Wild Free and Happy Sample 32

[Note: This is the thirty-second 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 202 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.] 

Plant Domestication

The domestication of crop plants is an enormous subject.  It has enabled and accelerated a long sequence of unfortunate unforeseen consequences over the centuries.  Of course, the same could be said for the domestication of animals.  If domestication had never occurred, life in the twenty-first century would look nothing like the world outside your window.  There would be no windows.

Our population would not be zooming down the fast lane to eight billion, nine billion….  We would not be helpless sitting ducks today, standing in the path of an onrushing out of control climate shit storm.  Wild folks would have never conjured techno-nightmares like automobiles, cell phones, cities, nuclear bombs, or pesticides.  Agriculture produces megatons of surplus food, which enables societies to feed and clothe herds of nerds, who are highly skilled at maximizing unsustainability in every imaginable way.

Agriculture was not an amazing invention created by a brilliant mad scientist.  For four million years, every hominin who had more than two brain cells clearly understood that plants grew from seeds.  Agriculture was not an awesomely cool fad that spread like wildfire around the world.  As long as wild foods were adequate, it would have been ridiculous to deliberately shift to tedious, miserable, backbreaking work. 

When hunters have an unlucky day, they can lose a day’s work.  When farmers have bad luck, they can lose more than a year’s hard work, and have no safety net to catch their fall.  Crops can be zapped by drought, deluge, late frost, early frost, fire, storms, plant disease, enemies, wildlife, insects, and so on.  High rewards came with high risks.

Kat Anderson described how hunter-gatherers in California “tended” the wild landscape to encourage the growth of wild plants that were useful to them.  They didn’t strip the living green skin off the land, pulverize the naked soil, and plant seeds.  That would have been ecologically insane.  They had no need to do that.  They had plenty to eat because their time proven culture was well adapted to their land, and because they hadn’t stumbled into the trap of domestication.

Mark Nathan Cohen wrote an important book that described how agriculture emerged independently in several different regions.  It was a jarring transformation for humankind.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years, a highly successful strategy.  Until 10,000 years ago, everything on the menu everywhere was wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms.

Preceding this shift, hunters had spread around the world.  They had gotten very good at killing large game, and a number of megafauna species had been driven into extinction.  Also, as the ice age weakened, the climate got warmer, and forests expanded into steppe and tundra regions.  Forest was not prime habitat for herds of horses, reindeer, and mammoths.  These herds shrank or dispersed.  So, the menus had to be rewritten to include more offerings of stuff like waterfowl, fish, crustaceans, small reptiles, mollusks, and plant foods. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that the recovering forests of Europe were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Less meat led to a significantly smaller population.  It was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of a wide variety of foods could be gathered.

This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while.  No wild plants suitable for agriculture were domesticated in early Europe.  At the time, much of the continent was still forest.  The primary food of civilizations is grains.  Grains are produced by grass species like wheat, oats, barley, and so on.  For this reason, large scale agriculture did not emerge in forests or jungles. 

Meanwhile, to the east, in the awesome grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, there was so much wild plant food that some groups had the option of giving up the nomadic life and settling down in delicious locations.  Cohen noted that the seeds of wild wheat (emmer and einkorn) and wild barley provided storable starch (calories).  Storable protein was provided by peas, beans, lentils, and vetches.  In North America, the primary starch was corn, and beans were the main source of plant protein.  Grasslands were also excellent places to hunt.

Cohen noted that the practice of agriculture migrated from its birthplace in the Fertile Crescent.  It moved into southeastern Europe between 7000 and 5000 B.C.  It then spread along the Mediterranean coast, and into the Danube river watershed.  At the time Europe was already inhabited by scattered communities of hunter-gatherers. 

Whether agriculture primarily spread through Europe by migration or diffusion is controversial (probably both).  In Australia, it spread by migration, when outsiders from Britain brought their dirty habit with them.  In North America, it apparently spread by diffusion, as corn and beans spent centuries gradually making a long pilgrimage from Mesoamerica to Ontario.

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward, gradually displacing tundra.  The elk, moose, and tropical primates managed to survive.  As megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens.  Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.

Eventually, the seeds of corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that got addicted could produce far more food per acre, and support a larger population.  Their new diet had nutrient deficiencies which had health effects. 

I’ve already mentioned ideas from Mark Nathan Cohen’s book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, in which the archaeologist and anthropologist explored what drove the transition to agriculture.  Twenty-two years later, he published Health & the Rise of Civilization, which extensively examined how health declined in agricultural societies.  The healthiest people were the hunter-gatherers who dined on large game.

The shift to agriculture took a toll.  Teotihuacan was a city located not far from today’s Mexico City.  It was home to a culture of pyramid builders.  At its prime around A.D. 500, it had about 125,000 people, and was the biggest city in the world.  Cohen wrote that it had very high rates of malnutrition, stunted growth, deciduous tooth hypoplasia, and infant and child mortality.  I’ll have much more to say about human health in a later chapter. 

Anyway, there is strength in numbers, and farmers trumped hunters.  In any region that was suitable for the agriculture of the day, the hunters were in danger.  A dozen healthy, well-nourished hunters were unlikely to triumph against 100 malnourished corn farmers with bad teeth.  Corn typically depleted soil fertility in a few years, so clearing new fields was an ongoing necessity.

Farmers were not friendly new neighbors.  Over time they were more like an uprising, a steamroller.  Muir described how the corn powered Iroquois gathered momentum over time, pushing out the tribes of Algonquin hunters.  Cunliffe wrote that when agriculture moved close to your home sweet home, you had four choices: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.

Mesopotamia

James Scott, a political scientist, studied the dawn of agriculture in southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states — hierarchical societies with rulers and tax collectors, sustained by a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, because it was easier to harvest, transport, and store than foods that were more perishable.  An entire field of grain ripened at the same time, which enabled one sweep harvesting.

Today, southern Mesopotamia is largely a treeless desert, and many assume that it always has been.  Actually, it used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers.  There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities.  Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush.  They also ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.  The ecosystem was generous, and life was good.

