Wild Free and Happy Sample 12

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

Technological Innovation

When a hungry chimp snatches a small monkey, termite, or bird egg, all she needs to eat it are fingers and teeth.  When a hungry baboon discovers a carcass abandoned by lions, he can chew the meat and fat off the bones and hide.  It’s very different when a persistence hunter chases a large kudu until it is exhausted, and then suffocates it.  What now?  Imagine turning a road kill deer into a feast without a knife.  Have a bloody good time!

Chimps use slender sticks to fish for termites.  They use clubs and rocks to aggressively attack critters that annoy them.  Macaques use stones to smash open shellfish.  Vultures use rocks to open ostrich eggs.  Ravens use gravity to crack open the nuts they drop.  This is not complex technology.

Our ancestors began a transition from found tools to manufactured ones.  The oldest ones discovered so far, mostly simple choppers, were found in Africa, and date to about 2.5 million years ago.  A major advance emerged around 1.5 million years ago — biface knapping.  Some types of rocks, like obsidian or flint, can be carefully knapped to knock off flakes having razor sharp edges.  These were useful as scrapers, knives, and choppers.  Later, ancestors learned how to knap long sharp blades, and attach them to handles.  Still later, they became skilled at chipping flakes into delicately shaped spear points and arrowheads.

We glowing screen people arrogantly smirk at the primitive technology of our early Stone Age ancestors.  In reality, stone tools were revolutionary inventions that shifted the hominin saga onto a new, unusual, and risky path.  For the first time, folks could effectively skin and butcher large animals — an ability that greatly expanded their food resources, and provided high quality nutrients for their jumbo-sized energy-guzzling brains.  Imagine a world in which teeth were the only cutting edges for any purpose.  Civilization would be impossible, and hominins may have never evolved.

Kathy Schick and friends once successfully butchered a dead elephant with stone tools.  A mature adult’s rugged hide is about one inch thick (2.4 cm).  Scavengers like hyenas don’t even bother trying to chew into the carcass of an elephant that recently died.  They let it bake in the sun for a few days, allowing decay to soften it up.

Our ancestors used sharp cutters to remove hides, cut meat off bones, and dismember the carcass into portions easier to haul back to camp.  They used stone hammers to smash open bones, to extract the marrow, which was rich with fat.  Fat is an essential nutrient, and the meat of wild game has only one-seventh of the fat found in supermarket beef, according to Schick.  Ancestors may have scavenged elephant carcasses, but adult pachyderms may not have been prime targets for hunters.  Once you strip the meat off of the exposed side, flipping over a dead elephant is a huge challenge.  Smaller game takes less effort.

We have no idea when spear technology was first developed.  It could have been two or three million years ago.  Wooden artifacts are highly prone to decompose over time.  Spears were also revolutionary.  They made it easier to kill large game, and allowed the ancestors to be less dependent on scavenging.  Spears were also useful for discouraging attacks from man-eating predators.

Thrusting spears, or lances, were driven directly into the prey by hungry hunters, at close range.  Javelins were thrown spears that could kill from a distance, which was much safer.  Carleton Coon mentioned a tribe that could hurl long spears with deadly accuracy from up to 180 feet away (55 m).

The oldest spears found so far were discovered in a coal mine at Schöningen, Germany.  Frederick Coolidge wrote that seven spruce spears, a throwing stick, and other tools were found near ten butchered horse carcasses.  The spears were 400,000 years old, up to 6.5 feet long (2 m), scraped smooth, and pointed at both ends.  They were made by the ancestors of Neanderthals (Homo heidelbergensis).  The fact that Neanderthals could survive for hundreds of thousands of years using such simple weapons is evidence that they lived in a time when large game was abundant, and it was proof that they were not dummies.

The killing power of spears was boosted by the invention of the atlatl, a spear-throwing device that enabled the weapon to be hurled farther and faster.  Alfred Crosby noted that in Peru, an Incan warrior with an atlatl could send a short spear completely through a conquistador wearing metal armor. 

Eventually, nobody is sure when, the bow and arrow was invented.  Like the spear, this deadly technology spread around the world, and over time enabled the slaughter of countless millions of animals.  Of course, with state of the art weaponry, well fed clans grew in number, conflicts increased, and hunters increasingly had to also turn their weapons on strangers who encroached into their territory.

