Humanity’s Second Epochal Event – The Super-Predator Revolution – Part 2
As repeatedly seen in the historical era, if a new technology enabled great numbers of animals to be killed, hunters would quickly adopt the practice of killing the most animals they could and harvesting only the choicest cuts, as with bison tongues, as the North American bison was quickly driven to the brink of extinction by American “pioneers.” When Indians obtained horses from Europeans, they too killed all the bison they could, and stampeding them off cliffs was a common practice for thousands of years, but accelerated when horses made the job easier. Some Indians used all parts of a bison, but that seemed a minority practice, particularly after horses made hunting far easier, and was probably economically mandated. Cultural differences between Plains tribes began disappearing with the radical changes that horses and firearms brought to bison hunting, and stealing horses from neighboring tribes became a predilection.
While in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Eurasia, the five-to-seven metric ton herbivores and the predators that hunted them became a guild that stretched back to the dinosaurs, in marsupial-dominated Australia, they were a little smaller, with the largest marsupial ever, Diprotodon, reaching “only” about three metric tons. Australian animals enjoyed about 45 million years of isolation from the rest of Earth’s ecosystems, and large herbivore/predator guilds thrived there as they did elsewhere. After living for 1.6 mya, Diprotodon quickly went extinct about 46 kya, and their bones have been found with what appear to be butchering marks on them. The next largest denizen of Australia, Zygomaturus, weighed about 500 kilograms, and went extinct when Diprotodon did. Megafauna is variously defined as animals weighing at least 45 or 100 kilograms, which is about as massive as humans. About 90% of Australia’s megafauna went extinct soon after humans arrived. Lizards of up to two metric tons disappeared, a 500 kilogram, three-meter tall flightless bird also disappeared after its family had a 15 million year existence, a gorilla-sized kangaroo, and so on. A number had fossil records of more than ten million years, to go extinct shortly after humans arrived. The list of suddenly extinct Australian megafauna is horrifically impressive. I have yet to see a disinterested scientist or academic deny the idea that humans were primarily responsible, likely solely responsible, for the Australian megafauna extinctions. When a “referee” paper was published in 2006, assessing the state of the debate, the authors attributed the Australian megafauna extinctions entirely to humans. There is evidence that those early Australians engaged in setting great fires. On Borneo, about the same time that humans first invaded Australia about 46 kya, near Niah Cave humans also burned the forests with abandon, probably trying transform the rainforest environment to something human-friendlier.
Along with huge Australian herbivores, their predators went extinct. Australia’s “marsupial lion” lived about 1.6 mya before it died about 46 kya, when its prey did. There is a “loyal opposition” to idea of human agency for Australian megafauna extinctions that churns out papers that attribute the extinctions to climate. However, the vast majority of research results point very clearly to human agency in the extinctions. The battle of the scientific papers will likely not end soon, but this is where the pattern recognition of the generalist can greatly assist, while the specialists’ obsession with minutia get them lost in the details. While the human-agency skeptics sometimes seem to look at the big picture, their picture is not nearly big enough, in my opinion, and what follows is a generalist analysis.
What I have yet to see human-agency skeptics discuss is that the guild of multi-metric-ton herbivores and their attendant predators appeared more than 100 mya, which rose to dominance along with flowering plants. When the Cretaceous extinction wiped out those dinosaurs guilds, it was not long before they began to reappear, with mammals in those niches, and within 25 million years of the bolide event, mammals reached their maximum size and remained there for the next 40 million years, until humans arrived. While species emerged and went extinct, just as they had for the entire eon of complex life, that guild stayed relatively constant in size. With the appearance of humans, entire guilds disappeared. The five-to-seven ton herbivores and their predators vanished and were replaced by guilds a tiny fraction of their size. Car-sized glyptodonts filled a niche that ankylosaurs once resided in, and soon after humans arrived, only dog-sized armadillos remained.
