Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall; Great lord of all things , yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Love and understand thy not-self as modern human, as dissipative subsystem of the Gaian system.
To love and understand your condition is to be delivered from it.
In choiceless awareness is obedience to the nature of things.
In persistence is the ending of modernity, no post about it.
To think is to listen to Mother who has all the answers.
Listen to the sound trees make when no wind blows.
“The first thing you have to realize is that you are an animal." —David Suzuki 2009.
The second thing to realize is that all modern humans are denormalized animals, domisticants of NIMH. But modern humans don't like that story as we prefer to believe in the necessary primacy of the modern human enterprise apart from which we (moderns) cannot exist, which is correct.
"The only thing that gives me hope is that we don't even know enough to say it's too late." —David Suzuki 2022.
"This is just suicidal. We have a mentality that makes us an invasive species everywhere, and we're destroying the underpinnings of life itself.... We are part of nature, and what we do to nature, we do directly to ourselves." —David Suzuki
"You must always be willing to consider evidence that contradicts everything you think you know, and admit the possibility that you may be wrong about everything. Intelligence isn’t an ability to know stuff. It’s the ability to challenge the consensus narrative you and others seek to create.... 'Truth' is the lie that allows a society to exist." —Unknown
"What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere's handmaiden anew." —Howard T. Odum 1973
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,..." [organized religion is an expression of overcomplex societies] "the heart of a heartless world,..." [of societies lacking in normal human heartfulness populated by the denormalized] "just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation" [a condition lacking in normal humans who may have cosmic religious feelings, who tell stories about the gods but do not believe them (e.g. San), i.e. the condition of denormalized humans living in overcomplex societies/forms of non-viable civilization]. "It is the opium of the people." —Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right 1843 [only the Introduction was published 1844, the short version is widely quoted out of context, hence almost all who know the quote don't know what Marx may have meant when he wrote it or that the ideologues who misquote him don't either, i.e. that everything they think they/we know must be presumed to be wrong (a condition of error, ignorance, and illusion), a universal condition of modern humans.]
After 75 thousand years of expansionism, humanity’s future will be defined not by growth,
but by contraction as we did not even tap on the brakes in the 1970s (or since) when we knew enough to do so.
TOPICS: RENORMALIZE, FROM THE WIRES, OR DIE OFF
Abstract: Human expansionism, the Anthropocene, has come in three tsunami-like waves: 1) a within Africa expansion begining 75k years ago followed by an out of Africa Geat Expansion 50k to 60k years ago involving megafauna extinctions (including hominins), 2) an agrarian expansion starting about 12k years ago in the Fertile Crescent that transitioned to expansionist empire building and spread back to Africa involving plant/animal extinctions (agriculture=habitat loss, the number one driver of species extinction in today's fossil fueled techno-agro-expansion), and 3) the technology+agriculture dynamic enabled rapid Indo-European expansion beginning about 7k years ago (with bronze metalurgy+large solid-wheeled cattle-drawn carts+plus horse domestication 5k years ago followed by light-wheeled war chariots, followed by guns from China, business as usual... to nuclear weapons) resulting in a mass extinction event that may rival that of the Permian. Bottom line message to humanity: expansion (competitive growth) is for a time. The expansionist form of civilization is foundationally a form of denormalized K-selected (K-strategist) humans who resemble r-selected (r-strategist) species as dogs (de facto r-strategists) resemble wolves (K-selected K-strategists—in average size pack only the alpha female breeds). Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) r-acculturated humans are not viable long term.
K-strategists are evolved to live within limits. K-culture is antithetical to r-culture, especially the modern form.
Laozi represents nature-centric K-culture, while Confucius epitomizes human-centric r-culture.
Only 10k K-culture humans may remain, the 99.9999% are products of and serve r-cultures.
A remnant of techno-industrial society can only persist in 3 hydro powered megacities.
The expansionist/growth-maximizing form of competitive human has developed as human centric r-culture forming dissipative structures (overcomplex societies/empires/nation-states) that selects for overshoot (and collapse). Few to no modern humans may adapt by renormalizing as evolvable K-strategists (K-culture people of place). All, on a likely 500 to 1k-year downslope, may fail to persist. Archaeogenetics is providing new information about the past lives of humans. To consider it requires an ability to re-image human history, to question and rethink everything we think we know about ourselves.
COOS BAY (A-P) — For over six million years (250k generations) our hominin ancestors lived in bands, typically groups of 20 to 50 trusted others (range 5 to 85), as nomadic foragers. They were adaptive, evolvable K-strategists (having a K-culture) managing a biophysical economy of enough within the limits (carrying capacity) of the biome they served by working as observational ecologists, handmaidens, to maximize the empower of the life-support system supporting one and all as co-dependent subsystems. And for 65 million years, so did our primate ancestors. And going back 600 million years our animal ancestors were both adaptive and evolvable. To persist is to become an ancestor (most individuals do not). Not one of John B. Calhoun's rats and mice at NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) became an ancestor (modern humanity's 'demographic transition' [denormalization] is changing more than fertility rates).
If we modern techno-industrialized humans, who as inecolate (not systems aware, lacking foresight) expansionists are far from normal animals (such as our ancestors prior to about 60k years ago had to have been to persist), are many generations (2-2k) removed from ancestral norms, we may fail to again endeavor to live within limits as our ancestors did.
We may not be able to renormalize as ecolate subsystems of the world system (Gaia). We can pass away by leaving no descendants after the Great Selection (that to the ecolate foreseeably follows the Great Acceleration). We are now in the climax of our global succession. Continued expansionism, conflict, will merely determine who inherits the rubble (for a time) during the Great Contraction. There being no limits to the rate of degrowth, conflict on the downslope could take as little as 200 to 500 years (8 to 20 generations) with no viable outcome.
When did we first begin to denormalize? Denormalization may involve technology, but technology per se may not be the condition that allows for unsustainable expansion. Some memetic/cultural component may be the proximal cause. Species that exhibit a rapid expansionist growth dynamic (for a time) are common, such as during secondary succession after a major fire or primary succession after a volcanic event that is followed by diversification as the ecosystem matures (maximizes empower).
Some species have even adapted to the dynamic of one-off plague-phase overshoot (e.g. locust, yeast, but not humans to whom collapse seems lamentable). Invasive species were uncommon until one invasive species spread globally (e.g. the out of East Africa across the Red Sea and the out of the steppes of Central Asia expansions) to enable the spread of many other species who also prospered for a time at the expense of global biomes. We modern humans have come to consider the condition of overshoot and environmental degradation to be normal because normalized by us (and plague-phase expansion seems normal until it doesn't, until degrowth sets in), but what is normal is what is selected for by the nature of things, the system, and not against to thereby pass away (e.g. metastatic growth of a cancer is not selected for long term, is selected against). As obligate expansionists we are at risk of passing away if we cannot renormalize.
Humans (hominins) were able to develop technology (reshaped sticks and stones and fibers... e.g. digging sticks, spear points, string of which only stones remain for archaeologists to find and misinterpret with stories of Man the Hunter (Woman the Gatherer could not build empire or form an expansionist culture [form of civilization], but could tell different stories and normalize different behaviors that select for a viable outcome).
"If we're going to save humanity, the hunter-gatherers are the key."
‘Hunting is boring and unreliable..., that's why we let the men do it!’
[transcript]
Compare Aborigines, the first expansionists to take Australia, with the British,
the second, and compare both to the San. Watching a docudrama is one way:
The Extraordinary Tale of William Buckley: The great untold story of Australia's Robinson Crusoe
And for the straight dope: Bees chasing God’s Testicles
If we're going to save humanity, learning from the few remaining pre-"Man the Hunter" types are the key.