In this region, communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers began appearing by maybe 12,000 B.C.  The first evidence of domestication appears around 9000 B.C.  Then, it took another four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared.  The first states emerged around 3100 B.C.  In the Middle East, it does not appear that early cultivation was encouraged by declining availability of wild plant and animal foods.  Contrary to common beliefs, in Mesopotamia, cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity.

In the early days, there was no need for irrigation.  Stream banks and river deltas were covered with alluvium — a moist and highly fertile deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel that was delivered by annual floods.  It was a soft and loose soil that was ready for sowing.  So, in addition to the wild grains they enjoyed, it was fairly easy to sow seeds in the fresh deposits of alluvium.

Scott mentioned archaeologist Hans Nissen, who studied the ancient Near East.  Nissen noted that for quite a while, the climate had been wet and warm.  With adequate rains, abundant water moved through the streams and rivers.  The Tigris and Euphrates watershed emptied into the Persian Gulf.  Nissen measured the accumulated sediments on the floor of the Gulf.  Thicker layers of organic matter indicated times when lots of water was moving lots of silt.  This study illuminated climate patterns.

Prior to roughly 3500 B.C., so much water flowed into the Gulf that its water level was 10 feet (3 m) higher than it is today.  The north shore of the Gulf expanded quite a ways into southern Mesopotamia.  Much of the region was then wetlands, and folks resided on islands.  It was a paradise for happy wild people — plenty to eat year round.

But then, climate trends gradually shifted toward cooler and dryer.  Less rain led to lower water tables.  The Gulf’s shoreline retreated.  Wetlands began drying out.  It became possible to plant seeds on the highly fertile, newly exposed soil.  For a while the alluvial soils were a sponge that held enough moisture that crops could be grown without irrigation, but this situation was temporary.

Nissen noted that wild grains still grow in Mesopotamia.  Today, in remote locations, folks can gather two or more quarts (or liters) of grain in an hour — a decent supply of calories for minimal effort.  On the other hand, cultivated grain grown in irrigated fields can produce far higher yields, sometimes two or three harvests per year.

Here is where the domestication of wheat played an important role.  Wild wheat grass readily drops its ripe seeds, which maximizes reproductive potential — evolution’s goal.  But this minimizes efficient harvesting.  Lots of seeds drop to the ground and are not collected.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that retained their seeds. 

Also, wild wheat seeds are coated with hard husks, which reduce the risk of premature germination.  Farmers have to remove these husks.  This can be accomplished by pounding or roasting, but then the seeds are less likely to germinate.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that produced seeds having less troublesome husks.

Annual grain yield was important, but effective storage was equally vital.  The primary objective of agriculture was not to produce millions of morbidly obese rats, or impressive heaps of stinky rotten wheat.  Grain was best stored in large closed vessels of fired clay. 

Gold is dense and shiny, but you can’t eat it.  Its only value is when you find odd people with vivid imaginations who believe that a shiny yellow stone is something of immense value.  Stored wheat, on the other hand, is something you can eat, food that can sustain your survival.  A full granary is truly precious to folks who enjoy being alive, it is a genuine treasure.

History is clear on one thing — stored treasure is fantastically tempting to ambitious hard-nosed folks untroubled by morals, like Vikings, Mongols, or billionaires.  Tacitus, writing in A.D. 98, described the wild German tribes.  “They actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”

What may be the world’s oldest story was found etched on clay tablets in southern Mesopotamia — the Epic of Gilgamesh.  It’s the saga of slimy King Gilgamesh who clear-cut ancient forests, triggered massive floods and erosion, and built the city of Uruk.

Nissen spent a lot of time digging up stuff in Uruk, which is now scruffy ancient ruins surrounded by a barren brown wasteland.  [LOOK]  In the days of its glory, was a highly advanced place.  Nissen called this era “the beginning of early high civilization.”  It had writing, large artworks, and monumental architecture.  Gilgamesh built a wall around Uruk that enclosed an area of 1,360 acres (5.5 km²).  The wall included at least 900 semicircular towers.

Around the world, throughout history, it is no coincidence that settlements with stored treasure (especially granaries) have commonly been surrounded by walls, moats, palisades, and so on.  Alfred Crosby wrote a tragi-comical history of the evolution of weaponry, from stones to hydrogen bombs.  Many, many centuries were devoted to a tireless arms race — ongoing efforts to use new tricks for destroying walls, and new countermeasures for defending the stored treasure.

OK, back to Mesopotamia.  As the climate got cooler and dryer, rain decreased, river flows decreased, and the water level of the Gulf dropped.  Less water was available for irrigation.  Plus, as river flows dropped lower, their channels dug deeper into the soil.  This caused even more water to be drawn away from the surrounding land.

In the driest regions, agriculture could not survive without irrigation.  Over time, an enormous canal system was built in Mesopotamia.  The unintended consequence of this brilliant technological masterpiece was catastrophe.  Regular irrigation led to salt buildup in the soil (salinization), which rendered it permanently infertile, killing the golden goose.

Salt-nuked cropland had to be abandoned, forcing folks to concentrate in more urban settlements.  With more people crammed together, conflict levels increased.  To avoid social meltdown, conflicts needed to be brought under control.  This need encouraged the further intensification of civilization — powerful leaders, laws, enforcers, obedient tax-paying citizens, and hard-working slaves.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 31

[Note: This is the thirty-first 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 202 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.]

Dogs

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time close to nature.  The deer, bears, skunks, bats, foxes, coons, wolves, beavers, coyotes, and weasels tolerated my passing as long as I behaved calmly and respectfully.  None of these wild beings had the slightest interest in becoming my friends, or my fur children.  None depended on me in any way.  None fully trusted me.

All were absolutely free to live as they wished, every minute of every day (unlike me).  They all had a perfectly healthy relationship to the land (unlike me).  None of them ever sent anything to a landfill, or caused permanent damage to the land, water, or air (unlike me).  All of them will celebrate when the lights go out, the last car dies, and the last bullet is shot.  Hooray!

