My Energy Journey – Part 6
The path to humanity
As I noted, I studied everything, all at once, and still do. But I go through phases, in which I will study one area at length for a time, while taking it easier on the other areas. For the past year, I have been reading about ancient civilizations, dozens of them. I often read several works on the same subjects, as in each of them, I will learn something new. I am currently reading books on Ur and the Incas. My main takeaway on ancient civilizations is how brutal they were compared to today. Sons killed fathers and brothers slaughtered each other, to sit on those coveted thrones and enjoy their attendant harems. Entire cities could be slaughtered.
A close relative is a famous primatologist, we sometimes discuss primates, and I have taken trips to zoos with her, where she could get the VIP treatment. I watched Jane Goodall documentaries as a teenager, so primates have been a longtime interest of mine. But I didn’t really start studying primates, to write about them, until around 2008, as I recall. The results quickly became striking. For living primates, Richard Wrangham and Frans de Waal quickly became my favorite authors, and I have more than a dozen of their books. They did not always see eye to eye. Wrangham began his career working for Goodall, and his extraordinary career has seen him as the leading proponent for the early control of fire in the human line, the effect of cooking on the human journey, and he is the most prominent proponent of the idea that human warfare has ancient roots. De Waal had high regard for primates, which comes through in his books.
Today, scientists think that primates first appeared on the evolutionary scene perhaps 85 million years ago, but they likely did not migrate to the tropical canopy until after the bolide event wiped out the dinosaurs. Flowering plants began a huge coevolutionary dance with animals, as animals lowered the reproductive costs of plants, in the greatest instance of symbiosis of plants and animals ever. Primates in particular took advantage of that, not only eating insects that fed on flowering plants, but fruit became a primate staple, especially simians (monkeys and apes), which may have contributed to the big brains that primates have. We can see that when comparing chimps and gorillas. Chimps are smarter than gorillas. Gorillas live in the heart of the rainforest while chimps live more on the periphery. Chimps have to forage farther to find their fruit staple, so they have to remember when and where fruit is ripe.
In the wet season (the African rainforest has two wet and dry seasons each year), when fruit is plentiful chimps and gorillas have been seen foraging together, gorillas follow their smart chimp friends to the trees where the fruit is. In the dry season, however, it is no longer so friendly when food is scarce, and chimps have attacked gorillas and their infants. But chimps mostly fight each other, and their methods of warfare can be startlingly like human warfare, such as deceptively staged rearguard attacks.
Monkeys and apes are dimorphic, which is thought to reflect sexual selection, which means how females choose their mates. Males are larger than females, with huge canine teeth, thought to have evolved as males fought for dominance and mating privileges. This is one of many areas of investigation that can reveal behaviors that are eerily reminiscent of human practices.
But to back up a little, in the cooling, drying Earth, on its way to this ice age, rainforests shrank and grasslands began appearing. Probably at least 29 million years ago, some monkeys began to leave the shrinking tropical canopies and evolve into apes. They were likely marginal monkeys that were driven there to survive, which is a common evolutionary story. Animals don’t leave their survival niches unless they have to.
By around 20 million years ago, apes began to become common in Africa, and two events soon happened. Africa began crashing into Eurasia about 18 million years ago, just when a global-warming period began, driven by a volcanic eruption in the Pacific Northwest. Tropical forests once again blanketed Eurasia, apes migrated from Africa, and it was the golden age of the ape. There may have been 100 ape species in those warm times. But by 14 million years ago, that warm period ended and it has gotten colder ever since, into this ice age. Scientists are uncertain whether chimps and gorillas are the result of a migration back to Africa after the good times ended, or whether their ancestors never left. Rainforests are poor fossil preservers.
But as the rainforests continued to shrink and the woodlands and grasslands grew, in that colder, dryer world, some apes became bipedal, somewhere between four and six million years ago, and it seems to have independently happened several times. By four million years ago, indisputably bipedal apes lived in East Africa. Around 3.3 million years ago (and perhaps somewhat earlier), some of those bipedal apes learned how to make stone tools. That was a watershed event in life’s journey on Earth. Big-brained tool-makers like apes had never been seen before. The brains of that line of bipedal apes began growing around then, likely fueled by the enhanced calories that tools procured.
The interplay of energy, intelligence, and tools has defined the human journey ever since. I have made that tool-making event the beginning of my Epochs of the human journey, and that comes next.