What human-agency skeptics have ignored or argued around are unique features of the megafauna that went extinct and the humans that preyed on them, while they examined minutia. As discussed previously, proboscideans were Earth’s most successful land animals ever before humans arrived. As modern research has discovered, African elephants help create the biomes they live in, as terraforming agents. They were far from idle browsers and grazers, but had outsized impacts on the vegetation, soils, and geological features such as water holes. Dinosaurs may have had similar biome impacts, and it was likely a feature of that large herbivore guild, and scientists have been finding plenty of evidence that vegetation changes that human-agency skeptics attribute to climate change may well be largely the result of the guild’s disappearance, not a cause. Researchers in Africa have also discovered that changes wrought by elephants created biomes dependent on elephant management. When the elephants disappeared, so did the biomes they created, which is why smaller species could also disappear when the large herbivore guild vanished. While Australia was the only non-Antarctic continent without proboscideans 50 kya, and their guilds were comprised of somewhat smaller animals, probably reflecting inherent differences between placental and marsupial mammals, their large herbivores likely had similar biome impacts.
Human-agency skeptics emphasize climate change above all other factors, but that seems a very weak argument. As noted previously, many of the suddenly extinct Australian megafauna had lived for more than ten million years and longer, such as that family of large, flightless birds. Many others appeared during the current ice age and lived for more than a million years, to suddenly go extinct when humans appeared. Scientists have counted 17 glacial episodes during the current ice age, and they have had a clockwork-like regularity for the past million years, and the most severe episode yet was more than 400 kya. How can guilds that likely lived uninterrupted for at least 40 million years, and survived many climate fluctuations of the current ice age in fine shape, suddenly go extinct, worldwide, wherever humans appeared, and it was all due to climate?
As impressive as the capabilities and survival history of the global megafauna were, what seems far more difficult to explain away are the humans that arrived when the global megafauna went suddenly extinct. The only megafauna of note to survive were those that had lived with humans in Africa and Eurasia for more than a million years and learned to avoid them.
Anthropologists reacted to the devastating world wars in the first half of the 20th century by creating a “peaceful savage” meme that dominated thinking regarding “primitive” and ancient peoples. In the early 1990s, as I began the study that became my website, which eventually led to this essay, I was influenced by “the peaceful hunter-gatherer” meme. However, the evidence has been increasing from numerous disciplines that that idea is false, and can even be seen as a romantic notion of looking back to a vanished Golden Age. That “peaceful savage” myth has been overturned by archeological evidence. Often, it was not new evidence coming to light, but archeologists no longer being blinkered by their indoctrination, denying what their eyes were telling them. The evidence finally prevailed, and on the heels of that dogma being overturned, genetic evidence provided new insights into the human journey since that founder group left Africa.
When protohumans mastered stone tools and fire, they eventually transformed from hunted to hunter, and there is no persuasive reason to believe that an early application of their new ability to inflict wounds would have not been used on each other. As this narrative reaches the rise of Homo sapiens and the archeological record’s changing toolsets before people became sedentary, those artifacts may well reflect the conqueror’s toolsets, and the vanished toolsets also represented vanquished and exterminated peoples.
To briefly revisit UP, men have always committed the vast majority of violence, were the primary hunters, and almost always dominated all societies. In general, the higher women’s status, the healthier the society. The !Kung people of Africa stayed isolated hunter-gatherers to the present day. Their click language, with their click sounds shared with other African groups, such as the last full-time hunter-gathers left in Africa, the Hadza, probably sounded like the language that the founder group left with, and has since been lost beyond Africa. Genetic testing has demonstrated that the !Kung and related groups stayed in Africa when that founder group left, and their isolation and warlike ways kept them genetically isolated. Genetic testing also traced the migration path to Australia, and found peoples that stopped along the way, as part of a coastal migration that eventually reached the Pacific side of Asia and maybe all the way to the end of South America. One reason why the coastal route was probably the first was that it was warm and relatively easy. Around 60 kya, the global climate warmed a little, being about the warmest period in the hundred thousand years before this interglacial period, before it began oscillating toward the glacial maximum around 20 kya.
The Andaman Islands are positioned off the Malaysian coast. Sailors avoided the islands for centuries, as the natives killed anybody who landed and burned their bodies. The Andamans looked like African pygmies. As the British conquered the region, they established a penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the late 1700s, when about five thousand aboriginal Andamans lived on the main islands. The Andaman population collapsed from the usual diseases, mayhem, and alcohol that Europeans brought with them, and they were nearly extinct within a century of British contact. Less than one thousand aborigines survive today. The genetic and other evidence draws a convincing picture that the aboriginal Andamans were island-dwarfed descendants of the original inhabitants. The Andaman Islands were never connected to the mainland, so the aborigines likely descended from people who stopped and stayed during that founder migration from Africa.