The San never starve, and move from camp to camp not because their food supply is depleted, but for any number of other reasons (e.g. vermin control). They do not use any form of birth control nor practice abstinence, but those not living among Bantu or Indo-European pastoralists nurse each child for 3 to 5 years to space births (normal women, e.g. San women, are infertile while nursing, so beyond 5 years, infertility could be maintained..., e.g. some women provide breast milk for use in hospitals for over 30 years from last pregnancy), so to maintain abundance the women collectively determine how long to nurse, e.g. to nurse longer (reducing a band's fertility/population) or if there is too much abundance, to decrease the time children are nursed (as feels right). As sensitive K-strategists, produces of a K-culture, they respond to feedback (stress) from conditions of declining abundance by lowed fertility (General Adaptation Syndrome) and use of infanticide as needed to maintain their population well within carrying capacity (that they could commit infanticide and assist decrepit elders to die was viewed by Indo-European expansionists as among the reasons to exterminate them).
Genetic diversity among today's humans is abnormally low compared to other primates. The San of Southern Africa and Pygmy groups of Central Africa are the least abnormal, having the greatest genetic diversity, meaning their ancestors did not pass through a genetic bottleneck in recent times (50k-60k years ago). The San are the largest and most diverse population of hunter-gatherer nomads (the hominin norm for six million years) to survive to the 21st century with culture and genome mostly intact.
That all of our ancestors were hunter-gatherer nomads (expansionist and non-expansionist) until about 12k years ago is all we know of them. The San may be a window into what our pre-agrarian, pre-empire building, pre-expansionist norms were. Given that expansionist culture (growth) can provide positive feedback only for a time, and that invasive species initially prosper unsustainably before being harmed by the harm they cause, they can pass away or renormalize to remain within viable limits as part of a viable ecosystem. We moderns, who must renormalize or die, need to listen to Nature (the nature of things) and learn. And we need to listen to those who endeavor to listen to Nature, e.g. the San, the Kogi, and some scientists and 'cultural creatives' and cultural physicians. Have any invasive species pulsed to climax and extinction before? Well, humans did on Malta and other places.
Homo sapiens sapiens first left Africa over 100k years ago (120k to 185k range) to join other hominins and archaic humans (e.g. Homo sapiens [aka H. s. heidelbergensis], H. s. neanderthalensis, H. s. denisova) who had left Africa before them (e.g. Homo erectus, Homo sapiens [heidelbergensis]). These early peoples were not conspicuously associated with megafauna extinctions nor the extinction of other hominins, e.g. Neanderthals, Denisovans, and populations of Homo erectus (who had spread out of Africa about two million years ago) such as on Flores lived in competitive coexistence, persisting where each was favored/better adapted.
The pattern of early hominin migrations followed the pattern of a gradual spread of evolvable K-strategists living within environmental limits while adapting to new biomes, and not that of a rapacious invasive species maximizing short-term gain for a time while reducing long-term carrying capacity of an area to support their kind and that of other species. As a result, there is little record of early human migrants out of Africa nor of mass anthropogenic extinction in Eurasia in the first 80,000 years of the Late Pleistocene.
But 50,000 to 60,000 years ago there was another out of (and within which is still underway) Africa expansion of a single group of humans (H. s. sapiens. var. narrator) who crossed the Red Sea to disperse globally, becoming the ancestors of all non-Africans (and Africans other than San, Hadza, Sandawe and Pygmy) other than such Neanderthals, Denisovans, and as yet unidentified humans as they interbred with before displacing them. Homo sapiens sapiens left Africa about 100k years before this small group left Africa, but not as aggressive expansionists maximizing short-term pay-offs.
Extinction of other hominins not included in tally of 174 above, nor megafauna on smaller islands, e.g. three on Malta.
The expansionist form of human was the primary driver, though only the megafauna extinctions in New Zealand are necessary to admit as some claim almost other extinctions were caused by climate change alone.
But evidence is mounting: humans were responsible for the extinction of large mammals. Human hunting, not climate change, played a decisive role in the extinction of large mammals over the last 50,000 years. This conclusion comes from researchers who reviewed over 300 scientific articles from many different fields of research.
The single group that non-Africans (and most modern Africans) descended from, then 'displaced' all other groups (except the San, Hadza, Sandawe and Pygmy), interbreeding with some, but non-Africans descend only from those who, expanding out of Africa, made competitors go away however you may imagine that happening. The last 55k years of human expansionism out of Africa may be a his-story of male driven expansionism that differs from prior her-story norms that select for long-term persistence of humans and biomes (conjecture: the first expansionists were competitive and initially matrifocal, but after 20k years of selection within Africa, those who expanded out of Africa were or soon became a patrifocal (more competitive) r-culture able to spread more rapidly than the initial within Africa expansion—a competitive us-vs-them narrative may be the foundational patrifocal r-culture/conquest culture worldview/mindset that bifurcated from the K-culture's us-and-others worldview/mindset). Modern cultures on the leading edge of expansion, e.g. Māori, Aztec, and Indo-European, select for patriarchy, while post-conquest cultures select for a gradual toning down (renormalizing—praise Gaia) of alpha-male worship. The renormalizing of modern males will take millennia and will involve a shift in gene frequencies by female selection.
The single group of humans of 75k years ago (H. s. s. var narrator) differed from prior human norms and during their 55k years of out of Africa expansion displaced all other Homo sapiens sapiens and all hominins (e.g. Homo sapiens, H. s. neanderthalensis, H. s. denisova (two as yet unnamed other H. sapiens subspecies), remnant H. erectus, H. e. floresiensis, H. sapiens idaltu, and all pre-expansion H. s. sapiens within Africa except the San and Hadza populations with pre-expansionist culture intact) while causing significant megafauna extinctions on five contents (six counting Zealandia), subcontinents (e.g. India, Madagascar), and many islands (e.g. San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz; Ireland, Sardinia; Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu; Ishigaki, Miyako, Kume, Okinawa; Luzon, Mindanao, Mindoro, Palawan; New Ireland, Buka; Sulawesi; Timor, Alor, Flores, Sumba; Cyprus, Crete, Naxos, Mascarenes, Malta). The expansionists were the first hominin to spread across Australia 46k years ago/Tasmania 41k years ago when continent-wide megafauna extinctions occurred (some see correlation, some see causation). The single group were aggressive (patrifocal?) expansionists as evidenced by us and our conquest cultures of dominance and seeking of short-term pay-offs.
The most recent regional mass extinction event is the current conversion of ecoregions around the globe into agricultural lands, e.g. the Amazon, Indonesia. And within the memory of oral history there was the mid-15th century taking of Zealandia where a small population of human were able turn megafauna into more humans. And less than two thousand years ago, austronesian expansionists going west reached Madagascar with results as usual per business as usual for 50k years.
For 1500 years humans lived on Madagascar and hunted megafauna, but not to extinction nor to overshoot. Then came Austronesian expansionists. In 1400 years there was more megafauna biamass than before they arrived (but it was all humans and livestock, all other megafauna having gone extinct).
As warriors, expansionists can readily displace non-patriarchal peoples living in small groups. As hunters, expansionists can over hunt for a time, prosper, and then move on, repeating the pattern for millennia (about 50 millennia so far) until they overrun the planet (the condition we are now in).
What enabled their expansion is unknown. A genetic mutation that would not show up in the fossil record may have been involved that changed behavior (selected for expansionism). Or the difference could have been memetic/cultural, e.g. for six million years hominin evolution was selecting for cooperation, especially among males, which selected against male competition/dominance. Serial monogamy likely arose (was selected for) among the Australopithecines, and with the longer period of childhood dependence in Homo, long-term pair bonding was selected for allowing males to invest in overlapping dependent children of a female (likely his off-spring). What may have reemerged as an anthropological atavism 50k-60k years ago could have been patriarchy, rule by alpha males who make good expansionists especially when forming larger than band-sized groups of aggressive males. The short-term benefits to expanding takers would support a larger than steady-state population that could overrun normal K-strategists and overexploit biomes before moving on.