Gray Wolves

Gray wolves are the wild ancestors of dogs.  Their history is a bit misty.  One source wrote that gray wolves emerged in Eurasia maybe a million years ago, and migrated into North America maybe 750,000 years ago.  Their range spanned across the northern hemisphere, from Europe and Asia to North America.  They didn’t fancy living in tropical forests or intensely arid regions.  Instead, they adapted to grasslands, forests, and artic regions.

Humans emerged in Mother Africa, south of the equator.  Over the course of maybe two million years, in various ways, our ancestors transitioned from foragers and scavengers, to persistence hunters, to innovative weapon users, and then teams of communal hunters.  Africa was wolf-free, but it had a home team of man-eating predators, like big cats, big snakes, big crocodiles, and packs of hyenas.  They did a good job of weeding out the weak, the sick, the injured, the inattentive, and the unlucky.  They kept our clans tidy, fit, and strong.

Wolves evolved in Eurasia, north of the equator.  Barry Lopez noted that wolves shared their food with others in the pack.  They educated their young.  They could hear clouds passing, and were able to smell prey from a couple miles away.  They were expert trackers, and hunted in a state of heightened concentration, paying relentless attention to details.  Wolves generally travelled in packs of 6 to 10 animals, and could sprint as fast as 37 miles per hour (60 km/h).  Like many man-eaters, they mostly moved and hunted at night (not a great time to be out alone).

Wolves and humans likely never met one another until some human pioneers eventually wandered north out of Africa, across the equator, and into wolf country.  History is clear that wolves had no taboos against feasting on yummy tropical primates.  In many cultures, big bad wolves enjoyed starring roles in their myths, because they had to be taken very seriously in real life.  One source noted that wolves and Eskimos were equals — prior to the arrival of firearms.  For them, wolves were valuable teachers.  I have never seen a wolf in the wild, and I hope I never see one in lockdown

The Dynamic Duo

Everyone agrees that dogs were the first domesticated critters, but exactly when and where remains highly controversial.  Wolves and humans maybe began their cautious relationship while scavenging snacks from animal carcasses.  Wolves were certainly attracted to the garbage piles at human camps.  They can chew up bones that humans can’t.  Humans were also magical critters who had the fantastic ability to regularly emit indescribably delicious turds that canines cannot resist.

We’re not sure how, but canines (wolves or dogs) and humans gradually became hunting buddies.  Eventually, via a long process of selective breeding, wolves were reduced to dogs, critters less likely to rip out your throat, and kill your friends and family.  Dogs were four-legged garbage disposals that helped keep camps tidy.  Compared to a wolf of the same size, a dog’s skull is 20 percent smaller, and its brain is 10 percent smaller.  Dogs have smaller teeth and jaw muscles, after thousands of years of dining on human refuse and other soft foods.

Anyway, the hunting buddies had complementary skills.  Dogs had superb senses of smell and hearing, excelled at team hunting, and were far speedier than humans.  Humans had the advantage of weaponry.  They had the spooky ability to hurl projectiles (sticks and stones) with remarkable accuracy, often with lethal results.

So, sniffing dogs could discover the presence of coons, and chase them up a tree, where humans could then kill them.  Thus, dogs ate better, and humans ate better, while coons (and other prey) became more vulnerable to predation.  Previously, the coon’s ability to quickly climb trees was their primary defense tactic, for maybe a million years or three.  It now became less safe to be a coon.  By gaining access to more food resources, the number of both dogs and humans could grow.

Actually, “buddies” exaggerates the intimacy of the relationship.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas spent lots of time with the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari.  Writing in the 1950s, she noted that the dogs in their camp were skeletal and weak from starvation.  The dogs were owned and named, but folks never fed them anything except shit.  When a mongrel made a move on the humans’ food, it was stoned or whipped.  At night, they chased away visiting hyenas, jackals, and leopards.

Louis Liebenberg also wrote about the San.  By the late 1960s, hunters were using dogs, which radically changed the game.  On their own, dogs were not top class hunters.  Sometimes they could run down small animals.  When they teamed up with humans, both could eat more meat.  And so, ancient food chain balancing acts were disrupted, and life became less safe for some.

With dogs, it became far easier for the San to kill gemsbok, because when pursued, they will eventually stop, turn around, and confront the dogs, at which point it was much easier for hunters to kill them (deer also eventually stop and surrender).  Gemsbok was a prime prey for hunters, because they were fairly large, and fairly numerous.  Despite the assistance of dogs, hunters still had to possess exceptional knowledge of tracking, animal behavior, and the ecosystem.  This traditional knowledge was vital for mindfully directing the dogs toward the most promising locations to find a hot lunch.

Wireless Voice-Activated Herding Robots

At some point in the game, clever shepherds, with abundant free time on their hands, taught dogs to quickly and accurately obey their exact instructions for controlling the herd.  With a well-trained dog, a herder on foot could manage 150 to 200 sheep.  With this great advance, humankind was well on the path to the wondrous realm of modernity.

Writing in 1902, Irishman W. G. Wood-Martin wrote: “The dog is the greatest conquest ever made by man, for the taming of the dog is the first element in human progress.  Without the dog, man would have been condemned to vegetate eternally in the swaddling clothes of savagery.  It was the dog which effected the passage of human society from the savage to the patriarchal state, in making possible the guardianship of the flock.  Without the dog there would be no flock and herds; no roast beef, no wool, no blanket, no time to spare; and, consequently, no astronomical observations, no science, no industry.  It is to the dog man owes his hours of leisure.”

The Deadly Trio

Liebenberg noted that following the introduction of dogs to hunting, some folks also added horses to the Kalahari team of hunters and dogs.  Consequently, the traditional method of persistence hunting — tirelessly chasing game for hours during the heat of the day until they collapsed — was no longer necessary.  Speedy horses made it far easier for the team to hunt speedy antelopes.  Dogs will chase anything that moves, and horses excel at high-speed pursuits.

As a result of this great advance, the hunting game got too easy.  Hunters no longer needed to possess exceptional knowledge.  At the same time, the San lost access to much of their former hunting territory.  Now, as the elders die, large portions of a two million year old knowledgebase are going extinct, including much of the original hominin software.  The San live in permanent villages.  Game over.

