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.

The Inner Life of Animals



In his bestselling book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben revealed the fascinating magic and mystery of trees.  He spent his childhood close to nature, where he was fascinated by the family of life.  In his adult years, he has been a forest manager in Germany, continually striving to nurture the health of the land, and minimize harms.  He has spent much of his life outdoors.  Consequently, he has developed a perception of reality that is quite different from the herd.

In his new book, The Inner Life of Animals, he directs his attention to animal life, which is also little understood by mainstream society — the folks who spend most of their lives in climate controlled compartments.  For them, the natural world is often just a meaningless blur of scenery along the freeway, and wildlife sightings are mostly on glowing screens.  The new book is a pleasant voyage into a kinder and gentler mindset.  Readers are served a banquet of interesting ideas, mostly.

Wohlleben is a caring man who wishes that humans would cause far less damage and suffering in the world.  That’s his message.  At his home in the woods, he keeps goats, horses, rabbits, dogs, and chickens.  He apparently treats them with kindness until they drop dead from old age, or become terminally ill.  He confesses to drinking goat milk and making cheese, but says not a peep about meat (a touchy subject these days).  He detests factory farms, hunters, and industrial forest miners.

He has a deep appreciation for the coherence of wild ecosystems, and the remarkable relationships that coevolution has produced.  A primary focus of his book is to confront the cult of human supremacy.  Like patriarchy, and get-rich-quick fever, human supremacist beliefs intensify the madness of modern society.  The cult asserts that anything non-human is below us.  It’s perfectly OK to cram 20,000 chickens, shoulder to shoulder, inside a metal shed, without guilt or shame.  They are mindless machines that can feel no pain, organisms incapable of thoughts or feelings.

Supremacism has left a boot print on the English language.  Throughout the book, there are two categories of critters, “humans” and “animals,” implying that humans are not animals.  Of course, that’s not true.  Take off your clothes and look in a mirror, and you will see an animal that looks a lot like a chimp or bonobo, our closest living relatives.

In the mirror you will see a furless tropical primate that evolved an upright bipedal stance fine-tuned for long distance running.  This enabled us to survive via persistence hunting — chasing animals across the savannah for hours, until they collapsed from exhaustion.  Louis Liebenberg wrote about this.  Our ancestors have been hunters for several million years, long before we became Homo sapiens.  As every gardener knows, our bodies are poorly designed for gathering seeds, nuts, melons, and berries — too much bending and backaches.

Wohlleben hates hunting, which in its current form is “no longer appropriate.”  During the season, the woods are crowded with hunters, hiding close to bait piles, with high-powered rifles.  Bullets are whizzing all over the place, and up to 650,000 wild boars die every year.  Some animals are merely wounded, and suffer agonizing deaths.  He doesn’t describe what “appropriate” hunting would be.  Society has vigorously exterminated wild carnivores, whilst growing staggering amounts of boar food.  Is boar overpopulation appropriate?

Wohlleben owns a number of domesticated animals, and they spend their days in locations enclosed by electric fences.  They cannot go where they please, and the fences discourage the indigenous wild lynx from dining on his exotic invasive critters.  This disturbs him a bit.  “Nature didn’t intend for goats and horses to spend their whole lives as prisoners behind a fence.  Let’s not pretend: these animals would hightail it in a heartbeat if they could.”  (Did nature intend the existence of domesticated animals?)  The best he can do is treat them respectfully.

He lives in the twenty-first century, when many people own domesticated animals, a source of wealth and status.  For these folks, wild predators are evil.  Chickens are fox food, and foxes are demonic anti-capitalist anarchists.  Many also plant large fields of boar food, and get quite upset when boars come to enjoy their generous offering.  Some farmers surround their corn fields with electric fences to keep them out.  In the good old days, before domestication, nobody owned the large game and edible plants.  Nobody got upset when wild predators consumed wild herbivores, because nobody’s status was diminished.  In egalitarian societies, all people were equal, and status consciousness was totally inappropriate.

In The Others, Paul Shepard brilliantly described how important it is for all humans to spend their entire lives in healthy wild ecosystems, surrounded by many species of wild animals.  He also explained the many ugly consequences of capturing, confining, and domesticating “goofies” and “hooved locusts.”  Civilized primates are seriously deformed and traumatized by spending their lives in isolation from their wild relatives.

It’s easy to gobble a Big Mac when you have been taught that animals are like rutabagas, dumb organisms.  Now, we’re learning how sensitive and intelligent animals are.  To complicate matters, in his tree book, Wohlleben revealed that plants are also not dumb machines.  How can we feed ourselves in a morally acceptable manner?  Chimps and bonobos happily beat small animals to death, eat them raw, with no guilt at all.  A robin eating a worm is not evil.  We all feed one another.

