humans – Olduvai.ca

When we think of endangered animals, we generally think about elephants, tigers, and whales — but certainly not humans. Yet between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, ancestors of Homo sapiens lost 98.7% of their population, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Science. Before the population crash, as many as 135,000 early humans roamed the Earth, but according to the team of geneticists behind the study, that number plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals, and the population stayed that low for more than 100,000 years. (These weren’t modern humans, but earlier hominins on the genetic timeline; one species that was alive at the time was Homo erectus, and we’re still discovering new prehistoric human species.)

The population decline could have been related to the wild environmental changes happening around that time: Extreme cooling of the Earth coincided with a drought in Africa, leading to fewer sources of food. Whatever the cause, it created a genetic “bottleneck” that researchers say nearly wiped out our prehistoric ancestors. This conclusion lines up to a period of time that left few fossils behind, but the research has yet to be replicated by other studies, and many genetic scientists remain skeptical of the claim.

By the Numbers

Estimated population of humans on Earth

8 billion
Age (in years) of the oldest human DNA ever discovered

400,000
Years since Homo sapiens first emerged

~200,000
Individual prehistoric humans identified in fossils

6,000

DID YOU KNOW?

Several human species lived on Earth at the same time.

More than 20 human species — that is, species in the genus Homo — have existed in the last few million years. But evolution isn’t a straight line, and multiple early humans walked the Earth at the same time. When Homo sapiens (that’s us) first emerged around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, we joined at least eight other living species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even Homo erectus…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

We are One Species

July 31, 2022

We are One Species

Homeless camp and salmon mural under Morrison Bridge, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The world is a mess, in both social and ecological terms, mired in unjust and unsustainable systems. Responsibility for this condition is not shared equally. Powerful nations define world politics that has produced dramatic wealth inequality, and rich nations contribute more to global warming and ecosystem collapse. But along with efforts to change those conditions and address the crises today, we should reflect on how we got here. How did one species end up so fractured?

First, it should be uncontroversial to assert the antiracist principle, anchored in basic biology, that we are one species. There are observable differences in such things as skin color and hair texture, as well as some patterns in predisposition to disease based on ancestors’ geographic origins, but the idea of separate races was created by humans and is not found in nature.

There are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations from different regions of the world. There is individual variation within any human population in a particular place (obviously, individuals in any society differ in a variety of traits). But there are no meaningful biologically based differences between populations in the way people are capable of thinking, feeling, or making decisions. We are one species. We are all basically the same animal.

Although we are one species, there are obvious cultural differences among human populations around the world. Those cultural differences aren’t a product of human biology; that is, they aren’t the product of any one group being significantly different genetically from another, especially in ways that could be labeled cognitively superior or inferior. So why have different cultures developed in different places?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Anthropocene is a Joke

July 22, 2022

Stuart Gleave / Getty

THE ANTHROPOCENE IS A JOKE

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.

Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.

These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.

So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO₂ into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gaia’s Problem Children: Humans

July 25, 2021

Gaia’s Problem Children: Humans

Also discussed during two podcasts: one here and another here.

Ecological engineering, and a keystone role, in any local ecosystem, is the human cultural adaptive niche. Maybe we should call this a “hyper-keystone” niche, since humans have managed their ecosystems by making use of a host of other keystone species like beavers, wolves, bison, and giraffe in the past when living as hunter-gatherers, in addition to reduced wildfire risks and creating ecological mosaics through the use of small controlled burns.The development of domesticates was an intensification of this hyper-keystone role, under conditions of increased seasonal risks and longer term risks of drought or other temporary decline in food supply. Boserup’s model addressed the next step; development of more intensification under conditions of denser population and more limited options to utilize wild species as these become locally extinct.