Even if not initially genetic, expansionism over a 50k to 60k year period within and out of Africa would select for a change in gene frequencies which will add to the difficulty of our renormalizing post expansion. As the leading edge culture comes through a region, they leave behind genes and memes that are maladapted for renormalizing back to non-expansionist ways, a condition that their descendants not on the leading edge of expansion, our post-expansion ancestors in areas already taken, have been in for millennia to tens of millennia, e.g. in Europe hunter-gatherers were renormalizing when the agrarian expansion that eventually selects for empire building came, and the more mobile Indo-European expansion again denormalized humans.
Even where Indo-European language and genes did not spread to become dominate, their expansionist culture did, e.g. the Mongolian language and genes are not Indo-European, but their language contains many words of Indo-European origin, and their culture of aggressive expansionism looks (may have been) the outcome of Indo-Europeanization (they learned to do what, for a time, works as others did).
The San (and maybe 400 remnant Hadza) are the only real people, the Kogi the only agrarian people proven by their persistence to have renormalized 1100 years ago.
Apart from the Indo-European expansion, the leading edge of the out of Africa expansion was still underway when the Indo-Europeanized modern techno-industrial expansion began. Consider the Māori and what they did (with Indo-European help) on the Chatham Islands in historic times. The Moriori had been Māori three centuries before the Māori came to enslave and commit genocide (and breed the women), but the Moriori no longer had the potential to expand, and so were renormalizing as hunter-gatherers (climate too cold for Polynesian crops) when subsumed in glorious expansionist style by their Māori brothers (as they would have been by the European expansionists, albeit in a manner that would have differed in the details). If the San and Hadza are the 'real people' who were never denormalized, the Māori are the remnant of the leading-edge expansionist culture (last megafauna extinction event occurred in New Zealand a few hundred years before European expansionist arrival) that had been selected for for 50k years. Compare and note differences between non-expansionist K-strategists, and expansionist empire builders. One form of civilization is viable; the other isn't. We (with a few exceptions) are the Māori and we must understand or die.
The Māori culture of aggressive expansion, intentional exploitation of species to extinction, and dominance (New Zealand settled by about 400 Polynesians late 13th to early 14th century CE (1250-1300 CE), and moa [9 species] went extinct in the early- to mid-15th century CE when the human population was still less than 2k, a very low density, on its way to 100k when Europeans arrived in the 18th century, so the Māori were already a complex society well above Dunbar's number on arrival, not 12 bands of normal humans who happened to arrive at the same time, and those who left Africa 50k years before may have been of a kind) may be viewed as what the prior 50k years of expansion selected for (collapse of moa population from abundance to extinction occurred within one lifetime, hence was as foreseeable as was failure to prevent), but ecocide and genocide work only on the leading edge of the expansion.
Once a region has been taken (e.g. New Zealand today), the takers and their culture will no longer be selected for as the population will need to transition back, to some extent such as they can, towards what works long term (cooperation, co-existence, husbanding [handmaidening] of environmental resources instead of exploitation for short-term self interest to live as K-strategists). For two thousand generations those on the leading edge (people like us moderns) were denormalized to pursue short-term self interests as expansionist true believers with a mania for growth, for short-term taking (which selects for takers and for men who would be king). Renormalizing may not be possible. If it is, the idea that it could take less than 8 to 20 generations of determined effort may well be to fatally underestimate the difficulty of renormalizing as functional K-strategists, as Earth's handmaiden anew.
Our direct ancestors on leaving Africa divided, one group rapidly expanding across southern Asia to New Guinea and Australia. The other group traveled north to Eurasia via the Middle East about 45,000 BP, spreading throughout Western Europe as hunter-gathers about 43,000 BP, and later to the Americas. The Clovis expansion of 16,000 BP was a techology and r-culture expansion involving megafauna extintions throughout the Americas which where already inhabited by prior humans who arrived 25k to as early as 40k BP. The first Americans may have been non-expansionist K-culture humans as were those in China 300k BP who may have spread as K-culture humans did throughout the Americas, not causing megafauna extinctions and leaving few traces, prior to the first wave of r-culture expansionists.
And in 1021 CE early modern Indo-European humans sailed across the Atlantic to dwell for a time on Newfoundland (ruins with timber, tree rings tell the year the tree was cut), and the two groups who had split soon after leaving Africa met up after 50+k years of expansion.
When was humanity's global expansion completed? When did the second agrarian expansion from band-to-band begin and transition to the expansionist empire building of overcomplex societies? When did the modern techno-industrial form of Indo-European/Indo-Europeanized civilization begin, marching as to war? When will Earth finally be taken?
Before being distracted by recent history (last 7k years), what is vital to grasp is that our history as expansionists (marching as to war) goes back 50+k years. Our expansionist ways will end (we won't get a vote), and underestimating the challenge of changing a 50+k year dynamic of an invasive form of civilization back to a steady-state, pulsing-paradigm norm dynamic could have our extinction as outcome (or worse, i.e. a metastatic cancer is not sustainable, must selects for its own failure, but if it mutates into a tumor on the face of Gaia, diverting all primary production to support itself forever, it could persist by maximally degrading a biosphere forever... if any renormalizable humans remain, they must view this Borg-like transhumanist/humanist outcome as worse than the extinction of their form, though, of course, all Anthropocene enthusiasts will beg to differ).
The form of Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator who had left Africa 55k years ago was not anatomically different enough to matter, to justify a new subspecies name based on archeological remains, but there could have been a wetware mutation (or several, genetic and/or memetic) that made them significantly different (e.g. tolerance for a higher Dunbar number, patriarchy, a taker culture). All modern humans (except for San and Pygmies) descend from a small group of Homo sapiens sapiens that lived in Africa about 55k years ago (they had spread within Africa fir 20k years before leaving Africa).
Our MTI (modern techno-industrial) form of civilization began about a thousand years ago in Europe as the remains of the Western Greco-Roman Empire began to auto-organize to resist the Muslim Expansion.
And the Indo-Europeans who had taken Europe in the Bronze Age had to auto-organize to build empire or today the Vikings, as the Great Satan, and Muslims would be battling each other.
In North America, first settled by Vikings in 1021 CE, there were too many natives for the Greenlanders to conquer or withstand their push back, and the Viking conquistadors withdrew to Greenland.
The remnant of the Greco-Roman Empire persisted as the Byzantine Empire until Muslim conquest in 1453 CE. Without being able to grow their economy, the Viking Empire went into decline and fell to Christian hegemons.
Muhammad, Peace be upon him, started building empire in 622 and had conqueored Mecca by 630.
About a thousand years ago Bantu expansionists aligned with mostly Persion expansionists to become the Swahili.
The expansionists were not the only H. s. sapiens on the planet in or out of Africa, but that almost all modern humans descend from them is what archaeogenetics is telling us. It is telling us that the humans with the greatest genetic diversity are the San of Southern Africa who persisted as nomad foragers to modern times on land unsuitable for Bantu or European agriculture. They are the humans least denormalized, who, having never been expansionists, never had to renormalize, since the expansion of our ancestors 60k years ago. Perhaps we could learn from these people of place about how to live properly with other places.
The archaeogenetics is not telling us that all H. s. sapiens were killed by the Toba supervolcano except for our exceptionalist ancestors who then spread out to replenish the planet. Nature (the nature of things) via data is telling us that we all descend from a small population that was in some way different (expansionistic), that enabled our ancestors to 'displace' all other humans and hominins on the planet (except two) though it took us 50k years to do so.
