Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000 B.C
npr.org
npr.org
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nias
Sumatra is suprising - mountains, pine forests, mild climate suprisingly for equator it could often get chilly. Lots of agriculture. Vivid nature. But real jungle and primary forrest is mostly gone.
People are friendly, smiling, easygoing and welcomming to foreigners. Lots of people speak a little English and bahasa is quite easy to pick up. No grammar, super simple.
Indonesia has almost worst education system in the world [1] and forward thinking isn’t part of the culture. Neither is working hard. That can put you through lots of hardship - if you care.
People are incredibly social - this is what their life is about. There is a lot of childish fun everywhere - when minivan is passing through the village local people pour buckets of water through open windows. Lots of people sing and play guitar - most badly in my opinion but it is still sweet.
People are honest, you can trust strangers, not much of small crime, petty theft is uncommon etc.
Everyone smokes cigarettes everywhere also on the bus. Even 4 year old could be already hooked on fags. [2]
There is a lot of people, it is quite overpopulated island (not like Bali but close). It means tons of trash everywhere, everywhere, terrible impact on environment. Indonesia is world largest producer of marine pollution (3.2 milion metric tones of plastic per year). [3]
If there is trash it is mostly burned on site (including plastic et all) so you get a haze. Cities are polutted, there is too many cars, people and not enough infrastructure. Medan - largest city in Sumatra and 2nd largest in Indonesia is the worst place in SE Asia in my opinion. It is just hudge, poor, dirty and without anything there to compensate.
Clean water, sewage’s treatment forget about it. Everything goes into rivers and ocean. There is now wild gold rush which is destroying riverbeds in Sumatra.[5]
The food is good but monotonous.[4] The hotels, homestays, peningapans are usually quite dirty. Regarding cleanliness Thailand it is not. Don’t expect clean sheets. Bedbugs are common. There are exceptions.
Definitely go to Sumatra.
Disclosure: I have spent mist part of last four years here.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-Indonesia.pdf
[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-child...
[3] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/123/4/ehp.123-a...
[4] There are miracles like organic yogurt, mozarella and mascarpone from Medan or italian restaurant Bixio in Pulau Weh.
[5] https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/making-indonesian-rivers-gre...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium
Unless you were using it in a doubly jokey sense, while being aware of its actual meaning.
I'm personally more inclined to think we are less vulnerable than ever before.
I doubt any virus would wipe out an entire population. An infectious agent spreads better among a numerous population, but as it kills its hosts, the population becomes smaller, which slows the infection rate. So there is negative feedback here, and I doubt that can lead to a total extinction of the host species. Not to mention that we have modern medicine now, and that we understand how viruses work.
Climate change is an issue, but I have hard times imagining how it could wipe out all human beings. Worse case scenario, I guess, would be a sharp decline in agricultural production. So hunger riots and stuff. But even that would at worse reduce the population until a new equilibrium is reached. And I don't see that equilibrium to be at 0.
Nuclear war is a serious threat. But it's not like it would destroy the surface of the Earth or anything. It would provoke a nuclear winter though. I suppose a nuclear winter is about as bad as a volcanic winter is, or worse. Again, the main difficulty would be a sharp decline in food production. And that also would require a new population equilibrium to be reached.
IMHO human beings, nowadays, can deal with an awful lot of contingencies. We can predict them, we can store resources, we can plan ahead...
There really is a case to make about the idea that humans will survive a mass extinction. Annalee Newitz wrote a book about it[1]
1. https://www.amazon.com/Scatter-Adapt-Remember-Survive-Extinc...
I'm not sure "humans will not go totally extinct" is any more comforting than the cliche of "We'll not destroy the earth, it'll be fine, it's human's that'll be wiped out" there's definately the opportunity for a lot of people to have a very bad time. Even worse than the bad times that large segments of the planet are experiencing right now.
At https://ourworldindata.org/ you can find tons of data, info-graphics and articles from various (respectable) sources backing that claim. That's not meaning that things are all rosy yet - just meaning that they have been worse in the past!
If I see someone mentioning the "current, miserable state of the world" I have to object and correct their skewed view (which is not of the present but of a wrongly remembered or romanticized past that serves as incorrect baseline for the comparison!).
I did a quick poll of my FB feed, and about 60% of my "friends" felt that the present was worse than the past. Despite all the evidence saying that it's not.
