Wild Free and Happy Sample 24

[Note: This is the twenty-fourth 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.] 

Manmade Grasslands

It didn’t take long for our hominin ancestors, creatures of the grass, to learn that large game was most often found in grassland habitats.  Forests were more challenging to hunt in, and they were mostly home to small game.  This fact of life motivated hunters to eagerly follow their stomachs to wonderlands of grass-fed, organic, all-you-can-eat flesh.  Therefore, the human diaspora out of Africa tended to pursue routes that majored in grasslands. 

As they migrated out, their journey took them to grasslands in the Middle East, and then Europe.  Barry Cunliffe noted that a vast steppe grassland began in Hungary and ended in Manchuria, providing an easy to travel grass highway that was 5,600 miles (9,000 km) long.  As an added bonus, the steppe was largely carpeted with excellent vegetation that was drought-resistant and frost-tolerant. 

Later, around A.D. 1300, Marco Polo described the Silk Roads that spanned across the steppe, connecting the civilizations of Europe and the Far East.  This link enabled much cultural knowledge to move back and forth (a mixed blessing).  The steppe also enabled the emergence of tribes of pastoralists, with their large roaming herds of livestock.  These tribes were sometimes absorbed into powerful empires, like those of the Mongols and Huns.

Once established in Asia, the front line pioneers of the human diaspora were eventually able to wander from Siberia, over the Beringia land bridge, and then explore the incredible grassland Serengetis of the Americas.

Anyway, our early hominin ancestors could not help but notice that when occasional wildfires burned off the dry grassland vegetation, tender shoots would soon emerge from the ashes.  Fresh greenery looked heavenly to the hungry grazing critters, and hunters deeply loved grazing critters.  Fire was a good tonic for the health of grass.  It burned up accumulated dead foliage, allowing more solar energy to feed the grass people.  Also, when the snows melted away, the ground warmed up faster when the litter was gone, enabling the growing season to begin earlier.

Several million years ago, a clever hominin learned how to kindle a manmade flame by generating friction.  One day, by accident or intention, flames from a campfire somehow ignited nearby grass, and winds pushed the roaring blaze across hill and dale, incinerating brush, trees, dry grass, and unlucky wildlife. 

This exciting experience gave birth to a devious idea.  They could deliberately start grass fires wherever and whenever they wanted.  Burning fried the shoots of woody vegetation, eliminated dead plant debris, and encouraged grass to produce at optimal rates.  They could encourage bigger herds of game by expanding and maintaining high quality grassland.  They could entice game to graze in locations optimal for hunting them, like places close to a water source, and not far from camp.  By cleverly controlling nature, they could eat better, feed more bambinos, and enjoy a higher standard of living.  So they did. 

We folks in the era of glowing screens have a hard time imagining that the practice of deliberately burning grass was a remarkable history bending innovation.  But back in the good old days, it was a very hot idea.  The routine eventually spread around the world, and substantially reconfigured many ecosystems.  It was a highly influential transition in the human saga, far more significant than smart phones or automobiles, which are ridiculous unsustainable amusements that have no long term future.

Initially, fires were used to expand or improve open grassland.  Once woody vegetation was eliminated, additional fires were routinely set every few years to prevent its recovery.  Eventually, there were no more seeds of woody plants hiding in the sod, so the burn cycles could then be less frequent.

The practice of attracting large game by maintaining top quality grassland is often called firestick farming.  It was an easy low tech way to increase food resources.  Alfred Crosby noted that firestick farming had transformed much of six continents a long time before the first field was planted.  Let’s look at a few examples.

Australia

In Australia, the firestick farming practiced by Aborigines was a time-proven fine art that evolved after many centuries of trial and error, learning and tweaking.  Humans arrived between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, and they must have brought with them the magical art of fire starting.  Within several thousand years of their arrival, 85 percent of the megafauna species were extinct, including 1,000 pound (453 kg) kangaroos, 400 pound (181 kg) birds, lizards 25 feet (7.6 m) long, and tortoises the size of Volkswagens.  Over time, many dry forests that were not fire-tolerant went up in smoke, and were displaced by fire-promoting eucalypt forests.

Bill Gammage described the Australia that British colonists observed in 1788, when they first washed up on shore.  The landscape looked radically different from today.  Much of what is now dense forest or scrub used to be manmade grasslands.  Early white eyewitnesses frequently commented that large regions looked like parks.  In those days, all English parks were the private estates of the super-rich.  Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the beautiful park-like Australian countryside were penniless bare-naked Stone Age anarchist heathens.  Their wealth was their time-proven knowledge, and their respect for the land.

In 1788, large areas of Australia had been actively maintained by firestick farming, which greatly expanded habitat for the delicious critters that the natives loved to dine on.  The Aborigines used both hot fires and cool fires to manage vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire dependent, or fire promoting.  Different fires were used to promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses.  When starting a fire, the time and location was carefully calculated to encourage the desired result.  According to Gammage, most of Australia was burnt about every one to five years.  On any day of the year, a fire was likely burning somewhere.

