I am going to summarize what I think are the most important trends and features of the human journey in this post, and in the next post I will discuss how they will likely change in the Fifth Epoch.
In this series of posts, I sketched key events and trends in life before the rise of complex life, the eon of complex life, and primate evolution that led to bipedal apes that made stone tools, which began the Epochs of the human journey.
My studies have persuaded me of the validity of the ideas listed below, with some caveats.
Survival and reproduction: The biological imperative of all life on Earth is to gain enough energy to survive and avoid becoming energy for other life long enough to successfully reproduce. The alternative is death and extinction.
Mammalian males vie for dominance and reproductive privileges: In many mammal species, males vie for dominance, and enhanced mating prospects is the primary prize of such contests, which are often deadly.
Great ape males also vie for dominance, which can be deadly: However, great ape intelligence can make the contests more complex, especially for chimps, as they continually scheme and form coalitions.
Chimps engage in warfare: Chimps have tactics that are very similar to human warfare, such as raids and frontal, flanking, and deceptively staged rearguard attacks. The goal of such warfare is to wipe out neighboring societies, kill all the infants and adult males, and take their territory and fertile females. This is all very similar to what human hunter-gatherers have done. Chimp societies are hundreds of times more aggressive and violent than the most violent human societies.
Bonobos broke the cycle of chimp violence: A million years ago or more, some chimps became isolated from all other chimp and gorilla societies, south of the Congo River, and became bonobos. Their food supply doubled with that lack of competition, foraging parties became large and stable, and females banded together and overthrew male dominance. They are by far the most peaceful great apes, in which infanticide and killing adults has yet to be observed.
Predators kill as much as they can, and human hunters were no different: Predators are built to kill, and they do not seem to have an “off switch.” When predators find themselves in positions to kill far more than they can eat, they will. Human hunters have been the same, likely going back to chimps and further. What became the human line began driving easily killed species to extinction millions of years ago, and wherever humans arrived in the past two million years, the animals vulnerable to the latest hunting technologies quickly went extinct. The human line became energy-windfall opportunists, in a trend that lasts to this day. When behaviorally modern humans arrived in Australia and the Americas, the easily killed large animals quickly went extinct. The complete extinction of the elephant family in the Americas is my acid test of that idea. This has happened to nearly the present day. When the Maoris invaded New Zealand less than a thousand years ago, they drove large, flightless birds, who dominated the ecosystems, to extinction in less than a century, while wiping out about half of the forests. When Europeans turned the world’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane and thereby conquered humanity, they nearly drove whales to extinction in only a few centuries. All other human species became extinct at the same time as behaviorally modern humans conquered Earth, and it was likely not a coincidence or a peaceful process.
Hunter-gatherer societies were prodigiously violent: Hobbes won that fictional debate with Rousseau. Azar Gat has it right: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. The claims of peaceful “savages” are myths. About 25% of hunter-gatherer men died violently, which was an “improvement” over chimps, in which nearly half of all adult males died. Women were often treated as property, stolen from neighboring societies while the men were slaughtered. In a trend going back to gorillas, half of the offspring died before adulthood, and in hunter-gatherer societies, perhaps half of those deaths were inflicted by the parents, as they could not afford to feed their children. All male-dominated preindustrial societies were highly violent. The only partial exception was in societies that became matrilocal or multilocal and broke up the male gangs.
Plant domestication had several reasons for it: Plant domestication happened independently in several places on Earth, around the same time, give or take a few thousand years. There seem to have been several reasons for it, beginning with the fact that there were a thousand times more mouths to feed at the end of Earth’s conquest by behaviorally modern humans than at the beginning. Also, Earth’s easy meat had been rendered extinct wherever behaviorally modern humans arrived. Although it is not as “proven” as many other hypotheses regarding prehistory, I like Keith Otterbein’s hypothesis that plant domestication could have only happened when megafauna hunting and its attendant warfare declined. In addition, plant domestication only began in this warm, interglacial interval, when Earth was warmer, wetter, and with higher carbon-dioxide levels, which was all conducive to growing crops.
There was a brief honeymoon in the Domestication Revolution: When humans began domesticating plants, many early farming societies became matrilocal, likely because women invented farming, as an adjunct to their gathering duties. The wet, warm climate was favorable, the forests and soils were intact, there were no “pests” yet, and farming was spectacularly successful, able to feed many more mouths per acre of land than hunting and gathering could. Human farming populations exploded, and farming soon spread everywhere that it could. Hunter-gatherers either took up farming or went extinct, especially the men, as women readily married into the prosperous farming communities. The honeymoon did not last long, however, as the soils and forests were soon depleted, animals began adapting to eat crops, and farming became drudgery. Only then did farmers shrink in stature compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Once farming and its far larger populations existed, short of a catastrophe that wiped out nearly all of humanity, there was no going back to hunting and gathering. After the honeymoon was over, those societies often warred with their neighbors, as a new Malthusian limit was reached. They could be highly warlike and violent, but deaths from violence had declined to “only” a few percent of the population, on average, although mass exterminations of rival societies were still common. There was a genetic bottleneck in men that shows how, like chimps, some men rose to dominance and monopolized the mating opportunities, while over 90% of the men vanished from the gene pool.
The “pristine” civilizations all arose similarly: In four places on Earth, about five thousand years after farming was independently invented, civilization was independently invented. There are two schools of thought on why they formed: the attractive benefits of civilization, including the rise of professions, or so that elites could exploit the masses. But it seems that the benefits arrived first and elite-exploitation later. But all four pristine civilizations had striking similarities, which seems to have been a kind of convergent social evolution. They were all situated on shorelines, to take advantage of low-energy transportation lanes, without which civilizations would not have formed. According to Otterbein, all pristine civilizations arose peacefully, in a continuation of the trend of a decline in hunting and warfare that allowed for the rise of farming and, later, civilization. But that honeymoon did not last long, either. Soon rival cities began fighting each other, such as in Sumer, which was the first civilization. Men rose to dominance once more, and great blessings and evils attended the rise of civilization.
