi, they eventually moved beyond forest country and onto the open plains, where they met Indians on horses for the first time, and got blindsided.  It took many serious beatings until they figured out how to fight them.  Comanche warriors could readily attack any target within 400 miles.  Settlers and soldiers were sitting ducks for fast moving bands of warriors.  A warrior could shoot 20 arrows whilst a soldier or settler reloaded his musket once. 

James Sherow wrote about the challenges plains Indians had with keeping horses in the Arkansas River Valley.  Horses gave them amazing new powers, and painful new headaches.  Horses were personal property, and the more you owned, the higher your social status.  In 1855, the Cheyennes owned an average of 5.5 horses per person, and the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Arapahos owned 6.2.

Climate had a major impact on the grassland.  One acre (0.4 ha) could produce 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of short grass when annual rainfall rose to 20 inches (51 cm).  When it dropped to 10 inches, only 450 pounds.  During hot spells, rain evaporated in midair.  Creeks and springs dried up.  During winter, the protein content of grass was half of summer levels.  In harsh winters, large herds shrank.  Horses in close confinement provided comfortable homes for a variety of parasites.

George Catlin studied western Indian tribes from 1832-1839, when buffalo herds were still enormous, and natives used bows and arrows to hunt during high speed pursuits on horseback.  He did many drawings and paintings, and wrote extensive notes.  While he was fascinated by the many things he learned, he was also sad, because the plains Indians and the buffalo were on a dead end path.  The arrival of civilized people brought lots of dark juju to the west.  Buffalo were hunted in winter when their fur was thick, and their hides were most valuable for the buffalo robe market.  After skinning the animal, the rest of the carcass was left for the wolves.  Indians living far from traders wasted no part of the animals they killed.

In May of 1832, a mounted hunting party of 500 or 600 Sioux chased a large herd for several hours, and killed many.  At the end of the day, they came to the fort with 1,400 buffalo tongues, for which they received a few gallons of whiskey, which did not last long among the thirsty lads.  The hides and meat of the dead animals were left on the grass.

The whites were making a nice profit today, and it never occurred to them to give consideration to the future of the buffalo.  Among the tribes, there was an ancient and widespread belief that the buffalo were a gift from the Great Spirit, infinite in number, and whatever they took would be replaced.  Whites also overhunted the buffalo.  Catlin could see that the buffalo could be gone in as soon as 8 to 10 years, and was deeply disturbed about the insanity of it all.

Peak Horse

The use of horses for transportation and traction peaked early in the twentieth century.  Clive Ponting noted that the U.S. was home to 20 to 30 million horses in 1900.  About a quarter of the nation’s cropland was needed to produce their food.  Model T Fords did not require six acres of good grassland to fuel them.

My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and cities.  Venerable physicist Albert Bartlett calculated that, with regard to the all-time total volume of oil extracted by humankind, more than half of it will be consumed within the lifespan of the generation born since 1966.  We are living during a temporary explosion of staggering waste, and this idiotic binge has an expiration date.  So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power, right?  Well, umm, there are some challenges.

Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  By 1898, big city streets were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums. 

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.  In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring manure to their fields.  By 1900, there was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.  Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).  Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral diseases.  In 1880, 41 horses died each day on the streets of New York.  The average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).  Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables — excellent disease incubators.  In 1872, the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by the equine influenza virus.  Coughing spread it from one animal to the next.  Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically reduced.  Folks had to use wheelbarrows and handcarts to transport goods.  The postal service was hobbled.  Freight piled up.  Coal deliveries stopped.  Food distribution wheezed.  On farms, plows and other equipment fell idle.  Boats quit moving on the Erie Canal.  Horse-drawn fire engines and street cars did not move.  When a big fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going out on civilization as we know it.  Bye-bye railroads, air travel, sea transport, refrigerators, elevators, mining, supermarkets, and so on.  Sewage treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink out.  Vast areas of cropland will cease being plowed, planted, irrigated, and harvested.  Humans may actually have to walk (eek!!). 

Future generations will gather around campfires and laugh at hilarious stories about how people used to live.  It’s sad that we the living can’t see this.