The optimum strategy for virus is not to kill. It's to stay unnoticed and spread. And the best way to stay unnoticed is not to cause any symptoms ever.
HIV is scary because it's not very good at staying unnoticed. But it's also very bad at spreading too. Same goes with anthrax and pretty much every other deadly virus/bacteria. They typically are optimized for other mammals and therefore they suck at both staying unnoticed and targeting humans.
Other events (if in the next decades) that might kill billions of humans:
- meteorites.
- super volcanoes.
- any combination of them.
There is nothing else that could happen for real that would harm humanity to a catastrophic degree.
With regard to climate change: We know the danger is real and thus humanity adapts to prevent the worst.
That basically leaves the US or Russia (the only countries with the capacity to do so) arbitrarily deciding to nuke most cities in south Asia.
That said, I don't see any objective (rational or otherwise) of either country that would be advanced by such an attack. And again, we're talking about an attack that will kill 1B+ people, not just any nuclear attack -- that's a different story. Still low probability, but at least there are semi-rational objectives that could motivate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
No asteroid large enough to kill billions of humans is likely to impact Earth in this century. After that, it's likely that humanity will be so advanced that it'll be able to either mitigate or deter an impact of any magnitude.
An overlooked possibility imho would be a catastrophic population decline[1]. Basically women not having children anymore. Japanese style, only worse.
It's difficult to imagine it leading to extinction, since there will always be groups, at the very least religious groups, who will keep having babies. But still, it wouldn't take much of a cultural change for it to expand to all women.
Not saying it's plausible, but to me in terms of population dynamics it's at least as much of a concern as climate change (by this I mean that I believe reproductive behavior will have more impact on demography than climate change).
I can not imagine that lack of babies could ever become a problem for humanity until humans decide to build humans so that the "natural human species" dies out.
The solution for the aging population:
- Automation.
- Biochemical solutions and genetic engineering to remain/become capable. Replacement of natural body parts by machine body parts.
Worrying about overpopulation is short-sighted. Also, no matter what kind of problems overpopulation brings, it's hard to imagine how that could lead to extinction, which is what we were discussing.
I hope that poverty and the culture to have as many children as possible will not exist anymore after 2030 CE.
Pollution and resource scarcity are the obvious limits that can send population numbers off a cliff.
That the desire to "not want to have children" (especially among women) exists at all is caused by the sexual revolution (contraceptives), which changed who had children from "people who desired sex" to "people who desired to have children."
Maternal instinct exists : it pushes a woman to keep her offspring alive at all cost. I suppose it also makes women yearn for having a baby to take care of. But apparently, having just one is enough for them. Maybe two, but they seem to be content with no more than that.
What makes a woman pregnant in the first place is the sexual impulse of the male. That sexual impulse is the primary way nature gets animal organisms to reproduce. With contraceptives, males can satisfy that sexual impulse without creating new offspring. How will nature induce highly-intelligent animals to make an offspring if the sexual intercourse is no more sufficient? It's hard to imagine how genes could intervene high enough on cognitive functions to induce a thought such as "I must have intercourse with this women without contraception because I want children".
It could be an evolutionary dead-end.
My point remains anyway : even if there was a perfect symmetry in gender roles, parenting instinct would be what makes parents desire to have at least one offspring and keep it alive at all cost, but what would drive them to have more than two would be sexual impulse.
"As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility."[1]
It's culture and education
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
I can tell you that my wife and I both knew long before we were anywhere near adults that we wanted families. You know how some people know that they want to be a fire fighter or a police officer when they grow up? I knew I wanted to have a bunch of kids. The story is more or less the same for her. And my wife and I both grew up on the left, where the attitude toward having children varies from something you do after you have your career sorted to outright anti-natalism.
We're not zebra and lions
> knew long before we were anywhere near adults that we wanted families
peer pressure is strong in our society
family is a motivation to stay alive for many
> I knew I wanted to have a bunch of kids.
Yeah I though I knew as well, much like I thought I was going to be an astronaut
Now I'm a grown up man, in charge of his life, and I know I don't care about a family
And it's not the gene's telling me, I still think about having a legacy, a mini me persisting my DNA but I know that it's just a legacy from the past where a man without a family to support wasn't a real man.
