This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
I realized yesterday that I have never discussed what I call the Fifth Epoch, publicly and orally. So, here goes. First, I want to emphasize that people with comprehensive perspectives will gain a far greater understanding and appreciation of what the Fifth Epoch means than those who don’t, which is one reason why my work is largely about developing a comprehensive perspective.
I have decided to break this into five posts: which will mirror the essay that I published last year. The four posts will be:
1. Life on Earth before the rise of humans;
2. The Epochs of the human journey – in two posts;
3. What the coming Epoch portends for humanity and Earth;
4. How to achieve the transition to the coming Epoch.
From the very beginning of life on Earth, life has been an energetically intensive phenomenon, unlike anything else in the known universe. From the first life to enzymes to aerobic respiration (which was made feasible by oxygenic photosynthesis) to complex life and its mitochondria, life became so intensely energetic that complex organisms use energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produces it, pound for pound.
Also, the earliest life on Earth formed colonies, such as stromatolites, which have been on Earth for billions of years. Brains evolved when other organs did, particularly in the Cambrian Period, to coordinate the activities of those big new bodies. Neurons are never at “rest,” as they constantly “charge” themselves, which uses half of their energy, to be ready to act quickly in the waltz of predator and prey. For that reason, nervous-system tissue is very expensive to maintain.
When animals evolved, they could form communities, and social animals are social because sociality enhanced the survival and reproductive prospects of a society’s members. Azar Gat stated it as succinctly as I have seen: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence, and humans are no different in that regard.
In the eon of complex life, which is more than 500 million years old, various species could find themselves in golden ages when life was easy. It was generally due to some biological innovation around energy or reproduction, and those fortunate species lived in golden ages for a time. But breeding to ecosystem limits (usually an energy limit) and rising competition (mostly for energy) ended those golden ages. Often, those golden ages arrived after an extinction event cleared the biomes for those fortunate species to dominate what came afterward, and those dominant species were often marginal creatures before the extinction event. This boom-bust style of ecosystem evolution has been typical, probably from the beginning.
The move to land from aquatic environments was a huge boon to complex life, as land plants appeared and animals fed on them. After hundreds of millions of years of defending themselves from animals, some plants evolved to feed them, which lowered their reproductive costs. The flowering plant was thus born, which is the greatest plant/animal symbiosis ever. There was a great coevolutionary dance between animals and flowering plants, and one outcome was primates.
The energy issue has dominated life’s concerns from the beginning, and over the billions of years of life on Earth, there have been hot and cold periods, which are called hothouse and icehouse conditions among scientists. We are living in the fifth ice age that we know of in Earth’s history. But our burning of hydrocarbons to fuel industrial societies may have ended this ice age, and mass extinctions have understandably accompanied the transitions between icehouse and greenhouse worlds. The greatest extinction event in the history of complex life was the last time that Earth emerged from an ice age, which is one reason why what is happening today is so ominous.
When a bolide event wiped out dinosaurs, the rise of mammals began. Mammals went from small fringe-dwellers to dominating Earth’s ecosystems. But the reign of mammals only lasted about 15 million years before Earth began cooling down to this ice age about 50 million years ago. The primary reasons are thought to be reduced volcanism (which introduces carbon dioxide to the carbon cycle), and increased deposition (which removes it, and weathering new mountain ranges, particularly the Himalayas, contributed). There was an interruption in the cooling trend that lasted around 12 million years, beginning about 26 million years ago. Around 17 million years ago there was a secondary temperature spike, thought to be caused by volcanism in the Pacific Northwest.
Mammals were always relatively brainy, thought be to power keen senses to survive in a world dominated by dinosaurs. Primates were always relatively brainy for mammals, thought to be to meet the demands of living in an arboreal environment. Primates can see in full color, thought to be so that they could distinguish ripe fruit. While primates evolved in fruit-rich tropical canopies, that cooling trend meant shrinking tropical canopies, and some marginal monkeys migrated to the ground and became apes in Africa around 20 million years ago. About 18 million years ago, on the eve of that relatively short-lived secondary warming trend, Africa collided with Eurasia, which was generally a disaster for African animals, as they had been isolated from Eurasia’s fierce interspecies competition and lost out to Eurasian animals (most iconic African megafauna evolved in Eurasia and even the Americas, such as zebras). But two kinds of African mammals did well, extremely well. The elephant family migrated from Africa and dominated all ecosystems that it could get to. Antarctica obviously could not support elephants and it was impossible for elephants to get to, anyway, and Australia was also too far away to swim to. But elephants thrived on all other continents after they arrived in them. The other successful African migrants were apes. As many as 100 species of ape evolved in the Miocene’s golden age of apes. Today’s gibbons and orangutans are remnants of that migration.
