Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

 [Note: This is a new section in my rough draft of a far from finished book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be inserted before sample 26.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

In his lecture, Four Domestications, James Scott described four turning points that radically changed the course of the human saga — the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and ourselves.  We domesticated ourselves by radically changing the way we lived, in order to protect and nurture the survival and growth of crops and herds.  We controlled their lives, and they controlled ours.  Many tasks had to be performed at specific times for optimal results — tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.  Herders also fine-tuned their ongoing schedules and activities for the benefit of their livestock. 

We’ve already looked at the domestication of fire, and how this superpower radically altered the human saga.  It enabled tropical humans to survive in chilly non-tropical regions (snow country), colonize the planet, and eventually become participants in monstrous fire-breathing industrial civilizations.  This chapter will focus on plant and animal domestication, which mostly began within the last 13,000 years, and fired up the turbochargers for our high-speed one-way rocket ride into the unknown.

Supply and Demand

Mother Africa was the homeland where hominins first evolved maybe six million years ago.  Experts do not agree on when humans first emerged.  Estimates range from maybe 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were nomadic foragers — hunters and gatherers.  Around 60,000 years ago, some pioneers decided to see the world, and began exploring the tropics of southern Asia, on a path toward Australia. 

Around 42,000 years ago, humans were present up north in Europe, a region with a temperate climate.  It was a major shift, moving outside of the tropical climate for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  The curiosity of these explorers helped to accelerate our journey to a stormy future.  Long term survival in a non-tropical region required loads of radical innovations.

As mentioned earlier, William Rees proposed two fundament ecological concepts.  (1) Every species will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.  (2) When they expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them. 

Humans regularly bumped into limits as they colonized the world, and cleverness often provided ways to bypass the obstacles.  As long as wild foods were abundant, there was no need to pursue farming or herding, which required far more time, difficulty, and risk.  Large game was our ancestors’ preferred food but, over time, hunting a bit too much could gradually deplete the delicious herds.  Efforts then had to shift to class B and class C foods — small game, forest animals, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, insects, and so on. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that as the last ice age weakened, the climate warmed, and the more comfortable Holocene era began.  The forests of Europe were able to migrate northward from the Mediterranean, displacing some tundra regions, and their megafauna residents.  These forests 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.  Reduced access to easy meat motivated lifestyle changes.  Folks learned that it was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of foods might be gathered.  This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while. 

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.  When the tundra megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens. 

Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game got scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps were oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells got smaller and smaller. 

Eventually, the seeds of domesticated corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that pursued the new experiment could produce more food, and feed more people.  When fields were first cleared, and the virgin soil was still highly fertile, agricultural land might sometimes produce a hundred times more food than an equal area of wild land used by foragers.  Of course, population pressure is a predictable cause of social friction and bloody conflict.  Because they had no livestock, they had no manure to help conserve soil fertility, which declines over time, shrinking the harvests.

The big picture here is an endless struggle for survival, in which limits periodically stomped on the brakes, and cleverness often found new ways to temporarily sneak around them.  Cleverness is not an all-powerful miracle-making magic wand.  It also has limits, as the folks on Easter Island discovered, when the last tree fell (whoops!).  It’s not easy to cleverly sneak around food scarcity.  Options often boiled down to starvation, mindful family planning, or a blind leap into the mysterious realm of food production.

Cradle of Civilization

Jared Diamond seriously wondered why some cultures could remain rich and powerful for centuries, while many others rarely, if ever, had an opportunity to sniff prosperity’s butt.  He invested a massive number of brain cycles in a quest to find answers.  In 1987, he published his boat-rocking essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” [Link or Link]. 

He wrote, “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.  In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.  With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.”

Ten years later, in 1997, Diamond published his classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he presented a book length discussion of what he had learned.  Domestication emerged independently in maybe nine locations around the world, but one region in Eurasia played a starring role in influencing the chain of events that eventually led to the bruised, beaten, and bleeding world outside your window.

