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How Indonesia’s Toba Volcano Changed Human Evolution

May 5, 2024

How Indonesia’s Toba Volcano Changed Human Evolution

The massive supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago has been blamed for nearly killing off our species. The emerging truth is much more interesting.

A dramatic 2020 eruption of Kīlauea was nothing compared with Indonesia's Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, the largest eruption of the past 2.5 million years.

A dramatic 2020 eruption of Kīlauea was nothing compared with Indonesia’s Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, the largest eruption of the past 2.5 million years. HAWAII VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK/PUBLIC DOMAIN

THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING. For the small bands of hunter-gatherers across Africa and Eurasia, the day was like any other. Some tracked great herds of migrating animals across expansive grasslands; others moved through dense rainforests, or along the banks of turgid rivers and ephemeral streambeds. Survival—finding food and water, avoiding predators, strengthening the small group’s social bonds—was the order of the day.

Thousands of miles away, an extraordinary event was about to take place: a cataclysm that would make the entire planet shudder. It would also change the story of our species. The question is, how?

About 74,000 years ago on Sumatra, the Toba supervolcano erupted on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. It was the most powerful eruption of the last 2.5 million years; by volume, it was more than 215 times larger than the 20th century’s biggest boom, the Novarupta event in Alaska, and more than 11,000 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. It dwarfed even the three largest known eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

In the late 20th century, researchers began trying to reconstruct what happened after Toba blew. According to those early models, inches-thick blankets of ash smothered much of the Indian subcontinent and choked the seas from the Arabian to Chinese coasts. Global air currents swept a haze of sulfur and ash particles across oceans and continents, wreaking climate havoc…

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Humanity’s End Was Determined from the Start

November 22, 2023

Humanity’s End Was Determined from the Start

The moment a species learns to manipulate its environment for gain is the moment the clock starts ticking on its demise.

Given the vastness of the universe, it’s possible that 1 billion intelligent civilizations exist.

So why is there no sign of these civilizations?

It is likely that all advanced civilizations are eventually destroyed by a “Great Filter”. And it’s probable that humanity is currently going through its Great Filter right now.

First, Let’s Examine Why Alien Life Should Exist

The Milky Way, our galaxy, is home to approximately 100 to 400 billion stars. Assuming that a portion of these stars are central to solar systems, similar to our own, it’s conceivable that the Milky Way could contain tens to hundreds of billions of such systems.

Adding to this, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, many found in systems with multiple planets through missions like Kepler and TESS, reinforces the idea that planetary systems are a common feature around stars. This widespread occurrence of exoplanets suggests that a significant majority of stars throughout the universe might host their own solar systems.

Expanding this view to the larger cosmos, with an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each potentially holding as many stars as the Milky Way on average, the numbers become even more astronomical. This implies a universe where hundreds of trillions to quadrillions of solar systems could exist, each with its unique characteristics and potentially life-supporting conditions.

To crudely estimate the number of solar systems with planets that have conditions favorable to life, let’s use the higher end of the estimate: one quadrillion solar systems in the universe. If 1% of these solar systems have planets with conditions favorable to life, there could potentially be about 10 trillion solar systems with planets that have conditions conducive to life.

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Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization

April 23, 2023

Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization

Highlights

•The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.

•Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.

•Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.

•Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.

•Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.

Abstract

For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures.

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Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct

December 2, 2021

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct

Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse 

Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct

Credit: Jordan Lye/Getty Images

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there’s going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history.

Half a century on, the threat of nuclear annihilation has lost its imminence. As for overpopulation, more than twice as many people live on the earth now as in 1968, and they do so (in very broad-brush terms) in greater comfort and affluence than anyone suspected. Although the population is still increasing, the rate of increase has halved since 1968. Current population predictions vary. But the general consensus is that it’ll top out sometime midcentury and start to fall sharply. As soon as 2100, the global population size could be less than it is now. In most countries—including poorer ones—the birth rate is now well below the death rate. In some countries, the population will soon be half the current value. People are now becoming worried about underpopulation.

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What Defines Appropriate Technology?

October 5, 2017

WHAT DEFINES APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY?

