The Deep Anthropocene
aeon.co
aeon.co
Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this:
> Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa
Did that happen without any societal involvement. Did humans just carry seeds like birds might, or was there an organized effort to spread agriculture like this?
> ... it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles."
I hope that we'll continue to learn more.
A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.
They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days.
They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent.
Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste.
No health consequences.
As for fasting. I fast sometimes, but I would not try fasting on a long hike in mountains like Pyrenees. Probably not even Tatras.
Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.
> Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate.
And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.
There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them.
That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery.
Miles and miles of undersea construction off India, on seabed last exposed more than 7000 years ago.
The very oldest known stone construction, in both Egypt and Peru, used the very biggest chunks of rock, often 50 tons and more, (apparently) before even pulleys. Blocks get progressively smaller and clunkier in later work.
Egyptian sculpture made of basalt and granite, smoothed to a satin finish. Basalt boxes, 50 tons and more, with perfectly right-angled and smooth interior cuts, without tool marks.
I'm not saying it's aliens, because... why the hell would aliens care about rocks? But people were doing things that we don't understand, and cannot reproduce with the tools they should have had.
There is a great deal more to learn about the prehistoric past than we have even begun to get a handle on.
Even experts sometimes screw this up. I've seen my share of cropmarks and straight "walls" on imagery that turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. My first field season was particularly memorable. I spent days sitting in a muddy trench, convinced I had found a posthole. A few feet below was the remains of a collapsed rabbit warren. Archaeology can be hard.
"It is a common assumption that stone drilling originated during the Upper Paleolithic, but gained the features of a well-developed technology only during the Neolithic. The comparatively archaic method of two-handed drilling was replaced by the more efficient bow drill (Ibid.: 62). The process of stationary drilling, i.e., with the help of the bow drill, did not leave signs of drill vibration. These progressive features have been noted on the Denisova bracelet. It constitutes unique evidence on an unexpectedly early employment of two-sided fast stationary drilling during the Early Upper Paleolithic. All of the other known Paleolithic implements with signs of drilling bear features suggesting relatively slow drilling with a considerable drill vibration."
1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis.
2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones.
3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.
https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/
He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"
From Ricepedia: "Recent genetic evidence show that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, come from a single domestication event that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China."
Growing it in flooded padis, to control weeds, came surprisingly late, like 4000 ya. Putting fish in the padis to eat mosquito larvae and provide protein started only ~1800 ya.
"Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster." (implying that what's happened after 1950 isn't an ecological disaster)
"In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm ... human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world." (implying that human-caused climate change is a "myth")
If you read the article you'll find it's using a lot of double negatives like the ones above, and a lot of innuendo, but it ultimately boils down to denying that humans are causing climate change right now and we need immediate political change to reverse it.
It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bound to happen, of course. All that energy must come from somewhere.
I don't think the article suggests that the situation we're in now isn't happening. The article reads almost breathless—in on the knowledge that we're in a dire situation. Do we really need more reasons to illustrate our impact on the environment?
It also speaks to our strange compulsion to believe in the duality of human and nature. How do you get the public to recognize that there is no such thing, only one symbiotic whole? I hope we can figure out how to work together.
That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it.
I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.
Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.
Current anthropomorphic changes to the world are far faster than typical climate shifts, which occurred on the scale of 1000s of years, not decades.
Combined with humanity reducing the number of available species to adapt, mass extinctions seem akin to us playing russian roulette:
- did killing off this species collapse the entire system? No? - how about this one? No? - how about this one? Uhoh.
> Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.
From what I understand, the main existencial issue of CO2 and the subsequent global warming is the extinction of oxygen producing plankton in the oceans, which are apparently much more significant O2 producers than a typical forest.
This isn't a large multi causal multi-species antropogenic extinction, it is a single group extinction failure mode, directly caused by 'just global warming' which will automatically mean game over. We absolutely do need to curb greenhouse gases (not just CO2) and decelerate the trend of global temperature increase.
But just because that is a simple and direct danger, does that mean that mass extinction isn't killing off "key cog" species in more complicated critical machinery?
Regardless, I think you have misinterpreted this article anyway and it is saying the opposite.