It began one day, thousands of years ago, when some intrepid pioneers happened to stumble into an amazing jackpot known as the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization.  Gasp!  It was as if their wildest dreams had come true!  The place was home to a great abundance of wild game and plant foods — a heavenly paradise. 

Life was grand for a while, but as the mobs grew in number, they naturally smacked into more and more annoying limits.  Cleverness inspired behaviors and illusions that put folks on the treacherous path to farming and herding.  This generated a surge of temporary prosperity, while it permanently degraded the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed, the forests, soils, and wildlife got rubbished.  Paradise deteriorated into depleted cropland, deserts, ancient ruins, and persistent bloody conflicts.  The Fertile Crescent (like every other region), was not an ecosystem that could tolerate endless agriculture.  Diamond noted that farming is a slow motion act of ecological suicide.

In 2002, five years after Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond published a paper, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” [Link]  It presented some additional thoughts.  The emergence of domestication, maybe 10,500 years ago, inspired tremendous changes.  It commenced in Eurasia, primarily in the Fertile Crescent and parts of China, where the whims of “biogeographic luck” provided perfect conditions for seriously dangerous mischief. 

Not only were wild foods abundant, but an unusual number of the plant and animal species possessed characteristics that made them suitable for domestication.  Despite centuries of trial and error, clever humans have discovered that it’s impossible to domesticate the vast majority of plants and animals.  To be suitable for domestication, species must have specific collection of vulnerabilities.

For example, Diamond listed six obstacles that made it impossible to domesticate most large animal species.  Any one of these could prevent enslavement: (1) a diet not easily supplied by humans, (2) slow growth rate and long birth spacing, (3) nasty disposition, (4) reluctance to breed in captivity, (5) lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and (6) a tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators.  

Diamond wrote that there are maybe 200,000 wild plant species in the world, of which about 100 have been domesticated.  The Fertile Crescent was home several wild grasses that produced large cereal seeds (barley, einkorn, emmer, and spelt), a rich source of carbohydrates.  There were also several varieties of pulses (peas, beans, and lentils) that provided protein.  In the whole world, purely by random chance, the Fertile Crescent was the biggest treasure chest of future super foods, both plant and animal.  It was essentially ground zero for the birth of civilization.

Globally, there are 148 species of large land-dwelling mammalian herbivores and omnivores that weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 51 of these species, but none of them have been domesticated, because they luckily failed to meet all of the six criteria for enslavement.

Of the 148 species, just 14 have been domesticated.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species eventually became multinational superstars.  The Fertile Crescent was home to four of the five: the goat, sheep, pig, and cow (horses are the fifth) — an amazing coincidence. 

Of the 14 domesticated species, 13 of them originated in Eurasia.  Consequently, it’s no coincidence that Eurasia played a primary role in the growth and spread of acute, highly infectious, epidemic crowd diseases.  Farming and herding created communities of humans that lived in unhealthy proximity to unnatural concentrations of livestock, poultry, rats, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. 

This encouraged a number of animal pathogens to adapt to human hosts, including influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera.  Diamond noted, “Such diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture, because they can sustain themselves only in large dense populations that did not exist before agriculture, hence they are often termed crowd diseases.”

Nomadic foragers lived in small groups, enslaved no livestock or poultry, and periodically moved their camps — a brilliant strategy for avoiding diseases.  On the other hand, humans who lived in crowded villages and cities made tremendous advances in unsanitary living.  Crap and garbage was all over the place, all the time.  Rivers were the source of drinking water, and the dumping place for sewage and filth.  A later chapter will take a closer look at disease.

Diamond noted four developments that dimmed the future for hunter-gatherers, and encouraged the expansion of farming and herding.  (1) Over time, hunting gradually made large game less abundant.  (2) We learned new skills for collecting, processing, and storing foods.  (3) Societies competed, spurring innovations that improved our ability to survive.  (4) Growing populations required large-scale food production.