A bloodless alternative to conflict was migration into lands uninhabited by hominin competitors.  Many frontier regions introduced the ancestors to new species of prey, and clever folks invented specialized technology for killing them.  Joe Kane spent time with the Huaorani people of the Amazon rainforest.  Their armory included spears and blowguns.  Poison darts would kill monkeys in the branches above, requiring the hunter to climb up and retrieve them.  Over time, lads who did a lot of tree climbing developed odd-shaped feet.  Their big toes bent outward, providing a tighter grip.

Carleton Coon mentioned other tribes using different poisons that relaxed the muscles of monkeys, so they would fall from the trees.  No climbing needed.  Pygmy poisons were a potion made from ten different plants, beetle larvae, and snake venom.  They paralyzed muscles and stopped the heart.  In Japan, the Ainu built booby traps, in which deer tripped on a cord, and a bow shot a poison tipped arrow into the animal. 

When marine mammals were speared, their corpses often sank into deep waters, never to be retrieved and consumed.  The solution was to carve barbed detachable harpoon heads which would not pull out of the animal’s flesh.  The embedded head was attached to a cord linked to the hunter above.  When the dead animal sank, it could then be retrieved and invited to lunch.

Innovation also led to the use of rock-throwing slings, bolas, hunting nets, traps, and on and on.  You could fill a book on this subject, and Alfred Crosby did, covering the entire spectrum from rocks to nuclear weapons.  Humans are remarkably creative when it comes to devising an endless stream of new and improved systems for killing things.  It’s been a nonstop arms race.

The wheels of innovation spin faster when populations grow, and become able to support more and more nerdy specialists.  Also, trade with other regions brings distant groups into contact, where they are exposed to the gizmos and ideas from other cultures, and this can greatly stimulate the imaginations of anxious nerds.  The velocity of change in my lifetime has been dizzying, impossible to keep up with.

Craig Dilworth described what he called the Vicious Circle Principle (VCP), a cycle in which (1) scarcity spurred technological innovation, (2) innovation increased access to more resources, (3) more resources increased consumption, (4) increased consumption fueled population growth, (5) population growth led to resource depletion, and (6) resource depletion led to scarcity once again. 

The VCP cycle keeps repeating, each time ratcheting up the impact, until it eventually slams into firm resource limits, or chokes to death on its own pollution.  Some hunter-gatherer cultures managed to survive into recent times in a low impact manner — until the radicalized VCP mob barged into their world via loggers, miners, missionaries, and so on.

Dilworth noted that, from its beginning, technological development has degraded ecological sustainability.  Should we be proud of our legendary wizardry?  Species that don’t manufacture tools, like chimps, never experience this predicament.  Our current technological utopia, swarming with billions of hominins, continues to work tirelessly to destroy the ecological basis upon which it depends, a one-way dead-end path.  How smart is that?

Evolution is brilliant!  When predators are free to perform their natural ecosystem services, their prey do not experience population outbursts.  Chimps make no effort to exterminate the big cats that prey on them, consequently there are not seven billion chimps pounding the stuffing out of the planet.  The sacred dance of predator and prey works beautifully until it gets blindsided by technological innovation.  Technology improved our abilities at offence (killing game) as well as defense (exterminating competing predators).  Balance got blown out of the water.

Dilworth mentioned that by 200 B.C. the leopards and lions of Greece, and along the coast of the Near East, were gone.  Several centuries later, tigers no longer survived in northern Persia and Mesopotamia.  Predator extermination is a standard process in cultures that enslave domesticated animals.  Today, few wild high-level predators survive in most of the civilized world.

Environmentalists tend to focus their campaigns primarily on problems related to modern technology, because they think it’s especially terrible.  Dilworth’s VCP sees all technology as dangerous and unnecessary.  Across Eurasia and the Americas, megafauna extinctions surged between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago — in the Stone Age, prior to agriculture and civilization, when fewer than ten million humans likely wandered the Earth.  It was an enormous ecological holocaust that our culture has largely swept under the rug.  Today, few consumers wake up screaming from nightmares about the bloody extermination of mastodons, saber-tooth cats, or woolly rhinos by high-tech hunters.  We are also careful not to think about the mass extinctions happening right now, as we pedal to work.

