Professor Nevin Kozik, PhD, of Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science – National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, during fieldwork to investigate how rapid changes in marine oxygen levels may have played a significant role in driving Earth’s first mass extinction.
Fundamental to the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is the idea that environmental change causes evolutionary change, a consequence of which can be extinction, especially when change is too rapid for species to evolve adaptations to it. Environmental change can be very rapid (instantaneous in the case of a meteor strike, for example) but evolutionary change is characteristically very slow, needing many generations to produce a significant adaptation.
So, it's hardly surprising that a period of rapidly fluctuating marine oxygen levels about 443 million years ago, caused Earth's first mass extinction at the same time. Confirmation of that, and so of a prediction of the TOE, has now been produced by a team led by Florida State University (FSU) researchers.
The research depends on a fairly recent dating method for marine sediment that measures the proportion of thallium isotopes in the sediment, as explained by Owens, J.D; Neilson S.D; Horner, T.J., et al (2016)[PDF]:
If Creationism ranked as a serious scientific hypothesis, it would have been abandoned years ago because of the mass of evidence for an alternative theory - the Theory of Evolution. In fact, of course, in scientific circles, Creationism was never regarded as serious science because it entailed magical entities and was unfalsifiable, and was abandoned in 1859 when Darwin & Wallace first published their explanation for biodiversity and the existence of species.
Yet the childish superstition persists in the more backward and scientifically illiterate parts of the world, despite evidence of so many transitional species showing a clear evolutionary change from an earlier taxon to a later one. One such transition that has evidence in the fossil record is the evolutionary transition from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial vertebrates.
A key stage in the development of the terrestrial vertebrates was the transition onto land of air-breathing fish, so a key piece of conditioned denialism for Creationists is to claim there are no fossils showing this transition because their dogma dictates that there are no transitional fossils, for no better reason than Darwin said there should be some.
In fact, of course, there are very many of these fossils showing intermediate species, capable of crawling out onto land and of living in water.
I described this transition, and the ecological changes that facilitated it, in my book, What Makes You So Special: From the Big Bang to You, which deals with the science behind the formation of the Universe, of Earth and of life on Earth, and eventually to humans and the development of human cultures and civilisations, culminating ultimately in you, as a unique individual and beneficiary of that immense chain of causality. So, it's good to know this subject has now been made into a YouTube video, which entirely vindicates what I said:
Now, here is my description:
Here is an example of how science is self-correcting in that methods are critically scrutinised, especially if the reported results look far out of place with other known data. It's the sort of thing that Creationist frauds often find irresistible as something to misrepresent, as either science changing its mind, showing science to be unreliable, or scientists looking for an excuse to change the conclusion because it didn't conform to scientific 'dogma'.
It's neither of those things, of course. It just one team of researchers offering a suggestion as to why another team might have been wrong.
It concerns a 2021 paper published in Science by a team from Institute for Studies in Landscapes and Human Evolution, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK, led by Matthew R. Bennett which reported the discovery of human footprints preserved in sand deposits in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, in the what had been the sediment in Lake Otero at the bottom of Tularosa Valley, which had been dated to between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. The problem was, this placed them at the height of the last glacial maximum, long before other evidence suggested modern humans migrated into the Americas from Siberia.
That conclusion has now been challenged by a second team of scientists from The Desert Research Institute (DRI), Kansas State University, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Oregon State University, led by Professor Charles Oviatt, with some fairly hefty evidence. They have published their findings in the journal Quaternary Research.
Global distribution of plant species richness across the globe as predicted using the distribution 300,000 plant species across 830 regional floras worldwide.
Bagley Wood, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK is a lightly managed ancient mixed broadleaf
and conifer wood belonging to St Johns College, Oxford, who acquired it in 1557.
Prior to that it had been owned by Abingdon Abbey between 955 and 1538. It is
now used for field research by members of the University Zoology Department and
is probably one of the most closely studied areas of woodland in Europe.
These photographs were taken on a sunny sunday afternoon in November on one of
the warmest November days on record. Of particular note are the profusion of
holly berries and the variety of fungi to be seen.