Folks who inhabited a paradise of plant and animal super foods, learned lots of tricks for maximizing food production.  Population surged, spurring the emergence of cities and civilizations.  Civilization encouraged the development of stuff like metallurgy, industry, deforestation, soil destruction, warfare, overcrowding, patriarchy, and slavery.

So, let’s rephrase what William Rees said about species.  (1) “Every civilization will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.”  As they expand, they will take along their livestock, crop seeds, weaponry, culture, technology, religions, and diseases.  (2) “When they colonize new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them.”

Eurasia spans from Europe to China.  The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.  State of the art food production provided both centers with powerful advantages over their more humble neighbors.  The two centers became hubs for territorial expansion, and their languages, genes, tools, and cultural influences have spread around the world. 

This is a spooky story.  From the two hubs, the realm of farming and herding spread in many directions.  In the sixteenth century, European travelers began noticing striking similarities in Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.  They appeared to have a common ancestor.  As the years flowed by, scholars noticed that lots of other languages also had similarities.  A category was created to name this large assortment.

Visit Wikipedia’s discussion of Indo-European Languages.  See the maps that show how this language family spread across the Old World over time.  Around 500 years ago, the age of global colonization exported them to the Americas, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.  Today, the native language of about 46 percent of humankind, is an Indo-European tongue.

Drop a pebble in a calm pool of water, and rings of ripples spread in every direction.  Diamond wrote that humankind’s long and stormy story of food production, population growth, civilization, and global domination, began in the Fertile Crescent.  The pebble is called domestication.

Diamond lamented, “If they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition, and heavier disease burdens.”

Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can readily see the many unnecessary wrong turns that our ancestors made.  At the same time, we can observe the world around us today, and readily see the catastrophes that those wrong turns triggered.  It’s heartbreaking.  Cleverness without foresight is a deadly duo.  It sure is an interesting time to be alive!

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 21

[Note: This is the twenty-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 201 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.] 

Perfection of Hunting

Human pioneers continued their colonization of new regions.  Along the way, they kept learning new hunting strategies, and inventing more and better tools.  They became masters at killing big critters, and bringing home lots of meat.  But the more skillful they got, the greater the risk of unintentional overhunting.  Not only did many large herbivores gradually go extinct, but so did many of the carnivore predators that specialized in hunting them. 

For example, several large cat species had long upper canine teeth or fangs.  These cats were specialized for killing huge herbivores with very thick hides — including elephant-like species.  Big, strong, saber-tooth and scimitar-tooth cats evolved in Africa several million years ago, and eventually expanded across Eurasia and the Americas — and so did elephant-like species.  As hominin hunters gained skill, elephant-like species declined, as did the cats that killed them.  Baz Edmeades suspected that as the number of jumbo critters with thick hides declined, the cats’ long fangs may have become a handicap for hunting other types of prey. 

Evolution provided large herbivores with different self-defense strategies.  One was jumbo size and thick hides.  Another was the ability to flee at high speed.  As evolution gradually made the prey a bit faster, it also sped up the carnivores a bit, too.  Ecosystem health required that the two teams stay relative balance.  If carnivores got too fast, they would deplete their prey and starve.  If herbivores got too good at escape, they would overgraze the land and starve.  In some regions today, speedy lions, leopards, and cheetahs have managed to survive, along with a variety of fast moving herbivores.

When the sacred dance of eater and eaten drifted out of balance, trouble ensued.  Aldo Leopold wrote a famous parable that delivered a powerful ecological lesson.  The sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the deer, the deer feeds the wolf, the wolf feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the grass.  In the family of life, we all feed each other.  The U.S. government’s predator eradication program has nearly driven wolves to extinction, much to the delight of livestock ranchers.  Leopold explained that when wolves are scarce, deer numbers soar, vegetation gets stripped off the mountain, the soil washes away, and rivers carry the future off to the sea.  The deer lived in fear of wolves, and the mountain lived in fear of deer.

