Owing to the problems of calibrating
radio-carbon dates and securing accurate details from ice cores, the precise date
at which glacial conditions can only said to have fell between 22,000 and
21,000 Bc. However the world around 20,000 BC
the period when human culture started to evolve fairly rapidly and our research
starts, was a inhospitable, a cold, dry and windy planet
with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere.
The lower sea level has joined some land
masses together and created extensive coastal plains. Tasmania, Australia and
New Guinea are one; so are Borneo, Java and Thailand which form mountain chains
within the largest extent of rainforest on planet earth. The Sahara, Gobi and
other sandy deserts are greatly expanded in extent. Britain is no more than a
peninsula of Europe, its north buried below the ice, its south a polar desert.
Much of North America is smothered by a giant dome of ice.
Human communities have been forced, to
abandon many regions they had inhabited before the last glacial maximum, or
LGM; others are amenable for settlement but remain unoccupied because any
routes for colonisation have been blocked by dry
desert and walls of ice. People survive wherever they can, struggling with
freezing temperatures and persistent drought. Consider, for instance, those
living at a location in modern-day Ukraine known to archaeologists as Pushkari.
At this period of time five dwellings
form a rough circle on the tundra. They face south, away from the biting icy
wind and close to the meander of a semi-frozen river. The dwellings are
igloo-like but built from mammoth bone and hide rather than blocks of ice. Each
has an imposing entrance formed by two tusks, up-ended to form an arch. The
walls use massive leg bones as vertical supports, between which jawbones have
been stacked chin-down to create a thick barrier to the cold and wind. Further
tusks are used on the roof to weigh down hides and sods of turf that are
supported on a framework of bones and branches. Smoke seeps gently from the
roof of one dwelling; the cries of a baby pierce the thick hide of another.
Beyond the village a sledge loaded with
massive bones is being hauled from the river. The faces of those working are
misted in clouds of hot breath, behind which thick beards and long hair leave
little flesh exposed. They are wrapped in fur-lined clothes. No simple draping
of hides but artfully stitched clothing. It is the middle of winter and this
village is no more than 250 kilometres south of the
glaciers. Temperatures can fall to minus 3o0C and there are nine months of it
to endure. The river supplies building -materials: bones from animals that have
died in the north and had their carcasses washed downstream.
Life is tough: hauling the bones,
building and repairing dwellings, cutting and breaking tusks into sections so
that the village craftsmen can -hake utensils, weapons and jewellery.
Daylight is precious - just a few hours of it each day, and then long hours in
the darkness, telling stories around their fires. A small fire is already
burning between the huts, its flame provided by a single knotted log. This
provides a focus for half a dozen men and women who sit close together, knees
drawn up and arms folded, minimising their exposure
to the wind while stitching new clothes.
Near the fire an animal is being
butchered and the air stinks of flesh and Blood. It was a reindeer found
wandering in isolation from its herd – a welcome surprise for a party who had
gone to collect stone from a nearby outcrop. They killed it and can now eat
meat without depleting that stored within their freezer - a hole in the ground.
None of the carcass will be wasted. The meat will be shared between the five
families who are living at Pushkari this winter.
Knife handles and harpoons will be made from the antlers, clothing and bags
from the hide, the ligaments and sinews will Provide thread and cord. The
heart, lungs, liver and other organs will be eaten as delicacies, the teeth
drilled to make decorative pendants, the bone saved for fuel.
One of the dwellings has its interior
lit by the small flame of an animal fat lamp. It is warm an stuffy, inside. The
floor is soft, carpeted with hides and furs that surround a central ash-filled
hearth. Mammoth skulls and leg bones provide furniture; an assortment of
leather bags, bone and wooden bowls, antler and stone tools are scattered by
the walls and hung from the rafters - a scene of Stone Age domestic clutter.
The flickering light exposes a man's face. He looks old, but skin and bone must
age rapidly in the ice-age world. This man wears his hair in plaits, has
pendants of ivory and pierced teeth around his neck. His fingers work quickly
with a needle and sinew thread.
Outside the dwelling, a man and some
women and children sit together, while striking nodules of stone that rest upon
their knees. Flakes of stone are detached, the largest carefully laid to one
side; others are left where they all or casually tossed into the scatter of
surrounding flakes. There is chatter and occasional laughter; some cursing as a
thumb rather than a stone is struck.