Our ancestors did not pass through a genetic bottleneck due to our superiority compared to those who failed to survive us. A malignant cancer is not superior to normal somatic cells that live/multiply within limits. The the expansionists who arrived on an isolated island, Tikopia, had to renormalize or die, and did minimally, but not in a conscious, intentional, and determined way with a clear aim of never becoming expansionists again, and so when they could, they expanded off island (off Tikopia to surrounding islands, leaving 1,200 on Tikopia).
Our challenge is to renormalize and acquire memetic immunity to becoming expansionists when doing so becomes possible again, which requires preventing any humans from becoming metastatic expansionists that will eventually 'displace' all non-expansionists. A body's immune system that fails to recognize cancer as an existential threat fails; the body fails to persist.
We spread as expansionists within and out of Africa because we could, and then as the leading edge of the expansionist (likely patriarchal) culture passed, those left behind began to renormalize as K-strategists as the generations passed (at least to such extent as they had to), increasingly ruled by the Mothers living within limits, but with varying degrees of success. Those who left Africa, however, could keep on expanding into North and South America, island hopping across the Pacific, and even hunt on the Arctic ice if not the Antarctic's ice covered land. We moderns are the third wave of expansionists who are alive near the climax of humanity's succession as an invasive form of civilization. The difficulty of renormalizing may be impossible to overestimate.
The out of (and within) Africa expansion event was followed by a second global expansion of an agrarian biophysical economic system/culture based on plant and animal (including human) domestication that gave rise to the agrarian form of civilization beginning about 12k years ago in what was once the Fertile Crescent area (now infertile).
Initially nomadic foragers adopted domestic forms of plants (e.g. bottle gourds and food crops) to plant in garden plots without changing their lifestyles that had worked for hundreds of millennia other than not having to move their camp often or at all. But the agrarian way selects for (rewards) those who produce more to support larger families by working more to grow more. This dynamic led to overdensity settlements that select for hierarchy, for political and religious animals as a conflict control system that was mostly handled by the Mothers within a band before the coming of ever larger agrarian populations who 'needed' to expand and 'displace' nomadic foragers.
A third expansion dynamic was driven by technology (e.g. wheeled carts and dugout canoe technology), especially metal working (e.g. copper, bronze followed by iron). The early agrarians had largely expanded within Eurasia and were renormalizing as low intensity farming communities living in band-sized settlements when agro-empowered empire building began initially in Mesopotamia (Fertile Crescent), Egypt (Nile Valley flood plain), Norte Chico, and the Indus Valley, followed by China and Mesoamerica.
The existence of many band-sized forager-gardener settlements able to amass material goods (they were not nomads, but continued to live in small groups to remain sociobiologically normal/functional) were possibly living as a viable form of civilization (form 2 agrarian), but typically within a few millennia they had become expansionists again. Each settlement amassed stuff and stored food for the taking. Eventually one group becomes takers, the taking is prosperous, selected for, and the social dynamic changes from viable to expansionist empire building, a dynamic that is not sustainable.
The expansion of Indo-Europeans, their language and culture, began about 7,000 years ago with cattle-drawn cart technology. They were mostly hunters on the steppes of central Asia (a grassland with little plant foods to gather) before acquiring domestic cattle. An alternative hypothesis is that the Indo-Europeans originated in southern Anatolia and moved north without carts with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago, spreading north with the cattle they had domesticated, the original cowboy culture. As their biophysical economy was dominated by hunting before adding agriculture, the culture selected for was patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal. By 7k years ago they either acquired domestic cattle from southern Anatolia or had come with them, and had then developed solid-wheeled carts, which further enabled their expansionist culture.
The cattle were used to pull the carts as well as plows. As semi-nomadic pastoralists they remained mobile, but like settled peoples, they amassed material goods and energy in the form of food, far more than nomadic hunter-gatherers could. By means of sold-wheel cattle-drawn carts and metallurgy, their patriarchal culture favored expansion and expand they did, aggressively into a world of settled agrarians living in band-sized groups (typically not patriarchal, their mythology was goddess based, see Joseph Campbell) and into areas of renormalizing hunter-gatherers (also not patriarchal or as patriarchal) where most food was gathered by the women who appreciated the men for bringing home the bacon, but did not depend on them doing so as hunting is not as reliable as gathering. Women were the original breadwinners.
The Indo-European expansionists easily 'displaced' the indigenous populations of renormalizing hunter-gatherers and low-intensity forager-farmers. Their custom was to 'displace' the males and breed the females, causing a male bottleneck where on average one man bred 17 females resulting in a decrease in Y chromosome diversity. Horses were domesticated by Indo-Europeans in Kazakhstan about 5000 years ago and they rapidly spread throughout the regions Indo-Europeans had expanded into. Wild horses had been hunted, but the domestic horses were milked and used to pull spoke-wheeled chariots and ridden to aid in expansion by conquest (of males to breed females whose off-spring learn Indo-European language and culture). This pattern worked during the expansion phase, but as the decades and centuries passed, residents had to at least partially renormalize.
The Indo-European expansion was initially stopped only by earlier high-intensity agriculture-based empire builders (e.g. Mesopotamian, Egyptians, Semite pastoralists), though the more aggressive Indo-European individuals and culture made steady inroads into these prior empire building cultures even if not enough to replace their language (e.g. the Semitic religion was derived from Zoroastrianism, an Indo-European hierarchical priesthood dominated belief-based empire-serving religion). The expansionist culture continued to dominate, climaxing in the globalization of the 21st century of a global monetary techno-industrial form of civilization (overcomplex society).
Chinese diplomats like to remind their competitors that they are not merely a country, but a civilization at least equal to (or clearly superior to) any of the Indo-European so called civilizations. In this, they merely demonstrate how thoroughly Indo-Europeanized, monetized, and expansionist (e.g. global in their mania for growth and geopolitical hegemony) they have been Indo-Europeanized. Members of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) may not go to Davos, but they would fit in if they deigned to stoop so low (or be so obvious in their taste for inequality).
During the Indo-European expansion, on the leading edge, there were about 10 men to one Indo-European woman (hint, >9/10 were not monogamous — during the expansion they killed the men and bred their woman). With high-intensity agriculture needed to build empire, slavery became obligatory and male slaves didn’t get to breed the women.
A Patriarch had ‘concubines’ perhaps organized to breed as a harem, and would have many sons who had to serve and those who did with enthusiasm knew reproductive success. When expansionist males conquer new domains or fight with other clans to build empire, the winners typically end up killing the adult males and breeding the females.
Initial expansionist spread within Africa may have noticeably begun 75k years ago with a small population (1k-10k) and could have originated anywhere in Africa. Today, male genetic diversity remains low, about one third that of females. The back to Africa agropastorialist expansion was, like the Old European expansion from the western Fertile Crescent, matrilineal which favored women with high fertility rates (fewer women having most of the children) resulting in female genetic diversity decline in Africa.
Displacing the indigenous populations, e.g. the Man the Hunter Europeans who had been renormalizing for over 30k years (having acquired some Neanderthal genes and white skin) took longer than male-driven (e.g. Indo-European), but also reduced female diversity. Patrilineal expansion selects for a decrease in Y chromosome diversity which is strongly selected for on the leading edge of expansion. After the initial expansion of Man the Hunter, a period of partial renormalization begins. The 7k to 5k period of agrarian empire building again strongly selected for expansionist patrifocal genes and culture. The last 5000 years has selected for partial renormalization except among active expansionists, e.g. Austronesians (e.g. Māori), Bantu, Amerinds, Muslims, and Indo-Europeans.