The bottom line for Dilworth is that if technological development was truly wisdom-driven, intelligent, and beneficial, it would not have transformed the planet’s healthy genuinely sustainable wild ecosystems into toxic devastated wastelands, depleted countless precious resources, and sabotaged the climate.  Why do we continue proudly teaching children about our magnificent big brains and the wonders of progress?  The good news is that the VCP cycle is unsustainable, and will eventually blink out.  What will be left when it does?

The Origin of Science



 

NOTE: To better understand the following, you might read my review of The Art of Tracking first.

Back in the 1800s, folks on the cutting edge of Western science were perplexed.  Evolution had apparently provided hunter-gatherers with essentially the same brains that we moderns have, yet they appeared to be severely retarded — no clear-cuts, mines, cities, insane asylums.  What was wrong with them?  This abnormality led Alfred Wallace to wonder if the theory of evolution was a hoax. 

At the time, he and his peers believed that science originated in ancient Greece, but none of them knew anything about the wild people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.  Around 1950, anthropologists began spending time with these hunter-gatherers.  Their studies noted that the hunters carried small bows, which shot poison-tipped arrows.  Poisons were made from plants, snakes, scorpions, spiders, or beetle larvae.  They took from 6 hours to 3 days to kill the animal.  Because anthropologists could see the bows and arrows, they asked questions about them. 

What they could not see was enormous — a two million year tradition, a primary reason why humans walk upright, the mother of our high-powered brains — persistence hunting.  The researchers were attuned to cozy civilized living, not running barefoot across a thorny scorching hot desert for hours at a time.  Consequently, they missed a great deal.

Persistence hunting involved doggedly chasing game for hours until the animal collapsed from heat stroke and died.  Prey could run faster than hunters, for a while, until they became exhausted, overheated, and collapsed.  Their speedy escape left tracks that the less speedy hunters could follow.  Some hunters had fantastic skills in the art of tracking.  HERE is a 7-minute BBC video of a persistence hunt.

Louis Liebenberg is a South African lad, a “citizen scientist,” not a highly paid professional scientist from a luxurious education factory.  He has spent many years learning from the trackers of the Kalahari.  Because skilled trackers utilize an impressive variety of reasoning processes, he believes that tracking could have been the birth of science.  His first book, The Art of Tracking, was published in 1990.  It provides readers with an amazing collection of ideas.  The following commentary is on his 2013 book, The Origin of Science, which focuses on the relationship between tracking and science history.

Tracking requires accumulating an immense amount of knowledge about animal behavior and their spoor (tracks and other signs), an endless lifelong learning process.  In addition, while jogging across the desert in extreme heat, trackers must rapidly process complex inputs into accurate hypotheses.  The most gifted trackers excel at remembering, attention, reasoning, intuition, and imagination.  Their ancient culture enables them to survive in a vast desert that would promptly doom suburban consumers.

These wild super-survivors are nearly naked, unschooled, illiterate, unemployed, uninsured, homeless, penniless heathens who rarely take a bath.  Yet their culture remained sustainable for 100,000 years or more.  Their way of life is possible because they know how to engage in high quality scientific reasoning.  Tracking is about creative problem solving.  All trackers use inductive-deductive reasoning — track and sign recognition.  Advanced trackers also use hypothetico-deductive reasoning — track and sign interpretation, which requires more creativity.  Modern science continues to depend on both types of reasoning today.

Liebenberg has had years of direct experience with both wild people and modern people.  Tracking encourages wild people to develop heightened abilities for intuitive thinking, because the tracks of their prey are rarely clear and complete.  Intuition helps to fill in the blanks and suggest possible conclusions.  It is fast, automatic, effortless, and often unconscious.  Intuition also enhances social relationships.  Wild people are far more sensitive to each other than are folks in the modern world, “where perceptions of others have been blunted by fragmented and shallow relationships.”

For Liebenberg, “education” is a four-letter word, because it is so authoritarian.  Inmates are forced to sit indoors, in rows of hard seats, to have their brains filled with the infallible knowledge of modern science.  Truth is based on the authority of teachers and textbooks, and students on the golden path to success know better than to question authority.