Boserupian intensification has helped explain land clearing even in the deep past (Ruddiman and Ellis 2009). At present, as human populations are growing and urbanizing, agricultural demand has increased so much that the most intensive agricultural systems are becoming dominant. The good news is that the most intensive systems tend to focus on the most productive land – marginal lands are increasingly abandoned and left to regenerate ( the “forest transition”; eg. Rudel et al. 2009). So even as we go off the end of Boserup’s chart, disaster is not the result and intensification continues- though the planet will never be the same- our agriculture has now transformed the planet for the long-term (Ellis et al. 2010).
http://ecotope.org/blog/saved-by-ester-boserup/?fbclid=IwAR03YMtSeiKNSzNwnH_CDIKfjV6rU6iw8ZrZP8WiSA99ZBIXRaG-ZYHu8aI

So far, Boserup has been right and Malthus and Ehrlich have been wrong. And I would bet that the future will also be Boseruppian (Boserup 3.0). We humans will be around for the long term, adapting the earth to us, and then adapting to the earth we create…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 2

August 29, 2018

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 2

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part II

For Part I of this essay see here.

4. Our current context: the adaptive cycle, conservation, and release

As we’ve seen, predator-prey relationships shape the flow of energy through ecosystems. But what happens in either a natural ecosystem or a human social “ecosystem” when energy flows increase? As long as sufficient basic nutrients are available and other conditions (such as climate) are stable, the system tends to grow in size (in terms of biomass) and/or complexity.

And that is exactly what has happened within the human “ecosystem,” especially during the past century or so. We humans learned to use exosomatic energy (that is, energy apart from what is released from food through metabolism) when we started using fire several hundred thousand years ago. The domestication of draft animals (primarily horses, oxen, and mules), and the harnessing of waterpower and wind power (at first with sails, later windmills) increased our access to exosomatic energy. More recently, technological developments including metallurgy and the invention of the steam engine opened the way to our use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas.

Energy usage chart

Fossil fuels, representing tens of millions of years’ worth of chemically stored sunlight, enabled our global per-capita use of energy to grow by more than 800 percent in the past 150 years. With the confluence of science, technology, and fossil energy, many things became possible that were barely dreamt of previously—including aviation, global electronic communications, the mass production of goods, and a way of life (for some, at least) characterized by lavish consumption. Human population grew from under a billion two centuries ago to 7.5 billion today; cities and nations exploded in size; trade soared in volume, speed, and distance; and the destructive power of weaponry became global in scope.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Civilization as asteroid: humans, livestock, and extinctions

June 13, 2018

Graph of biomass of humans, livestock, and wild animals

Mass of humans, livestock, and wild animals (terrestrial mammals and birds)

Civilization as asteroid: humans, livestock, and extinctions

Humans and our livestock now make up 97 percent of all animals on land. Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3 percent. This is based on mass. Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.

To clarify, if we add up the weights of all the people, cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys, etc., that total is 32 times greater than the weight of all the wild terrestrial mammals and birds: all the elephants, mice, kangaroos, lions, raccoons, bats, bears, deer, wolves, moose, chickadees, herons, eagles, etc. A specific example is illuminating: the biomass of chickens is more than double the total mass of all other birds combined.

Before the advent of agriculture and human civilizations, however, the opposite was the case: wild animals and birds dominated, and their numbers and mass were several times greater than their numbers and mass today. Before the advent of agriculture, about 11,000 years ago, humans made up just a tiny fraction of animal biomass, and domesticated livestock did not exist. The current situation—the domination of the Earth by humans and our food animals—is a relatively recent development.

The preceding observations are based on a May 2018 report by Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bar-On and his coauthors use a variety of sources to construct a “census of the biomass of Earth”; they estimate the mass of all the plants, animals, insects, bacteria, and other living things on our planet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On The Road To Extinction, Maybe It’s Not All About Us

September 13, 2017

On The Road To Extinction, Maybe It’s Not All About Us

The devastating consequences of human superiority over nature.

“We can’t prevent the suffering and dying of wild life, and the Earth herself, when confronted by the unleashed forces of fire and water, but we can include them in our assessment of the cost. We might even grieve for them. Their losses are indeed ours, and if we do not see them or their importance to our lives, if we continue to either ignore and/or dominate all other life on this planet, it won’t be long till we join them.” (Photo: Flickr/ChrisA1995/cc)