The Andamans are members of a racial group called Negritos, which appear to be remnant populations of the original migration from Africa. They all survived in marginal environments where they subsisted as hunter-gatherers, while later agricultural immigrants dominated arable lands. About 50 kya, a few thousand years before the migration to Australia happened, the sea level was lower and the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo formed a contiguous peninsula called Sundaland today. New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania were also connected and formed a continent called Sahul today. Deep water lied between those two “lost continents,” and biologists drew lines between them, which note the distribution of animals and plants that did not cross open water. Wallace’s Line is furthest north, followed by Weber’s Line, and Lydekker’s Line is furthest south. Those lines mark the limits of migrations from Sundaland toward Sahul, which followed sea level changes. About 50-46 kya, behaviorally modern humans crossed the water in boats to Sahul, and the peoples of New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania lived in isolation until Europeans arrived. Those peoples have Denisovan remnants in their DNA, which likely means that they interbred with them while driving them to extinction on Sundaland and Southeast Asia, before some migrated to Sahul. Aboriginal Australian isolation was almost certainly maintained how Andaman Islanders did, by killing strange peoples who came ashore. When Europeans invaded Australia in the late 1700s, the aborigines they encountered were in a state of almost constant war. About 43 kya, lowering sea levels due to increasing global glaciation formed a land bridge to Tasmania. People migrated there, too, to become isolated when the seas rose again. The peoples of New Guinea’s highlands were the world’s most isolated, not “discovered” until the 1930s. When Europeans first encountered them, the highlanders did not know that a world existed outside of their highland home, thinking that they were creation’s only people. Unlike other relict populations of the original African migrants, New Guinea Highlanders practiced agriculture and lived in villages, and they were as violent as the others.
Except for New Guinean highlanders, the initial European contact with all of those relict populations was universally disastrous, just as it had been in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere for centuries. Those initial contacts happened in anthropology’s early days, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown studied the Andamans in the early 20th century, when they were tattered remnants of their people of a century earlier. The San people were also devastated by European invasion, with the Southern San driven to extinction when the Dutch invaded what became South Africa, with the !Kung surviving in the Kalahari Desert. Andamans, !Kung, and Aboriginal Australians all had/have strikingly similar religious ceremonies, which were marathon singing and dancing sessions that could last all night. Some rituals lasted for months. Their rituals are very likely what the first religions looked like, which were strenuous ordeals where people reached frenzied states that left them exhausted. Today’s leading hypothesis is that those rituals created group cohesion that held their society together. The social glue of monkey and ape societies is grooming, but humans seem to have replaced it with conversation when they mastered language, and those early rituals further cemented the bonds.
What all early civilizations had in common was that while they formed in-group cohesion with their rituals, it also meant that out-groups were fair game, and the connection between religion and warfare precedes that migrating founder group, as long as 70 kya. As will be discussed later, warfare and violence have been enduring human behaviors for the entire human journey, spanning from before the human/chimp split to today, with a brief hiatus when the human spread to open lands. Monkeys have wars, so that primate behavior has a pedigree that is likely tens of millions of years old.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever invoked a climate change hypothesis for the mass extinction of South American mammals when the land bridge formed that allowed for invasion from North America, even though the formation of that land bridge likely triggered the current ice age. About 95% of all South American mammals quickly went extinct when outcompeted by more cosmopolitan invaders that had survived many millions of years of intercontinental invasions. It was a purely Darwinian event, where animals with greater carrying capacities prevailed. There was no big picture awareness of events by invaders or invaded, just as there had never been during life’s history on Earth. They all just tried to survive, and previously isolated South American mammals quickly lost the game, with the survivors able to live in niches that no North American animals did, such as New World monkeys.