Around A.D. 1300, Marco Polo described how Genghis Khan used the deadly trio for an industrial scale approach for acquiring wild meat.  It included two flanks of mounted hunters, each having 10,000 men and 5,000 great mastiff dogs.  The line of hunters would extend to the length of a full day’s journey, and no wild animal would escape their dragnet.  These hunts were like a bloody vacuum cleaner.

Later, with the adoption of firearms, the deadly trio become a bloody foursome.  Guns made it much easier to kill large animals with the squeeze of a trigger.  Pita Kelekna wrote that when the breech-loading rifle arrived on the U.S. west, the buffalo herd was reduced from 60 million to 1,000.  Back east, there was high demand for buffalo robes and tongues, and new railroads delivered the profitable merchandise.  At the same time, the U.S. government was eager to clear the troublesome heathen savages from the west, and repopulate the region with respectable tax-paying, God-fearing settlers.

Here’s the issue.  All members of the family of life, in all types of ecosystems, continuously coevolve at a gradual pace.  Species at the foundation of the food chain, like insects, evolve the ability to produce massive numbers of offspring.  On the other hand, large, long-lived species that experience minimal losses to predators, like elephants and hippos, do not breed like roaches.  Hunter-gatherers were very interested in pursuing large game, rather than mayflies.  The more they came to depend on the use of the dynamic duo, the deadly trio, and the bloody foursome, the more success they could have at overhunting, and causing extinctions.  This was not a slow and gradual process of coevolution, it was more like a technological asteroid strike.

Big Juju Transition

Paul Shepard was an original thinker who could soar far above the concrete walls of consensus reality.  He perceived the Pleistocene to be the zenith of the human journey, and the high-water mark for the health of life on Earth (the Pleistocene ended 11,700 years ago).  Many professors can’t do this.  In the creative minds of wizards, an imaginative interpretation of deep history can conjure provocative visions, and sometimes blow large holes in deeply rooted cultural myths.

For nearly the entire saga of life on Earth — a 4.5 billion year pilgrimage — all critters everywhere were perfectly wild and free, as they should be.  No species anywhere owned, controlled, and selectively bred others.  Shepard perceived the emergence of domesticated dogs as something like a horrific cosmic tear in the universe.  A new and turbulent epoch was born.  He wrote, “The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound.”  To the conventional mindset, that sounds like a ridiculously stoopid idea.  But today the family of life is being massacred by the conventional mindset, a ridiculously stoopid rampage.

The act of gradually transforming a vicious, wild, man-eating predator into a tolerable shit-eating hunting buddy was super-big juju.  Mischievous folks discovered that the spirit of wildness was something that could be suffocated.  If you faithfully drowned the wildest pups in the litter, and allowed the wimps and dimwits to breed, over many generations you could produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that were the opposite of wild — mutant canines who would obey commands from domineering tropical primates.  These oddballs were highly vulnerable to wolves, coyotes, big cats, and other wild predators.  They were unlikely to survive outside the human sphere.

Over time, this understanding of control inspired some diabolical impulses.  Why should we spend so much <bleeping> time chasing wild animals all over the place?  Why don’t we just rip out their normal wild spirit and turn them into passive critters that we can keep in dense confinement near camp?  Wow!  Cool idea!

After many centuries of trial and error, the demented efforts of obsessive-compulsive control freaks succeeded in breaking wild aurochs, sheep, goats, and pigs.  For thousands of years, humans had perceived these wild animals to be sacred beings.  We painted magnificent portraits of them in caves.  Now, reduced to freakish GMOs, they were forcibly bred, castrated, branded, sheared, bobbed, hobbled, milked, slaughtered, butchered, and eaten.  Urp!

During this era, a number of groups were also fooling around with plant domestication.  By and by, territories most suitable for intensive exploitation were able to sharply increase their food production.  More and more fields were cleared on the soft floodplain soils along rivers.  Grasslands for herds were expanded by exterminating primordial forests.  Naturally, this led to growing numbers of bambinos, more tents in the camps, and increased social tensions.

Many centuries later, the last major GMO mammal emerged from the madhouse.  The domesticated horse was a critter with a far more disruptive destiny than the dog.  Shepard wrote that horses and hounds can be seen “as destroyers of nature and humankind.”  As noted, the deadly trio of hunter, dog, and steed enabled stunning advancements in wildlife extermination.  Horse power was used to accelerate soil mining, forest mining, and ore mining.  Horse power pulled wagons, plows, and war chariots.  Horse power revolutionized raiding, warfare, and empire building.  The Mongol empire was enormous [MAP].

Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus was born around A.D. 1050.  He shared many snapshots of the testosterone powered mega violence that came into full bloom during the era of domestication.  “Now the warriors, who were always pillaging the neighborhood, used often to commit great slaughters.  Plundering houses, cutting down cattle, sacking everything, making great hauls of booty, rifling houses, then burning them, massacring male and female promiscuously — these, and not honest dealings, were their occupations.”

King Gram boasted, “Singly against eight at once I drove the darts of death, and smote nine with back-swung sword, when I slew Swarin, who wrongfully assumed his honors and tried to win fame unmerited; wherefore I have oft dyed in foreign blood my blade red with death and reeking with slaughter, and have never blenched at the clash of dagger or the sheen of helmet.”

Stable, long lasting egalitarian cultures like the San, were based on sharing, cooperation, and simple sticks and stones technology.  Cultures of domestication are based on self-interest, competition, domination, and technological innovation.  The horse powered expansion of herding and farming turbocharged food production, population growth, and the size and number of horrendous bloody conflicts.  These aggressive cultures sort of behave like wildfires — as long as they can find resources to consume, and conditions remain favorable, they grow and spread.

In wild times, when wolves killed a deer, it was a perfectly normal act, and nobody soiled their britches.  When domestication arrived, and herds of my animals were grazing, wild predators immediately shape-shifted into demonic enemies that had to be exterminated — every single one of them, if possible.

In wild times, it was perfectly normal and natural for wild herbivores to munch on the greenery.  When domestication arrived, wild grasses shifted into being my grass needed by my herd to increase my wealth.  Wild critters that helped themselves to my grass were thieves that could not be tolerated.  They had no right to exist.