It is crystal clear—unlike the smoky skies where I live–to most of us who are willing to consider the facts: this summer’s ‘natural’ disasters have been seeded anthropogenically. Wildfires in the northwestern United States and Canada, in Greenland, and in Europe are often referred to in the media as ‘unprecedented’ in size and fury. Hurricanes and monsoons, with their attendant floods and destruction, are routinely described as having a multitude of ‘record-breaking’ attributes. No one reading this is likely to need convincing that humans –our sheer numbers as well as our habits—have contributed significantly to rising planetary temperatures and thus, the plethora of somehow unexpected and catastrophic events in the natural world. I’d like to include earthquakes, particularly those in Turkey (endless) and Mexico (massive), in this discussion, and while intuition tells me that there is a connection between them and climate change, research to support this supposition is just emerging, so for the nonce I will leave the earthquakes out of it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Humans Kill 14 Times More Adult Fish Than Wild Predators

August 24, 2015

Humans Kill 14 Times More Adult Fish Than Wild Predators

Enter the super predator.

Across the world, humans have overwhelmed wild populations and brought chaos to natural ecosystems. We may suspect this intuitively, but now researchers have some hard numbers to show just how efficient humans are as predators.

The result of a decade of work, new research shows that the typical marine fishery kills adult fish at 14 times the typical rate of a wild predator. Humans tend to hit fisheries harder—with hands, hooks, and nets—than any other group of wild animals.

Even the better managed fisheries often start with the proposition of harvesting as much as possible. “That’s the general paradigm,” says Chris Darimont, a Hakai Institute-Raincoast Conservation Society scholar at the University of Victoria. “How can we maximize the so called sustainable yield to humanity?”

Drawing on existing data, Darimont compared the predation rates of human versus wild predators. For example, in Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago, grizzly bears catch six percent of the adult salmon, while humans catch 78 percent, or 13 times more fish. Given the numbers, he says, humanity’s toll on ocean species is alarming and underlies many of the problems observed in the oceans today.

“Everyone assumes we are this dominant predator, but until now we didn’t know how to describe it,” he says. “Those cross-ecosystem comparisons had never been done before. It provides details at a global scale.” (Darimont’s research is supported by a grant from the Tula Foundation, which also funds Hakai Magazine. The magazine is editorially independent of the institute and foundation.)

Mechanized fishing methods, global seafood markets, and industrial processing—combined with relatively high reproduction rates among fish and their schooling behavior—may help to explain the high take in fisheries, says Darimont.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Humans Cause Mass Extinctions

August 16, 2015

How Humans Cause Mass Extinctions

STANFORD – There is no doubt that Earth is undergoing the sixth mass extinction in its history – the first since the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. According to one recent study, species are going extinct between ten and several thousand times faster than they did during stable periods in the planet’s history, and populations within species are vanishing hundreds or thousands of times faster than that. By one estimate, Earth has lost half of its wildlife during the past 40 years. There is also no doubt about the cause: We are it.

We are in the process of killing off our only known companions in the universe, many of them beautiful and all of them intricate and interesting. This is a tragedy, even for those who may not care about the loss of wildlife. The species that are so rapidly disappearing provide human beings with indispensable ecosystem services: regulating the climate, maintaining soil fertility, pollinating crops and defending them from pests, filtering fresh water, and supplying food.

The cause of this great acceleration in the loss of the planet’s biodiversity is clear: rapidly expanding human activity, driven by worsening overpopulation and increasing per capita consumption. We are destroying habitats to make way for farms, pastures, roads, and cities. Our pollution is disrupting the climate and poisoning the land, water, and air. We are transporting invasive organisms around the globe and overharvesting commercially or nutritionally valuable plants and animals.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mass-extinction-human-cause-by-paul-r–ehrlich-and-anne-h–ehrlich-2015-08#piBFQzcd7dq64wae.99

‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’: Truth and confusion in the same breath

May 4, 2015

‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’: Truth and confusion in the same breath

I really do want to applaud the Breakthrough Institute’s recently released paper called “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” It speaks with candor about the possible catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change. It recognizes the large footprint of humankind in the biosphere. It wants to address both, and it wants to do so in a way that offers a positive vision for the human future that will attract support and, above all, action.

But, I can’t applaud it because of its underlying assumption: that humans are in one category and nature in another. The key paragraph starts with the key sentence:

Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree. Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive.

“Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree.” This statement seems reasonable only if humans and nature are in different categories. But, they aren’t–a concept that is distressingly NOT clear to most everyone who styles himself or herself as an environmentalist. Humans and their creations are as much a part of nature as everything else. Humans don’t “materially depend on nature to some degree.” Humans are entirely and completely dependent on nature (of which they are a part) for EVERYTHING. Even every synthetic substance uses feedstocks and energy from the natural world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ready for the revolution?

