My Energy Journey – Part 8

The conquest of Earth

Investigating everything that happened before the invention of writing has been the province of scientists. Writing was invented in Sumer several thousand years ago, and only then did historians have anything to work with. Oral histories are not much to hang one’s investigative hat on, especially those that stretch back for thousands of years, such as the Creation myths that preliterate societies had.

To piece together the likely events in the preliterate past, scientists use all manner of technique and tool, and the rise of DNA and isotope analyses have shed great light on the human journey and the history of life on Earth. Scientists continually dig up fossils, rocks, artifacts, and the like and subject them to often-ingenious tests. That trend of new tools and techniques will not end anytime soon.

I collected fossils and artefacts as a child, but Velikovsky’s work helped renew my interest in these subjects. I studied some of those topics in the 1990s, but it was only after 2003 that I really began to dig into them.

In what I call the Fifth Epoch, paranormally acquired evidence will also have its place, but physical evidence trumps all, in our physical universe. Paranormal evidence will largely only help guide physical investigations. Brian O’Leary was a prominent advocate of scientific investigation of the paranormal. Near-death experiences have been fruitfully investigated by scientific methods. There is nothing inherently unscientific about such studies, the irrational and often-dishonest protests of the “skeptics” notwithstanding.

What I call the Second Epoch of the human journey began when behaviorally modern humans left Africa and conquered the world, and it ended with the beginning of the domestication of plants and animals. When that Epoch ended, Homo sapiens lived everywhere that it could get to, and all other human species were extinct, as well as all of Earth’s easy meat that Homo sapiens could get to.

Bipedal apes began to leave Africa over two million years ago. The “hobbits” of Flores Island might have been australopiths. Those migrations all happened during this ice age, and the past million years have seen continental ice sheets advance and retreat like clockwork in the Northern Hemisphere, which caused dramatic climate and vegetation changes, which in turn impacted all animals. That would have obviously had profound impacts on evolution, migrations, and humanity’s expanding toolset. About 1.5 million years ago, Africa’s megafauna began going extinct, especially members of the elephant family, and the same thing happened in Eurasia, which likely reflected the expansion of Homo erectus, which became an apex predator.

For all of those migrations, which surely included conflicts among hunting societies, DNA studies have established that the conquest of Earth began with a “founder group” that left Africa, likely somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. All modern-day humans who are not from sub-Saharan Africa are descended from that founder group, which may have been only a few thousand people or less. All human societies have universal features, which have likely existed since humans became behaviorally modern.

The Second Epoch was an area of study that made it clear to me how biased scientists could be, as they let their ideologies prevail all too often. Over the past generation, I noticed that many scientists and scholars defended their in-groups, which in this instance meant Homo sapiens. I eventually called it the Homo sapiens bias. That bias resulted in what I consider to be two myths that have marred the Second Epoch’s study. The first biased idea is that humans could not have, or would not have, driven Earth’s easy meat to extinction, as they were too environmentally conscious and had some mystical connection with nature that would have prevented it (or they were unable to). A related myth is that humans lived peacefully before the Domestication Revolution and the rise of civilization.

I kept running into those myths that scientists and scholars treated as fact. When scientists began finding fossils of and even frozen woolly mammoths and other extinct megafauna species two centuries ago, it was initially thought that probably nothing but humans could have caused their extinction. But the rise of certain ideologies saw that understanding discarded in favor of myths that prehistoric humans were gentle pillars of virtue. It was a dogma in anthropology until the 1990s that preliterate humans, and especially those who lived before Domestication, were peaceful. Azar Gat called it the “Quasi-Rousseauian Error.” Gat’s statement, that the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence, is the most succinct recap of the issue that I have seen.

As humanity expanded into the unpeopled continents of Australia and the Americas, there was likely a brief golden age of the hunter-gatherer, at least until the easy meat was gone. Then it was back to fierce territoriality. Even Noam Chomsky was duped by that kind of scholarship.

Some delusions of anthropologists were understandable, which arose from limitations in their approaches. For instance, studying today’s hunter-gatherers is going to have limited relevance to how hunter-gatherers lived 50,000 years ago, as there are no hunter-gatherer societies on Earth that are not influenced by agrarian and industrial societies. Also, when those anthropologists witnessed indigenous battles, there were relatively few casualties among the combatants, so anthropologists concluded that native warfare was ineffective with few casualties, and was largely ritualistic. Those anthropologists failed to understand that the hunter-gatherer warfare specialty was the raid, at night or at dawn, in which the entire rival society was slaughtered, but the women were often spared, to be become the “wives” of the victors. Stealing women became so prevalent among many hunter-gatherer societies that any strange man was killed on sight, as the usually correct assumption was that he was there to steal a woman.

