Wild Free and Happy Sample 09

[Note: This is the ninth 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.] 

The Dance of Hominin Evolution

Experts have endless lively disputes about many aspects of hominin evolution.  There were many predecessors to Homo sapiens, but an accurate lineage of the hominin family tree does not exist, and probably never will.  The physical evidence discovered so far is extremely incomplete.  It’s like a million piece jigsaw puzzle where more than 99 percent of the pieces are missing, and most of these have disintegrated over time.

Evolution does not resemble automobile assembly plants, where production of 2018 models completely ends on a fixed date, and the process of building new and improved 2019 models begins.  The transition from one species to the next is a blurry process that can take hundreds of thousands of years, and isolated groups of the same species can evolve in significantly different ways. 

In addition to arguments over the branches of the family tree, the dates assigned to specific events are also controversial and inconsistent.  Technology for dating specimens has advanced over the years, and different technologies often produce very different dates for the same bone or artifact.  Also, ongoing field work continues to make new discoveries.  So, did Homo sapiens emerge 190,000 years ago, or 300,000?  Did they arrive in Europe 50,000 years ago or 36,000?  And so on.  Numbers are slippery.

If we step back a bit, and disregard numeric dates, there is general agreement on a number of big picture trends.  Homo erectus is much older than Neanderthal, and both are older than Homo sapiens.  Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and Neanderthals did not.  Erectus and Neanderthals are not associated with megafauna extinctions, but our species certainly is.  For the purposes of this book, the trajectory of trends is important — event A preceded event B.  All numeric dates presented here are controversial.

Although the Earth Crisis has roots much older than Homo sapiens, our species is playing a starring role in this catastrophic tragedy.  For this reason, the following chapters will primarily focus on humans, and the emergence and expansion of some highly destructive cultures.  But first, a few comments on two notable cousins.

Erectus and Neanderthal

Homo erectus emerged maybe 1.9 million years ago, and eventually spread across some of the warmer regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe.  They may have been an early ancestor of modern humans.  Erectus hunted, gathered, and used stone tools.  They were the first hominins to evolve a larger than average brain, and they may have been the first to domesticate fire.  Erectus maybe walked off the stage somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.  Their long era of existence does not correspond to extinction spasms or serious ecological injuries.  Erectus apparently lived on Earth much longer than Neanderthals did.

Neanderthals probably evolved north of the Mediterranean, not in Africa.  Their remains have been found in Siberia, the Middle East, and Europe.  The earliest discoveries date to maybe 350,000 years ago.  We share up to 99.9 percent of our DNA with them.  Because they lived in non-tropical regions, they evolved thick bodies with large bones that provided greater strength and better cold tolerance.  Elizabeth Kolbert noted that modern humans have up to four percent Neanderthal DNA. 

Erectus, on average, had 1,000 cc brains.  Neanderthals were the brainiest hominins, at 1,600 cc.  Sapiens averages a modest 1,350 cc.  Could our smaller brains be the result of having access to cutting edge new technology (javelins, harpoons, bows and arrows, etc.)? 

Kathleen McAuliffe reported on research finding that human brains have shrunk about 10 percent in the last 20,000 years.  The Homo sapiens with the biggest brains lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.  They were the Cro-Magnons, who had to overcome the many new challenges of surviving in snowy ecosystems, while fending off hungry cave lions, cave hyenas, and saber-tooth cats.  The shrinking brain trend has been found in China, Europe, Africa, and even Australia, which remained Stone Age until 1788.  Why?  Perplexed experts propose some theories, but they don’t know for sure. 

One study found that brains get smaller as population density increases.  Tim Flannery suggests that modern consumers live like cattle on a feedlot, all our needs conveniently provided.  We no longer have the skills or knowledge to survive in the wild.  Thirty species of animals have been domesticated, and for every one of them their brain volume was 10 to 15 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Some think that humans domesticated themselves.

Anyway, the trademark Neanderthal weapon was a heavy thrusting lance.  Hunters had to slowly, silently, and very skillfully approach the prey undetected, then suddenly charge the animal, firmly gripping the spear with both hands, and ram it deep into its flesh.  Readers who have hunted hippos with wooden thrusting spears know that this can be very dangerous.  One site in Croatia contained the remains of 75 Neanderthals, and none were older than 35.  Many of their bones had healed fractures, suggesting painful accidents or encounters with fierce animals.  Dying of old age was unlikely.

The climate of the Neanderthal era was like a roller coaster.  In Europe, they were pounded by an era of extreme cold maybe 70,000 years ago.  From maybe 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, the climate was a spastic freak show.  Clive Finlayson noted that the climate often flip-flopped between warm periods and intensely frigid.  Radical shifts could arrive suddenly, and last hundreds or thousands of years, all across Eurasia.  Youngsters might grow up in a chilly steppe ecosystem that used to be a comfortable forest in the days of their grandparents.