In wild times, there were zero fields planted with crops.  The countryside was a free all-you-can-eat buffet.  Help yourself, take what you can find.  Have a nice day!  When domestication arrived, all the birds, bunnies, coons, deer, and bears that were tempted to sample the fruits of my hard work, in my fields could not be tolerated.  Kill them all!

In normal wild ecosystems, Big Mama Nature encourages long term health.  A forest roasted by a wildfire can usually heal and recover.  In ecosystems ravaged by Big Daddy Dominator, the damage is often irreparable.  The vegetation is stripped off, wildlife erased, the land dries out, flowing springs disappear, the climate gets hotter and dryer, persistent toxins soak in, precious soil is blown away, washed away, or rendered infertile by salt buildup, and so on.  When a Big Daddy settlement is eventually reduced to wasteland, the survivors migrate elsewhere and promptly begin repeating the same cycle of mistakes.

Big Mama is sustainable and durable.  Big Daddy is a one-way death march that burns every bridge behind it.  The ecosystems he rubbishes can never fully heal, and return to their original condition.  He’ll strive to expand his domain, by any means necessary, as far as possible, but Earth is finite.  You can’t destroy more than everything (but he’ll try).  Big Daddy is well on his way to what is known as a Pyrrhic victory.  His heroic efforts for glorious conquest are terribly successful, but the losses he suffers in the process are so enormous that the final victory is meaningless.

In countless city parks and squares, it’s common to see huge bronze statues of male conquerors, holding deadly weapons, riding their snorting steeds.  They are proud monuments of the fanatical Big Daddy cult.  The message of each is “I courageously destroyed the despicable opponent that threatened our glorious way of life.”

Big Daddy is a huffing, puffing, smashing, killing, whirlwind of self-destruction, burning up the fossil energy, moving the topsoil into the sea, causing mass extinctions, poisoning the waters, and on and on.  He is the proud father of an accelerating, out of control climate disaster — a massive challenge against which the brightest nerds in the world are impotent, reduced to delivering happy rainbows of magical thinking (hopium).  On the bright side, the economy continues growing!  Hooray!  Let’s go shopping!

OK, well what would a monument celebrating Big Mama look like?  It would not be bronze.  She detests animal slavery.  She has no cannons.  What she has is the power of persistence, the power of life, the power of regeneration and healing.  Her monument would look like a wild planet.  She will someday watch Big Daddy wheeze, stumble, collapse, take his final breath, and dissolve into the ecosystem.  Then, for many thousands and thousands of years, the surviving species will strive to restore some form of ecological balance once again.

Oh!  A hand is raised in the audience, a question.  Hey, in the New World, substantial civilizations emerged that seemed to have Big Daddy DNA, but they had no horses, cattle, sheep, goats, almost no metal tools or weapons — essentially Stone Age.

Good point!  In fact, several big bloody civilizations did emerge in the horse free Americas, develop productive agriculture, and feed growing mobs.  In South America, they were making a few bronze tools, and ornaments of silver and gold.  When Cortes first arrived, the Valley of Mexico had two million residents, and Tenochtitlan was a city of 200,000 — twice the size of Paris at that time.

In 1492, compared to the Old World, the Americas still had far more wild lands, ancient forests, and abundant wildlife.  Without large herds of livestock, there was not abundant manure to optimize soil fertility and crop production.  Luckily, the lack of horses, plows, wheels, and roads limited their trade, travel, expansion, industry, and agriculture.  Like Australia, the Americas enjoyed a lack of contagious infectious diseases, because they did not have large concentrations of domesticated animals from which to acquire exotic pathogens.

In 1492, Native Americans did not discover Spain, it was the other way around.  Because Europe had horses, they had long distance trade networks which linked a variety of cultures and civilizations.  Networks enabled the spread of devious ideas, kooky religions, domesticated plants and animals, dangerous technological innovations, and deadly epidemics.

Kelekna noted that both people and ideas moved slowly in a horseless world, if they moved at all.  The brilliant mathematical achievement of the Mayans was the invention of the zero — 500 years before the Hindus.  In the Old World, the extremely useful idea of zero spread fast and far, while the Mayan zero never left home.  The voyage of Columbus depended on the existence of countless tools, resources, and skills, none of which were invented in Spain.  Some came from as far away as China, like gunpowder, forged steel, paper, and printing.  Imagine what today would look like if the concept of gunpowder had never left China, and was still only used for glittering fireworks.

Ronald Wright pointed out that in 1492, after at least 15,000 years of separation, the cultures of the Old World and New World directly met each other.  In Mexico, the invaders found “roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theater, art, music, and books.”  Agriculture enables dense populations, hierarchy, and complexity.

Wright also talked about “progress traps,” beneficial innovations that were also severely addictive, like horse domestication, agriculture, metallurgy, autos, or computers.  Once you got hooked on the habit, good luck quitting.  Over time, the impacts of their unintended consequences kept ratcheting up.  The dodgy solution for problematic progress was to introduce more and bigger progress — snowballing lunacy.  Progress traps had no safe and easy Undo button.

Large predators used to provide an important check on our numbers, but many went extinct.  We got too good at killing them.  We got too good at killing large game.  We got too good at confining herds of livestock.  We got too good at producing and storing huge harvests of calorie dense grain.  We got too good at coercing dense populations of humans to obey orders and perform tedious, difficult, dangerous, soul killing work.  We got too good at perfecting insanely unsustainable technology.  Now what?  [UNDO] [UNDO] [UNDO]  Shit!

Makgabeng Cave

Mother Africa was the land where hominins first evolved two million years ago.  The human line emerged maybe 300,000 years ago.  Hominins coevolved with the ecosystems they inhabited.  Africa was blessed with good luck.  Jared Diamond noted that no crop plants were domesticated south of the equator in Africa, and there were no large herbivores that were suitable for domestication — only the guinea fowl was enslaved in this region.