Tikopia



Tikopia (tik-o-PEE-a) is a wee island in the Pacific, quite close to the middle of nowhere, the remains of an ancient volcano.  Its area is 1.8 square miles (4.6 km²), much of it steep rugged hillside.  The closest neighbors live on Anuta, 85 miles away (137 km), a long and dangerous voyage in a dugout canoe.  Tiny Tikopia is eleven times larger than Anuta. 

Humans arrived in Tikopia maybe 3,000 years ago, and brought along pigs, dogs, fowl, rats, and the seeds of Polynesian foods.  For a while, folks ate well, dining on the abundant birds, fish, and shellfish.  As abundance faded, slash and burn agriculture gained momentum.  Deforestation crept up the slopes, and eroded soils washed down, accumulating near the shore.  Efforts were made to stabilize and expand the shoreline.  As a result, Tikopia’s land area is now 40 percent larger, and the reef area is 41 percent smaller.  There is much more land suitable for raising food.

The crater of Tikopia’s volcano used to be a saltwater bay linked to the sea, home to plentiful fish and shellfish.  Soil deposits have now blocked the connection to the sea, turning the bay into a lake.  This sharply reduced the marine life that formerly thrived in the bay.  The villages that depended on this food were screwed.  Around 1700, they exterminated a village having fertile land.  Another village fled in fear, paddling into the ocean, almost certainly drowning.  Conflict is hunger’s shadow.

The lake water is too salty to drink, as is the ocean.  Drinking water is obtained from springs flowing out of the hillsides, coming from sources above the villages and latrines.  Ashes, excrement, and kitchen wastes are used to return nutrients to the gardens and orchards.

Over time, folks planted more food-producing trees.  Eventually, they developed a clever three-story system of arboriculture, mixing tall, medium, and short tree species.  These included bananas, papaya, coconuts, sago, chestnuts, and almonds.  On the ground, they grew root crops, like taro, sweet potatoes, yams, and manioc.  This system maximized food production, reduced erosion, enriched the soil, was less vulnerable to cyclone damage, and did not require endless toil.  Pigs swiped too much human food, and were eliminated before 1800, as were the dogs.

Nature kept life interesting by sending drought years and frequent cyclones.  These could hammer the food supply.  Because Tikopia was so far from anywhere, importing food from elsewhere was not an option.  Folks preserved calories for famine years in two ways.  (1) They dug pits and fermented taro, breadfruit, and manioc into glop called masi, which could be stored for several years.  (2) The pith of the sago palm was dried and ground into storable flour.

Each house was assigned specific garden plots and orchards that comprised their primary source of nutrition.  If you ran short, you starved.  Carrying capacity expanded and declined in synch with food production.  When conditions got tight, older males in the household would set limits on reproduction.  The families complied, because everyone understood the painful consequences of having too many mouths to feed.

Because it encouraged social stability, population management was intelligent and ethical.  It was done in several ways.  Junior members of the family might be expected to remain bachelors or spinsters.  Everyone practiced coitus interruptus.  Efforts were made to induce miscarriages to end unwanted pregnancies.  Newborns were promptly suffocated.  It was usually OK to have two sons, but subsequent male offspring were strangled, to avoid conflicts over land inheritance.  Unmarried males sometimes jumped into a canoe and never returned.  Others swam out into the open sea and fed the sharks.  When all options failed, it was time to fetch clubs and go on the warpath.

I invite you to watch The Island of Tikopia, a pleasant 53-minute video.  It shows us cool people living in a tropical paradise.  Tikopia is blessed by being tiny, isolated, unsuitable for industrial agriculture, and having no valuable resources.  Hence, they have not been obliterated by modernity.  They will never suffer from automobiles or cell phones.  Even today, Tikopians live in functional communities, and enjoy an easygoing way of life that is unimaginable to frantic consumers thrashing through life in Crazyland.

The video does not focus on how contact with civilization has impacted their society.  On a different island, the Sentineli welcome all visitors with a shower of arrows.  They have learned from painful experience that outsiders can be bad juju.  Tikopians had no fear of visitors, because anyone who paddled in was a mellow islander like themselves.  Whites were different; following a visit in 1828, a quarter of the population died from disease.

