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 Dominant Animal

Paul and Anne Ehrlich are respected thinkers in the modern environmental movement.  Paul achieved infamy in 1968, following the publication of his book, The Population Bomb.  It made dire predictions, warning of mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s, and won him the intense and enduring hatred of every fiend suffering from a loony obsession with perpetual growth. 

The predictions probably would have come true, but Ehrlich’s timing could not possibly have been more unlucky.  He was blindsided by the unfortunately lucky efforts of Norman Borlaug, who tried to eliminate world hunger.  His Green Revolution dramatically increased grain yields, leading to a dramatic surge in population, making the original problem far worse — progress!  Catastrophe was postponed for a few decades.

In 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne published The Dominant Animal.  They admitted that the original book had a serious defect — it was too optimistic.  The new book presents an extremely intimate “birds and bees” discussion of the facts of life regarding the immense challenges of the twenty-first century, including overpopulation, overconsumption, peak energy, global heating, toxic pollution, mass extinctions, and on and on.  It neatly describes the hominid journey, millions of years long, which led to what we have become today.

This book is special because of its expanded discussion of cultural evolution.  Genetic evolution is a slow motion process that modifies genes over the passage of many generations.  Cultural evolution modifies and accumulates information, and it can happen with dizzying speed.  Other animals learn behaviors by imitating their elders.  Humans learn behaviors and ideas, via imitation and complex communication.  Alas, cultural evolution enabled us to become the dominant animal on Earth, a backhanded honor, sodden with appalling consequences.

It’s not a book to read for pleasure, but it should be read by everyone on the planet, two or three times.  It fills many of the huge empty gaps in our education, and in the media coverage of our era.  You don’t have to be a propeller-head to understand it.  Hopefully, it will make enormous throbbing consumer fantasies go flaccid, and reorient minds to life in actual reality.

On the bright side, we’re not 100% committed to mass suicide.  There are people all over who think that self-destruction is totally unhip.  Most of them are far more interested in moving toward a survivable future.  The Internet enables ordinary people to make their ideas available to billions of others, and everyone now has access to a much broader range of ideas.  Sometimes the efforts of individuals succeed in sending cultural evolution off in a new direction — all that’s needed is a healthy imagination and good timing.

Ecological history has thoroughly compiled our major mistakes.  In theory, we could study this history, change our habits, and break out of the centuries-long cycle of repeated mistakes.  That might be fun.  When luck is in the air, large societies can make huge changes with dazzling speed — like the collapse of the Soviet Union.  We don’t need more technology; we need social change that’s inspired by clear thinking.

The authors recommend a number of rational things we could do, but make no effort to mesmerize us with magical thinking.  The Ehrlichs are not betting heavily on a future of endless “sustainable” growth.  They are sharing two lifetimes of learning with the younger generations, and that’s very thoughtful of them. 

Daniel Quinn’s work taught me that a segment of humankind went sideways with the transition to agriculture.  Everyone agrees that our problems grew explosively from that time.  In their 1987 book, Earth, the Ehrlichs wrote, “In retrospect, the agricultural revolution may prove to be the greatest mistake that ever occurred in the biosphere — a mistake not just for Homo sapiens, but for the integrity of all ecosystems.” 

Other writers, like Paul Shepard, John Livingston, and Alfred Crosby, understood that the roots of our problems were older.  They point to the Great Leap Forward, about 40,000 years ago, the cave painting craze.  The Ehrlichs agree that the Great Leap “greatly accelerated our rise to dominance,” but they also look even farther back.  Our ancestors began making chipped-stone tools about 2.5 million years ago.  “It was the start on the road to dominance that has produced technological ‘descendants’ as varied as books, blenders, SUVs, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons.” 

Other animals sometimes use tools, like chimps fishing for termites with a stick.  Hominids became increasingly innovative at making tools.  Without stone tools, life would have been a struggle for Homo habilis.  Modern consumers cannot survive without tools, but chimps without termite sticks would be just fine.

Further population growth, at any rate, is insane.  In Earth, the Ehrlichs discussed China’s one child policy, an impressive success that prevented 350 million births, and the corresponding environmental harm and social misery.  The Ehrlichs recommended that all governments implement fertility control programs — especially in over-developed consumer societies like ours — because it was the moral and responsible thing to do.  This notion was not repeated in the new book.  The authors deeply lament the fact that overpopulation remains a taboo subject among world leaders — inexcusable stupidity.

Just as destructive as overpopulation is overconsumption.  Billions of people, both rich and poor, have been programmed to believe that nothing is better than shopping.  I never watch horror movies.  Whenever I have an urge to get really grossed out, I go to a mall and observe the super-trendy shopping zombies.  Eeeeek!  The Ehrlichs recommended creating an organization similar to Planned Parenthood to help us plan our acts of consumption with utmost wisdom and responsibility.  Abstinence is usually the most mature option.

George Basalla now steps into the spotlight.  He pointed out that technological innovation was almost never motivated by fundamental human needs.  Everyone agrees that we were healthier and happier before agriculture.  Cars were not invented because people had lost the ability to walk.  What “need” is being met by cell phones, TVs, and computers?  Phooey on frivolous stuff.

This book devotes loads of attention to the many serious problems that have resulted from our experiment in cultural evolution.  One sentence hit me like a large stone hammer.  The authors are celebrating our glorious achievements.  Human brains have evolved capabilities “far beyond those of other animals, allowing us to become the dominant animal and (we hope) to remain so.” 

We hope so?  Dominant is cool?  Isn’t “dominant animal” essentially the one and only reason why we’re racing toward catastrophe?  Play with the notion of the “formerly dominant animal.”  What might that look like?  Could we live without tools once again, running around naked in the jungle?  Could we shut down the asylum and go back home, to the family of life, and live happily ever after?  That would be fun.  Have a nice day!

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H., The Dominant Animal - Human Evolution and the Environment, Island Press, Washington, 2008.