Walkers are welcome to use the wood but are politely requested to stay on the
footpaths, to keep dogs on a lead and not to disturb the wildlife, so the
woodland remains almost completely undisturbed.
A feature in Late Spring are the carpets of bluebells as well as the many
nesting birds, especially finches, warblers, blackcaps, chiff chaffs and tits.
In recent years, red kites and buzzards have both increased in numbers, and
muntjac deer have become common.
If you've fallen for the Intelligent Design hoax and so believe viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 were intelligently designed, you probably should be deeply in awe at the lengths to which your putative designer is going to find a super new version that can evade our antibodies acquired from vaccines and earlier infections - antibodies produced by an immune system you believe it created to protect us from the pathogens it creates to make us sick, obviously - and so make even more people sick, ruin even more economies and scupper economic recovery.
We've had in sequence since the initial wave, several waves as new variants emerged, including Delta and most successful to date, Omicron, which is now in the latest of several new subvarieties.
Of course, to anyone who understands evolution, this is nothing more than what is expected as the virus mutates within a selective environment and the most successful becomes the dominant variant. Mutations arise because of copying errors and hybrids arise when two different variants infect the same cell and their genomes get mixed up in their descendants.
To an ID cultist, however, this explanation must be rejected in favour of one in which their imaginary creator actively redesigns the virus to overcome new challenges.
In this article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence, Victoria Easton, Virology Research and Teaching Fellow in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, UK, looks at the emerging variants and discusses whether we should be concerned or not. The original article can be read here:
GSS study showing increase in American rious “Nones”
('Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion).
With the raucous jabber of evangelicals drowning out other, quieter, more measured voices in American politics, a non-American like me could be forgiven for thinking they are the major force in US politics, and they have had some, hopefully short-term, successes such as getting Trump elected in 2016 and him then stuffing SCOTUS with right-wing Christian extremists who promptly overturned Roe vs Wade. But there are more measured and thoughtful voices also beginning to exert a moderating and humanitarian influence, especially in the Democratic Party. They are the growing number of 'Nones', or people with no religious affiliations.
Of course this include Atheists/Agnostics, but it also includes people for whom religion is a personal thing that doesn't require affiliation to any one organised religion, although studies have shown that 'None' tends to be a half-way house between religious and Atheist as the loss of group affiliation tends to free the individual to look dispassionately at the (lack of) evidence, free from peer-pressure, and draw the rational conclusion - there is no evidential reason for religious belief.
The evidence is that the 'Nones' could have been behind Biden's win in 2020, helping to secure swing states, since 1 in 5 Americans adults and more than 1 in 3 Democrat voters are now 'None', and since 'Nones' tend to be generally more informed, it would be surprising if they weren't having an effect on US politics.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, USA, gives his assessment of the impact the 'Nones' are now having on American politics. The original article can be read here:
This is beginning to look like the end times for Donald Trump and his Trumpanzee cult.
The mid-term elections which were supposed to deliver a 'red wave' of Repugnican candidates as Trumpanzees took control of both houses, failed to materialise and scarcely even resembled a dribble. It looks like the Democrats will retain control of the Senate and very many of the candidates publicly endorsed by Trump either lost or won by slim margins. To make matters worse for Trump personally, his arch rival for both the Repugnican choice for the 2024 presidential election and as leader of white right extremism, Ron DeSantis, won the gubernatorial race in Florida by a landslide, setting him up for a run at the presidency.
Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft (left) and Andrea Williams, CEO of Christian Concern (right)
Like the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, or Church of England (CofE) in Britain is struggling to come to terms with the fact that society has moved on and no longer accepts the primitive Bronze Age moral code in the Bible. In order to stem the haemorrhage of members which has now left Anglicanism a minority cult in the UK with empty pews and derelict churches and not enough vicars to fill all the vacancies, reformers such as the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Crofts, are trying to distance the church from that primitive barbarism, division, exclusion and hate that the Bible encourages. They are trying to make the CofE become more inclusive, embracing the humanist ethics that now form the basis of UK society, with same-sex marriages, sexual freedom, contraception and a woman's right to chose.