But when that warming trend ended, apes became confined to either Southeast Asia and its periphery or Africa and its Eurasian margins. From the mid-Miocene, Earth kept cooling and tropical rainforests kept shrinking as grasslands grew, which created another great coevolutionary dance. Some apes learned to walk upright, and it seems to have independently happened several times in Africa and its Eurasian margins. As with those monkeys that migrated from the canopies, those bipedal apes (the only bipedal mammals known) were likely pushed there by shrinking forests. Only later did they take advantage of the opportunities that their new lifestyles provided.
Humanity’s closest living cousins are chimps, bonobos, and gorillas. It is debated just what evolutionary connection we may have with them. It is quite possible that the ancestors of gorillas and chimps entered the African rainforests when apes migrated back to Africa, and they could be relatively distant cousins to humans, when compared to extinct relatives. Monkey and apes are dimorphic (males are bigger and stronger than females), and the reason is sexual selection, arising from how females decide whom to mate with. The primary impetus for dimorphism is thought to be males that fought over mating privileges, and bigger apes demonstrated their fitness by vanquishing their fellows. Male gorillas have huge canines to battle their rivals. Also, big males were useful for defending their societies from other societies and other species, which likely goes back to monkeys.
Chimps also have big canines, for the same reasons. While gorillas live in the heart of the rainforest, smaller chimps live more on the margins and have to forage farther to find their food, which is predominantly ripe fruit. Chimps had a brain/brawn tradeoff, compared to gorillas. Chimps are smaller but smarter, partly so that they can remember when and where fruit is ripe. Gorillas and chimps can forage together in the wet season when fruit is plentiful, and gorillas can follow their smart chimp friends to the ripe fruit. But it was likely competition over millions of years that resulted in big gorillas in the rainforest heart and chimps that lived on rainforest margins.
Social mammals are always vying for status, as higher status means better survival and reproductive prospects. Monkeys engage in crude forms of politics as they jockey for status, and chimps engage in such sophisticated political wrangling that lifelong chimp observer Frans de Waal doubted that any human could navigate the chimp political system for a day. De Waal particularly studied how chimps reconcile after fighting. As with human societies, chimps engage in the delicate dance of vying for status while also maintaining the social cohesion that is needed for societies to survive.
Chimps are fiercely territorial and constantly battle neighboring societies. When Jane Goodall first began studying chimps at Gombe National Park, she initially fed them, in order to closely observe them. Eventually the society that she studied split into two societies around the feeding station. Before long, one newly split society began killing the males of the other new society. They eventually killed all the males and took the territory and the fertile females (while killing infants of the defeated society). It was initially debated whether Goodall unintentionally caused that outcome with the feeding station, but other chimp researchers from around Africa, who did not feed the chimps, began reporting similar activities. Chimps engage in warfare that can be startlingly similar to human warfare, such as deceptively staged rearguard attacks. Chimp societies are hundreds of times more aggressive and violent than the most violent human societies.
Today’s bonobos were chimps that became isolated south of the Congo River likely at least a million years ago, and they had no competition from gorillas. Those chimps evolved to better eat gorilla food, mainly foliage, and they differed from chimps elsewhere in that the food was so plentiful that their foraging parties became large and stable. That situation led females to band together and overthrow male dominance. Once male dominance ended, bonobos became Africa’s most peaceful apes. A recent summary of studies had stark findings. Far more than 100 chimp deaths through violence have been recorded, while there may have been one violent bonobo death. While infanticide is common practice in chimp societies, it has yet to be observed among bonobos. Life was easy and good for bonobos, with their plentiful food supply and the end of male dominance. Relative abundance made it all possible.
The fossil evidence shows that for the earliest bipedal apes, their canines shrank and they were less dimorphic than chimps and gorillas. This has been interpreted to mean less male fighting over mating privileges. One of the many debates among anthropologists is when the human line began to form pair bonds. Reduced dimorphism and canines are evidence of that, and it has been argued that pair-bonding began when bipedalism did, as infants could not easily cling to their mothers any longer, so mothers needed help.
The earliest crafted stone tools are dated to 3.3 million years, crafted by bipedal apes. The most accepted hypothesis today is that bipedal life freed the hands for more uses, which led to the crafting of stone tools. Chimps make and use tools, while bonobos don’t for feeding (and barely use tools at all), and I suspect that bonobos did not need to, with their abundant food supply. I have marked the beginning of what I call the first human Epoch as the crafting of stone tools, because the swift rise to the arrival of the human genus likely began then, as the brains of that evolutionary line brains grew enormously, which is where I will end this post. The human Epochs come next.
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