“Modern societies in general, and education in particular, does more to stifle than to encourage intuitive thinking.”  Modern science is often hierarchical, elitist, and less accessible to non-specialist commoners.  On the Kalahari, tracking science is informal and accessible to everyone.  A youth can disagree with how an experienced elder has interpreted tracks, and suggest a different conclusion.  From childhood, youths are regularly exposed to the scientific process.

Modern human brains are probably little different from those of early Homo sapiens.  Liebenberg believes that “some trackers in the past probably were, and perhaps today are, just as ingenious as the most ingenious modern mathematicians and physicists.”  At the same time, both trackers and physicists are capable of being stunningly irrational.  “Cultures may go into decline when scientific knowledge is undermined by irrational belief systems.”

We believe that our industrial civilization is too smart to collapse, perpetual growth is possible, innovation will create “clean” sources of abundant energy, climate change can be reversed, eleven billion can be fed, and the best is yet to come.  He warns us that, “Political leaders who hold irrational and superstitious beliefs, and may even be anti-science, clearly may have serious negative implications for human welfare.”  (Gulp!)

The goal of this book is to argue that science began with prehistoric bipedal trackers.  I wonder if scientific processes aren’t even older than bipedal primates.  Who taught our ancestors the art of hunting — locating prey by scent, sight, sounds, tracks, and knowledge of prey behavior?  Who taught us concealment, stalking, silent movement, deception, ambush, and approaching prey from downwind?  Lions don’t sit in the grass with their mouths open, waiting for breakfast to prance in.  They survive because they have teamwork and powerful minds.  “The /Gwi believe that some species possess knowledge that transcends that of humans.”  In Alaska, the Koyukon proverb is, “Every animal knows way more than you do.”

On the Kalahari, the traditional wild culture is being driven to extinction by growing contact with you-know-who.  Herders are moving in, fencing off lands.  In the 1960s, hunters began using dogs.  Much more game was killed, but the tracking skills of the hunters declined.  More recently, horses have also been added.  The diabolical trio of hunters, horses, and dogs makes it much easier to overhunt and deplete wildlife populations.  Far less skill is needed.  Younger generations have shifted to making souvenirs for tourists, as their ancient culture is pounded against the rocks.

Liebenberg is working with Kalahari elders to encourage younger folks to learn tracking, in hopes that skilled trackers can gain employment collecting wildlife data for use in scientific research.  He has created CyberTracker, a smart phone app that can be used to collect data in the field.  The interface is icon-based, so it can be used by illiterate people.  It is now being used in research around the world, and is helpful in documenting ecological trends, like the welfare of endangered species.  It also encourages the survival and preservation of the art of tracking.

Liebenberg, Louis, The Origin of Science, CyberTracker, Cape Town, South Africa, 2013.

Free PDF downloads of Liebenberg’s books, The Art of Tracking, and The Origin of Science, are available HERE.  Amazon sells a Kindle version of The Origin of Science for $1.00.

Silent Spring

Silent Spring is a classic, a powerful broadside against synthetic pesticides.  Now, more than fifty years old, the book still packs a solid roundhouse punch.  With one book, one woman enlightened millions and spurred a loud outcry.  One woman inspired big changes.  Many of the pesticides she slammed have been banned or highly restricted.

Following World War II, Americans had big heads.  We had won the war, invented a terrible new weapon, our economy was booming, and life was great!  We succeeded at whatever we tried.  We were giddy with euphoria.  Then, Rachel Carson rolled a hand grenade into our dining rooms.  Suddenly, Sunday dinners at grandma’s looked far less delicious.  What were we eating?  Would it kill us?

During the war, researchers working on chemical warfare agents discovered substances that were highly toxic to insects.  After the war, greedy minds became fascinated by these super-poisons, and visions of big profits danced in their heads.  Synthetic pesticides were toxic to morals, ethics, and foresight.  And so, a new industry was born, and the production of pesticides increased five-fold between 1947 and 1960.

To control the elm bark beetles that caused Dutch elm disease, two to five pounds of DDT were sprayed on elm trees.  This killed the natural predators of the beetles, as well as 90 species of birds, and assorted mammals.  Worms ate the poison leaves, and the robins that ate the poison worms quit reproducing.  Elms kept dying.  More elms survived in places not sprayed.

