Hi:
I just finished with my first writing of the next chapter. I am not sure that I can even call the below a draft yet, but I am rushing off to the next one, as I am getting pressed for time. I have editorial comments back on early sections that I will now digest, and by early next week I should be writing about the Third Epochal Event, when humans became civilized. The chapter draft below will have to be a three-fer, as it is the longest chapter yet. As I suspected, it was a very heavy lift, emotionally, and I am not sure that it will get much better in the future chapters, but I am going to do my best.
So, without further ado…
Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution – Part 1
Anthropologists and primate researchers long believed that culture was the unique province of humanity, but relatively recent scientific findings have disproven that notion. Capuchin monkeys have cultural learning, and it is more sophisticated with great apes. It took a few million years after the human/chimp split for our ancestors to learn to make stone tools, and that culture then spread widely in Africa. The control of fire, appearance of Homo erectus, and development of a new toolset were likely all closely related and at least partly interdependent, but little seemed to change for the next million years or more. Then the next version of humanity appeared and possessed a larger brain, and new tools and behaviors are evident beginning about a half million years ago. The timeframes continually shrank between major events in the human journey. Only two hundred thousand years later, Neanderthals appeared and created a new toolset, and new behaviors are in evidence. Only one hundred thousand years after that, anatomically modern humans appeared. Only thirty thousand years after that, about 170 kya, new tool-making techniques appeared, as well as humanity’s first known exploitation of the seashore biome, probably due to necessity, where life once again was eked out on the margins, and those humans may have decorated their bodies. About 100 kya, innovation seems to have accelerated again, and by 75-60 kya there is evidence of bedding and sophisticated tools made with complex processes. Needles and perhaps even arrowheads first appeared about 60 kya. There is no doubt among scientists that members of Homo sapiens made those advances, and their artifacts provided evidence of increasing cultural and technical sophistication, which soon left Neanderthals and all other land animals far behind. About 75-70 kya, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia was Earth’s largest in tens of millions of years, and there is controversy today whether that eruption was partly responsible for the genetic bottleneck that Homo sapiens passed through not long afterward. What became today’s humanity seems to have nearly gone extinct at that bottleneck.
Those issues will not be resolved in my lifetime, but Homo sapiens migrated past Africa in the interglacial period of 130 kya to 114 kya, and there is evidence and speculation that those humans may have bred with Neanderthals, may have been killed off by them, may have migrated across Eurasia, or some combination of those events. There is evidence that heidelbergensis or Neanderthal descendants, the Denisovans, also migrated across Eurasia, perhaps expanding to Southeast Asia as Homo erectus did. The Denisovan evidence arose from analyzing DNA from teeth and bones, which is the only physical evidence of Denisovans so far, and their genes are more prevalent in aboriginal Australians and Melanesians. To summarize, there is substantial evidence that humans far more evolved than Homo erectus likely populated Eurasia in significant numbers by 200 kya, and perhaps even anatomically modern humans around 100 kya, and certainly enough to drive vulnerable species to extinction, with their advanced toolkit and hunting behaviors, long before behaviorally modern humans left Africa about 60-50 kya. Homo erectus became extinct less than 150 kya in East Asia or the islands off of it, and the largest primate ever disappeared about 100 kya, two primates that coexisted for more than a million years, and they disappeared concurrent with the rise of humans with sophisticated toolsets, and may well have been early casualties of humanity’s success.