Over the course of four million years, hominin hunters slowly gained some advantages via genetic evolution.  But it was cultural evolution that enabled them to begin a long journey down a powerful and dangerous path.  More and better tools and strategies amplified their ability to hunt and eat a wider variety of animals.  Their growing toolbox included gizmos specialized for killing animals of every size and shape — megafauna, small game, birds, fish, and so on.  

Saber-tooth cats were doomed by hyper specialization.  Human survival is not highly dependent on a narrow variety of food sources.  We are omnivores.  We can digest deer, rodents, eels, shellfish, locusts, worms, maggots, grass seeds, nuts, berries, roots, and so on.  Dietary flexibility, tool making, and cooking technology are important reasons why humans haven’t joined the saber-tooth cats in megafauna Valhalla.

Of course, in the good old days, the preferred prey was megafauna.  For the time and energy invested, they provided generous servings of high quality nutrients — far more than bunnies or maggots.  Of course, large game was not an infinite resource for skilled hunters.  Populations of some megafauna gradually declined, and eventually went extinct.  Plan B for human survival was to adapt to changing conditions, not be a fussy eater, and dine on whatever delicacies were handy.

In the good old days, there were no hunting licenses, regulations, or game wardens.  Hunters were free to do things that are restricted today.  In different regions, herds were sometimes driven into traps, where the killing was indiscriminate, and excess meat was left behind to be recycled by wolves, ravens, microbes, and other scavengers.  Nothing was wasted, but more animals were killed than the hunters needed.  This could weaken the herd.

In Europe, several sites indicate that hunters had focused on nursery herds, consisting of mothers and their offspring.  It was much less dangerous to kill a young mammoth than to attack its huge and powerful daddy, who could easily splatter you into a puddle of bloody mush. 

Edmeades noted that scimitar-tooth cats also preferred to dine on youngsters.  In the Friesenhahn Cave in Bexar County, Texas, excavations revealed the remains of 33 cats, and 300 to 400 young mammoths, mostly two year olds.  He added that the human youngsters in ice age Europe were similarly vulnerable.  Their homeland did not sound like traffic and sirens, it sounded like moaning lions and whooping hyenas.  Wandering away from the camp at night was dangerous and dumb.  Babies instinctively cry when left alone too long.  Even our chimp and baboon cousins have been known to snatch and devour helpless infants.

Evolution continuously learns new tricks via ongoing trial and error.  This is why every species produces surplus offspring, because they are insurance policies.  If each mating pair only had two offspring, they would be in the fast lane to extinction.  Bunnies produce many surplus offspring, and megafauna produce some extras.  This worked brilliantly for millions of years — until tropical primates acquired deadly superpowers via cultural evolution.  These dangerously clever critters developed new and unusual abilities far faster than the genes of other critters could evolve new adaptations to counteract them.  Oh-oh!

Fernando Fernandez noted that, on every continent that humans colonized, the process of driving species extinct often took at least several thousand years.  Abundant populations of megafauna could tolerate centuries of folks who sometimes hunted a bit too hard.  Over the passage of many generations, it would have been normal for the hunters to remain unaware of the gradual long-term decline in game — until the arrival of hunger times, when they slammed hard into the stone wall of resource limits.

In the good old days of abundant megafauna and simple weaponry, some bands of hunters reportedly had no sense of limits at all.  Dan Flores wrote that the Cree tribe believed that buffalo numbers were essentially infinite, and that the animals they killed in no way diminished their abundance.  Shepard Krech wrote that the Powhatan tribe hunted throughout the year, and killed animals regardless of their age, sex, or breeding state.  The Cherokee believed that every deer they killed was reanimated, each would be replaced.  Eventually, unpleasant experiences of scarcity revealed the existence of limits, which inspired a shift toward a more conservation-oriented approach.