Would Neanderthals have become the modern global primate if Homo sapiens had blinked out in Africa?  I sometimes wonder if real estate was a significant limiting factor.  Caves were luxurious addresses during glacial centuries, compared to hide-covered teepees or huts.  The primo caves were south (sun) facing, and ideally overlooked the seasonal migration routes of animal herds.  But there was a limited number of caves, and many were not vacant.  Neanderthals were always welcome dinner guests when they stumbled into caverns inhabited by hungry, jumbo-sized cave lions, cave hyenas, and cave bears.

In warmer and wetter periods, glaciers retreated, and tundra transformed into forest and grassland, habitat for critters like red deer, horses, and moose.  In colder and drier periods, glaciers advanced, forest retreated, and tundra returned, as did mammoths, woolly rhinos, and reindeer.  Neanderthals listened to their growling tummies, and went where the meat was.  They migrated northward in warmer eras, and retreated south when blast freezers returned.  The last Neanderthals died on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, in Gibraltar, maybe 40,000 to 28,000 years ago.  This was definitely after the arrival of humans in Western Europe, and before the spasm of megafauna extinctions on the continent.

Our human supremacist culture routinely preaches that Neanderthals were pathetic dullards.  During their long vacation in Europe, maybe 270,000 years, Neanderthal technology didn’t change much.  From the supremacist perspective, Neanderthals’ 350,000 year era of stable, low impact, ecological sustainability was indisputable proof of low intelligence. 

Elizabeth Kolbert absolutely disagreed.  Neanderthals lived in Europe for a very long time while affecting their ecosystem no more than any other large mammals.  Flannery noted that, for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals coexisted with straight-tusked elephants, mammoths, and woodland rhinos — without driving them extinct.  If humans had never wandered in from the Middle East, Europe might still be a wild, free, and happy celebration of Neanderthals, Irish elk, saber-tooth cats, straight tusk elephants, and aurochs.  What’s wrong with that?

Everything!  The supremacists leap to their feet, jump up and down, spitting, shouting, smashing bottles.  Humans are blessed by incredible intelligence, brilliant innovation, complex hunting weapons, sophisticated language skills, artistic creativity, decorative ornaments, and the powerful ability to invent totally irrational beliefs, accept them as absolute truth, and exterminate large numbers of nonbelievers.  Ancient mystical stories invented by Homo sapiens proudly assert that Homo sapiens is the absolute Crown of Creation, and the rest of the family of life was provided for our sustenance, amusement, and assorted perversions.

OK.  Stop right here.  Reread the list of human blessings in the previous paragraph.  For the most part, these are not characteristics of species that managed to live sustainably for more than a million years, like the chimps, baboons, lions, horses, and on and on — “ordinary animals” in other words.  In the big picture, it’s not irrational to conclude that the unusual intelligence we have acquired is powerful, dangerously irrational and destructive, and has become the primary threat to our continued existence.

For 150+ years, it has been a normal and respectable tradition for scholars and theologians to line up and urinate on the stupid Neanderthals.  European intellectuals were quite sure that the Garden of Eden was located rather close to London.  They were stunned and bewildered by the growing evidence that the ancestors of all hominins trace back to Mother Africa.  All Homo sapiens living 50,000 years ago had beautiful dark skins.   Oh my God!  It can’t be true!  Horror!

In 2014, Paola Villa and Wil Roebroeks reexamined the traditional beliefs in Neanderthal inferiority, to see if the latest archaeological research still supported them.  They did not find compelling data.  They also pointed out that the traditional beliefs of human superiority in language, symbolic communication, cognitive abilities, and abstract thinking were impossible to prove via archaeological data.  These were the biased opinions of supremacist imaginations.  Science is not required to be rational, and very often isn’t.

Sustainability Doesn’t Suck

Anyway, Neanderthals demonstrated that bipedal primates with huge brains can live sustainably for several hundred thousand years, in extremely challenging conditions, without agriculture, metal making, animal enslavement, fish mining, deforestation, or writing.  In fact, stability is not a problem or flaw.  Stability sounds like a fun and healthy alternative to mindless perpetual growth, fanatical eco-destruction, and devastating hurricanes of irrational illusions.

Clive Finlayson reminded us that no animal species can foretell the future.  When life is comfortable, and the ecosystem is not being ravaged, the safe and intelligent option is to be conservative, and remain on the well-worn time-proven path.  But when the <bleep> hits the fan, and traditions totally fail, innovation might be a less dangerous option.  The path of innovation is risky, often leading to unintended consequences and bloody surprises.  In worst case scenarios, innovation can backfire spectacularly, as 7+ billion people are now painfully discovering.  Yikes!

Chris Stringer reminded us that the myth of progress is a new idea.  The notion of utopia-bound continuous improvement is a bit over 200 years old.  Civilization was imagined to be an upward spiral. 

