Another Bottle Neck Approaches

SUBHEAD: The inability to focus on (or even realize) the source of our near term extinction makes it more likely happen.

By Juan Wilson on 8 January 2020 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/01/another-bottle-neck-approaches.html)


Image above: Photo of four women inside the indigenous fight to save the Amazon rainforest. From (https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/45703/1/the-fight-to-save-the-amazon-rainforest-youth-activist-protest).

Before we get any farther let me say "Here's Wishing You Happy New Year!"

And that is about as optimistic as I can put it. I actually don't think this year is going work out as rosy as many are hoping. Why?

We are facing the results of our wild success as a species. We have overpopulated the world and consequently have demanded too much of the Earth's resources for ourselves.  This has meant the development of "agriculture" that consumes the forests that are the "lungs" of the planet.

It has meant the destructive acquisition as well as the poisonous consumption of water, minerals, fossil fuels and other resources. Add to all that - the pollution and contamination from burning and dumping all those resources once they are "garbage".

Okay, Okay! We are selfish monkeys too greedy to get out of our own way.

 Historians often categorize human history in the Three-Age System - Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.

The Stone Age is the longest period of human history lasting from about 2.6 million years ago to about 5,000 years ago. During the latter part of the Stone Age agriculture was developed.
 
The Stone Age amounts to about 99% of human time on Earth. Most tools and materials humans employed were from found objects modified by hand - materials like stone, wood, grass, shells, bone, pelts and sinew made up all we had.

The Bronze Age began about 2,500BC. The relatively low melting point of tin and copper allowed Neolithic pottery kilns to produce bronze that was used for tools, decorations and weapons. During the Bronze Age writing began, in part to account for trading.

The Iron Age required the technology of higher temperature furnaces than the Bronze Age. The production of iron meant better tools and weapons. Larger more stable communities

But wait there's more... The Iron Age lead to the Steam Age, Coal Age, Oil Age and Atomic Age.

With each step "up?" this ladder human population increased, as well as our demands for land, resources and places to throw out all our crap. We have come to the end of that trail.

The only way for humans to flourish in the near future is to climb down from our high impact on Mother Earth. That is about to happen whether humans want it or not and whether or not the future even includes us.

We have been cornered before. See One Time Through the Bottle Neck - Ea O Ka Aina 7/21/10.

The article describes when humanity was reduced to a few families living at the southern tip of Africa eating shellfish and living in a mammoth cave 200,000 years ago.

We're coming up to another bottleneck and nobody is safe.

• With the unemployed, uneducated, lower-class facing homelessness, no healthcare, opioid addiction, violence etc...
• With the white christian, heterosexual, middle-class mired in debt, racial anxiety, self delusion and self absorption ...
• With the elite, educated, privileged, upper-class worried about being over-run and fearful of total ecosystem collapse...

The real threats are the results of human beings snuffing the deciduous forest covering much of Mississippi Basin (North America), the killing the Amazon Rain Forest (South America), as well as the Congolian Rain Forest (Africa), the Western Ghats (India), and threats to the Tongass Rain Forest (Alaska) et cetera, et cetera.

My advice... find a place where the biosphere is thick and the human population is thin. Be sure their is food, water and shelter locally accessible. Go indigenous. Make friends. Share what you have and hunker down.

It's going to be a bumpy ride.

See also:
Facing Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina  5/4/19
Kunstler Predictions for 2019 - Ea O Ka Aina 12/31/18
In the Face of Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina 12/4/18
Biodiversity loss is our extinction - Ea O Ka Aina  11/6/18
Too Late Too Little - Ea O Ka Aina 6/20/18
Civilization as Asteroid - Ea O Ka Aina 6/19/18
NTHE is a four letter word - Ea O Ka Aina 3/27/18
Half-Earth, Half-Baked - Ea O Ka Aina 3/25/18
On the Road to Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina  9/13/17
Sixth Mass Extinction Underway - Ea O Ka Aikna 7/11/17
Arctic Methane "May be apocalyptic" - Ea O Ka Aina 3/24/17
Mass Extinction and Mass Insanity - Ea O Ka Aina 12/10/16
Global warming and woolly mammoth - Ea O Ka Aina 7/25/15
Resisting Near-Term-Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina 5/19/13
The Pleasures of Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina  5/17/13
Preparing for Near Term Extinction - Ea O Ka Aina 5/7/13
Extinction Event? - Ea O Ka Aina  2/8/11

Human lineage from Greece?

SUBHEAD: Fossils cast doubt on early human lineage originating in Africa.

By Will Dunham on 23 May 2017 for Ekathimerini.com -
(http://www.ekathimerini.com/218639/article/ekathimerini/news/fossils-cast-doubt-on-human-lineage-originating-in-africa)


Image above: Graecopithecus freybergi lived 7.2 million years ago in the dust-laden savannah of the Athens Basin. This view from Graecopithecus freybergi’ place of discovery, Pyrgos Vassilissis, to the southeast over the plain of Athens and under a reddish cloud of Sahara dust; in the background: Mount Hymettos and Mount Lykabettos. Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski. From (http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/graecopithecus-freybergi-hominin-04888.html).

Fossils from Greece and Bulgaria of an ape-like creature that lived 7.2 million years ago may fundamentally alter the understanding of human origins, casting doubt on the view that the evolutionary lineage that led to people arose in Africa.