The last 75k years of human r-culture metastatic expansion is the context of our modern techno-industrial form of civilization's climax this century, which needs to be viewed within the context of 500 million years of K-strategist ancestry that defines what is normal for such evolvable animals as we no longer are.
.
Overview
The recent history of our species is one of 50k-60k years of expansionism, first as nomadic 'Man the Hunter' expansion followed by slow and only partial recovery of what works long term among those left behind the leading edge of expansion to renormalize as the leading edge expansionist culture moved on, a pattern that was repeated with the agrarian and industrial expansions. The leading edge of the out of Africa expansion ended in recent times with the Austronesian/Polynesian expansion, leaving only Indo-Europeans and the Indo-Europeanized techno-industrial/agrarian expansionists (their expansionist economies and political influence/conquest expansionism) on the leading edge in recent (last three) centuries, a hegemon now climaxing in the Sino region. After climax comes the downslope.
The second wave of agrarian expansion initially spread by diffusion among nomadic foragers who transitioned to living in band-sized settled communities that low-intensity farming allowed, but as settlements came to support large populations, hierarchy emerged (was selected for) and empire building emerged. Nomadic hunter-gatherers and forager-farmers still living in band-sized groups were easily 'displaced' or assimilated (resistance was futile) to serve expansionist empire builders from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nation-states of commoners and elites.
Technology, e.g. the red cedar canoes of the Pacific Northwest and cattle-drawn carts of the Indo-Europeans, also enabled empire building as did extrasomatic energy (e.g. wind, solar, hydro, biomass burning, animal power, and during climax, fossil fuels/nuclear) used to empower industrial culture. As both plant and animal empowered agrarians with metal working technology, the Indo-European semi-nomads rapidly spread for seven thousand years, and are poised to climax their expansion in the 21st century.
Technology empowered hominins, prior to evolving self-limiting controls if significant harm is possible, face extinction (significant harm). Significant empowerment of an animal by technology began with fire making/using hominins (Homo erectus, et al.) who may have started out by putting everything that would burn to the torch because doing so, burning forests and grasslands (at both ends) gives a lovely light!
Hominins, however, must persist as K-strategists or go extinct (expansion is for a time), and using fire maximally for short-term self interest (e.g. for pleasure or to kill a lot of game for one feast) would be selected against. Nomad foragers using fire to diversify a biome and prevent large-scale conflagrations by naturally occurring fires would not be destructive, would be adaptive and beneficial overall (maximize empower of the system).
Early humans/hominins did limit their use of fire and were selected for as the millennia passed. Within the last 10k years, however, they were increasingly displaced by agrarians until modern industrial times when insapient fire starting (arson) became common. Note: our ancestors limited their use of the awesome powers of fire before the expansionist phase change (when humans first looked beyond the horizon and saw a planet for the taking), implying we have the potential to self-limit our use of technology too if our culture selected for us to do so, i.e. a non-expansionist civilizational/cultural paradigm shift will be required if we are to renormalize.
Within Africa, hominin development of stone tipped hunting weapons was slow enough that prey species were able to adapt, so this technology did not lead to extensive megafauna extinctions until humans went out of Africa as expansionists. The use of advanced technology (e.g. atlatl and Clovis point force-multiplier technology) increased Man the Hunters' effectiveness. This was humanity's first major failure to limit their use of technology to avoid long term harm to themselves and the local ecosystem. Outside of Africa, fauna initially failed to recognize humans as a threat and were killed too easily (71% of US/Canada megafauna went extinct in the latter part of the Late Pleistocene, but no consensus as to cause).
Assume 99% of nomadic bands 60k years ago in Africa recognized the potential of overhunting prey to extinction, and limited their taking of any species to avoid any noticeable decrease in the prey population below optimum (e.g. as evidenced by under grazing) as the decades passed. Limiting human demands on Nature's resources is foundational to persistence long term, and prior to expansionism, was the norm as evidenced by human/hominin persistence.
Oh, but if initially 1% of 100 bands who left Africa view animals as a resource for the taking (e.g. as dodo birds were), then take, prosper, and easily support large families, their behavior/culture will be selected for. Their offspring do likewise only more efficiently and with greater enthusiasm. Soon, all who are aggressively expanding within or out of Africa are enthusiastic expansionists whose culture increasingly celebrates taking as the millennia pass (and as the leading-edge expansionists spread out of Africa, those left behind as the leading edge moves find it increasingly more difficult to renormalize as K-strategists as they are increasingly far removed from ancestors who were, e.g. the Natufians were renormalizing hunter-gatherers who were displaced/assimilated by goat-herding agrarian cultures who had expanded south from the Fertile Crescent area (and back to Africa) while cattle culture had spread north, then east and west and south).
For expansionists (who are not people of place), as one area is depopulated of fauna and flora, no problem, the expansionists (who imagine themselves to live on an 'illimitable plane') can just move on. This short-term expansionist culture was selected for, and may have supported a larger population easily able to overcome any humans/hominins they encountered. Modern humans have now overrun the planet, and doubling down on expansion (growth), on what worked for 50k years, but cannot work (have a viable outcome) long term. Nor can denialism work long term.
"We are now in the middle [near the end] of a long process of transition [50k-60k years] in the
nature of the image which man has of himself and his
environment. Primitive men [not so much women over the last 50k years], and to a large extent also men of
the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a
virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere
beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very
large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has
been something like a frontier. That is, there was always some
place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason
of the deterioration of the natural environment [and/]or a
deterioration of the social structure[emph added] in places where people
happened to live. The image of the frontier is probably one of
the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we
find it hard to get rid of." —Kenneth E. Boulding, 1966, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth
Elements of expansionist culture remained within the renormalizing hunter-gatherer cultures, and when agriculture enabled expansion, a second wave of expansion occurred. Into a world of renormalizing nomadic foragers, some came to plant and select for desired traits to domesticate plants (e.g. bottle gourds, cotton, food plants), and others domesticated animals as commentalists which allowed the nomadic to settle in one camp and amass possessions far beyond what they could carry. Initially renormalizing settlements of bands remained band-sized in population, 20 to 50 trusted others, which was viable. Spread of agrarian ways was initially by cultural diffusion, and not by forced conquest. The agrarian biophysical economy, however, supported larger populations who could, and in time did, expand by force. Early on, renormalizing agrarian form 2 civilizations were viable.
Typically, within a few millennia, larger populations were selected for which in turn selected for hierarchy, the emergence of elites and commoners. The emergence of overcomplex society selects for growth and expansion (empire building from chiefdom to nation-state), e.g. the global modern techno-industrial form of civilization we are products of, live in, and serve. Latter agrarian form 2 civilizations transitioned to a non-viable empire building form,
Technology enabled a third wave empowered by wind, wood, whale oil, then fossil fuels and nuclear power, and we are the outcome. The expansionist pattern worked for millennia and selected for humans who prospered greatly as an invasive species responding to short-term contingencies of reinforcement (short-term self interest). Eventually an invasive species, however, after overrunning a habitat (e.g. planet Earth in the case of modern humans) must re-adapt to a steady-state biophysical economy or face local to planetary extinction.
Will modern humans understand their predicament, rapidly contract their overshoot population/economy and renormalize? Will 0.001% of modern humans understand their predicament, vote with their feet to form viable pockets of slowly renormalizing humans able to pass through the coming bottleneck and persist? Will we moderns stand down from our humancentric hubris heights to again know Nature, to again be reanimated in all due biophilia?
Into a depleted and degraded world, will a fourth expansion of a viable, consciously and meta-reflexively co-creating form of non-expansionist culture/civilization arise (be selected for) that is able to manage its demands on Nature's resources, and determined, for posterity's sake and the biosphere's, to not repeat humanity's prior overrunning of the planet as a one-off plague-phase techno-industrialized species? Could there be a viable form of civilization by design (by changing the rules of the game) that can have some technology but is not had/possessed by it?