Thus, the official way of life remained nomadic hunting and gathering.  Traditional wild Africans caused much less disturbance than folks who emigrated out of Africa, into exotic ecosystems, where old survival strategies met many new challenges.  Those who wandered into Eurasia discovered wild cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses.  These animals were domesticated and, along with agriculture, they ignited radical change in the human saga.

Lyall Watson wrote a biography of Adrian Boshier (1939-1978), an English boy who arrived in Africa at the age of 16.  He learned to venture into the bush alone, taking just a knife and a bag of salt, in search of old Africa.  Boshier slept in caves and dined on stuff including bats and lizards.  He collected the venom of snakes and scorpions to earn some money.

At a cave in the mountains of Makgabeng, Boshier discovered ancient paintings, and some of these were terribly disturbing and depressing.  The images included sheep — peculiar critters from outer space.  Some folks had migrated back into Africa, and they imported a number of destructive habits and beliefs.

By three or four thousand years ago, this exotic invasive culture had metastasized into a widespread pastoral economy that often led to conflict and overgrazing.  This unsustainable way of life caused ever-increasing destruction.  It has now almost completely eliminated the earliest human culture — the culture of our oldest, wildest, and freest ancestors — the folks whose genes we all carry.

Extra Credit Reading

Out of courtesy to loyal readers, I’ve tried to avoid recycling earlier writing here.  My second book, Sustainable or Bust (2013), discussed dogs in three essays.  These essays are also on my blog.

Before Dogs Became Pets looked at the wolf-to-dog transition, and the shift from scavenger to hunting companion, to herding aid, to pet.  For tribal people, dogs were not beloved “fur children.”

 Stray Dog Blues talked about the soaring global dog population (900 million in 2018), of which 75 percent are strays.  Vicious dog packs are a growing problem.  Dogs eat humans, and humans eat dogs.  The pet industry makes huge profits.

 Beyond Zenith described how dogs helped hunters kill more game.  War dogs were trained to kill foes on the battlefield.  Dogs have now become pets, living toys.  Health issues with dogs are increasing.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 30

[Note: This is the thirtieth 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 202 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.] 

Horse

The first species of the horse genus (Equus) emerged in North America about 4.5 million years ago.  Over time, some migrated to South America, and others crossed the land bridge to Eurasia, and spread as far as Western Europe.  Maybe 15,000 years ago, hunters from Siberia discovered America, home to many horses.  Over the following centuries, a surge of megafauna extinctions occurred.  The last horse in the Americas died in Patagonia about 7000 B.C.  In 1493, Spaniards brought domesticated horses to the Americas, and by 1550, there were 10,000 of them rediscovering their ancestral homeland.

Graham Harvey noted that horses are fine tuned for grassland living.  They can run at a sustained gallop of 43 mph (70 km/h).  Sheep and cattle have complicated digestive tracts, so they need to rest after grazing.  Horses can eat and run.  They can go up to four days without water, so they can utilize grasslands farther from water sources.

Dixie West added that horses are able to efficiently digest a high fiber diet, so they can live on a daily intake of just 22 pounds (10 kg) of vegetation.  They are better able to survive on low quality forage, and they require less pampering than other livestock.  Prior to winter, herders had to gather and store hay for feeding cattle and sheep.  Horses were able to feed themselves throughout the cold months.  They also grew warm coats. 

Food Critters

Horses and hominins have had a long relationship.  As mentioned earlier, Neanderthals were trapping and killing horses at the Roche de Solutré site in France about 55,000 years ago.  Later, around 37,000 years ago, humans killed many horses at the same location.  West noted that, when panicked, horses flee in a single file, rather than rapidly scattering in every direction.  This made it easier to drive herds into traps. 

Over time, hunters got too good at trapping and killing horses.  Pita Kelekna wrote an excellent book on the history of the horse-human relationship.  She noted that by the Neolithic era (8000–4500 B.C.), the once plentiful wild horses had disappeared across most of Europe.  Some were able to survive in small pockets of Spain and central Europe. 

To the east, large numbers of wild horses thrived on the vast wide open steppes, where there was no brush or trees to conceal hungry hunters.  The placement of a horse’s eyes gives them a 300° range of vision — they can see in almost every direction.  The flat landscape lacked ravines or valleys into which herds could be conveniently driven, trapped, and killed.

Humans have been eating horses for tens of thousands of years.  Today, folks in many nations continue enjoying lunch dates with horses.  In the top eight horse loving nations, 4.7 million are eaten every year. 

Domestication

Long before horses were enslaved, sheep, goats, and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East.  Horses remained wild and free until maybe 4000 B.C.  They had thrived on the steppes, which were northern shortgrass prairies that spanned a 5,000 mile (8,046 km) range from Hungary to Manchuria.  Several scholars have speculated that domestication probably saved horses from extinction, because it transformed them from wild and free into private property — my horsy!

Wild horses were strong, fast, intelligent, and aggressive.  They were not easy to domesticate.  When cornered, they aggressively stomp, kick, and bite.  Swift kicks could be fatal.  Zebras, their Equus cousins, have never been tamed, despite countless attempts — the older they get, the meaner.

The domestication of horses was a revolutionary event in the human saga — like fire, agriculture, metallurgy, fossil energy, nuclear technology, and so on.  Countless highly destructive new trends did not become possible until after their domestication.  Sometimes it’s interesting to play “what if.”  What if evolution had selected for untamable zebras, rather than horses? 

Kelekna described, at great length, the huge impacts that domesticated horses had on the course of both human and environmental history.  At first, domesticated horses were kept for meat, milk, and hides.  Eventually folks learned how to effectively utilize horse power, greatly reducing society’s heavy dependence on human muscles.  Horses could pull stuff like plows, wagons, logs, and battle chariots.  They could carry heavy loads.  They could be ridden.  A herder with a dog could oversee 150 to 200 sheep, but a mounted herder could manage 500. 

Horses enabled humans to quickly travel long distances, a huge boost to human mobility.  They made it far easier to hunt large animals, or to raid enemies.  Trade networks could extend much farther, and transport larger cargoes of goods back and forth.  Long distance travel could also transfer technologies, religions, ideas, infectious diseases, and invasive exotics over long distances.  Horse domestication promoted the expansion of farming and herding, spurring population growth and conflict.

