The Homo sapiens Bias

It is understandable, but it can become exasperating

I recently updated my chapter on the conquest of Earth by Homo sapiens in my recent essay. I call that conquest the Second Epoch of the human journey. I updated it to reflect recent reading and my recent writings. It is related to my recent posts on the limitations of intellectuals. This is an area in which I doubt that deliberate lying is taking place, which I have often seen, but it shows how deeply ideological delusions can be rooted among intellectuals, and especially scientists in this instance, as reconstructing events from many millennia ago is their province.

I have written at length on the delusional tripe that I was fed regarding American history while growing up, as mass-murdering thieves were portrayed as heroes and saints, and because I am Ed Herman’s biographer, I am all too aware of the daily deceptions in the media, in which genocide is either covered up or celebrated, and no crime is too great to receive heroic treatment, as long as we (or our elites) are beneficiaries of the crime.

Events of many millennia ago may seem like a trivial matter compared to today’s events, of genocide (even imperial tool Amnesty International is describing the Gaza genocide accurately – although their recommendations are useless, as Sam Husseini noted), a possible nuclear war, and other existential risks. But what I have seen with scientists is relevant, and is partly why free energy is an orphan in orthodox scientific circles, even though free-energy technology is older than I am.

In the preface of Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization (1), he remarked on how the idea that pre-civilized people were warlike was forbidden among archeologists when he began his career in the 1970s. Neolithic fortifications unearthed in digs were characterized as “enclosures,” and their obvious defensive character was denied. The evidence amassed over his career became so overwhelming that Keeley eventually had a Kuhnian paradigm shift, which led to his groundbreaking work. But to this day, there are anthropologists who argue that there was no warfare before civilization. Warfare likely goes in an unbroken line to chimps. Hunter-gatherers were prodigiously violent, with about 25% of the men dying violently. Those “peacenik” anthropologists have helped obscure how greatly violence has declined over the Epochs. There were no “good old days” in the human past. Industrialized peoples live immensely better lives than preindustrialized ones have, from the elimination of childhood death alone, which is the biggest event in the human journey so far.

What spurred this post, however, was the issue of the megafauna extinctions. I recently encountered some articles and papers that highlight the issue. I’ll start with an obvious finding. In the Clovis culture, mammoth meat was a staple (1). The megafauna extinctions in North America were so dramatic that two centuries ago, scientists doubted that anything other than humans could have caused the megafauna extinctions in North America. The Clovis culture, identified with its rock weaponry, only lasted a few centuries, and ended with the swift decline of the megafauna about 13,000 years ago.

Darwin noted that the fossil record is sparse. It is estimated that far less than 1% of the species that ever lived have left behind fossils that have been discovered. As I have discussed, it is insane to argue that humans had little or nothing to do with the complete extinction of the elephant family in the Americas. They lived the length and breadth of the Americas, everywhere that they could get to. They lived in the Americas for over 16 million years, to suddenly go 100% extinct soon after humans arrived. What I have seen over and over in the past generation have been scientists who study this and that elephant family extinction in the Americas, to argue that climate change did it, just when the Americas were emerging from the glacial interval and it was paradise again. The elephant family went extinct during the paradisiacal warm days, not when ice sheets dominated North America. I have seen scientists argue that they solved a local elephant-family extinction, and humans had nothing to do with it, to then suggest that all of other elephant family species in the Americas suffered a similar fate. I call this the “anything but Homo sapiens” hypothesis (the “ABHS hypothesis”). Those scientists who absolve humanity for those extinctions all have a conflict of interest, as they are humans.

Another contributor to this widely held delusion is the tunnel-vision of specialists, who often lack the pattern-recognition of generalists. That scientists study various local extinctions and conclude that humans had nothing to do with them, while ignoring the hemisphere-wide vanishing of the elephant family soon after humans arrived, is astonishing to witness.

I am going to present a few recent examples that I found in a few minutes of surfing this past week. Here is a recent paper that presented the case that the Clovis culture could not have really been mammoth hunters, as their tools were unsuited for it. That hypothesis rests on a tower of shaky assumptions, but has the virtue of supporting the ABHS hypothesis. The elephant family began going extinct in Africa and Eurasia with the rise of Homo erectus. Behaviorally modern humans, over a million years later, would have been far better at it.

Here is an article on a paper that deals with the last mammoths on Earth, on Wrangel Island. Those scientists made the case that the extinction of the mammoths was sudden, but humans could have had nothing to do with it, because the only archeological site in the island old enough to be relevant was formed several hundred years after the mammoths went extinct. The continental USA has had armies of fossil hunters combing it for centuries, and only a few dozen megafauna kill sites have been found, which harkens back to Darwin’s observation on the fossil record. Wrangel Island is nearly 3,000 square miles in size. Call me skeptical that all evidence of early humans on Wrangel Island has been found, if the evidence even exists today. Mammoths had lived on Wrangel (it was not always an island, and was last separated from Siberia 12,000 years ago) for probably hundreds of thousands of years, to suddenly go extinct just before humans arrived, which kept the ABHS hypothesis intact. Here is an “icing event” hypothesis for their extinction. Here is an “inbreeding” hypothesis. The other lone survivors of the human holocaust were on Saint Paul Island, and scientists argue today that they died of thirst. Today, it is hard to find scientists who argue that humans had anything to do with the mammoth extinctions, especially after Paul Martin’s death. I have had to suffer through the comet hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions in the Americas, which miraculously spared Africa.

This ABHS hypothesis is far from confined to mammoths, although the mammoth extinction has become a fixation among various camps, I suppose because they were the only furry members of the elephant family. I recently saw a reference to a paper on a local horse extinction in the Americas over 10,000 years ago, which also supposedly happened only a few centuries before humans arrived. It is highly misleading to assert that kind of chronological accuracy for events that old. I have seen the same argument for the Neanderthal extinction: they lived for hundreds of thousands of years, to go extinct just before behaviorally modern humans arrived. That hypothesis, at least, is no longer credible, as DNA studies show plenty of crossbreeding of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

The ABHS hypothesis is far from confined to the megafauna extinctions. I recently replied to somebody who denies Global Warming. Denying Global Warming is part of a classic ABHS effort. The strategy of Fred Singer and friends was to deny that Global Warming is happening at all, but when it could no longer be denied, then deny that humans have anything to do with it.

These failures to accept responsibilities for our behaviors, or to deny the crimes of our ancestors, are just more examples of my journey’s primary lesson.

I could continue with more examples, such as American mythology called temperate North America just “virgin” land there for the taking. The natives either were few in number, or were not taking advantage of North America’s bounty, so their dispossession was actually a heroic deed (capitalist hero Ayn Rand made exactly that argument, among many others), or other convenient rationales. For current events in the media, Ed Herman noted how the victims of our imperial crimes were often written about in the passive voice: instead of their being killing by us and our allies, they simply died, without mentioning how they died or who killed them.

My effort won’t be helped by people who deny their responsibility for our world. Every time that I drive my car, I contribute to Global Warming. Only by accepting our responsibility for our world will we be able to change it. Responsible means able to respond. Until we own it, we cannot change it. We are creators, not victims, and creators create with love. I know who I am looking for, and they will not subscribe to ABHS ideologies.