Missionaries began to wash ashore in 1857, occasionally visiting the island.  Within 50 years, they had made a few converts.  Half were baptized by 1928, and by 1955, most were nominally Christian.  Chiefs who agreed to be baptized were rewarded with metal axes, knives, adzes, and other amazing stuff.  Heathens who preferred the ancient path were rewarded with self-righteous intolerance.

More destructive than dysentery, pneumonia, measles, and influenza was the deliberate introduction of European morality.  Much of the traditional culture managed to survive, but Christians were especially uptight about sex, family planning, and which deity to worship.  Naturally, the stern prohibition of premarital sex was disregarded by almost all youths, including horny young Christians.

Naturally, the mission’s opposition to population control had negative results.  Population soared 37 percent from 1,288 in 1928 (too many), to 1,753 in 1952 (way too many) — just in time for a devastating cyclone, and a bloody plunge into helter-skelter.  This drove anthropologist Raymond Firth crazy.  Christian culture was obsessed with compulsory conformity, but disinterested in the predictable results.  Tikopians had evolved a remarkably competent culture that adapted to the ecosystem and mindfully lived within limits.  Leave it alone, he shouted.

Anyone who has studied European history knows that this irrational morality of unrestrained growth has, over the centuries, led to the death of hundreds of millions via wars, famines, and epidemics.  Is this truly more ethical than intelligent family planning?  The principles of carrying capacity and overshoot apply to both tiny islands and the entire planet, as we are now in the process of discovering.

When the first humans arrived in Tikopia, there were no mammals.  There were no wild herbivores to freeload on their food supply.  The only man-eating predators were sharks, which swam outside the reefs.  In the absence of large predators, humans were the dominant animal.  There were no lions, jaguars, or hyenas to provide essential population control services.  Thus, a culture of mindful restraint was the preferred path to sustainability.

Today, Tikopia is one of 900+ islands in the nation of Solomon Islands, which is 95 percent Christian.  The Tikopian population crisis has been addressed by sending folks to establish colonies on other islands — islands that have been depopulated via exposure to the diseases of civilization.  Other Tikopians enjoy rewarding careers in manual labor at coconut plantations on larger islands.  How much longer can the consequences of European morality be sidestepped?  Sea levels are rising, cyclones are intensifying, and low-lying islands in the Solomons are vanishing.  Good luck islanders!

Firth, Raymond, We, The Tikopia, American Book Company, New York, 1936.

Firth, Raymond, Tikopia Ritual and Belief, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967.

Kirch, Patrick Vinton and Douglas E. Yen, Tikopia — The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, 1982.

Topography of Ireland



One grouchy grumpy day, Pope Adrian IV got honked off at Ireland.  The Irish were not paying their tithes, and they were Catholic in name only, living in abominable moral decay.  So, he ordered England’s Henry II to conquer the rowdy heathen barbarians.  Along with the invasion went a secretary, Giraldus Cambrensis (1146 – 1223), a Welsh priest and scholar.  (“Giraldus Cambrensis” was Latin for “Jerry of Wales.”)  Father Jerry arrived in Ireland in 1185, and wrote a description of the emerald isle, Topography of Ireland.  It captured a rare snapshot of what life was like more than eight centuries ago, when the Irish were still tribal people.

At that time, Ireland was a remote and isolated frontier, largely off the radar of civilization.  The landscape majored in forests, bogs, lakes, streams, and swamps.  Boats were the easiest mode of travel.  Stags feasted on the lavish banquet of foliage, becoming chubby and less speedy.  Wolves dined on the abundant boars and wild pigs.  The air and water were clean, and the rivers were loaded with fine salmon, trout, muddy eels, and oily shad.

The tribes of Ireland were wild chiefdoms, and the lads and lasses were primarily cowboys and cowgirls.  The climate was mild, rainfall was gentle and abundant, and the grass was green all year.  Snows were rare, and soon melted away.  It was a paradise for herbivores and herders.  Herders needed no structures to protect the livestock from the cold, and they had no need for cutting, drying, and storing hay.  Organic milk, grass-fed meat, wild fish, and little else, were on the menu every day of the year.

The wild folks had no interest in adapting the latest European fashions — dainty, frilly, colorful attire.  They refused to invest endless hours in the tedious drudgery of spinning and weaving fabric of flax or wool.  Sensible people are not trend junkies, and dressing up in silly duds made you look like a goofy geek from Liverpool.  It was simply too embarrassing.  Sensible people wore skins and furs, which were comfortable, durable, attractive, and suitable for all occasions.

