The Humans Who Went Extinct

Clive Finlayson is an evolutionary ecologist and a champion skeptic.  He routinely rejects theories based on no evidence, even if they are solidly supported by popular whims, like the widely held belief in the inferiority of Neanderthals.  What science now knows about human evolution is something like finding 100 pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

Experts have a strong urge to fill in the blanks with their opinionated imaginations, an approach that is far from trusty.  The mindset of mainstream modern science worships Homo sapiens like Hitler worshipped Aryans — the master race — whilst the holy species rips the planet to shreds right before their eyes.  For 300,000 years, Neanderthals had the good manners to remain in balance with life, as did most of our ancestors.  Good manners are important.

The whims of Ice Age climate patterns are the primary reason why you and I are not gorgeous, sexy, brilliant Neanderthals today, admiring a passing group of wooly rhinos, in a healthy world where bison far outnumber people.  Finlayson’s book, The Humans Who Went Extinct, convinced me to reconsider my perception of the human journey.  Not many books do that anymore.

The era we live in, the 10,000 years of civilization, human domination, and ecocide, is but an eye blink in the long human journey.  Our era is a freak, because the climate has remained relatively warm and stable for an amazingly long time.  The pattern of the last 70,000 years has been a roller coaster of surprising climate shifts, from milder & wetter, to colder & drier.  Shifts could occur within a single lifetime.

When the glaciers grew, sea levels plunged, forests shrank, countless animals died, and some went extinct.  The deer and hippos fled or died, and were replaced by wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, musk ox, and reindeer.  Sea levels 30,000 years ago were 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today.  You could walk from England to Holland.

The Younger Dryas cold snap lasted a thousand years, and ended 11,600 years ago.  Warm weather melted the glaciers, life migrated northward, forests returned, and the land was filled with abundant megafauna.  This was the last waltz for many cold-tolerant megafauna.  The breezes were filled with the yummy aroma of sizzling mammoth meat.

In the Middle East, the Natufian culture was developing a sedentary way of life that majored in harvesting the abundant wild cereal seeds.  Within a thousand years, folks were experimenting with the dangerous juju of cultivation.  Tragically, they could never begin to imagine the unintended consequences of their cleverness.

Many have pointed to agriculture as the father of our disaster.  Lately, I’ve been more inclined to point to tool addiction.  Hominids were able to move out of the forests and survive.  The savannah offered immense amounts of meat, but acquiring it with bare hands was not easy

Once you get started with innovation, is it possible to stop?  Yes.  The macaques of south Asia break open shellfish with stone axes — they have been tool addicts for ages, but their excellent manners and beautiful small brains protected them from being flushed down the toilet by the Technology Fairy.

The ancestors of the chimps evolved large canine teeth for dining on meat, whilst early hominids developed meat-processing tools instead.  Baboons hunt small animals without weapons.  Tool-free small-brained monkeys of the American tropics eat a wide variety of jungle critters.

Could large-brained humans ever comprehend the healthy consequences of living tool-free, like the monkeys?  There is something deliciously appealing about the notion of living in harmony for millions of years without psych meds and cell phones.

And now, the plot thickens.  The Ice Ages did not hammer Africa, Australia, or India.  These southern folks continued living in the traditional human manner, as low density, low impact hunter-gatherers.  Northerners, on the other hand, stumbled onto a new and dangerous path.

Almost everyone has seen an image of the Venus of Willendorf.  She was carved by a member of the Gravettian culture of early humans, which thrived across the chilly treeless plains of Europe, from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago.  They were clever folks who loved reindeer stew.  They lived in huts with frames made of mammoth bones, covered with hides.  They made textiles, baskets, kilns, jewelry, and figurines.  They painted the caves at Chauvet and Les Garennes.

Finlayson laments that we modern civilized folks suffer to this very day from the curse of the Gravettians, “who lost their own way and all sense of their Pleistocene heritage.”  It was these far-too-clever white folks who created the most diabolical invention of all time — (gasp!) the storage pit.

Southern folks enjoyed a warm climate, and a year-round food supply.  Most foods could not be stored, because they would soon spoil.  The crazy Gravettians lived in a frigid climate, where all you could see in any direction was endless empty steppe-tundra.  Food appeared occasionally, like when migrating herds of reindeer passed through.  When they did, the Gravettians hunted like crazy, and stored surplus meat in pits that they had dug in the permafrost.

Finlayson referred to these pits as dangerous toys.  “They had found ways of producing surplus, something almost impossible in warm climates, and with it emerged an unstoppable drive to increase rapidly in numbers.”  If some surplus was good, then more was better, and you could never have too much.  Abundant food led to growing numbers and bad manners.  Finlayson emphasizes that our nightmare actually began 30,000 years ago, and agriculture was merely its hideous grandchild.