Can information packages be preserved? Can some modern humans renormalize?
Anthem of Modern Techno-Industrial Expansionist Culture
at the Height of 50k Years of Progress, 1865-1980
Huston, the Planet has been Taken
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see his banner go!
[Refrain:
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!]
At the sign of triumph Satan's host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell's foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, loud your anthems raise! [Refrain]
Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod;
We are not divided [Though divisions harass]; all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine [purpose], one in charity. [Refrain]
Onward, then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song;
Glory, laud, and honor, unto Christ the King;
This thro' countless ages men and angels sing. [Refrain]
"For thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle: thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me." Psalm 18:39 (KJV)
"Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." Timothy 2:3-4 (KJV)
The thought of removing this hymn from Hymnals arose in the 1980s, was opposed, but by the 1990s and increasingly beyond, this anthem has been depreciated by some increasingly politicized churches who yet march as Christian Pilgrims.
Some Māori men are embracing feminism, but all of us moderns are far from normal as evidenced by our continued belief in belief, e.g. that there could be as imagined political solutions or religious salvation. Organized churchgoing religion in the US climaxed in the 1960s followed by televangelism climaxing in the 1980s, while our belief in politics and Lord Hubris Man has yet to. The thought of becoming ecocentric is becoming thinkable in a university newsletter, but not in mainstream and social media (or tavern talk).
Some may imagine they would like to live as the San or Kogi do, but are delusionally clueless as to the difficulty the denormalized would have doing so over a multi-generational period (as would Calhoun's rats of NIMH if they could think they could live as wild Norway rats instead). We are as far from renormalizing as Māori men are from listening to the Mothers who endeavor to listen to Nature (if there were any as eco-feminists are ideologues who don't/can't listen to Mother over the din of primate prattle). To renormalize is to not be energy and posterity blind, to do what we are told to by Mother (and perhaps those who endeavor to listen to Mother) in choiceless obedience to the nature of things as "our biosphere's handmaiden anew".
Eat of the fruit of the Tree of Self Knowledge
SUBNOTE TO FILE 10/12/2022
In 1928, almost all countries signed the Pact of Paris – [aka the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy] promising not to use war to resolve "disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them," and this international agreement remains in effect. History tells a different tale of the last 94 years than idealists (sane humans?) dreamt of. Remorseless dynamics don't seem to do as we wish or demand.
Perhaps we need to understand them to be delivered from them. And in 1987 the UN agreed to sustainably develop the planet (preferably at a 5% growth rate to eliminate poverty). In 2015, 196 signatory states agreed to not significantly change Earth's climate (Paris Agreement). Soon, expect all [real] humans to agree to stop causing species extinction by not destroying a planetary life-support system (aka the True Real Green New Deal Accord) by killing anyone who doesn't agree, while demanding that Saudi Arabia increase oil production until all cars have been electrified. And then what?
You can tell any story you want (as is your sort of mind), e.g. that the end of human expansion on Earth will soon lead to the building of Sol's Dyson sphere (after the singularity). Humans are like anaerobes of over a billion years ago who viewed the coming Great Oxygenation event as a catastrophe. Aerobes, however, view the event as a great advancement for life on Earth, without which humans would have never become transhumans living forever (if they want to), and spreading (as expansionists must) to fill the universe with wonder (and transhuman techno-biomass), with the first pause being the Milky Way galaxy before expanding to fill trillions of other galaxies for the taking.
Yes, as the storytelling animal you can tell any story you want, but you can't live any life you want for as long as you want. Could what happened to the Indus Valley civilization happen to modern techno-industrialized humans globally? Okay, maybe, but I don't like that story. My descendants will build a Dyson sphere. Time for my morning latte while I read Palladium Magazine.
SUBNOTE TO FILE 10/15/2022: More words, words, words, sorry about that.
Humans who tell stories about humans are subject to extremes of bias. As the storytelling animal, humans are subject to the original delusion (that the stories they tell are 'true'). That other humans tell false stories is a given since their stories differ from the one true story (consensus narrative as social construct) the one True People tell (those sharing one's tribal identity). Human storytelling is a language game that works to entertain without creating delusions provided those telling stories and listening to storytellers understand that humans tell and can tell no true stories. Humans tell stories. Full stop.
Ug is sitting with others about the campfire and tells a story of finding a beehive full of honey. He insists the story is absolutely true. Okay, maybe he found a hive of insects, maybe they are honeybees, and maybe they have collected a significant amount of honey. If Ug is known to tell only stories that he believes to be true, maybe asking him to lead a group to the hive tomorrow is to consider, but Ug couldn't know that the hive was 'full' of honey. Maybe he didn't even closely examine even one of the insects to make sure it was a honeybee (and would Ug know one if he saw one?). If Ug told a story of a burning bush that told him he should lead the hunters and that the women should..., then sane humans would merely smile at Ug's attempt to entertain himself.
When some humans started telling stories about a spherical Earth about which Luna (possibly also a sphere) 'orbited' (a binary system that orbited Sol along with the few moving lights in the sky)..., well, a few centuries may pass before their banned books are removed from the list, but stories of 'force', and 'acceleration', and 'gravity' are not all that much about humans, so the consensus narrative could more easily change (though the claim that Earth is not an illimitable plane [i.e. there are limits to growth] and 'orbits' Sol is problematic as it could be used by unbelievers to question human centrality in the Cosmos, or even our dominionism). And Hubble's and friend's crazy idea that we live in a solar system, one of billions, in a minor galaxy, one of trillions, is just so not right (except to some of the over-educated egghead types), but at least everyone (certainly all secular humanists) still knows that humans are different in kind from mere animals.
Humans who tell stories about humans include anthropologists and their bedfellows, archaeologists. Anthropologists depend on 'informants', other humans who care very much about what stories others tell about them and their ancestors. So if your informants are Māori, you may well find yourself telling stories about how the European racists and colonialists took their ancestors to the Chatham Islands to visit their brothers, the Moriori, so they could blame them for removing the Moriori so Europeans could colonize the islands That we progressive moderns allow those who want to blame others for the sins of their fathers to still live is proof of how tolerant we are, but even the enlightened have limits, so don't push too hard against the truth or we'll have to enslave you so you know how it feels to be a victim.
Archaeogeneticists are forced to tell stories that are severely constrained by hard data, so for some reason the story of the past lives of humans is rapidly changing. But there is still plenty of circumstantial data that can be interpreted to tell any story you want. If you are a misanthropic anti-human, eco-fascist (and racist) who wants to tell stories about megafauna extinctions being caused by the ancestors of modern humans (instead of the obvious cause, climate change), then you can.
There is absolutely no evidence that humans hunted the pygmy mammoths (much less caused their extinction) on Santa Rosa Island, for example. The pygmy mammoth population was in decline when humans first came to the island. That charred mammoth bones have been found that date to within 20 years of human arrival on the island is evidence that a mammoth carcass was burned in a wildfire (possibly caused by humans). The sites where early humans lived are full of shells, clearly indicating they ate shellfish. There are no mammoth bones in the sites with or without cut marks (racists claim all the mammoths could have been killed within one generation and only meat cut from the carcass may have been brought back to camp, but there is no evidence to support such biased storytelling that objective truth-seeking scientists must avoid telling).
Human taxonomy is problematic too, beginning with Carl Linnaeus calling modern man 'wise' (Homo sapiens in Latin). A more objective view (perhaps that of a visiting taxonomist from the planet Omicron) is that modern humans and the not so common chimpanzees and even less common bonobos are 'obviously' in the same genus. But to narrow the focus to humans, broadly, we upright bipedal apes are human, as were all prior upright bipedal apes. Modern humans, then, could be defined as 'the last human standing'.