The natives generally enjoyed an affluent lifestyle.  They had learned how to live through hundred-year droughts and giant floods.  No region was too harsh for people to inhabit.  Their culture had taboos that set limits on reproduction and hunting.  During the breeding seasons of important animals, hunting was prohibited near their gathering places.  Lots of food resources were left untouched most of the time, a vital safety net.  The Dreaming had two rules: obey the Law, and leave the world as you found it.

The colonists were clueless space aliens.  Their glorious vision was to transfer a British way of life to a continent that was highly unsuited for it.  Australia’s soils were ancient and minimally fertile, and the climate was bipolar — extreme multi-year droughts could be washed away by sudden deluges.  But, they brought their livestock and plows and gave it a whirl.  They believed that hard work was a virtue.  The Aborigines were astonished to observe how much time and effort the silly newcomers invested in producing the weird stuff they ate.

The new settlers wanted to live like proper rural Brits — permanent homes, built on fenced private property.  They freaked out when the natives set fires to maintain the grassland.  Before long, districts began banning these burns.  This led to the return of saplings and brush.  So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.

Without burning, insect numbers exploded.  Without burning, fuels built up, leading to new catastrophes, called bushfires.  The Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851.  It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep, thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.

Mark Brazil shared a story that was full of crap.  In Britain, cow manure was promptly and properly composted by patriotic dung beetles, which returned essential nutrients to the soil.  In Australia, none of the native dung beetles could get the least bit interested in cow shit.  It was too wet, and too out in the open.  Cow pies could patiently sit on the grass unmolested for four years, because nobody loved them.  This deeply hurt their feelings.

Australian flies, on the other hand, discovered that cow pies made fabulous nurseries for their children.  Each pat could feed 3,000 maggots, which turned into flies — dense clouds of billions and billions of flies — which the hard working Christians did not in any way fancy.  Being outdoors was hellish.  In the 1960s, folks imported British dung beetles, which loved the taste and aroma of cow pies.  Oddly, this is one example where an introduced exotic species apparently didn’t create unintended consequences.  When they ran out of pies to eat, the beetles simply died.

Anyway, a continent inhabited by Stone Age people was substantially altered by firestick farming and hunting.  The Australia of 1788 was radically different from when the first human arrived.  We’ll never know if continued firestick farming would have eventually led to severely degraded ecosystems.  Some serious injuries can take a long time to fully develop.  Many attempts to deliberately control ecosystems have spawned huge unintended consequences over time.  For example, agriculture.

United States

In the central U.S., the prairie ecosystem emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, displacing the tundra that had emerged as the ice sheets melted and withdrew.  Prairies support complex biodiversity, with different mixes of species adapting to different mixes of soil types, moisture, and climate.  Two hundred years ago, the prairies were home to 30 to 60 million bison, and numerous other herbivores.

Stephen Pyne wrote that when white colonists landed in America, the western portion of the Great Plains was shortgrass prairie, too dry to support forest.  But the eastern portion was tallgrass prairie.  Most of it had rainfall and soils suitable for forest, but Native Americans had gradually pushed back the forest cover.  They maintained this highly productive prairie by burning it every three years or so.  It provided excellent habitat for buffalo and other delicacies.

Burning was a common practice almost everywhere in North America.  By A.D. 1000, the expansion of manmade grasslands enabled buffalo to cross the Mississippi River for the first time.  By the 1600s, they had reached Massachusetts on the Atlantic coast.  In some regions, forests were periodically burned to prevent the accumulation of brush.  This was often done in late autumn, after the leaves had fallen.  Pioneers commented that these fire-maintained forests resembled European parks.  The open floor made it easier to travel, which sped the process of colonization.

Shepard Krech wrote that California Indians burned chaparral (dense brush) to entice deer.  Along the east coast, there were oak openings (meadows with scattered trees) as large as 1,000 acres (404 ha).  Manmade grasslands in the Shenandoah Valley covered a thousand square miles (2,590 km²).  Indians in Oregon’s Willamette Valley engaged in extensive routine burning.  When colonists ended this traditional burning, there was a tremendous recovery of forest in many regions.  Krech noted that Indian fires sometimes exploded into raging infernos that burned for days, sometimes killing entire buffalo herds, up to a thousand animals. 

Between about A.D. 800 and 1300, Indian agriculture greatly expanded, majoring in corn (maize), beans, and squash.  Much of their cropland was former forest, and it was kept cleared by regular burning.  Their fields were often 100 acres (40 ha), and sometimes 1,000.  Because they had no livestock to produce manure for fertilizer, soils were often depleted in a few years.  So, they cleared more forest, and the depleted fields once again grew trees.  This cycle could be repeated until the soil was junk.

In the Midwest, where large areas of forest had been replaced by manmade tallgrass prairie, the topsoil was deep and highly fertile.  Settlers, arriving with plows and draft animals, were able to turn the thick sod, plant grasses like corn and wheat, and reap impressive harvests.  Today, maybe one percent of tallgrass prairie still survives.  A number of states that were once primarily forest or tallgrass prairie are now sprawling farmland.