Later, the weather warmed, and the megafauna were gone.  Descendants of the Gravettians tried hunting small game for a while.  They learned how to enslave herbivores, which led to domestication.  Instead of storing meat in storage pits, they stored living critters in grassy prisons.  Others began growing plants for food, and storing the harvest in granaries.  By and by, ecosystems fell under human control.  Agriculture opened the floodgates to explosive population growth.  We embarked on an insane vision of “taming the future.”

Countless cultures and species were blown off the stage by climate shifts.  Finlayson insists that luck may be the most important factor in the evolutionary process.  Oddly, if luck had made Neanderthals the winners, and they had the good manners not to invent psych meds and cell phones, and the world of today was an incredible paradise — we’d still be long overdue for a turbulent climate shift.

Reading this book, I was impressed by the incredible resilience of life.  Over and over again, forest ecosystems were wiped out and replaced with treeless ecosystems that later changed back to forest ecosystems.  Countless species disappeared in this exciting tilt-a-whirl ride of climate shifts, and countless species adapted and evolved.  Our ancestors nearly died out 73,500 years ago, following the Mount Toba eruption.  A few thousand survived.  Today we’re at seven-point-something billion.

This is a small book, but it is jammed with information.  We really can’t know who we are, and where we came from, if we don’t understand the turbulent sagas of the Ice Ages.  The end of our entire way of life is just a climate shift away.  In the past, it was a zigzag between cold and warm.  Future zigzags seem likely to be between warm and roasting.  Hang on to yer arses, and the best of luck to ye!

Finlayson, Clive, The Humans Who Went Extinct — Why Neanderthals Died Out And We Survived, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

Cro-Magnon

Once upon a time, long, long ago, musicians Stephen Stills and Judy Collins enjoyed a romance.  Then, Judy sailed away and broke his heart.  Stephen wrote Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, which I recently heard again.  One line made my head spin: “Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.”  Why not?  Remembering the past sounds like an excellent idea.  What we are not now is wild and free human beings — normal & authentic.

I just finished Brian Fagan’s book, Cro-Magnon, which describes an important segment of my family history.  The happy news is that there have been three studies of the mitochondrial DNA of modern Europeans, and their genes are primarily indigenous.  The invading farmers from the Fertile Crescent did not exterminate the natives.  The genes of the eastern immigrants are somewhere between 15% and 28% of the modern European DNA. 

It staggers the imagination to contemplate the astonishing wildness, beauty, and vitality of Ice Age Europe.  It’s heartbreaking — and illuminating — when these grand memories remind us of what we are not now.  After reading the book, I feel a much stronger connection to the ancient cave paintings.  Those artists were my ancestors, and their images belong in the family album.  My people once lived in lands inhabited by wooly mammoths, aurochs, bison, and vast herds of reindeer.  They lived beside streams that thundered during salmon runs.  This gave me a sense of homecoming, a powerful remembering.

Fagan does a nice job of describing the world of the Ice Age, and the wild swings of the climate — growing glaciers & melting glaciers.  When the climate warmed, the hunters and their game moved north, and when frigid times returned, they moved south.  The hunters followed the meat, and the meat followed the grass.

“There were at least fifteen to twenty short-term events when temperatures were up to 44.5 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the intervening colder intervals.”  The climate could swing from pleasant to freezing over the course of a lifetime.  Siberia was once a tropical forest, the Sahara once had lakes and grasslands, and there was a time when you could walk from France to England.

The sad news is that the hunting tribes of Europe became farmers.  This may have been similar to the spread of corn from Mexico to the tribes of the north — an amazing innovation that bit us on the ass, and cast wicked shadows on the unborn generations.  Fagan helped me to better understand the transition to agriculture, in which ongoing innovation in hunting technology played a leading role.

All hominids have African ancestors.  Some of them migrated to Asia, where Neanderthals first walked onto the stage.  Some Neanderthals moved to Europe maybe 300,000 years ago, where they hung out in cool temperate forests.  Their primary weapon was a heavy thrusting spear with a sharp fire-hardened tip.  These were great for killing large slow-moving animals. 

Fagan believes that the Neanderthals were luckless dullards, because they displayed almost no innovative cleverness over vast spans of time.  They were simple and stable, and their dance on this planet may have been far longer than ours will turn out to be — and they didn’t destroy paradise.  What dreary bores!

“Cro-Magnon” refers only to the Homo sapiens clans that inhabited Europe, but our species originally emerged in Africa, maybe 170,000 years ago.  Around 45,000 years ago, some moved into Europe, and within 5,000 years, they lightly inhabited much of the continent.  Cro-Magnons left us the gorgeous painted caves, magic peepholes into fairyland.  Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago, for unknown reasons.