The problem for the CofE, like the Catholic church ,is that to catch up with modern society it has to abandon the fundamentals of the Early Medieval religion, yet, as its membership dwindles, the fanatical fundamentalists become proportionately more powerful within it. To those fundamentalists who are used to using the Bible to justify their smug bigotry and persecution of those who don't agree with them, to abandon the fundamentals is to abandon the faith altogether.
To these bigots the 'faith' is how they define it and they are not easily going to give up the basis for their entitled demand for the right to dictate to the rest of us.
This can be seen in a response by arch bigot, Andrea Williams, of Christian Concern, which represents the fundamentalist wing of Anglicanism, to proposed reforms in the CofE's attitude to same-sex marriage, with is dripping with condescension and the dogmatic assumption that their interpretation of their Bible is the definitive word of a god who empowered them to dictate to the rest of us.
SMU paleontologists helped find a new species of pterosaurs in Angola, where fossils of other large marine animals have been found. E. otyikokolo can be seen flying above the ocean in the ancient picture.
Artwork by Karen Carr Studio.
It must be difficult trying to maintain the necessary ignorance of the facts to be a Creationist who believes Earth was created as is just a few thousand years ago - rather like an idiot standing with his eyes shut, hoping if he can't see it, the onrushing avalanche won't affect him.
So, it's with great pleasure that I add another large boulder to that onrushing avalanche, in the form of news of a new species of pterosaur that lived on the coast of what is now Angola in West Africa, about 71.5 million years ago. It had a wing-span of almost 16 feet (4.8 metres).
My last couple of blog posts have delt with the evolution of human cultures by a
process analogous to Darwinian evolution, which follows the pattern of our
physical evolution with partial divergence, remerging, and hybridization with
closely related species, and how the evidence utterly refutes the narrative in
the Bible and the Qur'an and shows them to be nothing more than myths made up by
ignorant people.
Being entirely ignorant of earlier cultures and seeing no need to explain cultural development, the Bible's authors saw no need to even make up tales to explain it. To them, humans had aleays been as they were in the Bronze Age. We now know better, of course.
This blog looks at how the elements of modern human cultures evolved much later
in our history than when we became anatomically modern. It is, of course,
debateable whether we became fully modern humans without fully modern
cultures.
It turns out that the reason it took so long to evolve the elements of modern cultures was that there simply weren't enough of us to produce enough innovative geniuses - the Da Vincis, Einsteins, Newtons and Darwins of their day.
One of the explanations for why Neanderthals never developed more than simple stone technology was that they existed a small, scattered bands, so any new ideas tended to remain local and not spread across the entire species. If the local group died out, its ideas and any innovations died with them. This might well have been so for anatomically modern humans.
The following article by Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary
Biology and Paleontology, University of Bath, Somerset, UK discusses this
problem and outlines the development of human cultures. It is reprinted from
The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for
stylistic consistency. The original article can be read
here:
My last blog post dealt with how human cultures evolved by a process which, while maybe not being identical with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, is closely analogous to it, and how it reflected diverse origins in diverse populations affected by wide environmental differences across the range of human habitation.
This is in complete contrast to the narrow culture assumed in the Bible where there is no attempt to explain human cultural origins or even any awareness that it is something to be explained, just as the origin of living creatures and even the Earth itself needed to be explained, albeit with the naïve guesses of people ignorant of science and little or no understanding of biology, geology or cosmology.
This post should disturb Creationists even further because it flies in the face of anything the Bible implies about human origins. Bible literalist Creationists must believe that all humans are derived ultimately from a single couple, magically created in a 'garden' somewhere in the Middle East.
Bible scholars traditionally place this 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, citing:
The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.