That's it, education and culture
If reproducing was such a strong genetic trait, men on heart would have been billions centuries ago
The truth is kids are family support, the more societies get rich, the less people make children
It's scientifically proven, poor need kids not for reproduction but for elderly support
Poor also make a lot of children because in poor societies kids die more easily
The idea that complex behavior can be caused by genes in animals, but somehow not in humans is incorrect. People point to culture as if it is some magical force that makes people do things, but the human ability to create and interact with culture is itself the result of genes. After all, zebras and lions don’t have culture.
And you missed my point: I grew up in a culture that did not value having children. Having children was considered an after thought, something to be done after you had attended to your career. Growing up, I only knew one family with 4 children. They were considered the weird religious family. Yet I have known since I was 12 or 13 that I wanted to have a large family, even though I grew up in a culture that would look down their noses at a family of 4 or more children.
And the argument that poor people have lots of children for financial reasons doesn’t hold up any more. It did when most people were farmers, but the poor in the developed world are no longer farmers and I don’t think there’s any way to argue that children are a net financial benefit to them.
that's not true!
It's not even the main drive for many apes and monkeys…
> The idea that complex behavior can be caused by genes in animals, but somehow not in humans is incorrect
But I didn't say that
I said we are not those animals and don't live by the same rules
The complex behaviour of catching a mouse in a cat is genetic
Should humans behave the same when they see a mouse?
> I grew up in a culture that did not value having children.
Oh that's even more powerful
Youth rebellion
Do exactly the opposite that your parents and people around you are doing
> And the argument that poor people have lots of children for financial reasons doesn’t hold up any more
It does now more than ever
Now that globalization is taking a lot of poor countries out of poverty
Just watch Hans Rosling's talks
Easy: being on top of the food chain allowed us to evolve our relations beyond having an offspring
Those having more satisfactory relations formed groups that we now call families up to the point where sex today is mostly recreational
basically pleasurable sex gave us mate choice just like a bird chose the best dancer or a lioness the stronger male
pleasure instead of strength in the long run made happiness a goal in our modern societies instead of simply domination
we don't have sex just in some period of the year
we enjoy sex just like we enjoy eating or having fun
For a cat or a dog sex is not pleasurable, it's just a relief from heat, but we call it rape.
This is only the case if the selection pressures which humans in the developed world are facing stay the same. Since they seem to be tied to our technological development, I think there is a good argument to be made that these selection pressures will intensify as we breed resistance to them. My personal theory is that the increasing addictiveness (see the PG essay on this[0]) of modern life is why people are having less children. I don't see that trend changing.
I do think there's a good chance that technological renunciation and voluntary cultural isolation of some sort are the best solution to this problem for people who are naturally susceptible to the addictiveness of modern life.
At space there are some pan-galatic killers, nearby supernovas (no idea where is the closest candidate), and a black hole could always cross our path without any warning.
The effect of a black hole's gravity on distant objects is exactly the same as the effect of any other object with the same mass. It would disturb Kuiper belt objects that everyone's watching very carefully these days, affect the orbits of the outer planets as it moves closer, and bend light around its event horizon in a very obvious way.
Whether we can do anything about it, of course, is a different problem.
There's a serious theory it was this bottleneck where humans were confined to environments without natural preditors (seaside cliffs like those near Cape Town) and where social interaction was a necessity. Those with higher intelligence, particularly social intelligence, would scored more mates in that environment. And thus we had a runaway intelligence arms race that separated modern humans from their immediate hominid ancestors.
I suspect it's more likely that the selection happened between tribal groups, not within them.
Given independent groups with similar challenges, some would have the intelligence and luck to survive, and some wouldn't.
After a challenging event like Toba, tribes/herds with a culture that couldn't adapt or survive would be culled fairly quickly.
Selection doesn't work on the individual level.
So I'm doubtful the secret sauce of humans had its origin 70,000 years ago.
But species are to some extent artificial categories. Sapiens and Neanderthals were close. Genetically compatible and behaviorally similar (as far as we can tell). It would not be unreasonable to define them all as subspecies or ever varieties within a species.
ideology: 1 , science: 1.1 - slight edge
There is a lot we don’t know. The fact that Neanderthal buries their dead with some sort of symbolism, cared for elders, and lived in (small!) groups doesn’t really give us firm answers to these questions.
It is interesting that they actually had larger brains than modern humans, as did the Cro Magnon homo sapiens we have also found).
One interesting idea is that humans ultimately triumphed because we had better social connections, we traveled much further and had much larger circles.