March 30, 2015

Ready for the revolution?

Once aggrandizers are given an inch of leeway under favorable resource conditions, they quickly stretch that inch into a mile and keep on going.
— Brian Hayden

Once upon a time, there lived the ancestral apes that gave rise to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos.

In all likelihood, they lived in bands dominated by the strongest, most aggressive individuals — the male alphas. This tends to produce a rather disagreeable state of affairs where anyone can be humiliated or brutalized at any moment, and the best food and most mates go to just a few. Evenbaboons would rather opt out when the opportunity arises! In addition, our growing brains demanded the fats found only in scarce meat which the alphascommandeered.

Evolution snaked forward. The chimps pretty much put up with the true and tried. Bonobos evolved out of this unpleasant arrangement into an alliance of females, cemented by mutual sexual pleasuring. Humans likewise evolved out and into an alliance of betas, cemented by unprecedented, increasingly more subtle communication abilities, eventually including laughter and speech.

In conjunction with weapons-at-a-distance that equalized brawn and brains, power came to be shared, and so was the meat. The resulting egalitarian bands, a durable and satisfying arrangement, saw humans through the harshness of repeated ice ages and other natural calamities. During this time, humans became survivors par excellence on the planetary stage. The egalitarian strategy of “vigilant sharing” had proven itself a winner.

When did our first egalitarian revolution occur? Nobody knows, as yet. Some experts posit it could be as far back as when we came down from the trees, others place it into our sapienstimeline. The oldest known wooden, fire-hardened spears come from about 300-400,000 years ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

7 Things You Should Know About Permaculture – Verge Permaculture

December 13, 2014

7 Things You Should Know About Permaculture – Verge Permaculture.

What is permaculture? For those of you who’ve only heard of the term in passing, and ever for you seasoned “permies” who struggle to explain this exciting (and sometimes life-changing) idea to others, here’s the gist in 7 points:

1. Permaculture is a Design System That Uses Ecosystem Principles to Meet Human Needs

Permaculture is an ecological systems theory. As author Toby Hemenway notes, while conventional thinking asks how we can meet our own needs, permaculture asks the broader question of how we can meet our needs while also taking ecosystem health into account.

Permaculture looks closely at how ecosystems work and condenses those functions into twelve general principles. These in turn inform our design decisions about shelter, food, water, energy, and waste management. They also rest on two fundamental assumptions:

Humans are a part of the planet and cannot be separated from it.
Humans can be a positive force that leaves things better than we find them.

If we are willing to learn from and work with nature, we can make smarter decisions to inform how we live. These choices can prevent the wasteful use of fossil fuels or the unnecessary need for environmentally and economically costly foods. They can help us avoid living in areas prone to fires, droughts, and floods. They can help us tread more lightly on the environment while saving us money and keeping us healthier and happier in the long-term.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Surviving Alone: Is It Possible? | Survival Life | Blog – Survival Life | Preppers | Survival Gear | Blog

December 6, 2014

Man is a social being, no man is an island… we hear these phrases so often in this life. There is no society more complex than that of humans because surviving is not only about preserving one’s own life, but protecting those around us. Of course, there are those extremists who tend to be antisocial loners, but for the most part we have a desire and need to surround ourselves with other people, even in survival situations. Our chances for surviving increase when we are part of a group. Being part of a group means that that we can give and receive protection and help in the most desperate of times.

Surviving Alone: Is It Possible?

Being part of a group enhances the chances of survival for each member. The group supports the individual and the individual supports the group. As individuals work together to gather food and other resources, hunt or build shelter, each member benefits from the combined manpower. Defending a home or bug out location becomes easier. Life outside the comforts of the home would definitely demand a lot of work every day, and a group can help everyone reach their survival goals.

When it comes to surviving in a SHTF situation, it can be tempting to break off from the pack and fend for yourself. But is this your best bet for survival?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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DID YOU KNOW?

1. Permaculture is a Design System That Uses Ecosystem Principles to Meet Human Needs

Surviving Alone: Is It Possible?

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