To briefly revisit conflicts between specialists and generalists, to that speculation above, scientists ideally want persuasive evidence that humans drove Homo erectus and gigantopithecus to extinction, with Acheulean or later technological artifacts associated with kills of those species. All that scientists have found for gigantopithecus so far are some teeth and jawbones. While such deductive reasoning is sound, the fossil and artifactual record is so thin that such evidence will likely never be adduced, even if it was a common event 150-100 kya. Gigantopithecus survived for nine million years, disappearing around when more lethal humans arrived, and a camel that roamed today’s Syria went extinct about 100 kya, soon after anatomically modern humans arrived in the vicinity. Is that a coincidence? There is genetic evidence that behaviorally modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps other early humans, and they all went extinct soon after those behaviorally modern humans arrived. That they interbred put to bed the hypotheses that they went extinct before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. If they went extinct after behaviorally modern humans arrived, as the genetic evidence clearly tells us, the implications are obvious, and any extinction hypothesis that invokes climate change or some other natural catastrophe has some high hurdles to overcome. Those events were likely the first salvos of the Sixth Mass Extinction.
As will be seen in this chapter, the spread of behaviorally modern humans closely coincided not only with the extinction of humans and primates that existed for hundreds of thousands and even many millions of years, but virtually all of the world’s large animals went extinct almost exactly when behaviorally modern humans arrived, all except those that had evolved alongside the human line for millions of years in Africa and Eurasia. Some vanished animals were among the most successful in Earth’s history.
After Africa began colliding with Asia, about 18 mya Asian animals quickly invaded and dominated Africa, with the two primary exceptions being proboscideans and apes, both of which prospered at home in Africa and in the inviting biomes of Eurasia. Proboscideans did even better, not only becoming prominent in Eurasia, but they also migrated to North America by 16.5 mya. They migrated to South America about three mya, as soon as they could, and quickly succeeded in all South American biomes, from rainforest to grasslands to mountains. They beat apes to the Western Hemisphere by 16.5 million years. Elephants pass the mirror test and mourn their dead, and their huge size and prehensile trunks, as well as their ability to eat a wide variety of vegetation, let proboscideans flourish everywhere they possibly could. They even formed biomes, as a terraforming force. Until humans arrived, proboscideans were the most intelligent, adaptable, and successful land animals ever. But after nearly twenty million years of global success, they nearly all went extinct soon after encountering behaviorally modern humans. They went completely extinct in the Western Hemisphere, and there has long been controversy among scientists whether humans caused it, although the debate is fading as evidence of human agency becomes clearer.
Some scientists treat every proboscidean extinction as a unique mystery, unrelated to other proboscidean extinctions, with climate and resulting vegetation changes hypothesized as agents of extinction, or other causes invoked, when the very likely cause stares at them each morning in the mirror. The devil is in the details, but regarding the megafauna extinctions, some specialists cannot seem to discern a very clear pattern. Scientists, because they are human, have an inherent conflict of interest when attributing such catastrophes to non-human causes. During the remainder of this essay, it will become evident that a human penchant is absolving one’s in-group of responsibility for catastrophes and crimes, and historians, scientists, and other professionals regularly engage in such interest-conflicted acts, whether they were defending their species, race, gender, nation, class, religion, ethnicity, or profession. That in-group/out-group difference in treatment has a long history, probably going back to the beginnings of territorial social animals.