Nomadic Pastoralists

Bridle, saddle, and stirrup innovations eventually enabled humans to ride horses, at high speed, while effectively using deadly weapons to kill game or enemies.  Military campaigns could travel farther, and strike fast and hard.  Horses enabled the emergence of large nomad empires, and the spilling of oceans of blood.  Kelekna said that horsepower greatly benefitted the pursuit of “bloodshed, massacres, deportations, enslavement, amputation, beheadings, torture, incineration, rape, castration, famine, pestilence, and destruction.”

Nomadic herders did not need to trade with agricultural societies in order to acquire food.  They enjoyed an independent lifestyle.  Seed-bearing grasses were common on the steppe, and nomads simply gathered the wild grain.  Herds provided milk, blood, and meat.  Nomads were likely better nourished than most of the hungry dirty peasants and slaves in farm country.

Paul Shepard wrote that around 1800 B.C., mounted warriors with iron weapons opened the door to a new and super bloody chapter in the human saga.  Sudden surprise attacks from hordes of nomad warriors shattered or destroyed many civilizations, which were plump sitting ducks that were irresistibly tempting to plunder.  These attacks inspired the construction of a variety of defensive fortifications — wooden palisades, massive stone walls, moats, drawbridges, and so on.  Traditional population management services formerly provided by man-eating predators were now shifting to warriors, starvation, and epidemics.

It was no longer safe to live in many regions.  An old Bedouin proverb declares, “Raids are our agriculture.”  Describing tribes of horse-worshipping German herders in A.D. 98, Tacitus wrote that fighting was better than farming.  “They even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood.”  Shepard noted that these mounted nomadic raiders developed a culture of “hierarchy, theft, rebellious sons, and competitive use of the earth.” 

Our wild hunter-gatherer ancestors were egalitarian, no leaders, all were equal.  The secret to their tens of thousands of years of success was sharing, cooperation, and an intimate relationship with the land.  Nomads had an entirely different worldview, one that favored patriarchy, raiding, conquering, accumulating personal wealth, and competing for status.  Primary components of their worldview continue to be the foundation in modern cultures.

Horses and Wheels

David Anthony wrote that wheeled vehicles first appeared in the Old World around 3300 B.C., and were of great benefit to herders.  Carts made it much easier to move families, food, tents, and water to greener pastures, for extended stays, to better keep their herds well fed.  He said that horses and carts enabled nomads to intensify their exploitation of the steppes, which had previously been little used by humans.

To better appreciate the impact of horses and wheels in the Old World, it’s interesting to look at the Americas.  In the New World, the llamas and alpacas of Peru were the only large animals domesticated, and neither was capable of carrying an adult rider.  In the Old World, the diabolical invention of the wheel greatly accelerated agriculture, deforestation, population growth, empire building, and on and on.  Industrial civilization could not exist in a world without wheels.  In the New World, the only wheels were those found on tiny clay toys.  Without horses, the pampas and prairies of the Americas had wee populations, and little or no agriculture.

Having no carts or wagons, the Inca civilization in Peru did not need to build smooth roads.  They did build bridges, dig tunnels, and cut steps up steep hillsides.  Pack trains of llamas could travel up to 12 miles per day (19 km), with each animal carrying up to 101 pounds (46 kg).  Speedy long-distance communication was provided by messages relayed from one Inca runner to the next.  This was much slower than Genghis Khan’s pony express system, which could move messages 248 miles (400 km) per day.

In Mesoamerica, the pack animals were two legged primates.  On a good day, a healthy lad might carry 50 pounds (23 kg) for 13 to 17 miles (21 to 28 km).  Without carts or pack animals, Mesoamericans could not create vast sprawling empires like Rome.  While the Mayans built some roads, hiking in Mexico was via dirt paths, where they existed.  Military adventures were restricted in the New World.  Each soldier had to carry his own provisions, which limited the load size and distance travelled.  Thus, if supplies could not be snatched from villagers along the way, campaigns would have been limited to round trips of eight days or so. 

In Eurasia, huge Mongol cavalries could zoom across the steppe at 68 miles (110 km) per day.  The Eurasian steppes experienced century after century of the rise and fall of numerous hordes of horse-mounted nomads like the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks.  Mongol empires grew with explosive speed.  They peaked between 1279 and 1350, when they inhabited Iraq, Iran, central Asia, most of Russia, and all of China.  This was the largest contiguous empire in human history.  Later, the British Empire controlled more territory, but in many scattered regions.

Beasts of Burden

Paul Shepard was the opposite of a horse lover, because of the many new imbalances that domesticated horses enabled.  Compared to hand labor, the introduction of horses to agriculture allowed farm production to double.  This, of course, led to population growth, which often increased faster than the endlessly busy Grim Reaper could keep up with.  Agriculture’s faithful shadow is soil destruction.  We’re essentially eating soil.  The skin is being torn off of Mother Earth.  This has no long term future.

Clive Ponting wrote that before 1800, animals provided just 25 percent of the work energy, and humans did most of the rest (many serfs couldn’t afford work animals).  We used very little energy from windmills or waterwheels.  Feeding a horse required at least 6 acres (2.5 ha) of grassland, oxen a bit less.  In those days, most land suitable for crops was needed to grow food for humans, because agriculture was far less productive than today.

Consequently, prior to 1800, since people couldn’t afford a horse, they walked.  In that era, about 95 percent of humans in farming societies were peasants.  We have soft lives today, but Ponting reminds us that “Until about the last two centuries in every part of the world nearly everyone lived on the edge of starvation.”  My grandmother never tossed out apple cores, because the entire apple was food, seeds and all.

William McNeill noted that another troublesome cargo that domesticated beasts delivered into human society was deadly pathogens.  When human communities were brought into constant close contact with animals, it was far easier for diseases and parasites to leap from one species to another.  Over time, different diseases emerged in different regions.  Eventually, long distance travel for trade or warfare carried diseases from their place of origin to virgin populations that had zero immunity to them.  From A.D. 1200 to 1500, isolated regional disease pools eventually combined to form a large pool of civilized diseases.