The trademark weapon of Cro-Magnons was the lightweight throwing spear, tipped with stone or antler.  It was excellent for hunting on open land, and it could kill from a distance.  It made it easier to kill a wider variety of prey, like deer and reindeer.  Thus, there was more meat on the table, more bambinos in the nursery, and more spear-chuckers running around the bloody countryside.  Even during warm eras, European summers were short, and plant foods were limited, so meat was the core source of nourishment.  Homo sapiens have been purebred hunters since day one in Africa.

Later, the bow and arrow arrived.  Bows may have been used 18,000 years ago, based on circumstantial evidence, but the oldest bow found so far was from 10,800 BC.  The bow was a diabolically powerful weapon.  It could be fired from any angle, and quickly reloaded.  It could kill critters large and small from a long distance.  It was great for forest hunting.  Nets, traps, and barbed fish spears also came into use.  Rabbits, birds, and rodents now appeared on the menu — more meat, bambinos, and hunters — and less and less wildlife.  Our consumption of plant foods and shellfish increased.

Around 12,900 years ago, the Younger Dryas period brought frigid weather back again, for a thousand years.  It brought severe droughts to the Near East, and the humans adapted by harvesting and planting grass seeds.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  The combination of excess cleverness, deficient family planning, and climate change put us on a bullet train to global catastrophe.

“Within a surprisingly few generations, the people of the Near East and southeastern Turkey were entirely dependent on farming.  When wetter conditions returned at the end of the Younger Dryas, the new economies spread like wildfire across Anatolia and into southeast Europe, where they were well established before eight thousand years ago.”

What we know about human evolution and Ice Age Europe is quite fragmentary.  Time, glaciers, and civilization have taken a big toll on the meager evidence.  The timeline is full of holes, the dates are controversial, the theories are controversial, and the research continues.  Fagan’s book also has some holes, which can be filled by a visit to Wikipedia.

Annoyingly, he inserted a number of ideas unsupported by hard evidence, based on speculation.  For example, Neanderthals probably didn’t have complex language because they persisted in living in a simple manner.  Their primitive brains may have lacked the neural circuits necessary for feverish innovation and pathological ecocide. 

Fagan is the captain of the Homo sapiens cheerleading squad.  He gushes with praise for our unbelievably clever species.  “Effective technology, an acute self-awareness, and an intimate relationship with the environment made the Cro-Magnon personality practically invincible.”  In frigid regions of Europe, they “adapted effortlessly to the ever-colder conditions.”

I’m glad that I read this book, because I learned a lot from it, and I will not forget it.  The entire era of civilization has existed during an unusually long period of warm and stable weather.  Our food production system is fine-tuned for this climate, and it’s going to have tremendous problems as the planet gets hotter and hotter.  Fagan helps us remember the scary roller coaster of climate history, and how it mercilessly hammers the unlucky, over and over again, big brains and all.

Given the fact that we’re currently beating the stuffing out Big Mama Nature, the gushing praise for human intelligence and innovation emits a noxious cloud of stinky funk.  Where is the line between brilliant innovation and idiotic self-destruction?  Are they the same?  Is it possible that simple and stable do not mean stupid?  These questions should not be swept under the rug.  We really, really need to remember what we are not now.  We need to discover the long lost treasure.

The next book on my voyage is The Humans Who Went Extinct, by Clive Finlayson, who is far more sympathetic to our Neanderthal relatives.  Sounds interesting.  Stay tuned.

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

The Little Ice Age

Once upon a time, Brian Fagan became curious about how history has been shaped by climate.  He did a remarkable amount of research, and then delivered a fascinating and very readable book, The Little Ice Age.  Mainstream history tends to focus on rulers, empires, wars, and technology, providing us with a pinhole perspective on ages past.  Fagan used a wide angle lens, and revealed how the miserable peasantry of Europe struggled to survive in a world of daffy rulers, steamroller epidemics, wildly erratic weather, and the ever-present threat of famine — a highly insecure existence in a world with no safety nets, and brief life expectancy.

Most of our detailed, regularly recorded weather data is less than 200 years old.  Older writings made note of climate conditions, times of prosperity, famines, plagues, and natural disasters.  More recently, we’ve discovered that tree rings and ice cores can provide climate information going back thousands of years.  The annual rings in tree trunks are thicker in ideal weather and thinner in lean years.  The annual layers of ice in glaciers are thicker in cold years, and thinner in warm ones.  In this way, climate leaves a fingerprint pattern that we can decode.  Ice also preserves ash residue, marking volcanic activity, which can have significant effects on weather.

While climate can vary from year to year, and day to day, modern climate science has discovered broader trends in weather patterns.  Fagan examined three trends: the Medieval Warm Period (900-1200), the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), and the warming trend of the fossil-fuelled industrial era. 

In northern Europe, the years between 800 and 1200 were the warmest period in the last 8,000 years.  There were vineyards in England.  Generous grain harvests fed a population explosion, which naturally triggered a rash of bloody conflicts.  Because of the warm weather, sea levels rose between 1000 and 1200, creating challenges for the lowlanders.  “At least 100,000 people died along the Dutch and German coasts in four fierce storm surges in about 1200, 1212-1219, 1287, and 1362.”