The skeletal evidence from Australian aborigines is stark: about a quarter of the men and a third of the women had fractured skulls from interpersonal violence, and what are called “parry fractures,” in people’s forearms, as they warded off blows, were also common. That is also the general trend amassed from studying Earth’s other hunter-gatherer societies before the Domestication Revolution. Also, the first-contact accounts of previously isolated mobile hunter-gatherers (Australia), sedentary hunter-gatherers (Pacific Northwest), and subsistence farmers (Highland New Guinea) unfailingly encountered highly violent and warlike societies. In pre-contact Highland New Guinea, a third of the societies went extinct each century from warfare.

Eventually the evidence won out, although “peacenik” anthropologists still try to make their increasingly untenable cases. Steven Pinker is an imperial apologist (as Gat is), but Pinker is correct that human societies have become far less violent over the Epochs, at least on a relative basis. When Hitler and Japan started a war that killed over 50 million people, that was ten times as many humans as lived on Earth ten thousand years earlier, even though 50 million was “only” a few percent of humanity in the 1940s, so comparing absolute war dead is not a good measure of the relative violence of those societies.

Dozens of primate species have been observed committing infanticide, generally by rival members of the societies and even by other societies (as they eliminated the most helpless competitors). Humans killed infants too, but the parents generally did it, because they could not afford to feed them. In hunter-gatherer societies that chiefly depended on hunting, such as Arctic societies, so many infant girls were killed (or starved, or died in “accidents”) that there were twice as many boys as girls. The sexual imbalance was often remedied by slaughtering neighboring societies and stealing their women. Scientists think that it was an inadvertent method of keeping populations within the land’s carrying capacity. Half of all offspring died before adulthood, in an unbroken trend from gorillas to the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps half of hunter-gatherer children who died before adulthood died from infanticide. How can any society with such practices be romanticized? But the “peaceful savage” and “noble savage” myths about hunter-gatherers persisted until my lifetime, and there is still a cottage industry of scholars that argues for those myths. These myths became prevalent especially after the World Wars, when simpler times were yearned for.

Neanderthals were initially described as brute “cave men,” but they have also been romanticized. A Neanderthal could ride the New York subway without attracting much attention, and their intelligence likely rivaled that of Homo sapiens in ways, but they were no match for the invaders from Africa and quickly went extinct after contact with behaviorally modern humans. There was some interbreeding, but I consider the idea that the Neanderthal extinction was a peaceful process to be wishful thinking. Denisovans, also likely descended from Homo Heidelbergensis, interbred with descendants of that founder group as they quickly went extinct. An earlier migration of Homo sapiens may have caused the final demise of Homo erectus, and those “hobbits” went extinct about the time that behaviorally modern humans arrived.

Many times, I have had to suffer through books and papers in which scientists proposed flimsy hypotheses, based on equally flimsy evidence, that megafauna and human populations went extinct just before behaviorally modern humans arrived, almost as if humans arrived mere minutes after the last member of the species went extinct. Those hypotheses give science a bad name, in my opinion. I came to call it the “Anything but Homo sapiens hypothesis.” There is no good reason for such hypotheses, other than protecting the peaceful savage and noble savage ideas. Until the 20^th century, people reveled in killing the last member of a species. For me, the complete extinction of the elephant family in the Americas, soon after humans arrived, is the classic, irrefutable case that humans caused the megafauna extinctions. There are many other examples, but I consider that one to be impossible to honestly argue against, although many scientists have.

That romanticization of ancient humans has helped obscure how far we have come. Today’s societies, for all of their problems, are far less violent and more humane than anything that came before, and that is because they could afford to be. Rising standards of living, riding on our increasing energy consumption, more sophisticated tools, and greater collective intelligence, made it all possible.

By about 10,000 years ago, all of the easy meat that humanity could get to was extinct, all other human species had been extinct for tens of thousands of years, and Homo sapiens had grown from probably only several thousand at the beginning of the Second Epoch to several million at its end. The conquest of Earth was complete.

Human per-capita energy consumption did not rise in the Second Epoch, but all of that newly acquired energy, a thousand times more than before, went into producing a thousand times more humans.