But in earlier civilizations, mobs of loonies were furiously mowing down ancient forests, triggering landslides, flash floods, and harbors choked with silt.  Each new generation inherited an ecosystem that was obviously in worse condition.  The passage of time was seen as a downward spiral of decay and decline, an inevitable one-way descent into social and ecological Armageddon. 

Hesiod, an ancient Greek thinker, described the glorious days of his venerable ancestors as the Golden Age, when men were pure and lived like gods.  It was followed by a descent into the Silver Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and finally the Iron Age, when men were violent, foul-mouthed, and fascinated by every form of evil.

Stringer noted that the wizards of modern society are possessed by an overwhelming and irrational blind faith in progress and perpetual growth.  We are far more advanced than Neanderthals, and they were better than Erectus.  You and I are lucky to enjoy the amazing pinnacle of billions of years of evolution.  Stringer does not see this as proof of divine destiny.  He believes that the fact that Neanderthals blinked out, and we didn’t, was largely a result of chance.  We survivors were assisted by the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

For example, about 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, the Mount Toba super volcano erupted on the island of Sumatra, spreading enormous amounts of ash.  In some regions of India, up to 19 feet (6 m) of ash accumulated.  Much incoming sunlight was blocked, and global temperatures may have dropped by 3° to 5°C for several years.  Others imagine an intense thousand year instant ice age.  Still others suspect far less global impact.  One theory, presented by geneticists, asserts that the human population plunged to 5,000 to 10,000 individuals — implying that we nearly went extinct.  Others point out that there is no evidence of extinction spasms among mammals at this time.  It’s not easy being an expert on days long past.

Anyway, Stringer suggests that if a similar eruption had happened closer to Africa, instead of Sumatra, it could have been game over for our species, but maybe not Neanderthals, who resided north of Africa.  Or, today might look very different if the rollercoaster of ice ages had occurred in a slightly different pattern over the last 200,000 years.  The outcome could have easily been quite different.  Chance is powerful juju.  Stringer is not a member of the progress cult.  He believes that our long-term future is entirely unpredictable.   I agree.

Cradle of Humankind



East Africa is called the Cradle of Humankind because it’s where our ancestors originated.  As noted in an earlier post, two to four million years ago, the region became cooler and dryer.  Forests shrank.  The ancestors of baboons and humans moved out of the forest and adapted to savannah ecosystems (grasslands with scattered trees).

In this new habitat, male baboons evolved large canine teeth, to better deflect predator attacks.  All baboons retained the physique for scampering up trees.  Baboons still live sustainably, as they have for millions of years, because they continue to live in the manner for which evolution fine-tuned them.  They adapted to their ecosystem without altering it.  They did not make weapons and hunt animals larger than they were but, on happy days, they could mob a leopard and disassemble it.

Our ancestors evolved into critters that stood on two legs (bipedal).  They became furless, sweaty, long distance runners who, in a hot climate, could chase animals until they collapsed from exhaustion.  Heavy sweating kept them cool whilst jogging for hours.  With these traits, evolution created a new mode of offense, but it was weirdly stingy about providing defensive assets like speed, strength, teeth, or claws.  These ancestors were less agile at zooming up trees.  Over the eons, many species of bipedal apes have evolved, but only one still survives.

In the early days, the ancestors acquired new abilities very slowly, via evolution.  At the same time, other species were also busy evolving new abilities for countering our advances, and maintaining the balance.  For large animals like apes, genetic evolution can take thousands of years to stabilize a new and improved trait.  Evolution does not always mean progress.  We’re discovering that big brains can be more trouble than they’re worth.

With our transition to tool making, we began gaining new abilities by inventing them, a much faster process.  Spears enabled our ancestors to impede the man-eating predators that had kept their populations neat and tidy.  This rubbished the laws of nature.  Imagine rabbits inventing tools that allowed them to overpower foxes.  With spears, we could also kill large game, acquire abundant meat, and feed more bambinos.

By becoming tool freaks, our ancestors stumbled into the dangerous juju of cultural evolution, a painful experiment that has achieved enormous momentum and speed.  There are now seven-point-something billion of us.  We are the best-educated generation ever, the most destructive, we know it, and don’t seem to care much.  There is an important lesson here, summed up by Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Here’s a happy idea.  Genetic evolution is the result of a process that constantly generates billions of random mutations in every species of flora and fauna.  Most mutations are maladaptive and promptly blink out.  When mutations survive and continue, we call this natural selection.  William E. Rees reminds us that cultural evolution is also subject to something like natural selection.  Maladaptive cultural mutations, like soil mining or forest mining, are unsustainable.  Natural selection has no mercy for cultures that refuse to learn the dope slap lessons of repeated mistakes.  In the long run, the family of life will always trump self-destructive cultures, in a messy and merciless manner.