Michael Williams noted that as the diseases of civilization spread westward, Indians died in great numbers.  They had zero immunity to highly contagious Old World pathogens.  Diseases spread westward far faster than the expansion of settlers.  The half-lucky Indians who survived the epidemics were herded into reservations.  Consequently, the cycle of periodic burning stopped, and the forests quickly returned.  The high mortality of disease resulted in extensive reforestation.  Forests in 1750 may have been bigger and denser than they had been in the previous thousand years.  When whites eventually arrived to create permanent agricultural communities, the regrown forests had to be cleared.

Britain

When the glaciers of the last ice age began melting, sea levels were very low, and England was connected by dry land to Ireland, Scandinavia, and continental Europe.  Barry Cunliffe wrote that as the ice retreated, and the climate warmed, the newly exposed lands went through a sequence of transitions — from tundra, to steppe, and then forest.  Essentially most of Western Europe became a vast forest.  Large game thrived on the tundra and steppe, but the expansion of forests reduced grazing land area, and the abundance of large game.

By 9000 B.C., hunter-gatherers apparently made some small clearings in the forest to attract game.  By 6000 B.C., England became disconnected from the continent by rising sea levels.  By 4500 B.C., when farmers and herders began to trickle in, England was largely a forest, except for the highlands.  Hunters dined on red deer, wild boar, and aurochs.  By 3000 B.C., there were substantial clearances for cropland and pasture.  By A.D. 1100, just 15 percent of Britain was forest.  By 1919, it was five percent, Britannia was essentially stripped naked.

Jed Kaplan’s team of researchers wrote a paper on the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  It included stunning maps that illustrated the shrinkage of forests between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1850.  [MAP]  Forests can be pushed back by killing them via burning, chopping, or girdling.  Tropical primates are the only critters that have the spooky ability to create such massive change, affecting entire continents.

In the 1970s, Hugh Brody was working on a British documentary about the Inuit people of Canada.  He had worked closely with an elder named Anaviapik, who had never travelled outside of his homeland.  When the film editing was done, both got on a plane, and flew to London to bless the finished version.  One day, Brody took Anaviapik for a drive in the countryside, and he was totally freaked out by what he saw.  “It’s all built!”  The natural face of the land had entirely been torn off, and replaced with manmade scars.

J. B. MacKinnon mentioned the story of a British scientist visiting the U.S.  From an overlook in the White Mountain National Forest, he could gaze down on 800,000 acres of woodland — an overwhelming experience.  The man burst into tears and had a long, hard cry.  At Yellowstone, he saw wolves in the wild for the first time, and he dropped to his knees.

Ireland

The story in Ireland was similar to Britain in many ways, but Ireland got much more rainfall, annually receiving 50 to 200 inches (127-508 cm) of precipitation.  The wet climate encouraged the growth of lush temperate rainforests.  Frederick Aalen noted that early hunter-gatherers arrived about 8,000 years ago, when the isle was covered with a dense unbroken forest.  Folks lived along coastlines, lakes, and streams.  In the forest they created some openings to attract game, but these were apparently small in scale.

Farmers and herders began arriving around 3500 B.C., and the long war on trees commenced.  By the end of the 1600s, the destruction of native forests was nearly complete.  When Aalen wrote in 1978, just three percent of the land was covered by natural forest or fake forest (tree farms).  Deforestation had many unintended consequences.  William MacLeish noted that in the good old days, the rainforest wicked up a lot of moisture from the land, and allowed the breezes to disperse it into the atmosphere.  When the trees were gone, this dispersal ended, but the Gulf Stream continued delivering warm rainy weather from the Caribbean.  Consequently, water tables rose, bogs spread, and ground turned acid.

If we disregard the serious damage caused by deforestation, Ireland seemed to be a perfect place for raising livestock.  Winters were mild, the grass was green all year, and there was no need to grow, cut, and store hay for winter feed.  Barns were not needed to protect livestock from the cold.  Milk and meat were available all year round.  Herding worked well, but the very rainy climate made it rather risky to grow grain, despite the rich soils.

In A.D. 1185, King Henry II sent Giraldus Cambrensis (Jerry of Wales) to Ireland and report on the conditions.  His report mentioned many beautiful lakes, where some of the fish were larger than any he had ever seen before.  Common freshwater fish included salmon, trout, eels, and oily shad.  Along the coast, saltwater fish were abundant.  The woods were home to “stags so fat that they lose their speed.”  There were vast herds of boars and wild pigs.  Small hares were numerous.  Wolves had not yet been fully exterminated.  He said it was common to see the remains of Irish elk, a species that vanished on the island before the arrival of humans.  Their remains were commonly found in bogs, often in groups.

The Irish people lived like beasts, he wrote.  They held agriculture in contempt, and had no interest in the glittering wealth of the outer world.  There were large tracts of land suitable for crops, but folks had no interest in a shift to backbreaking drudgery.  The herding life worked just fine.  Cambrensis felt great pity for the uncivilized natives.  “Their greatest delight was to be exempt from toil, and their richest possession was the enjoyment of liberty.” 