The findings of mainstream science can be particularly persuasive when lines of evidence from numerous disciplines independently converge, which has become increasingly common as scientific investigations have become more interdisciplinary. DNA testing is clearly showing descent relationships, and ghost ancestors are being discovered via genetic traces. Numerous dating methods are used today, with more regularly invented. Typically, a new technique will emerge from obscurity, often pioneered by a lonely scientist. For instance, dendrochronology, the reading of tree rings, was developed as a dating science by the dogged efforts of an astronomer who labored in obscurity for many years. He was a fortunate pioneer; when he died after nearly seventy years of effort, he lived to see dendrochronology become a widely accepted dating method. Pioneers and their discoveries are usually ignored or pilloried at first, and the pioneer may die in obscurity while others eventually take credit for it. Eventually, the new method breaks past the inertia and even active suppression, if the breakthrough threatens powerful interests. Then the newly accepted method can be seen as a panacea for all manner of seemingly insoluble problems, in the euphoric, bandwagon phase. Yesterday’s heresy can become today’s dogma. Then early victories may not seem as triumphant as previously hailed, and a “morning after” period of sobering up arrives. The history of science is filled with fads that faded to oblivion, sometimes quickly, while advances that survived the withering attacks are eventually seen in a more mature light, where its utility is acknowledged as well as its limitations. DNA and molecular clock analyses have largely passed through those phases in recent years. In the 1980s, the idea of room-temperature superconductors had its brief, frenzied day in the sun when high-temperature superconductors were discovered. Cold fusion had a similar trajectory, although the effect seems real and MIT manipulated their data to try to make the effect vanish. The scientist who spoke out against MIT’s apparent fraud was murdered years later, during a series of events that I was close to. After the bolide impact hypothesis broke through a taboo that lasted for more than a century, some scientists tried explaining all mass extinctions with bolide impacts. Today, the bolide event that ended the dinosaurs’ reign is the only impact event widely accepted as responsible for a mass extinction, and even that event is still under siege by scientists who propose other dynamics for the dinosaurs’ extinction.
In the dating sciences, the tests have all had their issues and refinements. The equipment has become more sophisticated, problems have been resolved, and precision has been enhanced. While there are continuing controversies, dating techniques have advanced just like many other processes over the history of science and technology. These days, dates determined for fossils and artifacts are generally only accepted with confidence when several different samples are independently tested, and by different kinds of tests, if possible. If thermoluminescence, carbon-14, uranium, and other tests produce similar dates, as well as stratigraphic evidence, paleomagnetic evidence, current measurements of hotspot migration across tectonic plates, and with genetic and other evidence introduced in the past generation, those converging lines of evidence have produced an increasingly robust picture of not only what happened, but when.
In the 1990s, I found the dating issue enthralling and saw it assailed by fringe enthusiasts, catastrophists in particular. A couple of decades later, while I understand that, like all sciences, dating has its limitations and the enthusiasm for a new technique can become a little too exuberant, dating techniques and technologies have greatly improved in my lifetime. While dating the Cambrian Period’s beginning to 541.0 mya may seem a conceit, thinking that scientists can place that event to within a hundred thousand years of when it happened, over the years my doubts have diminished. When moon rocks and meteorites can be tested, and the findings support not only Earth’s age previously determined by myriad methods, but also supports the prevailing theories for solar system and the Moon’s formation, call me impressed. While controversies will persist over various finds and methods used, and scientific fraud certainly occurs, as a whole, those converging lines of independently tested evidence make it increasingly unlikely that the entire enterprise is a mass farce, delusion, or even a conspiracy, as many from the fringes continue to argue. There is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody. I have looked into fringe claims for many years, and few of them have proven valid, and even if many were, their potential importance to the human journey was often minor to trifling. As the story this essay tells comes closer to today’s humanity, the orthodox controversies become more heated, and fringe claims proliferate.
As scientific investigations deal with the human line, the issues increasingly become more complex and difficult to untangle and assess, largely because of human consciousness, which is a wild card, something that if not different in kind is vastly different in degree, at least for land animals; cetaceans may well be another matter. Designing falsifiable hypotheses for testing human behavior and consciousness has provided challenges not seen in other sciences, and experiments performed on our primate cousins have also become more humane. Dissecting chimp brains, while they are still alive, is no longer ethically acceptable, much less doing it to humans. Even today, data on the effects of cold and altitude on humans was primarily gleaned from Nazi experiments on prisoners. Today’s scientists studying human consciousness and its relationship to physical reality have been limited by ethics and what is perhaps the primary limitation: in studying human consciousness, scientists are studying themselves. The ideal of objective examination of the material world is hampered by unresolved paradoxes right at the bedrock, and objective examination of human consciousness, by humans, may well be an impossible goal.