Farley Mowat told stories about the Ihalmiut people who lived in the region around Hudson Bay in northern Canada.  When traders moved in, the natives learned that they could trade fox furs for cool stuff like guns and ammunition.  These made it far easier to kill deer, so their traditional mode of low tech hunting was abandoned.  Prior to firearms, it had never occurred to anyone that it was possible to kill too many deer.  Until then, the availability of deer was as reliable as the dance of the sun and moon.

Two factors were in play here.  (1) When each generation of hunters experienced adequate game, the sense of abundance could mask their gradual decline for centuries.  (2) Times of abundance could also absorb some growth among the hunting clans.  Dan Flores noted that the average size of coyote litters is 5.7 pups, but when food is abundant, or their numbers are dwindling, they have larger litters.  As I write today, the thundering herd of 7.7 billion humans demonstrates that, like coyotes, our numbers also grow when food resources increase.

Ronald Wallace noted that in times of abundance, intensification of hunting was normal.  When caribou herds were migrating, folks killed as many as they could, because winters were long, dark, and cold.  They could enjoy a stable (but temporary) way of life, for as long as intensification didn’t eliminate abundance.  Of course, the shadow of intensification was population growth, which had a tendency to hasten the end of easy living.  Scarcity inspired the nerds to innovate new hunting gizmos, like the leister, fish hook, net, snare, and bow and arrow.  Over time, as megafauna became scarcer, the menu expanded.  Red deer, elk, roe deer, wild pig, fish, shellfish, and waterfowl were eaten at the Maglemose site in Denmark 10,000 years ago.

Another star in this snow country soap opera was climate change.  When warmer eras moved in, ice sheets melted and retreated.  Ice was replaced by tundra, then steppe, then forest.  Much of Europe was covered with dense forest by 9,500 years ago.  Megafauna that live in herds thrive on steppe grasslands.  Forests were home to lower numbers of more solitary large game — elk, aurochs, deer, wild pigs.  Expanding forests encouraged some folks to migrate to coastlines, lake shores, wetlands, rivers, and streams.  Locations with abundant marine food resources sometimes developed into sedentary communities — like coastal tribes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Some cultures understood the notion of limits, and the risks of living too hard.  Some made efforts to live more conservatively, with greater emphasis on foresight and self-restraint.  Some developed traditions and taboos intended to reduce the risks of overhunting and overbreeding. 

Other cultures became less cautious, and pursued riskier paths.  Today, it’s clear that the risk-takers have overwhelmed the cautious, careful, and conservative.  Cultures that mindfully limit their numbers often become road kill for cultures that don’t.  Sadly, the world outside your window is a monster child of the risk fiends, for whom Growth is the god word — growth by any means necessary.

Anyway, Ronald Wright wrote that maybe 12,000 years ago, hunters in some regions had become too clever, too successful, and too numerous.  It was becoming apparent that their traditional lifestyle was approaching its expiration date.  Cave painters put down their brushes and became rabbit hunters.  Wild megafauna was not an infinite resource. 

Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” and he declared it to be humankind’s first progress trap.  Progress traps are the unintended consequences of brilliant innovations that permit clever folks to survive by shifting to a new and improved way of life.  Unfortunately, they also tend to burn the bridges behind them as they advance.   Returning to the good old days is no longer possible. 

For example, our transition to fossil energy has fueled explosive population growth, which makes a quick and easy return to a muscle-powered way of life impossible.  It’s like we’re helpless passengers on the Titanic.  Despite our legendary big brains, our capacity for foresight is often abominable.  Over and over we fail to anticipate what the unintended consequences of our ingenious inventions might be — agriculture, automobiles, nuclear weapons, etc.  The list is endless.

Wright concluded that the perfection of hunting put the forks to an ancient tradition, forcing humans to explore dangerous paths, like herding and farming.  Hunter-gatherer cultures mostly blinked out over time.  A few have managed to survive into modern times.  He expected that the fossil record left behind by the Anthropocene will resemble the effects of an asteroid strike.