Wohlleben is a fountain of stories.  Foxes lie down, tongues out, and play dead to attract hungry crows.  Goats move away from the herd when it’s time for them to die, because their corpse will attract predators.  Hives of bees with insufficient honey for the winter will attack weaker hives, kill defenders, and swipe their stash.  Swifts rarely stand on the ground, they sleep while soaring.  The book is loaded with hundreds of anecdotes like these.  I shall let you discover them on your own.

According to the human supremacist myths, animals do not have consciousness, self-awareness, or emotions.  They cannot feel pain, communicate, remember events, grieve, express gratitude, or recognize individual humans.  Today, the core of the controversy over animal intelligence is whether or not they are capable of thinking. 

Humans, of course, can think like crazy.  In our brains, the neocortex is the engine of self-awareness, consciousness, and thinking — and humans have the greatest neocortex of all.  Oddly, while most of the book is dedicated to challenging human supremacy, Wohlleben refers to our neocortex as the “crowning achievement of creation.”  Indeed, no other species is capable of experiencing so much cognitive dissonance.

Folks who understand environmental history and ecological sustainability, and have learned how to engage in critical thinking, can readily detect enormous flaws in the core myths of our culture.  The view from their mountaintop, far above the thick smog of dodgy beliefs, perceives that thinking is at least as much of a curse as a blessing.  We can live without glowing screens, but we can’t live in a toxic wasteland, with a hostile climate.  Supremacist myths trump common sense.  You can lead the herd to the pool of knowledge, but you can’t make them think.

“Mommy?”  “Yes, dear?”  “What is intelligence?”  “Sweetheart, intelligence is turning old growth forests into money, destabilizing the climate, acidifying the oceans, driving many species to extinction — and not caring.  Intelligence is speeding across the land in motorized wheelchairs, dumping trash on the moon, creating vast coastal dead zones, and developing miracle cures for the infectious and degenerative diseases that emerged with the birth of civilization.”  “Mommy?”  “Yes, dear?”  “I don’t want to be intelligent.  Can I be wild, free, and happy?”

Wohlleben, Peter, The Inner Life of Animals, Greystone Books, Berkeley, 2017.

The Call of Distant Mammoths



I’ve long been interested in the megafauna extinctions of Pleistocene North America.  A number of books endorse Paul Martin’s “Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis,” which asserts that the early humans on the continent were “super predators” who launched a blitzkrieg of overhunting.  Hunting began in northwest Canada, and spread south and east like a wild fire.  Within 2,000 years, at least 33 genera (50 species) of large mammals went extinct — many more than in the preceding three million years.  At first contact, large animals who had never before seen odd-looking humans, did not sense danger.

In other locations, when humans first arrived, extinctions followed — for example, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, and Caribbean islands.  Hunting, and hunting alone, was the cause, said Martin.  His ideas really pissed off Native Americans, like Vine Deloria, because overkill implied that Indians were as foolish as Euro Americans.

Deloria blasted the hypothesis, pointing to the fantastic number of bones found in northern Siberia — mammoths, mastodons, rhinos, horses, bison.  Chinese have been hauling away mammoth tusks since medieval times, and this ivory is still being mined today; a high-quality tusk can fetch over $40,000.  The white keys on grandma’s piano might be mammoth ivory.

These bones were not the result of a blitzkrieg.  Mastodons had been living in Siberia for 400,000 years, and woolly mammoths for 250,000 years.  The frigid climate helped to preserve their remains.  In central Russia, more than 70 mammoth bone huts have been found.  One hut had 385 bones, and weighed 20 tons.

I just read The Call of Distant Mammoths by paleontologist Peter Ward, and learned a lot about extinction and evolution.  I’ve often wondered how hairy lads, on foot, with wooden spears, were able to exterminate every horse in all of North America within 2,000 years.  Bison were also residents of the open plains, able to sprint up to 35 miles per hour, and they did not go extinct — and horses could run even faster.

Ward introduces us to the climate change hypothesis.  During the two million year Ice Age (the Pleistocene), there were at least 18 glaciation cycles.  Until the last cycle, the megafauna had mostly survived.  The last one began 18,000 years ago, and it was the most intense of all.  It ended 12,000 years ago.  The ice pack melted, forest advanced, and habitats rapidly changed.  The mammoth tundra fragmented and shrank, which split the herbivore population into isolated groups.

Ward also studied the extinction of dinosaurs.  They roamed the Earth for 160 million years, and then disappeared.  Ward was an early advocate of the notion that the dinosaur mass extinction was sudden, caused by an asteroid strike near Chicxulub, Mexico.  Some say it resulted in a decade of near-freezing temperatures on a planet that was largely tropical.