Ireland was a great place to be a hunter-gatherer, as long as the clans avoided classic booboos like overhunting, overbreeding, or allowing the introduction of domesticated livestock and bloodthirsty colonizers.  Unfortunately, booboos happen.  The wild stags, wolves, and boars were perfectly adapted to the ecosystem, and caused no permanent injuries.  Humans often have a difficult time smoothly blending into ecosystems.  Will shamans ever discover a safe and effective cure for cleverness fever?

Wild Free and Happy Sample 08

[Note: This is the eighth 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.] 

Domestication of Fire

Before hominins learned how create fire, they very carefully preserved the flames of a naturally caused fire by feeding it fuel.  Burning sticks could be taken to other locations and become the source of additional fires.  Folks were extremely careful to preserve the live embers because, if they ever went out, the unlucky brothers and sisters might begin to smell like cat food.

Once upon a time, in an African wilderness, we aren’t sure when, someone figured out how to conjure a dancing flame into being.  Whoa!  In the hominin saga, that first glowing ember was the equivalent of an asteroid strike — a big one.  It catapulted our ancestors outside of the family of life, and into a spooky new realm of supernatural power and danger.  It was the magic ring that gave our ancestors the ability to eventually become the dominant animal on Earth (for a while). 

Unfortunately, the powerful magic was not delivered with warning labels attached.  The gift box did not include powerful herbs and potions to inspire profound wisdom and godlike foresight.  No animal needs these abilities.  Hominins are animals.  The Great Spirit apparently had a mischievous sense of humor.

The four elements are earth, water, air, and fire.  Pyne perceived the first manmade fire to be an act of staggering ecological audacity.  Tropical primates had found the keys to the mastery of fire.  Good grief!  The event is reminiscent of the old Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, in which a half-clever trainee recklessly conjured a hurricane of big magic that he was powerless to stop, which soon got totally out of control. 

Without domesticated fire, hominins could have remained perfectly sustainable tropical primates, like baboons.  With fire, we acquired an impossible responsibility to use it with flawless wisdom, generation after generation, wherever we went.  The ancestors of baboons effortlessly lived sustainably for several million years by simply living like baboons — brilliant!  When hominins domesticated fire, they lost the magnificent inherent stability that comes from simply being ordinary animals, like all the others.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had visited Earth 100,000 years ago, our ancestors would have appeared to be nothing more than ordinary animals.  For a long time, I accepted that.  Now I don’t.  Those visiting space aliens would have noticed that one species — and only one — maintained fires in their encampments.  This practice was not the slightest bit ordinary.  Hominins were the only animals who could deliberately ignite or extinguish a fire.  By and by, when hominins go extinct, so will domesticated fire, and the monsters it conjured into existence.

Paleoanthropologists and archaeologists have endless screechy arguments about the dates when prehistoric changes happened, like the domestication of fire.  Pretty much, everyone agrees that it happened at least 400,000 years ago, and the most likely suspect was Homo erectus.  Others point to two million year old ashes in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The Swartkrans Cave near Johannesburg is a special site.  Many years of assorted stuff has built up on the floor, and the crud has been carefully excavated.  In the oldest layers, no charcoal is found.  It is an era before fire.  At this level, there are complete skeletons of big cats, and the scattered gnawed bones of the critters they ate, including more than 100 individual hominins.  In this era, cats were the top predator.  Higher up, charcoal is found in newer layers, about 1.6 million years ago, the age of fire.  Here are found complete hominin skeletons, and the scattered bones of the critters they gnawed, including big cats — hominins were now the top predator.

Today, a growing number of scientists think it’s time to announce the end of the Holocene Epoch (from 11,700 B.P. to now), and declare the arrival of the embarrassing Anthropocene Epoch.  Epochs are time periods in geologic history that leave behind a layer of residue that is unique and recognizable.  Carboniferous was the coal era.  Jurassic was the era of petroleum and natural gas.  The Anthropocene is the era when humans conquered the Earth, and unwisely initiated massive and irreversible change.

If you ever want to start a bloody fistfight at a bar full of scruffy drunken scientists, ask this: When did the Anthropocene begin?  Some say 1945, the dawn of the nuclear age.  Some say 1800, the kickoff of the Industrial Revolution.  Some say 8000 B.C., the Agricultural Revolution.  Paul Shepard thought that the game changer was the Hunting Revolution, when hominins learned how to make and use deadly stone tipped javelins and lances, hunt in packs like wolves, kill too many large animals, and feed their energy-guzzling oversized brains with highly nutritious grass fed organic meat.  Ronald Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” the first progress trap (a difficult to undo “advance”).

James Scott thought that the good old days ended with the domestication of fire.  In his mind, the nightmare world we live in is the result of four domestications — fire, animals, plants, and humans.  Domesticated fire, like livestock, required breeding, feeding, and oversight to keep it from running away from its master.  Domesticated fire was as addictive as heroin, a habit impossible to willfully quit.  The habit eventually spread around the world.  Carleton Coon noted that only a few folks made it into the nineteenth century without becoming fire makers — the Tasmanians, Andaman Islanders, and the Pygmies of the Ituri forest.

