Mammals Won the Dinosaurs' World
bbc.com
bbc.com
I adore Wikipedia!
Of course if the doom-mongers are to be believed and our climate crisis becomes a runaway hothouse which devastates life across land and oceans in major disaster fashion then the birds are well-placed to take over again. I've never trusted them crows!
Their lives are short. And not very cheery. But I feel like they may have won? Or are we winning because we have them confined?
:-)
> Their lives are short. And not very cheery. But I feel like they may have won? Or are we winning because we have them confined?
It'd say it's more domestication rather than confinement.
The real creatures that are challenging humans are diseases and invasive species. So MRSA/Covid-19 and Africanized Honey Bees/feral hogs.
The feral hog bit doesn't concern me as much. I eat two or three pounds of that a week. Now if hog gives me MRSA, it's all over.
“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . .
The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
there were powerful men controlling the wheat & peseants growing & eating it.
... But population growth explodes because of the reliable supply of food and the ability to be settled in one place and also the ability to wean babies sooner for the above reasons.
It turns out people will trade many valuable things -- including freedom and their own health -- in exchange for food security and stability and the knowledge that they don't die this winter because the neighbouring tribe overhunted all the deer and the fish didn't spawn this year.
Natural evolution doesn't optimize for hedonic well being. It optimizes for survival and growth.
It's also possible that if we manage to cope with things like climate change, avoid self-inflicted disasters like nuclear war or bioterrorism, and adapt to resource constraints, we'll eventually end up on the other end of the post-industrial transition better off than we started ~15,000 years ago. If it does turn out that way it makes the whole period of agricultural and early industrial toil look like a kind of "fitness valley," a decline between two local maxima.
In any case I don't think there's any going back. We have long ago passed the point at which reversion to a hunter-gatherer condition is politically, economically, and socially feasible. By the time large scale agricultural societies had standing armies it was pretty unlikely. I've long believed that we conclusively passed the point of no return at exactly 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_%28nuclear_test%29
That's also where I plant the stake as the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.
The best step forward is to automate all the hard work and make sure we divide the benefits equally.
That's a massive if.
Seemingly, the key enemies of fundamental human freedom are wheat and... cats.
So the wheat domesticated both us... and the cats.
Alcohol domesticated the grains domesticated the cats & people.
And BTW the cats also domesticated the people.
Certainly they put all the vertebrates to shame.
It's interesting how fast evolution can move when there are open niches.