Few humans know that they are animals, much less from what animal they evolved. First clue is knowing that we who are miss named Homo sapiens sapiens are one of many forms of Homo sapiens (heidelbergensis being the first form, all others being subspecies indicated by having a third name), much as there were many forms (subspecies) of Homo erectus (e.g. H. erectus yuanmouensis, H. e. lantianensis, H. e. nankinensis, H. e. pekinensis, H. e. palaeojavanicus, H. e. soloensis, H. e. tautavelensis, H. e. ergaster (our ancestor), and H. e. georgicus).
Thanks to paleogenetics, we now have enough evidence (data) to surmise (guess) that as we interbred with Neanderthal and Denisova (and an unnamed West African form and others out of Africa), that all are subspecies of Homo sapiens (aka Homo heidelbergensis). We are a subspecies of Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens sapiens. And we humans of the last 75k years are an expansionist form of Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator. We are not Homo sapiens (heidelbergensis is not a subspecies and so using Homo sapiensheidelbergensis is a misnomer). And Neanderthals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Denisovans are H. s. denisova, and the 'Hobbit' on Flores is H. e. floresiensis with whom we likely tried, but failed, to interbred with. But we don't actually know that. For all we 'know', H. floresiensis was in decline and our ancestors worked for centuries to help them survive, but despite all their efforts, the Hobbit went extinct. Science tells no true stories, but does endeavor to tell the most likely story.
There is evidence that H. floresiensis lived up to about 50k years ago. All of the fossils unearthed to date were found in one cave called Liang Bua, i.e. we would not know they ever existed if they had never inhabited this cave or if the cave had not be discovered by modern humans. Our ignorance is vast and may be impossible to overestimate. If H. floresiensis had lived anywhere else on Flores, the time of their extinction would be as unknown as their existence would be.
Per molecular clock estimates, genetic studies and archaeological data all suggest the initial colonisation of Sahul and Australia by modern expansionist humans who had rapidly spread from Africa to reach Australia around 48,000–50,000 years ago. Pre-expansionist humans may have reached Australia earlier, but the molecular clock estimates could only apply to modern humans we have vast DNA data for.
That the modern expansionist form of humans may have reached Flores on their way to Australia is not an extraordinary conjecture. That no modern human fossils have been found from 50k years ago could be viewed as evidence they did not live in caves initially and so the absence of evidence (e.g. H. floresiensis bones chard with cut marks found in a cave with modern humans buried with grave offerings dating from the same time) is not evidence of absenses. If such evidence was found, it would be trivial for an expert to tell a story of the cave being abandoned for a few years during which time H. floresiensis butchered one of their beloved relatives to ritually consume them as their religion compelled them to. No disconfirming evidence may exist (e.g. a modern human tooth is found embedded in an H. floresiensis bone from which DNA is recovered). Science is the endeavor to tell the most likely story, no certitude implied. Stories of the past are not the past.
And what of Homo sapiens [aka Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens heidelbergensis]? Well, first update hominin taxonomy (Homo sapiens was until recently viewed as Homo erectus heidelbergensis) and start using the full name: Homo sapiens (of whom we are a subspecies), who evolved from an African H. erectus (H. e. ergaster) about 1.3 million years ago and left Africa over a million years ago. Homo erectus, the first hominin out of Africa, left Africa about two million years ago.
Homo sapiens [aka H. s. heidelbergensis] was the first hominin to hunt in packs to kill megafauna (but not so much to species extinction) and develop dwelling technology (huts and hearths). H. sapiens [heidelbergensis] also filled a pit with 30 Heidelberg bodies, so perhaps our genocidal proclivities go back to the first of our species. The African population (aka H. s. rhodesiensis) evolved into H. s. sapiens, while the European population of H. sapiens [heidelbergensis] evolved into H. s. neanderthalensis and the Asian population of H. sapiens [heidelbergensis] evolved into H. s. denisova. Comparison of Neanderthal DNA (going back 800k years) and modern human DNA suggests that the modern humans lineage diverged from a common ancestor in Africa sometime between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago. So the common 200k or 300k years date for H. s. sapiens should at least be 375k if not a better 350k-400k date.
Oh, and H. s. sapiens mutated into an especially expansionistic form about 50k to 60k years ago to spread within and out of Africa to exterminate all non-expansionist forms of hominins except for the San, Hadza, and Pygmy forms of H. s. sapiens (not to mention a lot of other megafauna). This new form, though anatomically H. s. sapiens, is behaviorally (memetically, culturally) a new form of human (the last one standing) that may merit a different name, e.g. Homo sapiens insapiens) who may not expand into space to build a Dyson sphere before expanding Borg-like into the Cosmos. But some H. s. insapiens are not obligate patriarchal expansionists genetically or memetically (even if 99+% are). We modern form of human are not a subspecies but a variant of one, a short-term maximizer for a time (i.e. non-evolvable metastatic form).
It is not impossible that some of us eight billion and growing modern humans (H. s. insapiens) could pass through the coming genetic and memetic bottleneck to become a new form of H. sapiens (non-expansionist form) that has renormalized to live functional lives in complex societies. Perhaps in as little as 8 to 20 generations we can renormalize to live properly with the planet, we who, having technology and knowledge enough to destroy a planetary life-support system, yet lack the insapience to do so. We will have returned to the place we started from to know the place for the first time (and ourselves). They (potentially our descendents, but not us) will be Homo s. sapiens var. resapiens. We who have known technology, and who have been had by it, cannot know the sapience of the San. But we can realize the the Tairona preceded us. They were also H. s. sapiens var. narrator, but they renormalized as Homo s. sapiens var. resapiens who have recovered from their condition of empire building insapience.
They, and some modern techno-industrial humans may again, 'by our service be our biosphere's handmaidens', like the San, but anew, with information packages, the flower and fruit of our expansionistic form (not the ruins we've build), intact to allow humans to understand and be increasingly delivered over the millennia from error, ignorance, and the illusion of being exceptional, of not being animals (delivered by standing down from our hubris heights to again become sapient). Otherwise, any remnant population will go on to insapiently repeat the pattern until they can't. Maybe we don't live on an illimitable plane for the taking at the center of the universe; maybe there will be no endless frontier. Perhaps we are subsystems of Gaia who alone offers stories (via data) that are worth listening to, given that, duh, humans (who don't listen, e.g. H. s. insapiens who needs to tell better stories) can tell no true stories.
Summary, what every hominin should know
We are the last hominin standing. Homo pan troglodytes and Homo pan paniscus do not normally travel only on two legs. The last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo pan (about 7+ million years ago) is unnamed, but we hominins evolved from Homo australopithecus afarensis who gave rise to Homo erectus. The African form of Homo erectus (Homo erectus ergaster) evolved into Homo sapiens. The genetic evidence that Homo and Pan should be in the same genus was news in 2003, and chimpanzees are no longer viewed as from a separate family, as now they are at least in the same family as humans. But allowing them into "our" genus is still resisted.
"Human" is an informal term for members of the genus Homo. Common and Bonobo chimps are subspecies of H. pan, and what are now named as different subspecies of H. p. troglodytes may be viewed as different races (an informal term in biology rarely used and of little interest) of Homo pan troglodytes. If troglodytes and paniscus needed to be viewed as separate species, then their names would be Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus.
'6. During
times when energy flows have been tapped and there are no new sources [e.g. 21st century global techno-industrial society],
Lotka's principle [Maximum Empower Production Principle] requires that those systems win that do not attempt
fruitless growth [expansion] but instead use all available energies in long-staying,
high-diversity, steady-state works.