The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
Genesis 2: 9-14:
The problem for Creationists is that a team of Turkish researchers from Hacettepe University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey have just shown that the people living in that area between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago had a genetic and cultural makeup that indicates multiple origins from across the 'Fertile Crescent' and that the area was a melting pot and fusion centre, rather than an origin. This conclusion came from an analysis of the DNA extracted from the remains of 13 individuals together with cultural artifacts excavated at Çayönü Hill in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır between 8,500-7,500 BC.
Çayönü Hill, Ergani district of Diyarbakır, Iraq.
As the Hacettepe University news release explains:
Çayönü Hill was first discovered in 1963 by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood. The excavations that Prof. Dr. Çambel started systematically in 1968 were continued with a break from time to time. During the excavations conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Aslı Erim Özdoğan, it was determined that the first settlement in the region started approximately 12,000 years ago and that the region was inhabited until 6,000 years ago. During this long settlement, Çayönü Hill hosted different cultures. Archaeological remains show that the region has a dynamic cultural structure and that the architectural structures have changed over time. In addition, anthropological studies revealed that early examples of various modifications applied to the body, such as artificial skull shaping and trepanation, existed in this culture.
Researchers set out to understand the genetic makeup of people with this dynamic cultural structure. It is known that DNA molecules in human remains exposed to high temperatures due to climatic conditions throughout Mesopotamia are very difficult to preserve. Therefore, in ancient DNA studies carried out to date, the region was only represented by the genome of a single individual from the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site. Dr. Lecturer Füsun Özer stated that under these conditions, Çayönü individuals had a higher level of DNA preservation than expected and continued: “We scanned 33 skeletons from Çayönü Hill, dated between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, for DNA conservation. Of these, 13 individuals had enough DNA molecules to allow genome analysis. In this region, it was surprising for us to get close to 40 percent success from such old individuals.”
This study, carried out in Upper Mesopotamia, in the northernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, the center of domestication of plants and animals, revealed that the region was a center of attraction during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period, and people from the surrounding geographies mingled in the region. The genetic makeup of the people of the region bears traces from the eastern and western sides of the Fertile Crescent.
The central location of Upper Mesopotamia in Southwest Asia is also reflected in the gene pool of the society. The demographic patterns of the Central Anatolian Neolithic societies in the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, represented by the Zagros Neolithic societies, appear as a mixture in this region.
Dr. Ezgi Altınışık, first-author
Human-G Laboratory
Department of Anthropology
Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.
Although genetic diversity is observed to be high, no major change is observed in the genetic structure of the population during the 1,000 years examined. Despite this, the fact that a two-year-old girl is genetically closer to the communities living on the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent reveals that people from outside came to Çayönü and could live in this village. The etching mark found on the parietal bone of this girl presents the first example of the tradition still practiced today. Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal, one of the research team, stated that cauterization as a treatment tool is a common practice in Anatolia, and the Çayönü example is one of the oldest examples of this practice. This specimen, with traces of infection on its inner surface, indicates that it was probably treated with a method including magical-ritual application in order to eliminate the negativities caused by the infection. Erdal stated that, together with the trepanation sample found in Çayönü, these data indicate that Mesopotamia had a very dynamic and somewhat complex cultural dynamic in the Neolithic Age.
Another important finding from the study was to determine kinship relationships in Early Neolithic communities. In the Early Neolithic Period, it was a common tradition to bury the dead in the floors of houses in and around Anatolia. The kinship analyzes [sic] revealed that the individuals buried in the same house in Çayönü were mostly close relatives. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Somel from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University said that they interpreted these results as the social structure of society being organized within the framework of biological kinship. It is seen that this family-centered burial tradition observed in Early Neolithic communities has changed over time, and in some settlements from the Late Neolithic period such as Çatalhöyük, social ties besides biological kinship play a role in burial in the same place.
Finally, researchers sought to analyze how Upper Mesopotamian peoples influenced surrounding communities in later periods. Archaeological studies indicated that Upper Mesopotamia culturally influenced Anatolia during the Late Neolithic period. Genetic analyzes [sic] also revealed that some of the ancestors of people who lived in Central Anatolia (Çatalhöyük) and Marmara (Barcın Höyük) 1,000 years after Çayönü came from Upper Mesopotamia. This shows that people of relatively distant geographies interact not only with the exchange of ideas from afar, but also with human movement.