The interior of another dwelling lacks
any signs of domestic life. Its floor covered in thick furs; a particularly
large mammoth skull dominates the room, painted with red stripes. Adjacent to
it are drumsticks and flutes made from bird bone. Two ivory figurines, each no
more than a few centimeters long, rest upon a stone slab. Otherwise the
dwelling is quite empty, this is where special gatherings take place; when
visitors arrive, almost the entire village meets inside so that their news can
be heard and gifts temperatures were plummeting; droughts were persisting;
glaciers, ice sheets and deserts were expanding; sea level was falling. Plants,
animals and people either had to adjust where and how they lived, or become
extinct.
How many people were alive on planet
earth at the LGM? Taking into account the large areas of uninhabitable regions,
the harsh climatic conditions that induced early mortality, and the fact that
modern genetics has suggested that only l0,000 modern humans were alive
130,000 years ago, we can guess at a figure of around one million. But this
really is a guess; trying to estimate past population sizes is one of the most
difficult tasks that archaeologists face.
While the Pushkari
hunters build their dwellings and chip their stone, a mammoth herd forages on
the other side of the world in North America, in a vicinity that will become
known as Hot Springs, South Dakota. It is a winter's afternoon and the sunlight
is fading while the great beasts rhythmically sweep the snow away with their
tusks to find the grass below. They head towards longer grasses and small shrubs
that surround the steaming waters of a nearby pond. At 20,000 BC the Americas
remain quite devoid of human settlement, even though its landscapes are rich
with game, so these animals have no fear of human hunters.
The forthcoming global warming will not
only condition the human history that John Lubbock will experience but that of
all other species, some of which - such as the mammoths - will have become
extinct before his travels are complete. Unlike the global warming we face
today, that which came after 20,000 BC was entirely natural. It was just the
most recent switch from a `warm and wet' to a `cold and dry' period in the
earth's history - from a `glacial' to an `interglacial' state. The ultimate
cause of such climatic change lies in regular alterations in the earth's orbit
around the sun.
The Serbian scientist Milutin
Milankovitch first appreciated the significance of such orbital change in the
1920s. By building on his theories, scientists have established that every
95,800 years the earth's orbit changes from being roughly circular to
elliptical. As this happens, the Northern Hemisphere develops greater
seasonality, while the converse happens in the south. This sparks off the
growth of northern ice sheets. When a circular orbit returns, the north-south
contrasts in seasonality are reduced, global warming occurs and the ice sheets
melt.
Alterations in the earth's tilt during
its orbit also have climatic implications. Every 41,000 years, the inclination
of the earth changes from 21.39 to 24.36 degrees and back. As this angle
increases, the seasons become more intense: hotter summers, colder winters. The
earth also has a regular wobble on its axis of rotation, which has its own
cycle of 21,700 years. This influences the point on its orbit around the sun at
which the earth is tilted with its Northern Hemisphere directed towards the
sun. If this happens when the earth is relatively close to the sun, the winters
will be short and warm; conversely, if the earth is relatively distant from the
sun when tilted in this fashion, winters will be longer and colder.
While these changes in the shape, the
tilt and the wobble of the earth's orbit will alter the earth's climate,
scientists think that they are insufficient in themselves to account for the
immense magnitude and speed of past climate change. Processes happening on the
planet itself must have substantially amplified the slight changes they
induced. Several of these are known: changes in ocean and atmospheric currents,
the build-up of greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide) and the growth of
the ice sheets themselves (which reflect increasing amounts of solar radiation
as they increase in size). The combined impact of orbital change and amplifying
mechanisms has been the see-sawing of climate from glacial to interglacial and
back every 100,000 years, often with an extraordinarily rapid switch from one
state to another. One of the most dramatic of these switches came about in 9600
BC, following on from l0,000 years of ups and downs of rainfall and temperature
since the climatic extreme of the LGM.
From a low point between 22,000 and
21,000 Bc, until around 12,700 BC, it shoots upward,
marking the start of a period of relative warmth and wetness known as the
late-glacial interstadial. There are several small peaks within this period,
but the big dip that follows is called the Younger Dryas.
While the people of Pushkari
stitch their clothes and the artist paints within Pech
Merle, others are stalking wallabies on the grasslands of Tasmania, ambushing
antelopes on East African savannahs, fishing in the Mediterranean and the Nile.
This history will visit these and other hunter-gatherers, and then examine how
global warming changed the lives of their descendants. It begins, however, in
the Fertile Crescent - an arc of rolling hills, rivers valleys and lake basins
that is today covered by Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, southeast Turkey and
Iraq. This is where the first farmers, towns of civilizations of ‘Antiquity’
will arise.
A hunter-gatherer campsite is flourishing
on the western shore of Lake Tiberias, otherwise known as the Sea of Galilee.