Earth had never before witnessed anything like behaviorally modern humans. Nothing came close. They wielded fire and began using it for offensive purposes, to shape environments to their liking. They had sophisticated stone tools and weapons, they mastered language and could engage in group behaviors that no other land animal remotely accomplished. They likely had sophisticated projectile weapons, and if the !Kung example is instructive, they may have also known how to poison their weapons, where one well-placed !Kung arrow can bring down a 200-kilogram antelope in less than a day. What kind of animal in the Western Hemisphere and Australia, that had never seen anything like a human before, and would have been the mother lode kill of the invaders, and the large ones all reproduced slowly, could have withstood that onslaught? None that I can think of. Neanderthals were ambush predators of megafauna that were wary of humans, and whatever projectile weapons they may have had, they would have been inferior to those that behaviorally modern humans left Africa with about 60-50 kya, and Neanderthals still lived off of those animals, with many broken bones and undoubted deaths suffered during hunts. That would have been nothing like what the invaders of the Western Hemisphere and Australia encountered. They could have walked right up to all those animals with no conditioned fear of humans and stuck their spears into them, maybe not even needing to use projectile weapons, much less poisoned ones. That scenario has been called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, but it would not have seemed like a rapid event to the invaders. It would have been something like a butcher shop’s version of the Garden of Eden. Further than they could imagine, in every direction, were animals with no fear of humans and could be killed so easily that it may have literally become child’s play. One argument by human-agency skeptics is that continental animals were subject to predation and would have begun fleeing fast. That seems like a spurious argument, and here is why.
The genetic testing that has been performed on humanity in the past generation has shown that the founder group’s pattern of migration was to continually spread out, and once the original settlement covered the continents, people did not move much at all, at least until Europe began conquering the world. There is little sign of warfare in those early days of migration, and the leading hypothesis is that people moved to the next valley rather than be close enough to fight each other. Any conflict would have been easily resolved by moving further out, where more easily killed animals lived. Also, in those virgin continents, people need not have roamed far to obtain food. Today, an !Kung woman will carry her child more than 7,000 kilometers before the child can for walk for himself/herself. If an !Kung woman bears twins, it is her duty to pick which child to murder, because she cannot afford to carry two. That demonstrates the limitations of today’s hunter-gatherer life, but in those halcyonic days of invading virgin continents, which had to be the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, those kinds of practices probably waned and bands grew fast. When they reached their social limit they split, with the new group moving on to new lands where the animals again never saw people before. Unlike the case with humans, there would not have been a grapevine where animals told their neighbors about the new killer animal. The first time those megafauna saw humans was likely their last time. It is very likely, just as with all predators for all time, and as can be seen with historical hunting events such as the decimation of the bison, that those bands soon took to killing animals, taking the best parts, and moving on. To them it would not have been a “blitzkrieg,” but more like kids in candy stores. And after a few thousand years of grabbing meat whenever the fancy took them, or perhaps less, those halcyonic days were over as the far coasts of Australia were reached and the easy meat was gone. When that land bridge formed to Tasmania about 43 kya, people crossed and were able to relive that “golden” time for a little while longer, until all the megafauna was gone on Tasmania. It did not take long. They also may have worked their way through the food chain, where the first kills were the true mother lode, such as nobody even deigning to raise a spear at anything less than a Diprotodon or similar animal until they were gone. Then they started killing smaller prey, which eventually did wise up and were harder to kill, and humans had to work at it again and the brief Golden Age was over. The huge fires that accompanied the Australians as they shaped the new continent to their liking, maybe recreating the savanna conditions that they left in Africa, may have also been used to flush out animals if they began to avoid humans.
All continental and even most island ecosystems that humans soon invaded had predators, but they would have been as ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers as their prey did. They were capable of defending themselves, so were probably rarely hunted except by the most foolish young men. No predator on Earth would have wanted to confront fire-wielding humans with their array of weaponry and group skills. The megafauna predators went extinct when their prey did, and probably not because of much direct human violence.
When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, there were islands off the coasts that had not been inhabited for about ten thousand years, when the oceans rose and cut them off from the mainland. On King and Kangaroo islands, the wombats, emus, kangaroos, and other animals were so tame that people killed them with no effort whatsoever. Europeans on one island even built a hut for their wombats to sleep in at night, and they just pulled one from a hut when needed and slaughtered it. No mainland animals acted remotely like that, being shy and furtive around people, for good reason. It did not matter if the environment was warm, dry, wet, or cold; all large animals quickly died off when humans arrived. New Guinea had a similar megafauna extinction pattern: sudden and total.
