Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 7: Humanity’s Hobbesian Past and the Megafauna Extinctions

It is not pretty, but denying it also obscures how far we have come.

My introduction to the megafauna extinctions was through Velikovsky’s catastrophism, which argued that celestial catastrophes did it. It was in my early days of exploring the fringes, about 30 years ago. Like so many fringe topics, that idea did not hold up when I really began studying the issue. I slowly became aware of another debate among mainstream scientists on the issue. Scientists who dismissed the idea that humans caused the megafauna extinctions seemed to have a misplaced solidarity with the world’s indigenous people, especially in Australia and the Americas, or people in general. I never saw a scientist who investigated the issue independently of those ideological camps who did not conclude that humans were almost entirely, if not entirely, responsible for the megafauna extinctions. Not only did nearly all of the world’s megafauna go extinct with Earth’s conquest by behaviorally modern humans, so did all of our fellow human species. There are also scientists who deny that behaviorally modern humans had anything to do with those human extinctions.

I discovered a similar debate on whether hunter-gatherers were violent and warlike, which tended to absolve the ancestors of those same indigenous people of a violent and warlike past (and treating women terribly), and made the case that warfare was an invention of the Domestication Revolution and the rise of civilization. Noam Chomsky even blurbed a book that promoted that hypothesis. That idea did not hold up, either, when I began studying it.

I eventually called those humanity-defending ideas the “anything but Homo sapiens” hypothesis, as those scientists defended humanity (their in-group). The idea of a peaceful hunter-gatherer and early-agrarian past was a dogma in anthropology until the late 20^th century, when a frank assessment of the evidence began to overturn it. The denial that humans caused the megafauna extinctions is related to that Rousseauian “peaceful savage” idea. The complete extinction of the elephant family in the Americas, after 16 million years of thriving, soon after humans arrived from Asia, is perhaps the most spectacular evidence of human causation, but it is one of many. The elephant family was the most successful mammal ever before humans drove nearly all of them to extinction, in a process that began more than one million years ago.

Horses and camels evolved in North America over 40 million years ago and thrived until humans arrived, and then they quickly went 100% extinct in North America, for another example. Two centuries ago, scientists wondered if anything but humans could have been responsible for those extinctions that they were discovering, but ideology took precedence in the 20^th century and there are still scientists who strenuously argue that humans had little if anything to do with the megafauna extinctions. Those episodes really call into question the idea that scientists can objectively examine the evidence, especially where humans or indigenous people are concerned. I see it as just more examples of my journey’s primary lesson.

I eventually accepted that humanity was responsible for the megafauna extinctions, likely solely (climate change is often invoked, but it did not matter what the climate did – the megafauna was doomed when humans arrived), that ancient peoples were extremely violent and warlike, and that life was generally terrible for all people before the Industrial Revolution. From gorillas to the Industrial Revolution, half of all offspring died before adulthood, and in places such as England in 1500, a woman had a 10% chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth, so 15% of English women decided against becoming mothers. The daily sufferings and brutalities of life on Earth, whether they were hunter-gatherers, farmers, or city-dwellers in agrarian civilizations, are hard for industrialized peoples to even imagine. Hobbes was right: ancient lives were nasty, brutish, and short, but denying that harsh past has helped to obscure how far we have come. Modern industrial societies, for all of their woes, are far more humane than they were even a century ago. Even in my lifetime, I have watched racism and bigotry in the USA go from normal, even celebrated, which I was raised with, to revolting.

Denying that horrific human past unfairly minimizes what has been achieved. In what I call the Fifth Epoch, human progress will reach another level that few people today can even imagine. I could live to see it come to pass, I am trying to do something about it, and I seek people who can help, by simply learning to sing the song of abundance, which has never been heard in chorus on Earth before.