If you can't meet & talk to humans from 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, are you able to say any change happened 70,000 years ago?
Assuming the bottleneck theory is valid to begin with, this was a global ecological disaster - it's not like the Neanderthals sat this one out on another planet : )
Did the "secret sauce" of mouse-gui originate in the 70s with Bell Labs or Apple in the 80s? Did the secret sauce of early aggricultural civilization (Hati, Sumer, Hindus Valley..) start the first time a person grew stuff for food or when a larger scale grain economy first emerged?
There is plenty of evidence that paleo-humans from well before that 70k ybp cutoff was special, unique in the animal kingdom. Knowing what we know about people, a lot of that behaviour was almost certainly cultural and probably language-based. Very complex tool use, hunting and gathering methods, shelters, fire. Perhaps even fire-aggriculture practices.
Regardless, 70k ybp (or 40 or 100) the "secret sauce," whatever it is, begins to yield fruit. There are artifacts with symbolic expression, what we'd call art or even politics. The human population grows. We inhabit more (almost all) ecological zones. People get everywhere, including australia by 40-50k ybp. Maybe earlier. Tool invention gets faster...
something happened.
First, any theories about this period (the paleo revolution and/or dispersal era in a lot of theories) are very speculative and prone to change. We just don't have that much information. So, the margins are necessarily huge.
So, both these bottleneck narratives are probably over-literal reading of the data we have, at least stated in simple forms. Either way, they point to a single small seed population. There could have been many times more people (neanderthals and sapiens) at the time and later, and they just passed on far fewer genes to 100ky later.
Yuval Harari touches on the question you raise. Sapiens vs neanderthal (and others), and at one point do human behavioural characteristics (or more precisely their consequences) emerge as different. His take is (roughly):
[1] "anatomically modern" sapiens existed for 100ky+ before these behaviours emerge. [2]Findings do not imply a big cognitive or behavioural gap between sapiens and earlier subspecies in this period. [3] there appear to be botlenecks in our lineage, dating to this period [4] The "paleo-revolution" happened in some form, and he believes it was primarily linguistic [5] Our language abilities allow flexible, large scale cooperation that is unrivaled in our clade, and did not widely exist in the lower paleolithic even in sapiens [6] he spends a lot of time on the nature of those linguistic tools. In a nutshell, advanced language allows symbolism, necessary for human-level culture. Trade. Chiefs. Tribes. Gods. Money.
All that could have happened in a single cliffside cove. That seems possible.
His argument/theory is attractive, but these things are far from set in stone. New findings will force all theories to adapt. Some will become unlikely.
"Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults."
And from the abstract of the paper that that text links to:
"Both genetic and anthropological data are incompatible with the hypothesis of a recent population size bottleneck. "
This is a completely mind blowing idea that humans were down to a count of about 1000 adults. Look at us now at 7 billion, and we just can't stop warring with our fellow relatives.
No sign that this is not just a temporary stop, in fact the opposite. There were periods of relative peace in world history for longer than that.
In the last 100 years we had 2 world wars, 100s of millions killed, and tons of peripheral wars during the "Cold War".
Besides for a lot of modern history wars didn't involve much of the citizenry (they had mercenary armies). Now civilians are almost fair game. And where they had arrows, spears and swords for most of history, we now have airforces and atomic bombs.
Those numbers are highly discredited.
Historians such as Charles Patrick Fitzgerald argue that a claim of 36 million deaths is incompatible with contemporary accounts of the war. They point out that the numbers recorded on the postwar registers reflect not only population loss, but also a breakdown of the census system as well as the removal from the census figures of various classes of untaxed persons, such as those in religious orders, foreigners and merchants. For these reasons, census numbers for the post-rebellion Tang are considered unreliable. Another consideration is the fact that the territory controlled by Tang central authority was diminished by the equivalent of several of the northern provinces, so that something like a quarter of the surviving population were no longer within the area subject to the imperial revenue system.
So, in all, even less that 5%...
If the earth had just 200 people, 20 of them killed is 10%, but it's nothing that a small determined fight between two tribes can't easily achieve, without even weapons.
Whereas the 3-4% of the 3 billion during WWII is a much bigger affair -- took tons of bombs, battles, war-caused famines, an extermination program, and even nuclear bombs...
That is definitely not what I have read¹. What era are you thinking of?