When excavated by archaeologists, the campsite will be called Ohalo and recognised as one of
the best-preserved settlements from the LGM.
Being located far from the ice sheets
and tundra landscapes, oak woodland is not far away. Its dwellings are made
from brushwood, its people wear garments of hide and vegetable fibres. A new hut is under construction: cut saplings have
been forced into the ground and are being woven together to make a dome. Piles
of leafy branches and animal skins have been prepared to use as material for
the roof. Such building work involves far less effort than that required at Pushkari; indeed, life at Ohalo
seems far more attractive in every way.
There are many people scattered along
the lakeshore: some sitting in groups chatting, children playing games, old men
sleeping in the afternoon sun. A woman approaches the huts from the water's
edge bearing a basket of freshly caught fish, while others hang nets across
coracles to dry. She beckons her children to follow her into their dwelling
where the fish will be threaded on to twine and hung to dry.
Two women emerge from the woodland
draped with freshly killed fox and hare. Several men follow with a trussed-up
gazelle supported on a pole. More women and then children appear with bags and
baskets carried in every way imaginable - on their heads, hauled along the
ground, slung across shoulders, tied around the waist. The carcasses are placed
close to a hearth and the bags and baskets emptied on to hides. Piles of
fruits, seeds, leaves, roots, bark and stems have tumbled forth. There will be
a feast tonight. A young man stands amidst this busy village scene, quite
unnoticed by those at work and play…
The Continents
In the world at 20,000 Bc between 15,000 years one could say it was a time of
global economic equality when everyone lived as hunter-gatherers in a world of
extensive ice sheets, tundra and desert. By the end of that period, many people
were living as farmers.
Some people grew wheat and barley,
others rice, taro or squash. Some lived by herding animals, some by trade and
others by making crafts. A world of temporary campsites had been replaced by
one with villages and towns, a world with mammoths had been transformed into
one with domesticated sheep and cattle. The path towards the huge global
disparities of wealth with which we live today had been set.
Many hunter-gatherers survived but their
fate had been sealed when agriculture began. The farmers, eager for land and
trade, continued to disrupt hunter-gatherer lives. They were followed by
warlords and then nation-states building empires in every corner of the world.
Some hunter-gatherers survived until recent times by living in those places where
farmers could not go: the Inuit, the Kalahari Bushmen and the Desert
Aborigines. But even these communities are no more, effectively killed off by
the twentieth century.
It is no coincidence that human history
reached a turning point during a period of global warming. All communities were
faced with the impact at environmental change - sudden catastrophic floods, the
gradual loss of coastal lands, the failure of migratory herds, the spread of
thick and often unproductive forest. And along with the problems, all
communities faced new opportunities to develop, discover, explore and colonise.
The consequences were different on each
continent. Western Asia. for example, happened to have a suite of wild plants
suited to cultivation. North America had wild animals that were liable to
extinction once human hunting combined with climate change. Africa was so well
endowed w edible wild plants that this cultivation had not even begun there by
5000 B.C.Australia likewise.
Europe lacked its own potential
cultivars but it had the soils and climate in which the cereals and animals
domesticated elsewhere would thrive. South America had its vicuna and North
Africa its wild cattle; Mexico its squash and teosinte, the Yangtze valley its
wild rice.
Continents, and regions within
continents, also had their own particular environmental history, defined by
their size, shape and place within the world. The people who lived in Europe
and western Asia had the most challenging roller-coaster ride of environmental
change. Those living in the central Australian desert and the Amazonian forest
had the least. The type of woodland that spread in northern Europe favoured human settlement, while that in Tasmania caused
the abandonment of its valleys. The melting of the northern ice sheets caused
the loss of coastal plains throughout the world with the exception of the far
north, where precisely the opposite occurred when the land, freed from its
burden of ice, rose faster than the sea.
Although the history of any region was
conditioned by the type of wild resources it possessed and the specific
character of its environmental change, neither of these determined the
historical events that occurred. People always had choices and made decisions
from day to day, albeit with little thought or knowledge of what consequences
might follow. No one planting wild seed in the vicinity of Jericho or Pengtoushan, tending squash close to Guilâ
Naquitz or digging ditches at Kuk Swamp, anticipated
the type of world that farming would create.
Human history arose from accident as
much as by design, and the paths of historical change were many and varied. In
western Asia, hunter-gatherers settled down to live in permanent villages
before they began to farm, just as they did in Japan and on the Ganges plain.