OUR CURRENT ADDICTION TO TECHNOLOGY

If there is one defining aspect of our modern civilization it´s that we are a technological species. Compared to other organisms with whom we share this planet, we Homo sapiens aren´t exactly well adapted to long term survival. We have no coat of fur to keep us warm, we don´t have sharp teeth or claws to hunt with, and we´re extremely vulnerable to the elements around us at all times.

In fact, we kind of resemble in some ways a mishap of evolution; an unfortunate paint spill that sticks out on an otherwise beautifully painted canvas. If it weren´t for our ability to shape and alter our surroundings through technology we would have most likely long ago passed into the annals of history along with the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

The lion has its deftness and sharp claws, the monarch butterfly has its mesmerizing and threatening wing patterns, and us humans have nothing but a decently sized brain and the gift of self-conscious which has allowed us to reshape our surroundings through the use of technology. That which is our defining characteristic, however, has also been one of the main causes of the crises we now face.

HOW TO DEFINE WHAT IS APPROPRIATE FOR A PLACE

There are no universally appropriate technologies because we live in a diverse world where different contexts affect the “appropriateness” of each place. Agrarian author Wes Jackson states that nature must be our measure of what is right and correct for each place. We would add that the realities of the community where we live should also be an important factor regarding how we are to live in our places.

The fourth permaculture principle is “apply self-regulation and accept feedback.” Several of our current technologies are simply too large and too powerful to allow us to receive feedback.

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The Anthropocene and Ozymandias

August 28, 2015

The Anthropocene and Ozymandias

HABITUS 8 med

Much has been made lately of the so-called Anthropocene — the idea that Homo sapiens has so taken over and modified Earth that we need a new name for our geological age instead of the outmoded Holocene. One remorseless Anthropoceniac writes, ‘Nature is gone… You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene — a geological era in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.’

One of the reasons given today for renaming the Anthropocene is that we have so impacted all ecosystems on Earth that there is no ‘wilderness’ left. Insofar as I know, other than babbling about ‘pristine’, ‘untouched’, and so forth, none of the Anthropoceniacs ever define what they mean by wilderness, which is not surprising in that none of them give a hint of having been in a Wilderness Area or having studied the citizen wilderness preservation movement.

Moreover, they behave as though their claim about wilderness being snuffed is a new insight of their own. In truth, we wilderness conservationists have been speaking out about how Homo sapiens has been wrecking wilderness worldwide for one hundred years. Bob Marshall, a founder of the Wilderness Society, warned eighty years ago that the last wilderness of the Rocky Mountains was ‘disappearing like a snowbank on a south-facing slope on a warm June day.’ Congress said in the 1964 Wilderness Act that the country had to act then due to ‘increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization’ or we would leave no lands in a natural condition for future generations. My book Rewilding North America documents in gut-wrenching detail how Man has been wreaking a mass extinction for the last 50,000 years or so.

 

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How agriculture grew on us

March 14, 2015

How agriculture grew on us

 

The Neolithic revolution was neither Neolithic, nor a revolution.
— Colin Tudge

Human beings of the race that calls itself Homo sapiens lived in relative equality, in small foraging bands all its existence from the time they emerged about 200,000 years ago. Then, around 30,000 years ago, during a bit more clement time within the last ice age, glimmerings of inequality arose at sites known in Europe — in places that were unusually plentiful in game.

sungir

Tools grew more elaborate, trade widened, grave goods accompanied certain burials, jewelry and other prestige items became notable, and evidence of control over significant labor was in evidence (viz, for example, the stupendous numbers of sewn-on ivory beads in the Sungirgraves).

It has been hypothesized that at some locations, the fabled painted caves in France and Spain turned into places where elite children underwent their initiations. But when game grew sparse, humans went back to tight egalitarian cooperation.

Significant inequality kicked off around 15,000 years ago, after the end of the ice age, during the Magdalenian culture. By now, the dog, horse, and possibly the reindeer had been tamed by these stone-age foragers, thousands of years before the domestication of plants. The delicious pig was bred, also by foragers, in Anatolia about 13,000 years ago, while their Syrian neighbors may have tinkered with rye. A couple of millennia later, foragers built the impressive ceremonial center of Göbekli Tepe which shows the command of vast labor pools, not only to build the center, but eventually to bury it under a hill of gravel.

 

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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