Scientists said on Monday the creature, known as Graecopithecus freybergi and known only from a lower jawbone and an isolated tooth, may be the oldest-known member of the human lineage that began after an evolutionary split from the line that led to chimpanzees, our closest cousins.

The jawbone, which included teeth, was unearthed in 1944 in Athens. The premolar was found in south-central Bulgaria in 2009. The researchers examined them using sophisticated new techniques including CT scans and established their age by dating the sedimentary rock in which they were found.

They found dental root development that possessed telltale human characteristics not seen in chimps and their ancestors, placing Graecopithecus within the human lineage, known as hominins. Until now, the oldest-known hominin was Sahelanthropus, which lived 6-7 million years ago in Chad.

The scientific consensus long has been that hominins originated in Africa. Considering the Graecopithecus fossils hail from the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean may have given rise to the human lineage, the researchers said.

The findings in no way call into question that our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and later migrated to other parts of the world, the researchers said.

"Our species evolved in Africa. Our lineage may not have," said paleoanthropologist Madelaine Böhme of Germany's University of Tübingen, adding that the findings "may change radically our understanding of early human/hominin origin."

Homo sapiens is only the latest in a long evolutionary hominin line that began with overwhelmingly ape-like species, followed by a succession of species acquiring more and more human traits over time.

University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun said the possibility that the evolutionary split occurred outside Africa is not incongruent with later hominin species arising there.

"We know that many of the mammals of Africa did in fact originate in Eurasia and dispersed into Africa at around the time Graecopithecus lived," Begun said. "So why not Graecopithecus as well?"

Graecopithecus is a mysterious species because its fossils are so sparse. It was roughly the size of a female chimp and dwelled in a relatively dry mixed woodland-grassland environment, similar to today's African savanna, alongside antelopes, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, hyenas and warthogs.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Evolution becomes Conscious 1/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: One time Through the Bottleneck 7/21/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hobbits and Menehunes 5/9/09

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Whodunit? The foragers

SUBHEAD: Archeologists have been far too eager to brand ancient cultures as farmers on flimsy evidence. 

By Vera Bradova on 11 February 2015 for Leaving Babylon -
(https://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/whodunit-the-foragers/)


Image above: Hunter-gaterers, or foragers, in what appears to temperate north America. From original article.

Dogs diverged genetically from wolves more than 100,000 years ago, during the previous warm interglacial. Did humans have anything to do with it? The oldest known dog skeletons are from 36 and 33,000 years ago, found in Belgium and Siberia. A child was exploring the Chauvet cave, using a torch to look at the artwork while a dog followed… 26,000 years ago, well before the Ice Age Maximum.

When the cold began to let up, some 17,000 years ago, the people of the Pyrenees living at the Isteritz cave took such good care of a reindeer with a broken leg, it survived for two years (viz Paul Bahn: Pre-neolithic control of animals, 1984, and his response to ongoing controversy). By 15,000 years ago, pictures of horses with rope halters appear in the Magdalenian cave art of SW France.

Foragers created the first magnificent art. They built the first temples and the first high-density towns with thousands of inhabitants. They invented ovens and kilns, cookworthy pottery, wine and beer. They clearly domesticated the dog and probably tamed reindeer and horses.

So perhaps it’s not such a stretch to believe that they also domesticated the pigs, sheep and goats and a whole slew of plants, from grains to squash, gourds, and legumes, to delicacies like chocolate, vanilla, and chili peppers. Even more amazingly, it was rock-shelter dwelling, semi-nomadic foragers who spent hundreds of years patiently experimenting with the unpromising teosinte to bring about maize. Then they spent thousands of years more improving the new tiny-cobbed plant before settling down to grow it as a staple.

If a group of foragers plants a plot of squash near their favorite cave, then comes back in late summer to harvest their bounty, can they legitimately be called farmers? If another group of foragers raises some pigs while living off wild foods (and eating no cereals), can they be called farmers?

If Egyptian foragers throw a bunch of traded domesticated wheat down into the rich alluvial mud on the banks of the Nile, perhaps to brew some beer, but otherwise live the hunting-fishing-gathering lifestyle, how are they any different from the Californian native foragers or the Aborigines who spread some favorite seeds and flooded them by diverting a creek’s spring runoff?

Perhaps we need a new term, one that would reflect the foragers’ sophisticated plant manipulation skills that nevertheless did not, by themselves, lead to the predominantly farming life.

Archeologists have been, in my opinion, far too eager to brand cultures as farmers on flimsy evidence. It appears that farming is much younger than previously claimed. The first farming village was found in Egypt, dated to only 7,000 years ago.

As Melinda A. Zeder, an archeobiologist, states:

This broad middle ground between wild and domestic, foraging and farming, hunting and herding makes it hard to draw clean lines of demarcation between any of these states.

Perhaps this is the greatest change in our understanding of agricultural origins since 1995.

The finer-resolution picture we are now able to draw of this process in the Near East (and, as seen in the other contributions to this volume, in other world areas) not only makes it impossible to identify any threshold moments when wild became domestic or hunting and gathering became agriculture but also shows that drawing such distinctions actually impedes rather than improves our understanding of this process.

Instead of continuing to try to pigeonhole these concepts into tidy definitional categories, a more productive approach would be to embrace the ambiguity of this middle ground and continue to develop tools that allow us to watch unfolding developments within this neither-nor territory.

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