Conversely, plant cultivation in Mexico and New Guinea led to domesticated
plants and farming long before permanent settlement appeared. In North Africa,
cattle came before crops, just as vicuna came before quinua
in the Andes. In Japan and the Sahara the invention of pottery preceded the
start of farming, whereas it occurred simultaneously with the origin of rice
farming in China; its invention in western Asia came about long after farming
towns had begun to flourish.
Who could have predicted the course that
history would take? At 20,000 BC, Southwest Europe set the cultural pace with
its ice-age art, by 8000 BC it was an entirely undistinguished region. At 7500
BC, western Asia had towns housing more than a thousand people, but within a
millennium itinerant pastoralists were making campsites within their ruins.
It was the mind of humans enabled people
to colonise, to invent, to solve problems, and to
create new religious beliefs and styles of art (see our next article about
‘culture’). Without it, there would have been no human history but merely a
continuous cycle of the adaptation and readaptation to environmental change
that had begun several million years ago when our genus first evolved. Instead,
all of these common factors combined, engaging with each continent's unique
conditions and a succession of historical contingencies and events, to create a
world that included farmers, towns, craftsmen and traders.
When At 12,500 BC southern England had
been an ice-age tundra frequented by reindeer, snowy owl and arctic hare; by
8000 BC it was smothered in lush woodland within which red deer browsed and
wild boar rooted on the forest floor. Even in 1950 it had been a richly
textured landscape of woods and fields, of ponds, paths and pastures. But in
2003, there are vast expanses of southern England where hardly a tree or bush
exists, from which wild animals and birds have been almost entirely expelled by
the industry of modern farming. There are very few hills from which traffic
below and aeroplanes above cannot be heard.
Its polluted air requires one to ponder
the circularity of history. Farming and industry were products of a history
brought about by global warming. Now they themselves are the cause of renewed
global warming that has already had a sizeable impact upon the world and will
condition the future history of humankind. Mass deforestation and the burning
of fossil fuels have increased the level of greenhouse gases and planet earth
is becoming warmer than nature intends. During the last few decades, glaciers
on all continents have receded, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has
reduced dramatically, and the Antarctic ice shelf is on the verge of collapse.
Just as in prehistoric times, the
natural world is undergoing change. The flowering dates of many plants have
already advanced, birds are breeding earlier and changing their habitats. Once
again insects have been some of the first species to respond: flights of aphids
are arriving earlier in the United Kingdom while the butterflies in North
America and Britain are being found at higher altitudes and further north.
The next century of human-made global
warming is predicted to be far less extreme than that which occurred at 9600
BC. At the end of the Younger Dryas, mean global temperature had risen by 70C
in fifty years, whereas the predicted rise for the next hundred years is less
than 3°C; the end of the last ice age led to a120-metre increase in sea level,
whereas that predicted for the next fifty years is a paltry 32 centimetres at most, rising to 88 centimetres
by AD 2100.
However, while future global warming may
be less extreme than that of 9600 BC, the modern world is in a far more fragile
state owing to environmental pollution and the resource requirements of six
billion people. As a consequence, the threats to human communities and natural
ecosystems are far more severe than those of prehistoric times. When the vast
low-lying regions of the ice-age world were flooded, many were uninhabited;
those settlements that did exist - such as the 7000-BC town of Atlit-Yam on the Israeli coast - housed a few hundred
people at most. Today, 12o million people live in the delta regions of
Bangladesh, six million of them on land less than one metre
above current sea level, and 30 million below three metres.
Rising sea level will be accompanied by devastating storms and the penetration
of salt into their freshwater supplies?
When global warming made the Tasmanian
valleys uninhabitable after 14,000 Bc and the Sahara
Desert after 5000 BC, their people found other places to live - the world was
still quite empty of human settlement. But where will the new displaced
populations be able to go? Those from the flooded delta regions; those from
inundated low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans'; those from
Sub-Saharan Africa where the frequency and intensity of drought will become too
severe to be relieved by any amount of international aid?
The global warming that brought the ice
age to its close created localities of abundant resource which people claimed
as their own and were prepared to fight for, such as in the Nile valley at
14,000 Bc, northern Australia at 6000 Bc and southern Scandinavia at 5000 BC. Such conflicts were
trivial affairs in comparison to those that we know today; but our modern world
seems destined to become yet more violent as the impacts of renewed global
warming are felt.
Shortage of fresh water will become a
major source of conflict. Its supplies are already under pressure owing to the
demands of modern farming and daily human need. Such pressure will become
severe with the predicted reductions of rainfall and increased evaporation in
the key catchments of the world. Water will eclipse land, politics and even
religion as the source of dispute between Middle Eastern states - a development
that has already begun.