Fire altered the traditional food chain.  Man-eating predators were intimidated by all-night fires and burning torches.  So, fewer hominins were violently killed and eaten.  This diminished a population check on our ancestors, which may have disturbed the stability of functional ecosystems.  Other checks include disease, starvation, conflict, accidents, and so on.  John Reader wrote that, under ideal conditions, if two humans, and their descendants, all had large families, the clan would explode to 4 billion in just 500 years.  Man-eating predators are good for us.  They weed out the sick, elderly, injured, inattentive, and unlucky.  We all feed each other. 

Fire kept our ancestors warmer.  Humans have three million sweat glands to cool us off in hot weather.  In cold weather, the body directs more warm blood to the skin.  One thing that struck Europeans about primitive people was that they seemed to be impervious to cold.  During his famous voyage, Darwin was surprised to observe natives who wore little or no clothing during bitterly cold weather in Tierra del Fuego.

On the Kalahari, night temperatures in June and July can dip below freezing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was with a group of naked San people during a night when their water froze.  Their only protection was a kaross — an animal skin wrapped around their shoulders. 

Tropical people go naked, like chimps and baboons, because clothes are unnecessary, making them requires work, and pointless work is moronic.  Modern consumers waste lots of energy, because much of their sense of “cold” is merely a belief induced by cultural programming.  Also, they want to wear shorts and tee-shirts indoors, in the middle of winter.   I’ve taught myself to be far more tolerant of cooler temperatures than I was 30 years ago.  I wear more layers, and waste far less heat.

Fire enabled folks to survive in regions having extended cold weather.  So they eventually expanded into much of the northern hemisphere, previously home to wooly mammoths, sabertooth cats, and many other species of megafauna.  By making uninhabitable regions habitable, fire increased the global carrying capacity for the hominin hordes — more territory, more food, more hominins.

Fire was used on a large scale to manage landscapes for more productive hunting and foraging.  It was used to drive animals into bogs or streams, off precipices, or into locations where they could be confined and killed.  It burned off cover that concealed hidden nests or burrows.  Flame was used for optimizing grasslands to attract more game — it consumed dead vegetation and woody brush, encouraging the growth of fresh nutritious green forage.  It left behind a banquet of roasted grasshoppers.  It discouraged visits from bloodthirsty flies and mosquitoes.

Fire enabled slash-and-burn agriculture (swidden), which replaced forest with cropland.  Crops were grown for a year or so, until soil fertility was depleted, at which point another area of forest was slashed down.  The depleted fields were left to recover for ten or twenty years, when they were slashed again.  After multiple slash-and-burn cycles, the land was rubbished.  Daniel Hillel reported that in Indonesia there are more than 39.5 million acres (16 million hectares) of land that is incapable of supporting either agriculture or forest.

Fire has long been used as a weapon of mass destruction during violent conflicts.  Cities built of wood often fed the flames of horrific firestorms that claimed many lives.  Even in peacetime, structures heated with open flame fireplaces frequently went up in smoke, often igniting the rest of the village.  For many centuries, firefighting technology was an ineffective process of hauling buckets of water by hand.  Deadly fires were very common, and a great source of fear.  The Christian concept of Hell was intensified by the terror of frequent fires in early times.

Fire had a spiritual aspect in every traditional culture.  Jacob Grimm mentioned the needfire rituals that were once common in many regions of Western Europe.  Every year at the summer solstice, each home in the village let their hearth fire die out.  A new fire was kindled into existence by a spinning drill (never flint and steel), and everyone took home a bit of the needfire to light their hearth for the coming year.  Often people and livestock were passed through the glowing embers for purification and protection.  Fire was highly sacred business.  Many old pantheons had fire gods, goddesses, and myths. 

Domesticated fire is Earth-shaking super-big juju.  James Scott concluded that the accumulated ecological impacts of manmade fire on this planet overwhelm those caused by the domestication of plants and animals.

Cooking

The domestication of fire kicked open the door to a revolutionary change in the hominin saga — a technology called cooking.  Cooking softened and pre-digested food.  Ancestors were able to extract more nutrients from each mouthful.  Better nutrition facilitated the development of bigger brains.  Infants could be weaned sooner when softened food became an option, so births could be spaced closer together.  The toothless elderly benefitted from access to soft food.  Chewing was less work, so hominins evolved smaller teeth compared to other primates.  Also, digestion took less processing, so our guts got smaller, and tummies flatter.

Cooking transformed some foods that had been toxic or indigestible into edible nourishment.  By increasing the variety of plant foods we could eat, and the amount of nutrients we could extract from them, it became possible for an area of land to feed more ancestors.  Thus, cooking boosted an ecosystem’s carrying capacity for hominins.