Rainforests are a paradise for biodiversity, providing a pleasant home for huge numbers of species.  Savannahs support far less biodiversity, but provide excellent habitat for many large animal species.  A square mile of rainforest contains tons of biomass in its trees, far more biomass than a square mile of grassland, but grassland can produce more new biomass every year, primarily during the wet season.  This nutritious vegetation grows close to the ground, a convenient location for grazing animals.

The biological productivity of grasslands (savannahs, prairies, and steppes) enabled the emergence of large herbivores and their predators in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas.  For grassland herbivores, size and speed are evolutionary assets, because they discourage predators.  Lions scatter when menaced by uppity elephants.  Elephants live longer than bunnies.  Size matters.  Bigger is better.

Some species use simple tools like sticks, stones, or blades of grass, but our ancestors took the fabrication and use of tools to new levels.  They learned how make blades, projectile tips, scrapers, and axes by chipping flakes off stones.  Confronted with an organized gang of hungry apes with spears, giant size lost its advantage, and became a serious handicap.  Cultural evolution trumped genetic evolution.

In addition to getting extremely clever with tools, our ancestors also learned how to make and use fire, an ability that helped keep man-eating predators at bay.  Fire allowed us to inhabit the entire planet, and disrupt the balance of ecosystems wherever we went.  Cooked foods were easier to digest, so we could extract more nutrients.  Cooking also enabled us to digest formerly inedible materials.  Thus, our food resources were greatly expanded.

Stephen Pyne is the world’s expert on fire history.  He described excavations at Swartkrans Cave in South Africa.  At the oldest layers, the pre-fire level, no charcoal is found.  There are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including hominids — cats were the top predator.  Charcoal is found in newer layers, the fire age.  Here are found complete hominid skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats — hominids had become the top predator in the cave.

Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  Combined with fire, our ability to make spears, javelins, hammers, choppers, baskets, nets, and so on propelled our blastoff into outer space, far beyond Africa.  Maybe fire and tool making are the reason that evolution didn’t bother enhancing our defenses.

Baz Edmeades is a specialist in megafauna extinction, and he notes that our ancestors were not masters of sustainable living.  Africa was loaded with megafauna species at the dawn of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years ago, but many were gone by 1.4 million years ago.  At the Olduvai Gorge site in Tanzania, in 1.8 million year old deposits, they have found the butchered bones of rhinos, hippos, elephants, antelopes, and buffalo.  Elsewhere, evidence suggests that our ancestors were tending fires 1.6 million years ago.

In the good old days, Africa had nine species of big cats (three today), nine species of elephants (one today), and four hippos (one today).  There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, and giant baboons — all gone.  Primary suspects include an Australopithecus species and Homo erectus.  Homo sapiens emerged much later, maybe 100,000 years ago.

Edmeades emphasizes that during this wave of extinctions, there were not corresponding extinction blips in Siberia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas.  In these other regions, most megafauna species thrived for another million years — including many species that blinked out in Africa and South Asia.  If climate change was the primary cause of megafauna extinction, the northern hemisphere should have been hammered harder, because it was the region most affected by glaciation.

Lars Werdelin is a specialist in the evolution of mammalian carnivores.  He ponders the current efforts to designate a new era of geologic time, the Anthropocene, the period when humans began causing irreversible impacts.  When did it start?  Some think 1945, or the Industrial Revolution.  Others say the dawn of soil mining and animal enslavement.  Paleontologists like Werdelin observe reality from a perspective that embraces a much broader sweep of time.

He notes that between 3.5 million years ago, and 2 million years ago, the number of large carnivore species in Africa was reduced by half.  Today, only two percent of the African large carnivore species still survive.  This transition does not correspond to what is known about climate patterns — similar extinctions did not occur in other regions at this time.  A more likely suspect is the appearance of an early species in the Homo genus.  With regard to the kickoff date for the Anthropocene, Werdelin notes, “Humans have had the ability to affect ecosystems on a major scale for the past two million years.”

Björn Kurtén was an expert on the fauna of Pleistocene Europe.  The megafauna included varieties of mammoths, rhinos, horses, aurochs, reindeer, giant hippos, giant deer, giant musk ox, giant hyenas, giant bears, giant cheetahs, giant cave lions, saber-tooth cats, leopards, antelopes, goats, and many others.  Many of these species survived in Europe until the Late Pleistocene (which ended 10,000 years ago), but are now gone.

Kurtén concluded, “The mass death can hardly be ascribed to climatic causes alone, for there was no similar mass extinction in earlier interglacials.  It seems fairly certain that modern man has played a dominant role in the wiping out of many species, although perhaps by indirect influence as much as by actual hunting.”