The Black Death likely arose in China around 1331.  From there, by and by, it spread in every direction.  It hitched rides on merchant ships, armies, and trade caravans, and eventually appeared in Crimea by 1346.  From there, it proceeded to sail to Italy, rapidly visit much of Europe, and promptly delete about a third of the population.

Horses Return Home

Horses originally evolved in the Americas, and then blinked out in 7000 B.C.  In 1493, after an absence of 8,500 years, Spaniards brought domesticated horses back to the Americas.  Reintroduction eventually had dramatic effects on the western U.S. plains.  In 1598, Spanish colonists brought domesticated horses and other livestock to New Mexico.  One way or another, plains Indians acquired some of these animals. 

Richard White discussed how the acquisition of horses impacted the entire plains ecosystem.  Horses quickly became popular with many tribes.  Horses were trade commodities, the target of raids, and the inspiration for many bloody conflicts.  With horses, it became easy for hunters to kill far more buffalo.  With access to more food, population grew, tribal rivalries intensified, and warfare increased.  Horse stealing became a normal activity among the people of the plains.  Living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure, and corn growing villages were especially vulnerable to sudden raids.

Samuel Gwynne noted that prior to horses, the southern plains were lightly populated.  The region wasn’t well suited for agriculture, and hunting buffalo, antelope, and elk on foot was far from easy.  The prey was much speedier than the hunters.  A buffalo can sprint at 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  The acquisition of horses revolutionized buffalo hunting.  A number of tribes abandoned farming, and became hunters.  With easier access to food, more people could be fed.

As American colonists began moving away from the Atlantic coast, into a wilderness of forests, prairies, and wetlands, travelling on horseback was difficult or impossible.  There were paths, but not roads suitable for wagons or carts.  At that time, Indians in the eastern U.S. travelled by footpath and canoe, via predictable routes, where colonists could ambush them.  Tribes that raised corn were far more vulnerable than nomadic hunters.  When settlers found villages, they burned them.  Stored food went up in smoke.

When colonists moved west of the Mississippi, they eventually moved beyond forest country and onto the open plains, where they met Indians on horses for the first time, and got blindsided.  It took many serious beatings until they figured out how to fight them.  Comanche warriors could readily attack any target within 400 miles.  Settlers and soldiers were sitting ducks for fast moving bands of warriors.  A warrior could shoot 20 arrows whilst a soldier or settler reloaded his musket once. 

James Sherow wrote about the challenges plains Indians had with keeping horses in the Arkansas River Valley.  Horses gave them amazing new powers, and painful new headaches.  Horses were personal property, and the more you owned, the higher your social status.  In 1855, the Cheyennes owned an average of 5.5 horses per person, and the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Arapahos owned 6.2.

Climate had a major impact on the grassland.  One acre (0.4 ha) could produce 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of short grass when annual rainfall rose to 20 inches (51 cm).  When it dropped to 10 inches, only 450 pounds.  During hot spells, rain evaporated in midair.  Creeks and springs dried up.  During winter, the protein content of grass was half of summer levels.  In harsh winters, large herds shrank.  Horses in close confinement provided comfortable homes for a variety of parasites.

George Catlin studied western Indian tribes from 1832-1839, when buffalo herds were still enormous, and natives used bows and arrows to hunt during high speed pursuits on horseback.  He did many drawings and paintings, and wrote extensive notes.  While he was fascinated by the many things he learned, he was also sad, because the plains Indians and the buffalo were on a dead end path.  The arrival of civilized people brought lots of dark juju to the west.  Buffalo were hunted in winter when their fur was thick, and their hides were most valuable for the buffalo robe market.  After skinning the animal, the rest of the carcass was left for the wolves.  Indians living far from traders wasted no part of the animals they killed.

In May of 1832, a mounted hunting party of 500 or 600 Sioux chased a large herd for several hours, and killed many.  At the end of the day, they came to the fort with 1,400 buffalo tongues, for which they received a few gallons of whiskey, which did not last long among the thirsty lads.  The hides and meat of the dead animals were left on the grass.

The whites were making a nice profit today, and it never occurred to them to give consideration to the future of the buffalo.  Among the tribes, there was an ancient and widespread belief that the buffalo were a gift from the Great Spirit, infinite in number, and whatever they took would be replaced.  Whites also overhunted the buffalo.  Catlin could see that the buffalo could be gone in as soon as 8 to 10 years, and was deeply disturbed about the insanity of it all.

Peak Horse

The use of horses for transportation and traction peaked early in the twentieth century.  Clive Ponting noted that the U.S. was home to 20 to 30 million horses in 1900.  About a quarter of the nation’s cropland was needed to produce their food.  Model T Fords did not require six acres of good grassland to fuel them.

My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and cities.  Venerable physicist Albert Bartlett calculated that, with regard to the all-time total volume of oil extracted by humankind, more than half of it will be consumed within the lifespan of the generation born since 1966.  We are living during a temporary explosion of staggering waste, and this idiotic binge has an expiration date.  So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power, right?  Well, umm, there are some challenges.

Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  By 1898, big city streets were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums. 

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.  In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring manure to their fields.  By 1900, there was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.  Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).  Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral diseases.  In 1880, 41 horses died each day on the streets of New York.  The average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).  Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables — excellent disease incubators.  In 1872, the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by the equine influenza virus.  Coughing spread it from one animal to the next.  Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically reduced.  Folks had to use wheelbarrows and handcarts to transport goods.  The postal service was hobbled.  Freight piled up.  Coal deliveries stopped.  Food distribution wheezed.  On farms, plows and other equipment fell idle.  Boats quit moving on the Erie Canal.  Horse-drawn fire engines and street cars did not move.  When a big fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going out on civilization as we know it.  Bye-bye railroads, air travel, sea transport, refrigerators, elevators, mining, supermarkets, and so on.  Sewage treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink out.  Vast areas of cropland will cease being plowed, planted, irrigated, and harvested.  Humans may actually have to walk (eek!!). 

Future generations will gather around campfires and laugh at hilarious stories about how people used to live.  It’s sad that we the living can’t see this.