Cooking gave us the keys to industrial civilization.  Imagine the astonishment when early hominins watched some heavy rocks in the fire turn red and melt into a liquid form.  The first smelter was born.  Metallurgy gave us the ability to fill rivers with spilled blood, to reduce cities to ashes, and to ravage ecosystems in countless, devastating, and irreparable ways.

The ancestors also learned about cooking clay.  They were baking figurines in primitive kilns 25,000 years ago.  This knowledge eventually evolved into baking pottery and bricks.  Sand could be cooked into glass, limestone into cement, wood into charcoal, water into steam, crude oil into distillates (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.), and on and on and on. 

The Biggest Estate on Earth



The British colonization of Australia began in 1788.  Historian Bill Gammage, a white fella, spent ten years studying the writings of early observers, as well as paintings, drawings, and maps from the era.  The landscape in 1788 looked radically different from today.  Much of what is now dense forest or scrub used to be grasslands.  Early eyewitnesses frequently commented that large regions looked like parks.  In those days, all English parks were the private estates of the super-rich.  Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the park-like Australian countryside were penniless bare naked Stone Age heathens.  Their wealth was the land.

For unknown reasons, the British immigrants did not immediately discard their clothes, metal tools, livestock, and Bibles, fetch spears, and melt into the wilderness — freedom!  Instead, they attempted to transplant the British way of life onto a continent for which it was unsuitable.  In his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Gammage focused on the first century of the colony (1788–1888), an era he refers to as “1788” in the text.  He refers to the Aborigines as “people,” and the aliens as “newcomers.”

In a nutshell, he describes the people as being brilliant at surviving in a brutally bipolar drought & deluge climate, and the newcomers as a hapless demolition team.  Gammage’s academic peers, stodgy old gits faithfully clinging to the glorious myths of Empire and white supremacy, did not leap to their feet cheering for his scandalous nonsense.  So, his book is jam-packed with images and lengthy quotations that support his heretical conclusions (1,522 footnotes!).  The endless parade of historic evidence may test the endurance of general readers, but Gammage had to do it in order to avoid being dismissed as a raving nutjob.

A core subject in the book is firestick farming — using fire to deliberately reconfigure ecosystems in order to better satisfy human desires.  Our species originally evolved as grassland hunters that loved dining on large herbivores.  In Australia, the people used a variety of fire strategies for transforming rainforest and scrub into lush grassland.  This greatly expanded habitat for delicious grass loving critters.

The people used both hot fires and cool fires to manage vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire dependent, or fire promoting.  Different fires were used to promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses.  To prevent new grassland from reverting to woody vegetation, it needed to be burned every two to four years.  Eventually, after decades or centuries of repeated burnings, there would be no more dormant tree seeds that could germinate.  According to Gammage, “Most of Australia was burnt about every 1 to 5 years depending on local conditions and purposes, and on most days people probably burnt somewhere.”

Ideally, in selected locations, patches of dry grassland were burned as rains approached.  Several days after a shower, fresh green highly nutritious grass burst through the ashes, and the wildlife raced in to feast on it.  After a burn, the grass grew waist high, and often head high.  Some sites were deliberately designed to optimize ambush hunting for kangaroos or wallabies.  Without managers or fences, the wild game animals capably raised themselves, and eagerly moved to where the people provided fresh food.  By keeping most fires small, the people chose when and where game would be concentrated.  On outstanding years, when herds got too large, surplus animals were slaughtered, to avoid rocking the ecological boat.  Australia had few large predators that competed with the people, or ate the people.

Gammage saw that the people lived in affluence.  They had learned how to live through 100 year droughts and giant floods.  No region was too harsh for people to inhabit.  Their culture had taboos that set limits on reproduction and hunting.  Hunting was prohibited in breeding grounds for important animals.  Lots of food resources were left untouched most of the time.  Newcomers were astonished to observe the great abundance of wild herbivores, fish, birds, and edible plants.  Abundance was the norm.  “People accepted its price.  They must be mobile, constantly attendant, and have few fixed assets.”

In 1788, the people were also growing crops, including plums, coconuts, figs, berries, macadamia nuts, tubers, bulbs, roots, rhizomes, and shoots.  Yams were grown in paddocks that could cover many square miles.  The people planted grains, including wild millet and rice.  Early newcomers described millet meadows of a thousand acres (405 ha), as far as the eye could see.  The people’s method of farming did not require a permanent sedentary life.  They stored food, but they didn’t remain by their stores to guard them.  Even in harsh times, theft was uncommon.  The people were astonished to see how hard the newcomers worked to grow food.  Whites perceived hard work to be a virtue.

The people made farm and wilderness one.  Also, their way of life intimately married spirituality and ecology.  Gammage provided a fascinating chapter on the spiritual life of the people.  While many different languages were spoken in wild Australia, all places shared the same cosmology, the Dreaming.  Reality was created by their original ancestors in the Dreamtime, and they established the Law, which required the people to care for all of their country.

“The Dreaming has two rules: obey the Law, and leave the world as you found it.”  Thus, fundamental change was outlawed.  Many other societies are possessed with a pathological desire for change, and see it as natural — progress.  Their god word is Growth.  “People prize knowledge as Europeans prize wealth.”