Fig. 1. Spatiotemporal distribution of the samples and the population structure of Neolithic Southwest Asia. (A) Timeline of ancient Southwest Asian individuals used in the analyses. Colored horizontal bars at the bottom represent the subperiods of the Neolithic Era in Southwest Asia. (B) The map shows EP and Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia. Shaded areas mark PPN period cultural zones (referred to as the Aceramic period in C Anatolia). (C) Çayönü building types and their approximate dates of use, considered as evidence for Çayönü’s cultural openness and ingenuity. Modified from (112). (D) The first two dimensions of the MDS plot of genetic distances. The MDS summarizes the genetic distance matrix among ancient genomes calculated as (1 − outgroup f3) values. Outgroup f3-statistics were calculated as f3(Yoruba; individual1, individual2). The labels represent the following sites: Anatolia EP: Pınarbaşı; Anatolia PPN: Boncuklu and Aşıklı Höyük; Anatolia PN: Çatalhöyük and Barcın Höyük; Levant EP: Natufian; Levant PPN: Ain’ Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh, Motza, and Ba’ja; C Zagros N (Central Zagros Neolithic): Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul, and Wezmeh Cave; S Caucasus EP (South Caucasus EP): Kotias and Satsurblia. See note S5 for a definition of “Anatolia.” PPNA, Pre-pottery Neolithic A; PPNB, Pre-pottery Neolithic B; PPNC, Pre-pottery Neolithic C.
Details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper publish in Science Advances:
Abstract
Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and diet. We present 13 ancient genomes (c. 8500 to 7500 cal BCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. Our findings reveal that Çayönü was a genetically diverse population, carrying mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results further suggest that the community was organized along biological family lines. We document bodily interventions such as head shaping and cauterization among the individuals examined, reflecting Çayönü’s cultural ingenuity. Last, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesize that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections.
It probably wasn't the intention of the researchers to refute the Bible so comprehensively, yet they did so, simply by revealing the truth, as is so often the case with scientific discoveries.
Not only was there never a founding couple (as though that idea ever carried any merit) but the people in the area at the time in which the tale was set had multiple origins from much earlier populations and cultures. Of course, the Bible's authors were entirely ignorant of the facts and the evolutionary history of the people about whom they wrote, and simply made up stories to explain the unknown - and of course, as with so much else, got it hopelessly wrong.
And of course, without Adam and Eve, there was no original sin, no need for salvation and redemption and no need for Jesus, and yet the hideous superstition of vicarious redemption through a human blood sacrifice, and the need to be reconciled with an irascible god to avoid eternal torture, is still used by parasitic priests and imams to control and terrorise ignorant and superstitious people and to justify their demand to be allowed to make laws governing the rest of us and run society in their interest.
Religion teaches us not the think. Science teaches us how to think.
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I
wrote recently
about how the simplistic view of a linear progress for human evolution is wrong,
because the reality of the fossil and DNA record, of which there is a plentiful
supply, is that it was confused, as side branches partially diverged, then
re-joined and species such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbreed both
with one another with their cousin species,
Homo sapiens, and a third, as yet unidentified, species known only from
DNA, and a similar process of partial or complete divergence and remerging
probably occurred in Africa before H. sapiens emerged into Eurasia to
meet the descendants of earlier Hominin migrations.
This, of course, is exactly what we should expect from an understanding of
evolution and how it works over a large range and diverse geography.
And now, it seems the simplistic model of human cultural evolution from
'savage', through hunter-gatherer, to pastoralist and settled agriculturalist
may be wrong and the reality was as confused as that of our physical evolution.
This really isn't surprising, as cultural development is just as much an
evolutionary process as is physical evolution.