Edmeades notes that, in Europe, warmth-loving megafauna species, like the straight-tusked elephant, hippos, and woodland rhinos, went extinct by 25,000 years ago, around the time of the last glaciation.  There were many glaciations during the Pleistocene, and some were more severe than the last one.  The last glaciation corresponds to the time when Homo sapiens colonized Eurasia.  Cold-tolerant mammoths and wooly rhinos survived in Western Europe until 12,000 years ago.

In North America, prior to human colonization, Edmeades says the ecosystem remained comparable to Africa 1.8 million years ago.  There were condor-like birds with 16-foot wingspans (4.8 m), mammoths, and mastodons.  In addition to cheetahs, “No less than five other kinds of big cat were living on an extravagant assortment of camel, llama, deer, horse, musk ox, bison, goat and sheep species.  With its giant bears, giant beavers, giant armadillo-like species, giant tortoises, and its giant ground-sloth species, North America was, without exaggeration, a super-Serengeti containing many more big-animal species than present-day Africa.”

“The population of every organism on Earth,” he writes, “is limited by collisions with the wall of limited resources.”  Baboon numbers are limited by the availability of nutrients they can acquire with their bare hands.  Specialized meat eaters like lions are limited by the availability of prey animals.  Both lions and baboons live as evolution fine-tuned them.  Food may be abundant one season, and scarce the next.  When abundant, populations increase.  Starvation is perfectly normal and natural.

Our ancestors had the added benefit of being omnivores.  When hunting was bad, they could dine on roots, nuts, and fruits.  This dietary safety net provided a huge strategic advantage over specialized meat eaters.  Of course, even omnivores can experience mass starvation.  All life requires nutrients, and all nutrients are finite.

The ancestors also benefitted by having cutting edge technology like fire, javelins, lances, harpoons, nets, snares, boats, and warm clothing.  Modern humans have blindsided the planet by converting many wild ecosystems into freaky food production plantations, dramatically increasing their nutrient resources — as long as the soil remains fertile, and pests, viruses, droughts, deluges, and frosts don’t nuke the plan.

Everyone agrees that, once upon a time, many species of megafauna inhabited every continent, and that most are now extinct.  Everyone agrees that the extinctions did not occur at the same time, around the world.  There were not major spasms of extinctions in places where our ancestors had not yet arrived.  The extinct species had previously survived multiple eras of global and local climate swings, which were sometimes sudden and severe.  Climate shifts do alter the flora and fauna of affected ecosystems, and this contributed to regional extinctions, like the hippos of London.

When it comes to success at long-term sustainability, the chimps, bonobos, baboons, and every other non-human species, get high scores.  When the food supply in their ecosystem declines, they starve and die.  Our lineage took a different path.  Instead of starving, they increased their food supply via innovation.  Wild and free chimps, without technology, would struggle to survive beyond their current habitat.  They live where evolution fine-tuned them to live.

The creature you see in the mirror has the body of a meat-eating hunter.  It is bipedal, designed to be a long-distance runner in a hot climate.  Its hands, arms, and shoulders are fine-tuned for hurling projectiles (killing from a distance), and making and using tools.  Our ancestors were hunters more than a million years before Homo sapiens appeared.

Daniel Quinn wrote Ishmael, a best-selling novel that defined two classes of human societies, Takers (naughty) and Leavers (nice).  The fall of humankind was the transition to agriculture and civilization.  The book torpedoed sacred cultural myths and blew my mind.  Hunter-gatherers certainly have far less impact than civilized folks, but the history of megafauna extinctions is important. 

So is the fact that plant and animal domestication emerged independently in several regions.  Some groups of hunter-gatherers chose to increase their food supply rather than rely completely on the fickle luck of the hunt — or become masterful at family planning.  They cleverly began displacing the wild ecosystem to produce plant and animal foods — a transition that had Earth-shaking unintended consequences.

Worse, by producing far more food, their population bloated.  There is strength in numbers.  For thousands of years, mobs of hungry dirty farmers and herders have been steamrolling wild societies, helpless deer in the headlights of progress.  This is a real pisser!  High impact societies routinely trump low impact ones.  Consumer culture has become a monster factory where students are entranced by dark juju sermons on Sustainable Development™.  This feels like the Mother of All Predicaments.

The good news is that Big Mama Nature will not allow this tragic game to continue forever.  Highly educated consumers are consuming nonrenewable resources at a growing rate, blissfully ignorant of the existence of limits — a wall that they will slam into.  At the same time, centuries of progress are destabilizing the climate that has enabled the existence of civilization.  Wildlife populations are severely depleted and plummeting.  We are getting very close to the peak of our batshit crazy joyride of turbocharged foolishness.  An era of healing is coming.

Meanwhile, on the rainforest sidelines, are the chimps and bonobos, our closest living relatives, who have lived in the same place for millions of years without leaving scars on the habitat.  Imagine that!  Humans are animals, an extremely embarrassing fact that most of us adamantly deny.  I have no brilliant solutions to offer today.  My humble suggestion is to think like an animal.  Thinking like a consumer is pushing us toward the coffin of humankind.  All the best!

Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna — First Victims of the Human-caused Extinction, 2013.  This fascinating manuscript has been withdrawn from its home location (megafauna.com) for updates.  An earlier version is available HERE.

Kurtén, Björn, Pleistocene Mammals of Europe, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1968.

Pyne, Stephen J., Fire: A Brief History, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001.

Rees, William E., Is Humanity Fatally Successful?, Vancouver Institute, British Columbia, 2003 (Download).

Werdelin, Lars, Hominids, Carnivores, and the Origin of the Anthropocene, Swedish Museum of Natural History, 2015 (50 min video).

Lone Survivors

A million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors consisted of maybe 20,000 breeding individuals, according to wizards who speculate on the hidden secrets of DNA.  This is similar to the current population of chimpanzees or gorillas.  The ancestors lived in scattered pockets of Africa, at a time when Earth was a paradise of abundant life.  From these ancient roots, a number of hominid species evolved, but only Homo sapiens still survives, at seven-point-something billion and growing.  The chimps and gorillas continue to live in a manner similar to their ancestors of a million years ago.  What happened to us?

Chris Stringer is one of the venerable grandfathers in the study of human evolution.  He’s read the papers, attended the conferences, examined the skulls, and had a ringside seat at the noisy catfights.  This field of knowledge is far from finished.  New specimens continue to be found, and new technology provides deeper insights.  Stringer’s book, Lone Survivors, discusses some primary issues, and the scholarly disputes surrounding them, as they stood in 2012.  He does a pretty good job of providing an overview to a huge and complex subject, but readers with little background are advised to wear life preservers.

I learned a lot about Neanderthals.  They survived 400,000 years on a climate change roller coaster.  They hung out with hippos in warm forests near Rome, and they chased wooly mammoths on frigid treeless tundras.  They had short, stocky bodies that were good for preserving heat, but which required more calories.  Males and females were about the same size, suggesting little division of labor, everyone joined in the hunt. 

The Neanderthal diet majored in the flesh of large game.  Readers who have hunted hippos with wooden thrusting spears know that his is very dangerous.  One site in Croatia contained the remains of 75 Neanderthals, and none were older than 35.  In their clans, there were probably many orphans and few grandparents.  The scarcity of elders, and the small size of their groups, sharply restricted the flow of cultural information from one generation to the next, and from clan to clan.

Some say that Neanderthals lacked shoes and close-fitting clothing.  When Darwin visited chilly Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America, he was shocked to see natives wearing little or no clothing and sleeping naked in the open.  Stringer noted that modern Europeans seem to be poorly adapted to the cold, physiologically.

Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that moved into Europe maybe 45,000 years ago.  European Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000 years ago.  Neanderthals went extinct in the Middle East, Siberia, Gibraltar, and Britain at different times, probably for different reasons.  This was an era of frequent climate zigzags.  When temperatures plummeted, habitable territories shrank, and fewer folks could be fed.

Cro-Magnons apparently had footwear and warm, fitted clothing.  They had better tools for hunting, so their diet was more diverse and dependable.  They were able to extract more nutrients from an ecosystem, so they could survive in places where Neanderthals could not.  They lived in larger groups, and more of them survived to middle age or old age, so more cultural information could be passed to the young.

Large populations are better at preserving cultural knowledge, acquiring new information from outsiders, and generating innovations.  More busy minds interact, exchange ideas, compete, and imagine cool ways for living even farther out of balance.  Witness the city of Los Angeles, where 14 million animals with hunter-gatherer DNA are temporarily able to survive because of a highly complex system of innovative technology.  Note that this innovation has no relationship to foresight or wisdom.  Time is running out on Los Angeles.

On the other hand, less innovation occurs in smaller simpler groups, and that’s often a blessing.  Innovators can be dangerous loose cannons, introducing risky new ideas that result in horrid unintended consequences — like cell phones, automobiles, or agriculture.  Nothing is more precious than a stable, sustainable, time-proven way of living, where the secret to success is simply imitating your ancestors, conforming to the norm, and enjoying life, like the chimps and gorillas do.

When the planet heated up 14,000 years ago, rising sea levels submerged the land link between Australia and Tasmania, terminating the exchange of people, ideas, and gadgets.  Tasmania’s traditional way of life was also squeezed as the warmer climate spurred the expansion of heavy forest.  The natives experienced a cultural meltdown.  “Tasmanians appear to have led an increasingly simplified life, forgoing apparently valuable skills and technologies, such as bone and hafted tools, nets and spears used to catch fish and small game, spear throwers and boomerangs, and anything but the simplest of skin clothing.”