There were veins of ores, including gold-bearing quartz, but the cowboys ignored them.  Mining was brutally hard work, and their cattle refused to eat gold.  Their lands were home to majestic forests, but the cowboys weren’t interested in forest mining.  They had no need for lumber or paper, and their finicky cattle would eat neither boards nor money.  A good deal of the countryside was potentially suitable for use as cropland, but very little was tilled and sown.  Cowboys knew that soil mining was miserable, backbreaking work, and their traditional way of life worked just fine.  Cattle were perfectly happy to eat the delicious grass.

Tribes had abundant leisure time for making a joyful noise.  Father Jerry had travelled as far as Rome, and he considered the Irish to be the finest musicians of all.  Irish music was lively and rapid, and the harmonies sweet and gay.  They mostly played the harp and tabor (a small drum).  In those days, music was still genuinely sustainable.  Musicians did not need huge tour buses, or dozens semis to haul speakers, amplifiers, lighting systems, stages, mega-screens, and dumpsters of cocaine and heroin.

The people were strong and healthy.  They did not waste years in lingering sickness and decline.  They preferred to leap directly from good health to their deathbeds, and promptly get it over with.  They did not know the days of the week, the names of the months, or what year it was.  They kept time by the sun, moon, and seasons.

The Irish have never been fond of Father Jerry’s writing, because he was an obnoxious gaseous sphincter.  For example, “The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts.”  Or, “This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner… indeed, all of their habits are barbarisms.”

Father Jerry was certain that the world was very old, close to its end.  He was stunned and perplexed by the Irish indifference to salvation and eternal life.  You see, Saint Patrick had successfully converted all the tribes before he died in 485.  Yet seven centuries later, most of the Irish savages had forgotten everything about sin, damnation, and guilt.  Many Irish remained unbaptized and unmarried — shameless, adulterous, incestuous, illegitimate bastards.  (Writer Michael Ventura heard of an Irish grandmother who, in the 1950s, still referred to Christianity as “the new religion.”)

Anyway, King Henry’s invasion of Ireland was the kickoff for centuries of bloodshed — similar in many ways to English colonization of New England or Australia.  The Irish were low-tech guerilla warriors, skilled at hit and run ambushes.  They used slings to hurl stones with skull-splitting accuracy.  They had spears, javelins, and axes.  The English were state-of-the-art warriors, having chain mail, armor, archers, and deadly swords.  For example, “He who had seen how John de Courcy wielded his sword, with one stroke lopping off heads, and with another arms, must needs have commended him for a most valiant soldier.”

Long after Jerry’s death, after more than 450 years of fighting, the conquest was complete.  The English victors seized the estates of Irish nobles, and gave them two options.  They could move to a reservation, or be executed.  Thousands of Irish women were sold to the owners of Caribbean sugar plantations.  Countless lads were hung.  One observer noted, “You may ride 20 miles and discern anything or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets.”

History is clear that civilization trumps tribes.  It also trumps healthy wild ecosystems.  It trumps the wellbeing of generations yet to be born.  But even before Henry and Jerry washed up on shore, tribal Ireland was not a place of love, peace, and happiness.  Ireland was divided into many túatha, or petty kingdoms, the domains of chiefdoms.  The borders often fluctuated, as chiefs ambitiously pursued the glories of perpetual growth.

History is clear that the accumulation of property, including domesticated livestock, is a routine cause of wealth inequality, social friction, and war.  Before becoming cowboys, the Irish hunted and fished.  They could not capture and hoard wild stags or boars, so they avoided status-seeking mania, and the dark juju of bossy rich jerks.  Countless millions have perished in countless wars resulting from the insatiable obsession of insecure people for more, more, and more.  Today, many blame our woes on capitalism, but the roots of the monster are far deeper.

Father Jerry wrote with flamboyance.  The translation I read was clear and understandable.  However, he was not skilled at remaining focused on his subject, and frequently wandered away to jabber about whatever came into his head.  He wrote many books, including The History of the Conquest of Ireland.  The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis contains both of his books on Ireland, and his two books on Wales.  A free download is HERE.