Throughout the dinosaur era, small mammals also existed — insect eating night creatures.  The extinction of dinosaurs eliminated large animals, and made the age of mammals possible.  If not for the asteroid, humans and elephants would have never evolved.  Mammoth country once ranged from France to Siberia to New York.

Our primate ancestors evolved in the trees.  Their tropical homeland was eventually chilled by an era of glaciation.  It thinned the rainforest, and expanded savannahs, which encouraged the evolution of large mammals, including our hominid ancestors.  Thus, you and I are the children of climate change and asteroids.

Evolution is a process that creates and deletes species.  New species can only emerge when a group becomes isolated, evolves unique traits, and eventually becomes unable to interbreed with their old kin.  Homo sapiens come in many sizes, shapes, and colors, but all belong to the same species, because we can all interbreed.  Ward expects white skinned people to disappear in a few thousand years, because of their increasing vulnerability to skin cancer.

Our cultural myths tell us that humans are continuously getting smarter.  Ward believes that the brains of modern humans are essentially the same as the first Homo sapiens in Africa, 125,000 to 200,000 years ago (but we’ve learned lots of stuff since then).  Once a new species emerges, it changes little thereafter.  Humans are the last species of the hominids, and this has risks.  A gene pool has better odds for long-term survival when it diversifies into multiple species, as the ants have.

Another way for critters to avoid extinction is to become generalists, like humans, rats, and cockroaches, who have adapted to many different ecosystems around the world.  Today, humans live everywhere.  There is no place a group could remain isolated for millennia.  So, there is little chance for a new hominid species to emerge.

Evolution is random, like tossing dice.  The process is influenced by ongoing environmental change, natural selection, and genetic drift (chance genetic changes).  Evolution has no foresight; it can’t anticipate coming changes.  It’s not always progressive.  Greenland ice core data tells us that there have been times when global temperature changed up to 18°F in a few decades.  Many gene pools that work well in one set of conditions will fail to adapt to sudden shifts.

The golden rule of evolution is adapt or die.  Ward doesn’t discuss cultural evolution, which is a million times faster than genetic evolution, and has catapulted humankind onto extremely thin ice, by overloading our tropical primate brains with way too many half-smart ideas.  We are, by far, the world champion resource parasites.  We are hurling countless species into the abyss in our insane impossible quest for perpetual economic growth.

In an extremely quirky twist, Ward celebrates human supremacy at causing mass extinction.  “We are the comet now.  And not only have we won the game of evolution; we control the rules of the game,” he wrote.  “And to this winner, in my view, goes an even greater prize: species immortality.  It is my opinion that no matter where on the board we humans land and no matter what card we draw, we cannot be knocked into extinction.”  Who could disagree?

The book was written 20 years ago, when resource limits and climate change were still dumb ideas among the lunatic fringe — rational people.  Ward is employed in academia, which remains a militant hotbed of radicalized human supremacists.

OK, back to the megafauna.  Doubts are growing about the overkill hypothesis.  Martin claimed a sudden 2,000-year rampage wiped out the megafauna, but this was based on data generated by obsolete dating technology.  Improved dating does not confirm sudden extinction.  Martin claimed the extinctions fanned out in a wave, beginning in Alberta — so kill sites far from there should be more recent.  They aren’t.  We have only discovered a dozen sites where human artifacts are found with mammoth remains.

Dan Fisher has studied of mammoth tusks in Michigan and Ohio.  Tusks have annual rings inside, like tree trunks.  Rings are thin in hungry years.  In female tusks, rings mark each pregnancy, providing a birth rate.  If climate change had killed the mammoths, the rings would indicate malnutrition, but Fisher found that the last mammoths were “fat, fit, and well fed.”

Ward suspects that the mammoths were the victims of hunting.  Unlike bunnies, mammoths were slow to mature, and had low reproduction rates.  If hunters had regularly taken just two percent of the animals each year, the extinction process would have taken 400 years — too slow for each generation of hunters to notice.  Hunting alone could have wiped them out.  Ward thinks that if there had been no hunting, mammoths would probably have survived the warming climate.

In the 1990s, editors adamantly insisted that manuscripts like Ward’s include brilliant solutions and happy endings, because bummer books didn’t sell.  So, his mammoth book ends with a happy visit to the year 3001.  Population was well below its peak of 11 billion.  The U.S. grain belt was a desert.  African survivors were healthy vegetarians with solar panels and pedal-powered transport.  The rainforest was long gone, replaced with endless fields of GMO crops.  Wildlife and livestock had been eliminated by starving hordes.  Happily, the human species survived — hooray!

Compulsory happy endings meant that vital knowledge was deliberately withheld from an entire generation, who are now teachers, reporters, and leaders.  Even today, a “don’t frighten the children” strategy remains common among educators, and young minds are still being infected with a carcinogenic worldview.  Bummer!

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