Will climate change have a similar effect on industrial civilization in the coming decades?  Will it slash food production, sharply reduce population, eliminate travel between regions, pull the plug on modern technology, and erase lots of obsolete and unsustainable cultural information?  Could collapse have a silver lining?

Climate change can derail any culture, and drive species to extinction.  It can also produce beneficial conditions, like the unusually favorable climate of the last 10,000 years.  Natural selection rewards species that can adapt to change, and it deletes those that fail.  There is another important variable that is often overlooked — genetic drift — mutations that happen all the time when slight boo-boos occur during cell division.  These tiny defects can provide a barrel of surprises.

We are repeatedly taught that humans are nature’s flawless masterpiece, the glorious conclusion of three billion years of evolution.  But, if Big Mama Nature had experienced slightly different moods over the eons, we might be Neanderthals or Denisovans today (or maybe slime mold).  Climate change and genetic drift are purely random.  The fact that Homo sapiens is the lone survivor among the hominid species is not absolute proof of superiority, but it does indicate a temporary streak of good luck.

Homo heidelbergensis was an ancestor that lived 500,000 years ago.  They had brains ranging in size from 1100 to 1400 cc (modern brains average 1350 cc).  The average Neanderthal brain was 1600 cc — much bigger than ours.  Stringer noted that our brains today are ten percent smaller than our Homo sapiens ancestors of 20,000 years ago.  Is there a message here?

Without words, chimps and gorillas can express contentment, affection, irritation, excitement.  But without complex language, they are more trapped within themselves.  Language took us “into new and shared worlds that were unknown to our ancestors.”  We can talk about the here and now, the past, the future, abstract concepts, feelings, imaginary worlds, and so on.

Later, innovative geniuses invented the use of symbols.  Now we can convert words into patterns of squiggly lines, for example: “computer.”  Writing enables us to communicate with folks in faraway places.  I can read words written by Julius Caesar, and so might the generations yet-to-be-born, in theory.  Industrial civilization cannot exist without symbols — numbers, graphs, pictures, status symbols.  Progress abounds with powerful and dangerous juju.

Stringer is a mild mannered humanist.  And so, he portrays the human journey as one of admirable advancement (the chimps fall down laughing).  On the last page, he confesses a profound doubt.  “Sometimes the difference between failure and success in evolution is a narrow one, and we are certainly on a knife edge now as we confront an overpopulated planet and the prospect of global climate change on a scale that humans have never faced before.  Let’s hope our species is up to the challenge.” 

Stringer, Chris, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, Times Books, New York, 2012.

Megafauna



Baz Edmeades (“ed-meedz.”) grew up in South Africa.  His grandfather, Thomas F. Dreyer, was the paleontologist who discovered an unknown species, Homo helmei.  The new species was an immediate predecessor of Homo sapiens, and it lived 239,000 years ago — in Africa!  Europeans, the self-elected master race, naturally assumed that humankind emerged somewhere closer to London.  White folks were shocked to realize that they were (gulp!) Africans.

South Africa’s Kruger National Park is home to megafauna (large animals) that once inhabited vast regions of the world.  Sadly, poachers have been pushing a number of species close to extinction.  This drove Edmeades crazy.  It inspired him to begin research on a book that became Megafauna — First Victims of the Human-caused Extinction.

During the project, he became friends with Paul Martin, who strongly influenced his thinking.  Martin was the father of the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, which asserted that overhunting was the sole cause for the megafauna extinctions in North and South America.  They occurred after humans crossed into the Americas from Siberia, 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Other scholars disagreed.  They blamed climate change, and its effects on vegetation.  But the extinct species had previously survived a number of big climate swings.  Still others blamed disease, a comet strike, or a combination of factors.  The issue is highly complex, and there is currently insufficient evidence to unify the experts, and drive the controversy extinct.

On every continent except Antarctica, there were spasms of megafauna extinctions.  They occurred in different regions, at different times, not in synch with climate swings.  There is real evidence that humans were not innocent bystanders in these murder mysteries.  They likely played a primary role.

In Australia, some say that the species driven to extinction 50,000 years ago were victims of the newly arrived humans.  On the islands of New Zealand, Tasmania, Hawaii, Tonga, Madagascar, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, extinctions occurred at different times, following the appearance of humans.

Much earlier, Africa suffered a severe spasm of extinctions, long before Homo sapiens.  The continent was loaded with megafauna 1.8 million years ago, but many were gone by 1.4 million years ago.  There used to be nine species of big cats (three today), nine types of elephants (one today), four hippos (one today).  There were giant antelopes, giant hyenas, giant pigs, giant monkeys, and giant baboons, all gone.  

Some, including Edmeades, blame overhunting.  At the time, our ancestor Homo erectus had been busy, inventing a new and improved toolbox — knives, saws, axes, cleavers.  This was the Acheulian revolution.  They knew how to use fire, and they may have been the first to use the wooden spear.