Cambrensis, Giraldus, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, George Bell & Sons, London, 1905.

Hegarty, Neil, The Story of Ireland, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2012.

Bonus link: Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland. 

Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm is a professor of anthropology and director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of California.  He has read hundreds of anthropological studies on a variety of human societies.  He also spent time with Goodall at Gombe National Park, observing the behavior of wild chimpanzees.  These experiences inspired him to speculate on our evolutionary journey, and to attempt the daunting challenge of defining “human nature,” the core essence shared by all humans.  He presented his ideas in Hierarchy in the Forest.

Before we begin, the goal of my work is to help people who are interested in learning about ecological sustainability.  Boehm’s book pays little attention to ecology, and I quit reading about 75 pages before the end.  Folks who are eager to learn about the various trends and controversies in cultural anthropology should put it on their reading list.  I was intrigued by some of the passages I read.  My plan is to jabber a bit about these, and then call it a day.

There are numerous types of societies, ranging from egalitarian (no bosses) to hierarchical (some have more power than others).  Among hierarchical societies, some have many layers of rank and status, like wolf packs.  At the extreme, despotic societies have a dominant alpha to whom all others must submit, like chimps or Nazis.  Boehm presented theories on the evolution of politics and morality among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and humans.  Based on how the four species behave today, he imagined that the common ancestor of all four, who lived seven million years ago, was innately despotic — and that all four today remain near the despotic end of the political spectrum.

He believed that humans took a strange path.  In the beginning, we were hierarchical.  Later, for much of the hunter-gatherer phase, we were egalitarian.  Then, around 12,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, hierarchy returned to ascendance, and grew to monstrous proportions over the centuries.  This was not black and white, some early societies of herders or horticulturalists remained egalitarian, despite having private property and unequal wealth.

Oddly, egalitarian societies were also hierarchical.  Civilized societies have pyramid-shaped hierarchies, with the powerful at the top, and the dominated masses spread out below.  Egalitarian societies have an upside down pyramid, a “reverse dominance hierarchy.”  When someone began behaving in an inappropriate manner, the entire group united to confront the misbehaving oddball.

Cooperation was fundamental to the success of hunter-gatherer societies, so conflict avoidance was imperative.  Upstart males, exhibiting impulses to dominate others, were a serious threat to the stability and survival of the society.  Nothing was more uncool.  The antidote to disruptive upstarts was sanctions — criticism, ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, shunning.  Sanctions often helped the upstart get the message, and return to conformity.  If these failed, the upstart might move to a different group.  If all else failed, he might be executed.

Hunter-gatherer cultures had time-proven methods for encouraging conformity, and discouraging the impulses of problem personalities.  It was always uncool to be boastful, arrogant, or overbearing.  When a hunter brought home excellent meat, he would apologize for the worthless crap that was unfit for dog food.  Self-depreciation helped to level out differences, and discourage painful swellings of pride.

Once upon a time, Boehm had succeeded in earning the trust of Navajo elders, in his quest to learn about mental illness in the tribe.  One day, he realized that he had left a watermelon in his car, which he had bought to be a gift.  He ran out, got it, ran back, offered it to the elder — and immediately obliterated the trust he had carefully earned, terminating his research.  His action had been too sudden, and was perceived as aggressive.  The Navajo have a low opinion of white people, and are highly distrustful of them.  In Indian country, people are expected to be calm, composed, dignified, and respectful.

One passage especially touched me.  Jean Briggs was an anthropologist who spent more than a year with the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada.  She apparently behaved like an ordinary American, who had moody days, and sometimes displayed a flash of anger when irritated.  This freaked out the Eskimos, who sometimes ran out the cabin when she was crabby and hissing.  In that society, folks were expected to smile, laugh, and joke — to behave like happy people.  Nothing was more uncool than showing your emotions, because strong thoughts can kill or cause illness.  Anger was dangerous juju, highly toxic.

The Eskimos tolerated a lot of extremely inappropriate behavior, because Briggs was a visitor from a tribe that was notoriously loony.  They gave her hints for behaving more politely, but she missed their meaning.  Eventually, they reached their limits, and Briggs became a nonperson.  She simply could not learn how to conform.