However, studying the human line is in many ways little different from studying other organisms. Maybe there was love among the protists and trilobites, but life’s journey on Earth seemed to rarely stray far from the essentials of acquiring energy, preserving it, and reproducing. It is little different with today’s humans, even in the most “advanced” civilizations. Whatever the means humans used since that founder group left Africa 60-50 kya, the primary goal was always the same: survive long enough to produce offspring. All human societies had to meet that goal, first. There are no hungry philosophers, and the concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can help rank humans needs and desires. If a human does not receive adequate food, water, air, shelter, sleep, and sex, the rest does not matter. Once those needs are met, social needs become important, being that virtually all higher primates are intensely social. But for nearly the entire human journey, the primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time was food security. Until the Industrial Revolution, few humans ever rose much past that most fundamental need of getting enough energy to power their biology. When preindustrial societies ascended past that level, it was never for long, as famine and civilization collapses always brought humans back to the basics of securing food. This essay’s primary purpose may be helping humanity past that threshold, where survival needs are paramount and rarely recede from the forefront of human awareness, even when people pretend that they are not. I live in history’s richest and most powerful nation, near the world’s richest man, and I pass by homeless people each day. Just as the journey of life on Earth has always been primarily about economics (physical wellbeing), which is always rooted in the energy issue, so has the human journey.
While performing the studies that became my website and this essay, one figure loomed particularly largely, both within orthodoxy and on the fringes: Charles Darwin. Perhaps because I live in the USA, which may have more hostility toward evolutionary theory than anywhere else on Earth, with Biblical literalism still so popular, I have encountered many attacks on Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of evolution. I have continually read recent scientific works where the authors remark, “Darwin was right again!”, as another of his hypotheses was proven true by modern scientific investigation. When Darwin wrote that the cradle of humanity was probably Africa, because that was where the most human-looking apes were, his position was dismissed for generations, with most contemporary scientists suspecting that humans evolved in Asia. Among Darwin’s many contributions to science, the most enduring may be that all life on Earth has an ancestry, which can be traced all the way back to the beginning. Biology’s tree of life is only a more elaborate version of what Darwin began sketching long ago. When DNA analysis became feasible in my lifetime, the findings led scientists to say, “Darwin was right again!” Darwin died without ever hearing about genetic theory, but his theory of descent from common ancestry has become the bedrock of evolutionary theory. Also, scientists are using that idea to reconstruct trees of human language and religion, among other human constructs, where all languages and religions today are descended from that founder group of 60-50 kya, and the results are impressive.
Donald Brown published Human Universals in 1991, which noted traits found among all human societies. That book was published more than a decade before the human genome was sequenced and before amassing the genetic evidence that traced the human lineage to those five thousand people in East Africa 60-50 kya. Those universal human features were almost certainly possessed by that founder population. The primary traits of “the Universal People” (“UP”) are listed at this footnote. Some less-than-universal traits are not on that list, such as women terminating unwanted pregnancies, killing unwanted children, and capital punishment, but were close to universal, which may mean that some societies discarded those behaviors over time or that most adopted them later, with the former being more likely.
There have been many interesting divergences in descendants from that founder population, such as how the West emphasizes linear time while the East emphasizes circular time, and some scientists wonder if that has been reflected in the DNA of those peoples by now. How many of UP’s traits are biological? How many are culturally and economically dependent? What is human nature, and can our seeming sentience change or overcome our natures? Some of UP’s traits are evident in today’s monkeys and apes, so likely have a long pedigree and are deeply ingrained into human consciousness if not necessarily human biology, while others have declined in prominence or seeming importance in the historical era, particularly since the Industrial Revolution began. However, when I compared that list to my American society, which is history’s most “advanced,” all UP traits still exist, to one degree or another.