In North America, when humans arrived, there were at least nine species of big cats, and seven species of elephants.  The biodiversity was incredible — beavers as big as bears, two-ton buffaloes, armadillos the size of VW Beetles.  Until 14,000 years ago, mammoth country ranged from Western Europe to Mexico.  Aurochs ranged from England to Korea, and south to India and North Africa.  Rhinos ranged from Europe to Sumatra.  Under downtown London are the remains of hippos, elephants, giant deer, aurochs, and lions, residents of the thriving rainforests of England. 

Prior to the spear, our ancestors had been similar to baboons and chimps, scavenging lunch from carnivore kills, and bludgeoning small critters like monkeys and lizards.  Over many thousands of years, evolution had gradually made us better hunters.  Changes to our bones and muscles improved our ability to accurately hurl projectiles, and kill from a distance.  Evolution also improved our long distance running skills.  Our ancestors were much slower than antelopes, but we could chase them for hours, until they collapsed from exhaustion.

Before the spear, we acquired new abilities very slowly, by evolving.  At the same time, other species were also busy evolving new abilities for countering our advances, and maintaining the balance.  With our transition to tool making, we began gaining new abilities by inventing them, a far quicker process.  Spears enabled our ancestors to subdue the man-eating predators who kept them from exploding in numbers.  This rubbished the laws of nature.  Imagine rabbits inventing tools that allowed them to overpower foxes.  With spears, we could also kill large game, acquire abundant meat, and feed more bambinos.

Like the trend of population growth, the trend of techno innovation proceeded slowly for ages, until exploding in recent times.  Innovation allowed us to temporarily sneak around the checks and balances of evolution, and discover the painful consequences of violating the laws of nature in a giddy whirlwind of blissful ignorance.  We invented the ability to disrupt the balance of nature.

All wild animals live in the here and now, paying acute attention to the immediate vicinity.  None devote attention to the balance of nature, or to risks that may arise in the future.  If they get food, they eat; if not, they starve.  Amazingly, some tool-making societies eventually developed a sense of foresight.  They practiced enlightened self-restraint, which included taboos on overhunting and overbreeding — never-ending responsibilities.  Foresight was a slippery path, and some groups slid into domestication.  Unfortunately, societies that master self-restraint are helpless sitting ducks when discovered by civilization — a serious and perplexing predicament.

What really captured my attention while reading, was realizing the incredible abundance of huge, beautiful, powerful forms of life that once thrived on Earth.  It’s almost impossible to imagine how spectacularly alive and healthy this planet was in the days before the toolmakers.  Today, it feels like we’re living in desolate ghost towns, nothing but humans.  I can walk alone all night without fear of being eaten.  Our soundtrack is the rumbling, roaring, screeching noise of planet-eating machinery — not wolves, hyenas, elephants, elk — the wild music of a wild land.

And so, here we are.  We have unluckily inherited a treasure chest of predicaments, all getting worse.  Do you think we can somehow find a way to return to ecological harmony by continuing down the path of technology — solar panels, wind turbines, nanotechnology, space exploration, computer-driven cars?

Our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, provide excellent examples of the benefits of living in compliance with the laws of nature.  They’ve lived in the same place for two million years without trashing it.  Humans who study the school of life can survive in tropical forests without tool making, but seven billion can’t.

Cultures die.  The culture of endless growth and insatiable consumption is moving into its twilight years, as resource limits draw the curtains closed.  A muscle-powered future will require a muscle-powered culture.  We could resurrect the unsustainable cultures of centuries past, and repeat their blunders.  Or, we could learn from their mistakes and try something different and better — like rejoining the family of life, and obeying the laws of nature.  Imagine that.  What can we do to move in that direction?

Anyway, Edmeades provides a long and fascinating discourse on megafauna extinctions.  Megafauna is an unfinished work in progress (as of February 2015).  The manuscript has not been copyedited, but the text is well written, easy for general readers to understand.  Edmeades’ deep knowledge of paleontology is obvious.  This is an important document.

Edmeades, Baz, Megafauna — First Victims of the Human-caused Extinction, 2013.  This fascinating manuscript has been withdrawn from its home location (megafauna.com) for updates.  An earlier version is available HERE.

In 2020 and 2021, Edmeades has been working to finish his book.  Current news can be found at:  https://www.facebook.com/MegafaunaDotCom/

In 2013, the Caustic Soda program produced a slightly-serious interview with Edmeades, a 75-minute podcast.

The Tender Carnivore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When scientists raised chimps in their homes, along with their own children, the chimps were at least as intelligent as children, until the children were three or four, learned language, and left the chimps in the dust.  Language promotes mental development, spurring reasoning and knowing.  Yet, without language, lions and wolves are superior hunters.  Intelligence is an evolutionary experiment.  It allows us to better comprehend the complexity of the world, but it also enables us to better destroy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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