Briggs was brought up in a hierarchical culture, where we all compete against one another to acquire, hoard, and display the most status trinkets.  Self-centeredness is the expected norm.  Most of us live amidst hordes of perfect strangers, and the sight of strangers must make our tropical primate brains squirm and sweat.  When chimps see a strange male, they don’t welcome him with smiles and hugs; they kill him.  Gorillas are also impolite unknown visitors.  Of course, humans take great delight in savagely killing foreigners by the millions.

It’s hard for us to imagine spending our entire lives among a small group of people, where survival depends on cooperation, where competition and conflict were toxic.  The Eskimos were not merely “acting” happy.  They were raised in a culture where it was normal and healthy to mindfully maintain respectful relationships with all others.  They had to spend long dark winters in close quarters, so it was impossible to tolerate selfish spoiled brats or infantile tyrants.  Everyone’s highest responsibility was to maintain the stability of the group.

Boehm’s book was published in 1999.  Most research on wild bonobos occurred after 2003.  Early studies had to be abandoned, because of a civil war that raged between 1994 and 2003, claiming three million lives.  Based on incomplete information, Boehm assumed that bonobos were at the despotic end of the spectrum, but later research revealed that they were remarkably egalitarian.  Also, they were not egalitarian in the sense of “reverse dominance hierarchy.”  For bonobos, egalitarian behavior was normal, natural, almost effortless.  Humans are closely related to both despotic chimps and egalitarian bonobos.

Why are chimps and bonobos so different?  Ecology may be the primary factor.  Bonobos enjoy an ideal habitat, with abundant food, and no serious competitors in their niche.  Chimps live in leaner lands, and compete for food with gorillas and baboons.  Scarcity creates tensions, and territorial boundaries must be aggressively defended against trespassers.  Crowding is the mother of conflict.  Extreme crowding turns humans into bloodthirsty mass murdering maniacs.

Boehm, Christopher, Hierarchy in the Forest, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999.

The Tender Carnivore

Paul Shepard was an animal with a PhD who made the astonishing discovery that he really was an animal, and so was everyone else.  This sort of thinking makes us sweaty and nervous, because we prefer to believe that we are the creator’s masterpiece — not the cousins of disgusting baboons and orangutans.  It’s insulting to call someone’s kid a cute animal.

Two-legged primates evolved as hunters and gatherers in healthy wild habitats, living in groups of a dozen or so.  These highly intelligent animals were perfectly at home in natural surroundings, but today’s two-legs are overwhelmed by the input barrage of modern life.  For two-legs, industrial civilization feels like a prison.  Could this be why we are frantically shopping the planet to smithereens?  Shepard spent his life trying to solve this riddle.

Historians have invented glorious stories of the incredible ascent of humankind, from hungry dirty peasants to futuristic cell phone zombies.  In the process, they whited out ninety-nine percent of the human journey, the era before we went sideways.  Restricted to this heavily edited history, our culture has “unwittingly embraced a diseased era as the model of human life.”  This has nurtured “a malignant self-identity.”

We can’t know who we are if our past has been whited out.  In his book, The Tender Carnivore, Shepard pulls back the curtains and presents readers with the 14 million year version of our story.  Notably, the book leaps outside the wall of flatulent myths, and speaks from a viewpoint where wild people are normal healthy animals, and planet thrashers are not.  His ideas provide an effective antidote to the trance, a charm to break the curse.

The book includes a timeline of the human saga.  By 40,000 years ago, we had 240 tools, and numbered 3.3 million.  By 10,000 years ago, we had domesticated sheep, goats, and cereals, and there were 5.3 million.  By 6,000 years ago, we had irrigation, pottery, metal, war, states, wheel, trade, ideology, and writing — and there were 86 million.  The human enterprise was getting dangerously out-of-balance.

Tree monkeys are relatively safe from predators, so males and females are about the same size, and the troop is sexually promiscuous.  Ground monkeys, like baboons, are far more vulnerable to predators, so they are larger, and live in tight groups.  They kill and eat other animals.  The males are much bigger and stronger than the females, and they are hot-tempered.