To control gypsy moths, a million acres a year were sprayed with DDT.  Sprayers were paid by the gallon, not the acre, so some places were sprayed multiple times.  Bees died.  Cows ate DDT grass and produced DDT milk that was consumed by DDT humans.  Regulators did not block the sale of poison milk.  At the end of the expensive project, the gypsy moths returned.

To control fire ants, millions of acres were sprayed with two new poisons: dieldrin and heptachlor, which were far more toxic than DDT.  Newborn calves died after their first drink of milk.  Piglets were born dead.  Opossums, armadillos, raccoons, quail, songbirds, turkeys, livestock, poultry, and pets died.  In the end, there were more ants in Florida than before.

We know little about what these toxins do to the complex microorganisms in healthy topsoil.  Many of them interfere with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which provide an essential nutrient for all living things.  Some organisms are wiped out, leading to explosions of other organisms.  The chemicals persist in the soil for years, and build up with each new application.  Soil beneath an apple tree can contain 113 pounds (51 kg) of DDT.  Old-fashioned arsenic pesticides keep the soil toxic forever.

Yes, it’s a bummer that all spawning salmon died when New Brunswick’s Miramichi River got sprayed with DDT, while the terrible spruce budworms laughed at the embarrassed entomologists.  When Ontario sprayed to kill blackflies, they wiped out blackfly predators, enabling the fly population to explode 17-fold.  The same thing happened in Florida, where large areas in coastal regions are now uninhabitable because of hordes of pesticide-resistant mosquitoes.

“Resistant” is a keyword in this comedy of errors.  Big Mama Nature routinely produces organisms that are resistant to insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, and antivirals.  We can throw one poison after another at life, and life will become resistant to it.  Winning the war on life is impossible.  Resistance can develop in as little as two months.  The average time is three years.  Insects are reproductive champions, and can promptly refill the land with resistant offspring.  The breeding process in humans is much slower, so it will take us thousands of years to become resistant to pesticides. 

Silent Spring delivered two powerful messages.  It alerted us to the nightmare world of pesticides.  It also turned big floodlights on the incredible incompetence of our experts and regulators.  In 1960, almost everyone was blissfully ignorant about the toxic chemicals in their lives.  In those days, most folks still trusted their elected officials.  They trusted the experts who told them that DDT was harmless, and chlordane was a wonder of scientific genius.  Today, for good reason, we automatically doubt any statements made by leaders or experts because they, too often, have little or no relationship to the full truth.

Carson did not believe that the use of pesticides should be banned entirely, but she did recommend that we shift toward less toxic alternatives, like pyrethins and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).  Not surprisingly, malarial mosquitos are becoming resistant to bed nets treated with pyrethin-based insecticides, and many crop pests are now resistant to Bt.

She was fascinated by research in sterilizing male bugs, so that female bugs would not be able to tell the studs from the duds.  Chemo-sterilants were used to render millions of houseflies impotent.  Male gypsy moths found their lovers via sexy scents.  Researchers sprayed this scent all over the place, and were delighted to observe the flying lads falling deeply in love with wood chips that smelled like hot babes.  Ultrasonic sounds could be used to kill blowflies, mealworms, and yellow fever mosquitoes.

About half of the insects called pests are immigrants from foreign lands.  Here, they were not controlled by their natural predators from the old country.  Carson recommended importing the predators and parasites of notorious immigrant pests.  Moving organisms from one region to another is a mistake that has often led to unintended disasters, like the rabbits of Australia, the potatoes of Ireland, smallpox, and so on.  She thought that it was OK for humans to try to sit in the ecosystem’s driver’s seat.

Carson was fighting breast cancer as she finished her book, and she died in 1964, two years after it was published.  If she had lived longer, I think she would have recognized the serious shortcomings of the anthropocentric worldview of her era.  Living like the masters of the planet has been a reliable recipe for countless catastrophes, and it’s the core reason why seven billion people are standing on very thin ice today.

Ecological thinking is the antidote.  Forget control — adapt!  Carson was intrigued by the brilliant rascal Paul Shepard, who could have exorcised her anthropocentric demons, had she lived longer.  She quoted Shepard, who summed it up nicely: “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity?  Why would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

PS: Locust is the story of how humans, for once, actually succeeded in driving a major crop-destroying insect pest into extinction — unintentionally — by simply living like civilized people. 

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring — Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2002.