Mark Nathan Cohen lamented the shift to plant and animal domestication.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years.  He wrote that hunting “has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.”  Around 10,000 years ago, almost everyone lived on wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms. 

The early days of hunting megafauna was a luxurious life.  Gradually increasing population pressure was what drove the downward spiral to surviving on domesticated crops.  These foods were less nutritious and far more labor intensive to produce.  The engines of this decline were cultural evolution and technological innovation.  These forces were highly contagious, and spread around the world. 

Wright noted that in 1492, the culture of the Old World washed up on the shores of the New World.  The two cultures had been separated for 15,000 years or more.  The similarities between the two are striking.  Both had roads, cities, palaces, schools, kings, priests, temples, armies, peasants, merchants, sports, theater, art, books, music, and so on.

Diana Muir wrote a fascinating sketch about the early human experience in New England.  After the glaciers retreated, the land became home to animals including horses, musk oxen, wolves, saber-tooth cats, bison, giant bears, giant beavers, and four species of mammoths.  By 10,000 years ago, a number of the megafauna species had gone extinct.  The menu then featured deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, heath hens, salmon, shad, alewives, shellfish, berries, acorns, and so on.  This was a land of abundance, and the human population grew and grew.

Oysters and clams had once been famine food.  By 2,000 years ago, they became a dietary staple.  Digging them up was tedious backbreaking work, and a grown man needed to eat 100 every day.  Many thousands more were smoked and dried for winter dining.  Empty shells were dumped in huge piles.  At the lowest, oldest layers, the oyster shells were 10 to 20 inches wide (25 to 50 cm), indicating 40 year old animals.  In newer layers, the shells were much smaller.

By 800 years ago, agriculture was producing half of their food.  Staples included corn, beans, and squash.  Their slash and burn farming required tedious backbreaking work.  It also depleted the fertility of the thin, rocky soils.  The good old days had passed.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 18

[Note: This is the eighteenth 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 201 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.] 

Megafauna Pioneers

Every continent has regions of grasslands — savannahs, steppes, prairies, and so on.  Grasslands provide the nutritious greenery that can nourish herds of large herbivores.  Forest or desert ecosystems are far less ideal for grazing animals.  Meat provides nutrients that are essential for good health — nutrients much harder to acquire from wild grassland vegetation.  Hunters prefer to kill a large animal, rather than numerous rodents, grubs, worms, and so on.

Naturally, the existence of large herbivores needs to be kept in balance by the existence of hungry carnivores.  Too many grass eaters can turn grasslands into barren wastelands.  Large herbivores and large carnivores are both megafauna.  Megafauna are animals weighing more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  (Outside of America, more than 50 kg.)

Many families of megafauna species have expanded across five continents: Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and South America.  During glacial cycles, some regions currently separated by water became connected by dry land, as sea levels dropped.  Land bridges allowed megafauna on both sides to cross over into new habitats.  Australia has mostly been isolated from the other five continents.  It has its own unique story of herbivores, carnivores, and megafauna extinction spasms.

Buried under downtown London, construction crews have discovered the remains of hippos, elephants, Irish elk, aurochs, and lions.  North America was the original homeland for the ancestors of horses, bears, rhinos, camels, and others.  Horses and bears spread across the five continents.  Camels expanded into Asia and Africa.  Rhinos vanished from America five million years ago.

Mother Africa was the homeland for the saber-tooth cat group, which later expanded across Eurasia, and then to North America and South America.  Africa was also where the elephant-like family began, which eventually colonized the five continents, diversifying into many forms over millions of years, including mammoths and mastodons.  Until 13,000 years ago, mammoth country ranged from Western Europe, across Siberia, and down into Mexico.  In the Americas, before hunters from Siberia arrived, there were seven elephant-like species.

On nutrient rich grasslands, a major trend in evolution was to encourage herbivores to gradually expand to jumbo-sized proportions, a trait that increased their odds for survival.  Bigger was better — thicker hide, stronger, and more dangerous.  Size mattered.  For example:

Giant beavers could grow to 7.6 feet (2.3 m) long, and weigh up to 276 pounds (125 kg) — about the size of a black bear.