Ground monkeys are “the most aggressively status-conscious creatures on Earth.”  High-ranking males have primary access to females and food.  They are constantly watched by low-ranking males, who wait for signs of aging and weakness, and opportunities to drive the big boy out of the harem.  They are high-strung animals who constantly adapt to a hierarchy that is always changing.

Humans are also status-conscious critters, so it’s hard for us to recognize that this monkey business is unusual in the animal kingdom.  Monkeys are not our direct ancestors, but we share many genes with them.  Like ground monkeys, every group of humans has a hierarchy of individuals, from ultra-cool to scruffy riffraff.

In sedentary human societies, where personal wealth varies, the status game is amplified by hoarding status trinkets — cars, televisions, and other valuables.  Is it possible that the reason folks refuse to wean themselves from habitual car driving is because it would sharply reduce their social status — something far more important than a stable climate?  Shepard says that we are obsessed with immature goals and follow trends like a dumb herd.

The ape family includes chimps and gorillas.  They inhabit forests, and spend the daylight hours on the ground.  Chimps live in groups of about 40, and use a few very simple tools.  They are nice, mild mannered animals, Shepard says.  But when Shepard was writing, Jane Goodall’s chimp research was just beginning.

It turns out that chimp groups are ruled by an alpha male, who aggressively dominates the females.  They are also violent killers.  Goodall saw one chimp group completely exterminate another group.  Bonobos are their closest relatives, and they are strikingly different.  Bonobo groups are matriarchal, extremely promiscuous, and rarely violent.

A number of anthropologists have reported that, among recent hunter-gathers, males are not dominators, with some exceptions.  But many would agree that, during the civilized era, the status of women often got the shaft.  Shepard’s overview of primate history suggests that male domination and abuse was not invented by Middle Eastern deities.  Evolution can get rough.

When scientists raised chimps in their homes, 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.  Language promotes mental development, spurring reasoning and knowing.  Yet, without language, lions and wolves are superior hunters.  Intelligence is an evolutionary experiment.  It allows us to better comprehend the complexity of the world, but it also enables us to better destroy it.

When adolescence concludes with a successful initiation into adulthood, the youth becomes a confident fully human animal that is well integrated with the non-human environment.  He clarifies his self-identity, moves closer to his peer group, and away from his parents.  When initiation is botched or omitted, the youth remains trapped in adolescence, chronically narcissistic, enraged at humankind and nature for failing to help him become a complete human.  “Everyone who fails will be intellectually, emotionally, and socially retarded for the rest of his life.”

Because humans evolved to be ground-dwelling wild omnivores, the hunter-gatherer way of life “is the normal expression of his psychology and physiology.  His humanity is therefore more fully achieved, and his community is more durable and beautiful.”  When removed from a healthy wild environment, folks “live in constant crisis, stress, and poor mental health.”

Throughout the book, Shepard directs a fire hose of ideas at readers, and some are stronger than others.  This one is false: “Hunters and gatherers, by contrast, do not make war.”  When Knud Rasmussen trekked from Greenland to Siberia in the 1920s, he reported several regions where warfare was common, in his book Across Arctic America.

It is also false that all humans are inherently violent.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Richard Lee, and Colin Turnbull all reported that Pygmy and Bushman hunter-gatherers were not warlike.  People with adequate space and resources like to sing and dance.  The Inuit described by Rasmussen lived in extremely low population density, but the lands they inhabited had an extremely low carrying capacity.  Crowding is a social disease that causes frantic agitation.

In the last chapter, Shepard looks toward the future.  He presents us with imaginative, impractical, and sometimes daffy solutions.  Rather than burning oil, we could use yeast to convert it into high-protein food.  Agriculture and domesticated animals must go.  Human settlements should be limited to a five-mile strip along the coasts, returning the interiors of continents to nature.  In the wild lands, only foot travel would be allowed.  Only hand weapons could be used for hunting, no guns or dogs.  And so on.

The book was written in the good old days of the early 1970s, when there were fewer than four billion, and the future seemed fairly stable.  Peak oil and climate change had yet to walk onto the stage.  We seemed to have time to repair things.  This is a 40-year old book, with a few rough edges, but well worth the time.

Shepard, Paul, The Tender Carnivore, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.  [1973]

Other reviews of Shepard books: Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Nature and Madness, The Others, Thinking Animals, Encounters with Nature, Where We Belong