Africa and Eurasia were another matter, as humans had been living and evolving there for around two million years, and had been hunting for at least several hundred thousand years. Similar to those Negritos and other relict humans, some animals found refugia or were lucky to live in them, and did not go immediately extinct. That coastal route was only the founder group’s initial route. It seems that India was a key point of radiation, where the founder group’s descendants branched off north, east, and west. Homo erectus may not have been capable of interbreeding with modern humans, and nobody thinks that they see traces of their DNA in today’s human genome. But Denisovans and Neanderthal DNA is in the human genome, which likely means that humans interbred with them as they drove them to extinction. Their contribution to today’s human DNA is small, on the order of a few percent. Many thousands of years later, as Europe conquered the world, they interbred with all the peoples that they drove to extinction, and there is no reason to doubt that something similar happened as that founder group’s descendants conquered Earth.
The African and Eurasian megafauna learned to fear and avoid people after hundreds of thousands of years of being hunted, but those extinct humans may have been worthy adversaries and unwary behaviorally modern humans could have been occasional prey. Whatever behaviorally modern humans did to those virgin continents, there is no doubt that they moved to the top of every food chain they encountered. Nothing could withstand those people, and the easy meat fueled humanity’s initial global expansion. That may be when humans became “energy windfall opportunists.” All animals took energy windfalls when they found them (what fueled all those “Golden Ages” of the evolutionary past), but humans have quested after them to this very day, and the first instance was likely when that founder group exploded across the planet, getting all the easy energy that they could with their new, irresistible methods, and driving all other human competitors to extinction. It seems that Denisovans quickly succumbed in the warmer climates, and the “hobbits” effectively hid in their refugia for tens of thousands of years while the behaviorally modern humans passed them by, but Neanderthals were a different matter. There are no known Neanderthal sites on the Mediterranean’s African shores, which would have certainly been quite inhabitable, but contemporary remains of modern humans are found on the southern shores, with the divide evident where Spain and Morocco meet at the strait of Gibraltar. I consider it likely that inhabitants of the northern and southern shores were mutually hostile, with the Mediterranean forming a frontier. They did not mix because they adapted to different biomes and lifestyles, but they adapted to different biomes due to mutual hostility. That did not mean constant warring, but they knew to avoid each other and conflicts were not worth it. But the arrival of behaviorally modern humans changed the terms of engagement.
By about 45-40 kya, that northward migrating band from the founder group reached Europe. Although the exact route is in dispute, the genetic evidence supports the idea that the group originated from a migration into the Levant, probably via the east end of the Arabian Peninsula. Those invaders are called Cro-Magnons today. When they reached the Levant, they began migrating along the Mediterranean’s northern and southern shores, and Neanderthals began disappearing. The process took several thousand years at minimum, and has been called a border war with Neanderthals. The “blitzkrieg” of humans migrating across the length and breadth of Australia in a few thousand years was not in evidence for the migration/invasion around the Mediterranean’s periphery. Neanderthals do not seem to have gone quietly or easily (and maybe ancient Homo sapiens along the southern shore), and may have been the biggest obstacle to Earth’s conquest by behaviorally modern humans.
About 40-35 kya, a new stone technique, developed from the Neanderthals’ Mousterian technology, called Châtelperronian, appeared in today’s France and Spain. It was succeeded by a new stone tool technology that appeared about 30 kya called Mode 4, or Aurignacian, and the people making those tools also made cave paintings. Aurignacian technology was a Cro-Magnon invention of unprecedented sophistication, with blades instead of flakes. There is considerable uncertainty about the exact dates when those two technologies appeared, but the consensus is that Aurignacian succeeded Châtelperronian, and Cro-Magnons invented the Aurignacian and Neanderthals used the Châtelperronian. There seems to have been cultural interaction between the two peoples, as well as genetic interchange. While the controversies regarding Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interaction and mutual influence will not end in my lifetime, what virtually everybody agrees on is that by about 30-27 kya, Neanderthals were extinct. The Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal controversy is one of the more heated in anthropology, and there are two basic camps on the Neanderthal extinction, just as with the Australian megafauna extinctions: modern humans did it, or climate did it.
Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet
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If I die anytime soon, nobody will have any idea what to do with it. Ralph McGehee donated his intelligence library to a university when the CIA finally forced him out of business:
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