Moreover, global warming will likely
exacerbate the existing extremes of wealth and poverty in the world:
agricultural productivity in the developed nations is predicted to increase,
while the reverse will happen in the developing world. Global terrorism is
bound to thrive.
It is ironic that the continent that
became habitable as a consequence of the natural global warming after the LGM,
is now the one doing most to make vast areas of the world uninhabitable for
others by its excessive contribution to the cause of renewed global warming:
America is the main polluter of our skies.
In England, much of the Early Holocene
oak woodland had already been cleared in prehistoric times. But this region
only took on its now desolate appearance during the last fifty years: ponds
were left to silt up and soon disappeared, copses were removed, hedges grubbed-up, small farms
replaced by factory-like enterprises that specialised
in growing wheat and harvesting subsidies.
Today's prairie-like landscape suffers
from soil erosion and has been polluted by an excess of fertiliser
and pesticide." As with so much other farmland in the Western world, it
produces far more food than we require .12 And yet we live within a world
blighted by hunger. Eight hundred million people live close to starvation - a
number predicted to increase with the new global warming. Over the next hundred
years, an additional 8o million people are likely to become hungry and
malnourished because of environmental change.' Some believe that the only way
to end world hunger is by genetically engineering existing crops to increase
their yields, improve their pest resistance and make them tolerant of
salt-ridden soils.
Human-induced genetic modification of
plants first arose from the attempts of hunter-gatherers in western Asia to
cope with the droughts of the Younger Dryas and to feed the gatherings at Göbekli Tepe and elsewhere.
Their cultivation of wild cereals unknowingly created genetic change and
produced the domesticated wheat and barley we grow today. The genetics of other
species were also changed by human action, creating domesticated squash, maize
and beans, rice, quinua, taro and potatoes. Such
plants supported the Early Holocene increase in human population, and now, via
plant breeding and crop management, support our vast global population. But a
further two billion people will need feeding during the next quarter-century.
Some scientists believe that the genetic
engineering of plants at the molecular level - the deliberate insertion of DNA
from one species into another - is simply the next step forward in this history
of plant manipulation for human need.Because new
genetic variants solved a food crisis brought about by past climate change,
they argue, additional genetic variants might do the same for us today.
This may indeed be the case but
archaeology has given us another, and perhaps a far more important, lesson from
the past. As soon as farming had begun, the surpluses arising from the new,
high-yielding genetic variants had come under centralised
control, as is evident from the buildings at Jerf el Ahmar in 9300 Bc, Beidha in 8200 Bc and Kom K in 5000 Bc. From the very
start of farming, food had become a commodity, a source of wealth and power for
those who controlled its distribution. And so one should suspect that the
already existing inequities of global food supply are likely to become enhanced
by the creation of yet more genetic variants with even higher yields. Those who
guarded the grain silos in prehistoric times are being reincarnated as the
biotechnology companies who patent such plants and distribute their seed.
The defiled landscape of southern
England, and that of so many other regions of the modern world, poses another
question about biotechnology. As has been evident from this history, when
archaeologists study a past environment they invariably find a far greater
diversity of plants and animals than are known in the same locality today. The
flora of the forest steppe in the vicinity of Ohalo
at 20,000 Bc and the fauna of North America at 15,000
Bc are just the most obvious examples of a far richer
and more varied natural world in prehistoric times. Biodiversity was reduced by
climate change - the increasing zonation of vegetation types in northern
latitudes favoured the few specialists over the many
generalists. But the consequences of farming for biodiversity have been far
more severe, as can be appreciated by either imagining the devastated landscape
around 'Ain Ghazal in 6500 BC or by looking at that of any intensively farmed
region of the world today.
Will the cultivation of new genetic
variants, plants unnaturally resistant to pests and disease, take the loss of
biodiversity to a new extreme? Will such plants invade and overrun the
communities of wild species that still survive? Will the remaining refuges of
the natural world, especially the precious wetlands and salt marsh, also be
turned into agricultural land, just as happened to the woodlands of southern England
when people had the first genetic variants to sow? There are no answers yet,
although we will keep an eye on it here on world-news-research.com.
Biotechnology might be the greatest
blessing we have and lead to the end of world hunger: disease-resistant,
genetically engineered crops might protect biodiversity by reducing the need
for chemical sprays. A common need for water might unite the warring factions
of the Middle East. The predicted extent and impact of global warming might be
quite wrong. Our politicians might devise both the will and the means to curb
pollution, to distribute resources fairly throughout the world, to provide new
homes for displaced populations, and to preserve the natural world. They might
do all these things. But they probably won't, however we will let you know.
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