The kickoff for the Little Ice Age came in 1315, when it rained almost continuously from May to August.  Fields became lakes or knee-deep mud.  Floods erased entire villages.  Wars had to be cancelled.  The population, which had exploded between 1100 and 1300, now had to share a puny harvest, if any.

The survivors eagerly awaited a return to normal weather in 1316, but rains resumed in the spring.  Livestock diminished, crops failed, prices rose, and the roads were jammed with wandering beggars.  Many villages were abandoned.  People dined on pigeon dung, dogs, cats, and the corpses of diseased cattle (rumors of cannibalism).  By the spring of 1317, they had eaten their seeds, and had few oxen to plow with.  The rains returned.  There were seven years of bad harvests, creating steady employment for gravediggers.

For the next 550 years, the weather got colder, and there were more storms.  Frigid spells might last a season or a decade.  Cold weather was extreme from 1680 to 1700.  London trees froze and split open, and the Thames was covered with thick ice.  Chilly summers led to poor harvests from 1687 to 1692.  You could walk across the ice from Denmark to Sweden in the winter of 1708-09.  The All Saints Flood of November 1570 submerged the Dutch lowlands, drowning 100,000. 

This book is jammed with stories of weather-related problems — floods, droughts, crop failures, epidemics, famines, and food riots.  Most people struggled to survive via subsistence farming, using primitive technology.  Most didn’t have enough land for livestock, which meant little manure for fertilizer.  Under ideal conditions on prime land, planting a bushel of wheat would produce just four or five bushels at harvest time.  Because of this low productivity, feeding society required the labor of nine out of ten people.  Famine was common, and food relief was rare.  “Even in the best of times, rural life was unrelentingly harsh.”  “Farm laborers lived in extraordinary squalor….”

Fagan’s tales reinforced my dislike of agriculture.  It fuels overpopulation, converts healthy wild ecosystems into wreckage, enslaves plants and animals, and requires inequality and brutality.  It is proprietary — all the big juicy melons in that field belong to my group, and our field is strictly off-limits to any other creature.  This is the opposite of nature’s way, in which a big juicy melon is fair game for one and all, finders keepers.   

Private property turns humans and societies into obnoxious two-year olds — “that’s MY melon!”  Possessions become objects of wealth, power, and status.  If I steal your horse, then its power becomes mine.  In the insatiable pursuit of wealth, people will lie to your face, snatch your purse, cut your throat, bomb cities into ashtrays, and destroy entire planets.  You can’t farm without warriors to protect the real estate, livestock, and granaries, and you can’t control warriors without hard-fisted leaders.

The legions of hungry dirty peasants who produced the wealth were expendable, and lived in a manner that none of us would tolerate — while the lords gaily feasted.  “Excavations of medieval cemeteries paint a horrifying picture of health problems resulting from brutal work regimes.  Spinal deformations from the hard labor of plowing, hefting heavy grain bags, and scything the harvest are commonplace.  Arthritis affected nearly all adults.  Most adult fisherfolk suffered agonizing osteoarthritis of the spine from years of heavy boatwork and hard work ashore.”

 Today, our lives are unnaturally soft and cozy.  We exist in a “luxurious” unhealthy cocoon created by a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  The shelves at the store are always full, a wonderland of easy calories.  We have no memories of the hellish life of muscle-powered organic agriculture.  We have forgotten how recently our ancestors died from famines and pestilence.  As the cost and scarcity of energy increases, our bubble will surely pop.

Fagan gives us an eye-opening preview of what life is likely to look like when the fossil fuel bubble becomes the subject of scary old fairy tales (The Big Bad Consumer).  As our miraculous machines run out of fuel, we will have no choice but to slip and slide into a muscle-powered future, which will be anything but unnaturally soft and cozy. 

He also warns us that climate change is often not smooth and gentle.  History is full of sudden catastrophic shifts.  Despite our whiz-bang technology, and hordes of scientists, climate shifts remain beyond our control.  We will experience whatever nature decides to serve us — even if we exercised our famous big brains, and permanently stopped every machine today.  Climate was a persistent threat to agriculture-based societies long before coal mining was invented, because agriculture had far more defects than benefits.

This book provides vital information for those struggling to envision a sustainable future based on organic agriculture.  Ideally, enlightened humans will deliberately keep the transition to muscle-powered organic agriculture as brief as possible, whilst devoting immense wisdom to the essential goals of full-speed population reduction and rewilding.  There is nothing finer than a sustainable way of life.  All other paths lead to oblivion.

Fagan,Brian, The Little Ice Age — How Climate Made History 1300-1850, Basic Books, New York, 2000.