¹ One quickly googled up article: https://medium.com/future-crunch/the-decline-of-war-8760f9a5...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana
From the article: "As the world becomes more interconnected, the powerful have ever more incentives to avoid the catastrophic economic consequences of going to war too. Conflict isn’t good for your economy in a world of dense trade networks and digital flows."
The exact same argument was put forward just before WWI. Then all hell erupted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
In historical terms the decline is insignificant in duration. It just marks the point from the end of the Cold War, when there remained one sole global superpower (and most of the wars in the last 20+ years, from the Gulf, to Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc are wars where it fought or helped fuel). The article mistakes a decline in war during the end of the Cold War (when a global player emerged) for some long term trend.
Obviously there are more and more signs that this is not to be so -- with other players emerging like China, tension rising in different areas, even neo-fascists coming back into play in various countries governments.
> Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults.
... links to Hawks et al. (2000), with this in the abstract ...
> It is our conclusion that, at the moment, genetic data cannot disprove a simple model of exponential population growth following a bottleneck 2 MYA at the origin of our lineage and extending through the Pleistocene. Archaeological and paleontological data indicate that this model is too oversimplified to be an accurate reflection of detailed population history, and therefore we find that genetic data lack the resolution to validly reflect many details of Pleistocene human population change. However, there is one detail that these data are sufficient to address. Both genetic and anthropological data are incompatible with the hypothesis of a recent population size bottleneck. Such an event would be expected to leave a significant mark across numerous genetic loci and observable anatomical traits, but while some subsets of data are compatible with a recent population size bottleneck, there is no consistently expressed effect that can be found across the range where it should appear, and this absence disproves the hypothesis.
So yes, according to that study, the rest of the article is bullshit. But then, it was published in 2000.
I agree that it is fairly different from the "40 breeding pairs" quoted at times in the article though.
The cheetah had an extreme bottleneck — the remaining 20K or so cheetahs are so genetically close that they can take each other.
I remember when this was figured out reading that the estimate was that they had gone down below a hundred, a few kiloyears ago.
Here’s a brief article from back the (1987) about this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/16/c...
More detail (and later developments!) here: https://chickenoreggblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/cheetah-ge...
I believe this thinking is very out of date at this point.
The 2017 UN Population Prospect report has the World population at 11.2 billion and still climbing by 2100. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projection to be over 4.1 billion which I have to imagine will be nothing short of a cataclysm if it actually gets to that. The data here is stunning:
They really don't think any physical constraints are going to get in the way of that? There are only so many fish in the ocean.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ef1/254c1b7626ae1c70f0718c...
BUT there are some fairly important practical issues around unequal access to resources: some places have too much water and some don't have enough. Those kind of problems may lead to war, but probably won't stop population growth (short of it going large-scale nuclear or biological).
India will probably manage to, but some African countries probably won't. It's going to be quite bad for some unfortunate people living in these countries...
We can pack in more people but not if we hope to raise the living conditions of all those people. IMO those billions more are mainly going to be living hand-to-mouth in shanty towns. Whole countries living like that have little to lose by going to war to gain resources ...
With enough energy you are not constrained by resource limitations.
For example irrigate the desert with desalinated water.
It's a really big planet, you could fit a lot of people on it - and animals as well.
It's all about energy.
And domestic bees are brought in hives to many crops that are.
The challenge with extrapolating is that you can't know what you don't know (for example in 1975 they didn't know about AIDs) and you can't know how a society will respond (like Japan going negative in population growth).
I actually find 11 gigahumans surprisingly low. Unbounded exponential growth would suggest something more like 30 or 40 billion. Clearly that can't go on forever, but exactly what effects are expected to dampen the current post-Industrial trend and why in the 21st century?
In developed countries you may also have factors like people focussing on careers, valuing independence, more choice in relationships (i.e. divorce/separation being more acceptable) etc.
The Toba supereruption does correlate with a population decline, but evidence beyond that isn't very conclusive.
http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/what-animal-collectively-make...
Humans plus livestock are about 99% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass presently.
This is aa new development
https://i.redd.it/5h8e3j2tmftz.png
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...
So instead of (or along with) having being a major threat for us, I think it's what enabled us to become the global species we are today.
The concept of assigning value to largely useless objects and using them to keep score is extremely powerful, but also highly weird.
All speculative of course but its fun to speculate.