The native kangaroo grass was excellent (“caviar for grazers”).  It was a deep-rooted, drought tolerant perennial that held the soil in place, retained soil moisture, survived fire, and was highly nutritious.  It remained green after four months without rain, a great asset for wildlife in drought times.  The newcomers’ sheep grazed it down to bare clay, killing the grass.

Wetlands were drained to expand pasture.  Livestock compacted the soil, which dried out, and cracked.  Springs, ponds, and creeks evaporated, eliminating the critters that lived in them.  When rains returned, runoff was increased, leading to erosion, landslides, deep gullies, floods, silt chokes, and the spread of salts.  An observer in 1853 commented on the growing soil destruction: “Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.”

The unclever solution was to continue overgrazing, and plant exotic grasses from Europe and Africa.  These were shallow-rooted annuals that flourished in winter and spring, wheezed in summer, and died when burnt.  When “the land looks drought-stricken; it is cattle-stricken.”  Before long, the finest native grasses were greatly reduced, and in many places eradicated.

The newcomers wanted to live like rural Brits — permanent homes, built on fenced private property.  They freaked out when the people set fires to maintain the grassland.  Before long, districts began banning controlled burns.  This led to the return of saplings and brush.  So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.

Without burning, insect numbers exploded.  In 48 hours, a pasture could be nuked by caterpillars or locusts.  Dense clouds of kangaroo flies drove newcomers crazy.  Leaf-eating insects defoliated entire forests.  Without burning, fuels built up, leading to new catastrophes, called bushfires.  Since 1788, there have been many catastrophic bushfires.  The Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851.  It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep, thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.

Newcomers generously shared smallpox and other diseases with the people, who proceeded to die in great numbers.  Too late, the people realized that the newcomers intended to stay.  They resisted, but were badly outnumbered.  Newcomers “brought the mind and language of plunderers: profit, property, resource, improve, develop, change.  They had no use for people who wanted the world left as it was.”  They were champions at the dark juju of genocide.

Without people hunting them, the kangaroo population exploded, gobbling up the grass intended for sacred cows and sheep.  Bounties were paid for kangaroo scalps.  “In 1881, New South Wales paid a bounty on 581,753 roo scalps — 1600 a day — and in 1884 on 260,780 scalps in the Tamworth district alone, but roo plagues continued.”

Australia is an especially salty continent.  There are large lakes saltier than the ocean, and numerous saltwater rivers and creeks.  In many regions, topsoil sits on a layer of clay, which keeps water from penetrating into the salt below.  Since 1788, the salt problem has become far worse.  The bigger trees grow, the more water they drink, saltwater rises, killing the trees.  Also, forest clearing increases runoff, and faster moving water cuts deeper into subsurface salt — so do plows and other mutilations.  The salt predicament befuddles the experts, but all agree that salt is an effective cure for agriculture.

One question perplexes me: Was firestick farming genuinely sustainable for the long run?  It significantly altered the ecosystem of a land the size of 48 U.S. states, minus Hawaii and Alaska, and the alterations had to be regularly maintained, century after century.  Nobody is sure when the practice eventually became time-proven and widely adapted.  Obviously, Australia wasn’t interested in being continually forced to dress scantily, like a park.  At the first opportunity, she rushed to return to her preferred wardrobe, primarily forest and scrub.  Could the burning have continued indefinitely, without additional harm?  Should we consider firestick farming to be a form of domestication?

Gammage’s benediction:  “We have a continent to learn.  If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country.  If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.”

Gammage, Bill, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011.

There are several Gammage videos on YouTube.

The Last of the Nomads



Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Yatungka and her husband Warri, the last two Mandildjara people to live in the traditional way on the Western Gibson Desert of Australia.  William Peasley wrote their saga in The Last of the Nomads.

Aborigines have one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.  They have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years, some say 60,000.  Nomads first inhabited the more fertile regions, leaving the deserts for later.  Folks have lived in the Gibson for maybe 20,000 years.  Most readers, if dropped off in the Gibson, naked, with a spear and boomerang, would be dead in a day or three.  Water is extremely scarce.  For the paleface colonizers, the desert is dangerous, miserable, a land of horrors.  For Aborigines, it was home sweet home, where they belonged, a sacred place.  They had an intimate understanding of the land, and learned how to live in balance with it.

Yatungka and Warri spent most of their adult lives as pariahs, because their relationship violated a tribal law that defined permitted and forbidden marriages.  Laws were taken very seriously.  If they returned to their people, they might be beaten, or even killed.  So, their family lived away from the tribe, wandering from waterhole to waterhole, hunting and foraging.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the government made efforts to move the Aborigines into settlements, where intense culture shock led many to lose their identity, become massively depressed alcoholics, and abandon their ancient traditions.  The sons and kinfolk who stayed with Yatungka and Warri eventually moved off to civilization, but the outlaw couple feared to join them.