Giant ground sloths could grow as large as elephants.  They could stand erect up to 20 feet (6 m) tall, and weigh 2,204 pounds (1,000 kg).

Giant armadillos were mammals that had an armor of bony plates.  Some weighed more than 1,000 pounds (454 kg).

Short-faced bears were among the largest land dwelling mammalian carnivores.  They could weigh over 1,500 pounds (680 kg).

Irish elk were giant deer that could weigh more than 2,500 pounds (1,133 kg).  Their enormous antlers weighed more than the animal’s skeleton.  They could spread up to 13 feet (4 m) across.

Of course, the rise of jumbo herbivores encouraged evolution to also select for larger carnivores.  Grasslands were home to a continuous evolutionary arms race, the ancient sacred dance of eaters and eaten.

Later, when skilled teams of hominin hunters became prominent, jumbo size eventually became a huge liability.  (Jumbo herbivores became as vulnerable as whales did when primates began harpooning them from boats.)  Jumbo herbivores were easy to see, and they did not excel at high speed getaways.  To hungry hunters, they were slow moving giant meatballs.

In 1961, Colin Turnbull noted that a Mbuti pygmy hunter could singlehandedly kill an elephant with a short handled spear.  This deadly spear technology was available to African hunters two million years ago.

Overkill?

Paul Martin stimulated much controversy in the study of megafauna extinctions.  In the 1960s, he was surprised to discover that in Africa, about 1.4 million years ago, a cluster of megafauna species went extinct.  The number of elephant-like species dropped from twelve to eight.  Three species of sabertooth cats, adapted for preying on large animals like the elephant family, also vanished from Africa.  These cats had two long upper teeth that were useful for stabbing through the very thick hides of elephants.  When the elephants declined, the huge incisors became a fatal handicap.

Baz Edmeades notes that this time period corresponds to when hominin hunters developed the larger and more complex Acheulean class of tools.  Apparently, hominins were getting better at competing against the sabertooths for jumbo-sized prey.  As the prey populations declined, so did the cats that ate them.  Hominins can survive on a far wider variety of foods.  When elephants are scarce, they can feast on eggs, grubs, or lizards.

The notion of hominin-caused extinctions 1.4 million years ago did not sit well with those who proposed the Great Leap Forward theory.  While Jared Diamond accepted the notion of the more recent overkill in North America 13,000 years ago, the far earlier date clashed with his belief that humans were essentially cute chimp-class primates until 40,000 years ago, when the miracle of turbocharged cognitive abilities arrived.  (This date also corresponds to the start of the human migration into snow country.)

Later, Martin grated even more nerves when he presented his research on the megafauna extinctions in North America.  He framed them as a rapid thousand year “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) of overkill.  Following World War II, there was a golden age of anthropology, when scholars visited many lands, and learned that most wild folks were not stupid, fiendish, bloody savages.  In fact, they had many admirable traits.  In fact, in many ways their lives were far healthier and saner than those of the anxious stressed out consumers of industrial civilization.

It became trendy to issue shining halos to wild people, because they were clearly not relentless maniacal planet thrashers.  Indeed, compared to modern consumers, their eco-impacts can seem close to insignificant.  But, as centuries pass, even modest impacts can gradually snowball into embarrassing blunders that hurl numerous species off the stage.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that most or all techno-innovations have unintended consequences (even fire drills and wooden spears).  These consequences can often outweigh the benefits.  Also, the combined consequences of numerous innovations can swirl into bad juju hurricanes that can sharply impact the stability of entire ecosystems, even the planet’s atmosphere and climate systems.