What heads that list may well be the primary trait that led to UP’s dominance of Earth: their mastery of language. While social communication via sound may have begun with dinosaurs and perhaps even earlier, and Homo heidelbergensis had biological features that would have made vocal communication more sophisticated, and Neanderthals had biological features that further enabled speech, scientists strongly suspect that the mastery of language that today’s humans display probably allowed humans to rapidly develop their technology and culture. It was humanity’s first Internet; a way to communicate ideas and information in a way previously unfeasible and even unimaginable, at a level of sophistication that no other land animal ever achieved. That invention provided the opportunity for sharing complex ideas, which created positive feedback loops that allowed for quicker cultural and technological advances. That is not fanciful speculation, and linguistics, studying modern brain abnormalities, and genetics testing has converged on what seems the most plausible hypothesis today, although in these areas, the controversies can be fierce.
Noam Chomsky has been called “the Einstein of linguistics.” His influence on my political-economic thought has been profound, and it has been interesting to stumble upon his work in diverse scientific fields, largely related to linguistics and psychology, but he is also a major figure in philosophy. Chomsky did not find an intellectually satisfying connection between his scientific and political work, but others have. Chomsky has had an outsized influence in linguistics since the 1950s, his interactive style can be polemic and his tremendous influence arguably delayed some directions that linguistics has taken. Darwin’s observations again found new relevance, that time in linguistics, as he noted that language acquisition seemed instinctual. Chomsky observed that any infant on Earth can be placed in any society, and will master the language that he or she was raised with, which is one of UP’s traits. Darwin thought that human mental traits were developed through natural selection, and although Chomsky thought that there was an innate language “organ” in human biology, he did not pursue its evolutionary implications, and linguistics neglected that connection until recently. With the rise of DNA analysis and new directions in linguistics that even Chomsky began taking in his old age, scientists are finding genes and brain regions closely related to language. The predominant evolutionary models have linked language with other forms of communication such as gestures, and Broca’s area in the frontal lobe is closely associated with those activities. One way that scientists linked brain regions with activities and traits was when those areas have been damaged by accident or disease. In 1990, a scientist reported on a London family wherein a large fraction had severe language deficits. In 1998, geneticists studied the DNA of that family and isolated the FOXP2 gene as the cause. Neanderthals shared the same mutation with Homo sapiens, and with other anatomical similarities suggests that Neanderthals may have had some kind of language.
However, all that scientists can tell that DNA does is provide the “blueprint” for making proteins. Proteins have four levels of structure, and the science of epigenetics studies the highly complex way that genes express themselves. DNA provides the foundation for life’s structures, and as with Hox genes, the FOXP2 gene is highly conserved in humans, which means that it does not change. Similar to my analogy of a house’s foundation determining what kind of house can be built on it, those genes form the foundation of the biological structures built from them, and if the foundation is damaged, the resulting house will be defective. Epigenetics and other factors are important, but if the foundation is flawed, the house may not stand at all.
The Great leap forward has been a prominent hypothesis which posited that behaviorally modern humans suddenly appeared. It was once considered an abrupt event that began about 50-40 kya, but as new archeological finds are amassed, as well as recent advances in genetic research and other areas, the story is familiar. While on the geological timescale the event was abrupt, radical, and unprecedented in life’s history on Earth, the “ramping” period seems to have lasted longer than initially thought. A likelier story is that Homo sapiens first appeared about 200 kya in East Africa, which was a primate “tradition” with at least a 25-million-year history. Homo sapiens inherited culture and tools from their ancestors and continued along the path of inventing more complex technologies and techniques, exploiting new biomes, and reaching new levels of cognition. There does not seem to be any Missing Link or development that needs to invoke divine or extraterrestrial intervention to explain the appearance and rise of Homo sapiens. Some Homo sapiens migrated past their African homeland during the previous interglacial period of 130 kya to 114 kya, and brought along the technology of their time. While they may have disappeared, perhaps falling prey to Neanderthals, vestiges of their fate are likely yet to be discovered. They may have contributed to the biological and technological wealth of Eurasian humans and may have begun to drive vulnerable species to extinction with their new tools and techniques. However, Africa remained the crucible of primate biological and technological innovation, as it almost always had to that time, and by 70-60 kya, isolated African humans reached a level of sophistication called behavioral modernity. Art was in evidence, needles made clothes and other sophisticated possessions, and they mastered language, which was likely a unique trait among land animals. They made tools of a sophistication far advanced over other humans, which likely included projectile weapons that radically changed the terms of engagement with prey animals, predators, and other humans.