Anyway, in 1977, it was the third year of an extreme drought, the worst in a century, maybe the worst in many centuries.  The kinfolk of the outlaw couple were worried about them.  Mudjon was a respected elder who had been raised on the desert in the traditional way.  He knew all the waterholes, and cared about Yatungka and Warri.  His dream was to take the Mandildjara people back to their desert paradise, return to the old ways, and preserve their traditions.  Few of the young were interested.

Mudjon asked a white friend to help him search for the couple, and he agreed.  Mudjon was joined by five white lads, including Peasley.  They loaded up three vehicles and took off across the vast roadless desert.  Mudjon knew that this was probably his last visit to the territory of his people, and the last time a traditional Aborigine would drink from each well, or leave footprints in the dirt.  Peasley noted, “It was very sad for him to move through the land where once his people hunted and laughed and sang around the campfires.”

The chapters describing the long search contain some fascinating passages about the old way of life.  Mudjon was a master at reading the land, noticing the countless slight details that provided strong and detailed messages to him, but were invisible to the whites.  Without a map for the 1,500 km (932 mi) journey, he guided the team from waterhole to waterhole, looking for signs of the couple.  It was a powerful experience for him, to see old campsites, windbreaks, caves, springs, rock paintings, and other artifacts — the remains of an ancient culture.

Eventually they found signs of the missing couple.  At several locations, Mudjon started a brushfire that sent smoke high into the sky, where it would have been visible from up to 160 km (99 mi) away.  Warri did not respond with a smoke signal.

It was an ancient custom of the desert people to routinely light brushfires as they journeyed from waterhole to waterhole.  This had three benefits.  (1) Fire flushed out hidden game.  (2) It signaled their progress to other groups.  (3) It regenerated the earth and stimulated plant growth.  Fresh green sprouts attracted game.  Wildlife became dependent on burning.  This was called firestick farming.  In recent decades, in regions no longer visited, the burning has ceased, the water holes are not kept cleared, and animal and bird life largely disappeared.

One happy day, they saw smoke from Warri, and drove to his campsite.  When Mudjon greeted him, there were no smiles, hugs, or handshakes.  Warri was about 150 cm (5 ft) tall, naked, extremely thin, and both eyes were inflamed.  He wasn’t strong enough to hunt, so they were living on quandongs (peach-like fruit).  Yatungka returned from foraging with several dingo dogs.  She displayed no signs of excitement.  She was about 165 cm (5’ 5”) tall, younger, naked, very thin, but in much better physical condition.

They would not survive much longer at the waterhole.  The rescue party knew that the nearest well that still had some water was 150 km (93 mi) away, an impossible journey on foot.  The couple agreed to return to the Wiluna settlement with Mudjon and company.  They wanted to see their sons again.  Mudjon assured them that there would be no drama about the taboo violated long ago.

In Wiluna, many folks came to look at the long-missing couple, and were stunned to see their emaciated condition.  “There were no greetings, no shouts of joy, in fact there was no sign of recognition on either side, and yet the sons of Warri and Yatungka were within a few meters of their parents.”  Tears streamed down the cheeks of Warri and many others.  A few months later, Mudjon got very sick, declined, and died.  A year after their return, Warri and Yatungka caught a disease.  He died in April 1979, and she died a few weeks later.

For me, this was a powerful book, not primarily for what it said, but for the silent message unperceived by the white heroes who came to the rescue.  Peasley spent his boyhood on a farm in Australia, and he sometimes discovered signs of prehistoric campsites.  He felt sad that, after more than 40,000 years on the land, the people had not been able to leave behind anything more significant than simple campsites, grinding stones, rock paintings, and so on.

For me, this low impact living was an amazing achievement.  They successfully adapted to a hot dry ecosystem, and it was a wonderful home for them.  What a terrible problem!  The Gibson Desert that the rescue party drove across looked nearly the same as it did 1,000 years ago, or 10,000.  The silent message screams “genuine sustainability, beautiful, healthy culture!”

Humans are also capable of adapting to godforsaken nightmares like Chicago, jammed together with millions of isolated, anxious, stressed out, depressed strangers… ah, the wonders of progress!  The rescue party was proud of their advanced technology, which gave them the ability to dominate, exploit, and rubbish the continent.  What significant artifacts will they leave behind to impress the youngsters of generations yet to be born?  Will the land be in no worse condition in another 1,000 or 10,000 years?  These questions are taboo, heresy in a culture whose god-word is Growth.

Peasley did confess to having some uncomfortable thoughts.  When the rescue party knew that the couple was alive and nearby, he realized, “We were about to intrude into the lives of the last nomadic people in the Western Gibson Desert, and in doing so, it was possible that we might be responsible for bringing to an end a way of life that had gone on for several thousand years.”

Peasley, William John, The Last of the Nomads, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Australia, 1983.

The Last Nomads is a 45 minute Australian documentary of this story.

The Future Eaters provides an environmental history of wild Australia, the early human impacts, the mass extinctions, and the lessons painfully learned.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley tells the story of an Englishman who abandoned civilization and spent 32 years as a hunter-gatherer in the early days of Australian colonization.