It’s important to put these impacts into proper perspective.  Compared to modern consumers, whose whirlwind lives have staggering eco-impact, the lives of those Pleistocene ancestors were much closer to ecologically sustainable.  Walter Youngquist reported that in just the last few hundred years, highly educated civilized people have dug up and burned 500 million years of safely sequestered carbon, most of it during the lifetime of the baby boomer generation — me and my peers.  Look, it took 1,400,000 years to finally drive all sabertooth cats extinct on five continents.  It took just 40 years for greed-crazed American yahoos, with their rifles and railroads, to exterminate something like 60 million buffalo, and waste most of their meat.  Technology matters.

At the same time, paying careful attention to reality leads to far less cognitive dissonance than indulging in magical thinking.  Dan Flores prodded the romantics.  If the Paleolithic was such a long wonderful era of harmony, why did our ancestors abandon it?  Why, in the last 50,000 years, did they fan out across the world?  Why does the pattern of megafauna extinction spasms correspond to the geographical pattern of human expansion?

It’s always embarrassing to compare the human saga to our ancestral baseline.  Chimps and bonobos have continued to live sustainably, in the same way, in the same place, for several million years, without swerving off to dangerous experiments in technological innovation.  We seem to be the one and only living species that has wandered off the traditional path.  Many cultures have foolishly succeeded at monopolizing the exploitation of resources in their territories — a perfectly insane joyride of ecological self-destruction that will not have a happy ending.

Now, I must confess that I find it a bit difficult to effortlessly believe the overkill theory without a doubt.  I mean, how could a modest population of hunters, travelling on foot, armed with spears, exterminate all of the horses in all of North America, over the course of a dozen centuries or so, while the bison and others survived?  Many readers who have hunted wild horses with spears will find this idea hard to swallow.  To get a deeper understanding of this extinction tragedy, it’s time to pull on our waders, slog down bloody Megafauna Lane, and take a bunch of selfies.

Trail of Tears

Hominins have been around for maybe 2.8 million years.  During our visit on Earth, there have been several spasms of megafauna extinctions.  The spasms during the hominin era began in Africa about two million years ago, when the hominin predecessors of Homo sapiens were romping around on the savannah. 

Our species emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, and eventually expanded eastward, across tropical Asia.  Around 50,000 years ago, folks arrived in Australasia, setting off a wave of large animal extinctions.  Over the course of several thousand years, 17 out of 18 genera of megafauna blinked out.

What’s a genera?  It’s the plural of genus.  A genus is a category of closely related species.  For example, the Homo genus includes the species Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and so on.

Around 40,000 years ago, humans wandered into Europe, where the extinctions were less extreme because the local megafauna had already been living with dangerous armed primates (Neanderthals and others) for maybe 500,000 years.  The megafauna had learned the hard way that primates were not their good little buddies.  In the European spasm, 21 of 37 genera vanished.

Eventually folks expanded across northern Asia (Siberia), and crossed into the Americas, where the extinction spasm was rapid and intense.  Asia lost 24 of 46 genera, North America lost 45 of 61, and South America got hammered hard, with 58 of 71.

Finally, on many isolated islands, extinctions happened much later, when humans arrived.  For example, 4,700 years ago in Cuba, 1,500 years ago in Madagascar, 500 years ago in New Zealand, and so on.

Attentive readers will perceive that this series of extinction spasms clearly corresponds to the expansion of humans into new regions.  [Martin’s chart]  It is also absolutely clear that the pattern of extinctions does not correspond to patterns in climate history.  Most or all of the genera that blinked out had been in existence for at least several million years, and had survived numerous glacial cycles.

Fernando Fernandez summed up the extinctions more broadly.  Between 50,000 years ago, and A.D. 1500, about two thirds of the world’s megafauna species went extinct.  In this process, of the 150 genera of large mammals, at least 97 went extinct.  This statistic does not include the extinctions in Africa prior to 50,000 years ago.  When we take a moment to reverently sniff reality’s butt, it’s easy to see that, in the long run, innovation is not a good little buddy of the family of life.  Our magnificent standard of living has mindlessly created a global gas chamber.