Rising and falling empires characterized all agrarian civilizations: All early agrarian civilizations had constraints, which were primarily that farming produced a thin agricultural surplus that could only support a small elite and professional class, of around 10-20% of the population. The rest were peasants and slaves, who did the backbreaking work that supported civilization. The quickest path to wealth was conquering and plundering neighboring polities, and that was why empires continually rose and fell, in what was essentially serial predation of strong societies against weak ones.
No civilization has ever been sustainable: From soils to forests to fossil fuels, all civilizations have been based on rapidly depleted energy sources, and all early civilizations collapsed. In the Fertile Crescent and vicinity, the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic has been very evident, and it was a typical feature of early civilizations.
Europe’s rise to power: Rome was the last of the ancient empires in what became the West, and everything about it was on an unprecedented scale. Rome’s European dominion once again became a Eurasian backwater, but in the Medieval Warming Period, northwestern Europe exploited waterpower like never before, which helped begin its eventual rise to industrialization. Europe’s fragmented polities were in constant conflict with each other, and war was a near-constant. But it became relatively wealthy, partly thanks to waterpower, and in the 1400s it achieved the technical feat of turning the world’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane and conquered humanity with it. It was an unprecedented catastrophe for the world’s peoples, and many societies and their peoples went extinct under the European juggernaut.
England’s industrialization: In the midst of Europe’s conquest of Earth, England exploited coal like no other society had ever done, and that led to the Industrial Revolution. England rode the Industrial Revolution into becoming the world’s first global empire. The primary upshot of industrialization, and the biggest event in the human journey so far, has been the end of childhood death. It had to do with the rising standards of living of industrialization and attendant improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene, not medical interventions.
Human societies are far more humane and less violent than in the past: Gat’s statement reflects the gist of it. Over the human journey, energy breakthroughs led to each Epoch, and each Epoch was proportionately less violent and more humane than what came before it. It became dramatically more so with industrialization. All preindustrial societies are hard for the residents of industrial societies to even imagine, with their daily hardships and brutalities, but it was that way in looking back to all previous Epochs. In that way, there has definitely been human progress.
Global elites: While elites dominated the first civilizations, only with Europe’s conquest of the world could elites begin to truly think and act in global terms. That is probably the root of what my companies encountered as we pursued energy innovations, including free energy. Free energy would upset the entire elite ballgame.
The rise of oil: Only a generation after coal power overtook wind and water power, oil began to be exploited, which took industrialization to a new level. It soon became evident that most of the world’s oil was in the Middle East. The industrializing West began meddling in the Middle East before World War I, and it meddles there to this day, overthrowing governments, committing genocides, and the like, as oil is history’s greatest material prize.
The fall of oil: The USA, which is history’s richest and most powerful nation, reached peak oil-extraction rates in 1970, and its standard of living has declined since then. Globally, Peak Oil was reached in 2005, and we are witnessing the end of the short-lived oil era.
Global Warming: After the Sun, carbon dioxide is the primary reason why Earth’s surface is as warm as it is. Otherwise, Earth would have become a block of ice long ago, and Earth’s water would have eventually been blasted to space, like Venus and Mars lost theirs, and Earth would be lifeless today. Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen with carbon-dioxide levels for billions of years, and I have yet to see a credible paleologist who denies it. For one of many alarming examples of what this portends, half of Earth’s coral reefs have been killed off in my lifetime by the warming ocean, and in this century, they will all be gone, as part of humanity’s monstrous tally. In my lifetime, I have watched the glaciers quickly melt in my home state, forest fires have become epidemic in the past decade (so I now have to consult the smoke forecast before I go hiking), and we continue to have record-shattering heat waves, the most recent of which killed a billion sea animals, mostly shellfish (and right wingers still deny it all).
The race of the catastrophes: Will humanity run out of oil and other fuels, which will collapse global civilization, or will Global Warming make parts of Earth uninhabitable, and we have epic crop failures, so that billions starve to death (and we have wars over water and food instead of oil)? That is quite a choice to face.
The answer: During my life-wrecking adventures in the pursuit of free energy, I learned that free-energy technology is older than I am, as well as related technologies such as antigravity. It is not a third-hand rumor, but what people close to me directly experienced. We had many encounters with the global elite during our adventures, and they are divided. Some of them would happily sacrifice humanity and the planet in the pursuit of their games of power and control, while others are less evil-minded. I have heard them called White Hats and Black Hats, and we encountered both factions, but people have to play at those levels before they encounter the global elite, who generally hide in the shadows. The retail elite (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc.) are not members of the global elite that run the world, and the world’s politicians are all little more than stooges of the economic interests, as Bucky Fuller said.
The paths of failure and what might work: Far more than my life was wrecked during my adventures, as I saw many ruined and shortened lives. I eventually realized that bringing free energy to the public, which is the hardest nut on Earth to crack, won’t be achieved by the usual methods of activism, business efforts, and the like. I eventually learned that more than 99% of humanity is in ignorance, denial, or fear on the free-energy issue, and they will likely stay there until free energy is delivered into their lives, and I eventually realized that that was normal. For those who tried to “do something,” their approaches were mired in the delusions of our times, which are all rooted in scarcity and fear. It took many years for me to realize and articulate it, which led to what may be the only approach that can work: the love and enlightenment approach. This is what I have devoted my life to. The hard part will be finding the people who can understand and help, and I know who I am looking for.
What can happen if an effort like mine is successful? That is the subject of the next post, and this post summarizes the features and trends that make what I envision a likely outcome.