Creationists, who must subscribe to the Bronze Age mythology in the Bible and
Qur'an and so shun learning and reason, will probably find this difficult to
comprehend because, while the mythmakers appreciated that they needed stories to
explain theirs and other animal's origins, and even the origin of Earth itself,
they were ignorant of the sociology of human cultures, other than of
language.
There is the idiotic attempt to explain the origin of language with the 'Tower
of Babel' myth, but cultures were simply assumed to be the primitive warring
Middle Eastern tribal cultures that much of the Old Testament concerns itself
with, with no attempt to explain their origins. The mythmakers knew nothing
else, so assumed human culture had always been as they found it, complete with
misogyny, slavery, a hierarchy of priests and irascible and vindictive, brutal
ruling despots, and religious rituals to appease gods who closely resembled
those ruling despots, and simply set their tales in that culture.
The view of a linear progression of human cultural development is now being
challenged however, with evidence that palaeolithic cultures were as diverse as
palaeolithic people.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a
Creative commons license with reformatting for stylistic consistency, Vivek V.
Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada argues that we need to revise our
understanding of the evolution of human culture, in today's political climate of
increasing inequality, political polarization, and climate change to understand
what cultures are possible in the future. The original article can be read
here.
The origins of human society are more complex than we thought
During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer societies built sedentary
settlements.
In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear
fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers living in
small, nomadic and egalitarian bands. Later, they discovered farming and
domesticated animals for food and service.
Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings of the
modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex, leading to our
current state of affairs.
“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the
institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian Yuval Noah
Harari in his bestselling
Sapiens.
A new book —
The Dawn of Everything
by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow —
challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they
argue human societies during the Palaeolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.
Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from
mammoth bones. At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers hoisted
megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first human-built holy place.”
To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually unlimited social
flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark assessment about the
possibility for social change in the modern world.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I believe
both accounts miss the mark about the course of human prehistory. To see why,
it is important to understand how anthropologists today think about nomadic
egalitarian bands in the scheme of social evolution.
Human social evolution
In the 19th-century, anthropologists like
Lewis Henry Morgan
categorized human social evolution into three stages:
savagery, barbarism and civilization. These correspond to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life,
respectively. These so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution
as a steady march of progress toward civilized life.
Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little
intellectual connection
between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward studying
hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherers are profoundly
diverse in modern
times, and they were in the
past too. This diversity
helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes the scope of
social expression in human societies.
Human societies have generally become larger-scale and more
complex over time.
Popular
accounts
typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to “civilization” and
inequality. But the shift to farming was not a single event or a simple linear
process. There are many paths toward social complexity and inequality.
The Dawn of Everything, along with reviews in
cultural evolution and
evolutionary anthropology, suggests that complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged
far before the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone
Age (50,000 to 280,000 years ago).
This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be skeptical.
Complexity on the coastline
Social complexity
emerged among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like
southern France
and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.
So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast,
Indigenous peoples could
sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even evolving
complex hierarchies dependent on
slave labour.
Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic along rich
riverine systems or on
coastlines — now submerged
by sea level changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no
unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources are used
in the Middle Stone Age.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal
Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff.
Credit: V. Venkataraman, Author provided
But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to full-time
sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and success was probably
sporadic. Most of the year these populations lived in dispersed bands.
Egalitarian origins
Anatomically modern humans have been around for
roughly 300,000 years. There
is little evidence of markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized
inequality going back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.
This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our
ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals. Egalitarian
social life needs to be
maintained through active and coordinated effort.
From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged. Our
politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that diversity. Prehistory
shows us that human political flexibility is far greater than we can imagine.
Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology,
University of Calgary
Published by The Conversation. Open access.
(CC BY 4.0)
Human culture has evolved as with other evolutionary process to suit it to particular environment conditions, and what we have today is the result, just as the genes we have today are the result of our physical evolution over time.
Religions are remnants of that cultural evolution and whilst they may had had some value in ensuring group cohesion and conformity, in modern, multicultural, multiethnic societys, they are merely divisive and destructive, just when we need to start to become more united and egalitarian if we are to survive the challenges ahead of us.