Those events happened during a glacial interval, the global ocean was about seventy meters lower than today, and today’s 18 kilometer gap at the Red Sea’s mouth was far narrower about 60-50 kya. Today, this seems to have been the founder group’s point of exit from Africa. That route seems likely for a few reasons, one of which is the DNA trail of the peoples living along the periphery of Southern Asia all the way to Australia, and the other is that Homo sapiens were the first humans to arrive in Australia, and it could only be reached by boat. Taking a sea route was a new accomplishment by those behaviorally modern humans, and they likely reached Australia about 50-46 kya, because the Australian megafauna began going extinct about then, and that event begins a long and bloody tale that continues to this day. While earlier extinctions of the megafauna on Flores Island of nearly a million years ago, or Homo erectus and gigantopithecus between 150 kya and 100 kya, can be considered more equivocal, there is virtually no doubt among today’s scientists that the Sixth Mass Extinction began in earnest with the human invasion of Australia.
Before examining the details of the barrage of extinctions that followed behaviorally modern humans wherever they appeared during the next 50,000 years, a brief review of key dynamics is in order, and energy trumps all, as always. As with all predators, the easy meat is always eaten first, and a cost/benefit decision drives the process, which today’s analysts call EROI. It was an instinctual process with most animals. Many human practices today are similar, where members of traditional societies cannot provide answers for their mass behaviors other than, “We always did it this way,” or, “It is part of our religion,” but scientists study their practices and find them energetically ideal, even ingeniously, but nobody in those societies was consciously aware of it. Societies without such energy-efficient practices failed, while those that religiously followed them survived.
In today’s hunter-gatherer societies, the EROI on killing large animals dwarfs all other food sources. The EROI, of calories produced divided by hours of labor invested, for large game (a deer, for example), is on average four times that of small game, fifteen times that of birds, about eight times that of roots and tubers, and 10-15 times that of seeds and nuts. An African elephant carcass provides about six million calories, which would sustain a band of eight people for a year if they could eat it all before it rotted and did not die of protein poisoning. So, the EROI for those easily-killed proboscideans when humans invaded the Western Hemisphere could have been in the hundreds, and could have exceeded a thousand. Large animals have always been the mother lode of hunter-gatherer peoples, and the consensus among anthropologists is that no instincts urge a hunter to kill only what is needed, but a hunter will kill whatever he can. That finding partly derives from studying modern hunter-gatherers. There is no doubt that when early humans intruded into environments that never before encountered humans, where animals would have had no intrinsic fear of humans, people would have had an exceptionally easy time killing all large animals encountered. Animals without experience around humans, such as Antarctic penguins, are easily approached and killed. As happened innumerable times in the historical era, intruding humans killed all the naïve animals they could. The only animals that survived developed a healthy fear of humans and avoided them, but how many could develop that fear before they were all killed? From the very beginning of the eon of complex life, large size was an evolutionary advantage. More than five hundred million years later, a new kind of animal appeared that turned that advantage into a fatal disadvantage, as it found a way to mine that energy stored in large animals, and they quickly plundered it to exhaustion whenever they could.
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). I also have friends who killed people as part of their jobs. But my CIA relative and my killer friends were not psychopaths, but “patriots” who did it largely for “psychic income,” actually believing that they were serving some higher cause, or allowing themselves to be maneuvered into situations where murdering people became part of their jobs. That is common enough with the USA’s imperial soldiers, but it also happens plenty in other, less military, situations. 
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