Whenever an ecosystem reaches its steady state after periods of succession, the rapid-net-growth specialists [e.g. modern humans] are replaced by a new team of higher-diversity, higher-quality, longer-living, better-controlled, and stable components [e.g. watershed management units]. Collectively, through division of labor and specialization, the climax team gets more energy out of the steady flow of available source energy [solar, some water/wind indirect solar, and geothermal, e.g. hot springs] than those specialized in fast growth [e.g. expansionists] could.
'The human society of the planet is reaching the climax of its succession. Reversals of attitudes, policies, and laws are to be expected in the transition from the era [300 year? 50k year?] of growth to a time of descent. By developing explanations and plans now for making descent prosperous [intentional], we can be ready when the shocks of change galvanize the attention of society. Some can have faith in the future that comes from understanding energy principles. Others will find faith in religions that adapt the necessary commandments for once again fitting culture to the earth [e.g. Xin]. The people of Easter Island disappeared, leaving only their monuments [and a remnant denormalized population in conflict that was still on the downslope in 1722] as an example to the world of what happens when culture cannot downsize to fit its environmental production.'
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/7/2023
An unnamed subspecies of Homo sapiens identified from an East China site excavated in 2019 from about 300k years ago (kya) has been announced. It is similar to Denisovans, but with enough differences to be considered a separate and older subspecies. A likely West African subspecies of H. sapiens (aka Heidelbergensis) based on archaeogenetic evidence, remains unnamed due to a lack of fossil evidence. This new subspecies in China, with multiple fossils, including a skull, may be named Homo sapiens hualongdongafter the excavation site.
Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator, the last hominin standing, is looking less exceptional, being one subspecies of five (H.s. sapiens, H.s. neanderthalensis, H.s. denisova, and two unnamed subspecies of Homo sapiens (aka H.s. heidelbergensis).
H.s. sapiens has the dubious distinction of giving raise to an expansionist form of hominin 75 kya, an obligate invasive (r-strategist) culture subspecies, that added all other forms of hominin, except remnant populations of Haida, San, and Pygmy in Africa, to their long list of megafauna extinctions prior to presiding over the greatest mass extinction since the late Cretaceous, the current Anthropocene mass extinction event.
Whether the new form of H. sapiens will come to view itself as a new subspecies remains to be seen. Nature doesn't care, and renaming ourselves Homo sapiens supremacist will likely not change our trajectory following the climax of our succession this century.
New claims to consider, based on new methods. Original paper still paywalled. Interpreting claims will involve a process. But it looks like a bottleneck between 800k years ago and 900k years ago, based on a perhaps small genomic data set of 3154 modern individuals. Humans could have been an endangered species at this time, or this could be interpreted as the expansion by displacement of a small group of humans within Africa of other humans within Africa, which would look the same. This is a consensus narrative of a small group of researchers, and likely to change.
Humans are, as far as we know, the most successful species that has ever evolved on this planet. We've spread across the entire world, even through the unhospitable polar regions, bending nature to our will. Our technology allows us to travel to virtually any part of the world in a matter of hours. After conquering this world, humans have even traveled to the Moon and will soon touch down on Mars.
But it's easy to take this human success story for granted. In fact, it's only thanks to blind luck that Homo sapiens are a thing today. Throughout history, our species and our ancestors have gone through multiple crises that threatened to make us extinct. According to a new study out this week, one such event may have occurred roughly 900,000 years ago.
Around this time during the early Pleistocene, the number of human fossils scientists have found is very small compared to the rest of the fossil record. Now, a genomic analysis suggests that our human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck during this time of crisis. This would explain the fossil gap: there simply weren't that many people left anymore to leave traces behind them.
While there are more than 8 billion people alive today, scientists believe our ancestors' total population plummeted to just 1,280 breeding individuals -- and this crisis lasted for nearly 117,000 painful years. Before the crisis, the researchers estimate the human population hovered around 27,000 individuals.
The international team of researchers, which included scientists from China, Italy, and the U.S., employed an innovative technique called FitCoal (fast infinitesimal time coalescent process) to shed light on a previously unexplained gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. Instead of relying solely on fossils, this technique leveraged modern-day human genomic sequences from 3,154 individuals to infer the demographics of ancient human populations.
Researchers estimated the population of our ancient ancestors affected by a population bottleneck using a novel formula based on the genetic data of modern humans. Credit: Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, CAS.
The results indicate a significant drop in genetic diversity among our ancestors between 800,000 and 900,00 years ago. And this loss of genetic diversity can only mean one thing: a proportional plummeting of the population.
"The gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age as chronologically. It coincides with this proposed time period of significant loss of fossil evidence," says senior author Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome.
This period of extreme genetic constriction had far-reaching consequences. It's estimated that approximately 65.85% of the current genetic diversity in modern humans may have been lost due to this critical population bottleneck in our lineage's history.
Human ancestors on the Red List
The African hominin fossil gap and the estimated time period of chromosome fusion is shown on the right. Credit: Science.
[Current population in Africa is 1.4 billion, and out of Africa is 6.6, so above x-axis looks like a logarithmic scale or no scale divided on in vs out of Africa. Estimates of total human population before the neolithic globally are about 5 million, or 1 million in Africa, which is still 10 times the early Pleistocene population and 100 times the bottleneck population.
When it became evident that almost all modern humans (except San, Hadza, Pygmy) are descended from a very small population from about 75 kya, the story was all humans had gone through a bottleneck that only our clever ancestors emerged from. Actually, our clever ancestors, a small population of expansionist humans "displaced" all other hominin megafauna (except San, Hadza, Pygmy) along with an impressive number of other megafauna that happened to go extinct due to climate change soon after our coincidental arrival (or we eliminated them). If a small population, living within an area for over 100k years, competitively displaced the 90k or so other humans for some reason (e.g. increased longevity allowing grandparents to exist to serve their children's children so their children could hunt/gather more efficiently), would that look like a bottleneck event? I don't know, but I would raise the question.]
One intriguing finding is that this bottleneck might have contributed to a speciation event, where two ancestral chromosomes merged to form what we now know as chromosome 2 in modern humans. This mysterious human species may have been the last common ancestor of Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens sapiens.
But what happened during these perilous times that almost wiped out our entire lineage? Extreme climate change was likely the main factor behind this drastic decline. Around the same time, glaciation events caused wild swings in temperature, severe droughts, and the extinction of fauna that human ancestors likely depended on for food. As a result, the population plummeted to around 1,200 individuals. By the criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), this would have classed our ancestors somewhere between "endangered" and "critically endangered".
Where did these individuals live during this challenging period? How did they survive the catastrophic climate changes? Did natural selection during the bottleneck accelerate the evolution of the human brain? These are all open questions at the moment that may be answered as scientists carry out more research and refine their methods. There is still a huge knowledge gap about what transpired during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition period. As we dig deeper, we hope to uncover more pieces of the puzzle that is our early human ancestry and evolution.
Adapted from Mark Brown, Beyond Growth: Economics as if the Planet Mattered, 2/5/2019.
"Monetary culture" vs matter-energy system worldview. —M. King Hubbert
'Li' is Chinese for the laws—organizing principles—of the cosmos.
Technocracy and ecological economics were/are transitional. Naturocracy: Technocracy for the 21st century.
Note: our humancentrism renders us incompatible with persisting as a lifeform on this planet. So all you
wannabe Borg, start by moving to Mars to serve Elon Musk in his retirement where as a transhuman
he
will live for centuries and as a brain in a vat, he'll serve hu-manity
as
the millennia go by. The well-known one is r-culture.
One planet ain't big enough for both.
But it is big enough for zero.
Human (Homo sapiens) Population, Zero to ?
1.3 mya (million years ago) Homo sapiens evolve from Homo erectus ergaster in Africa (population zero then counting)
1.1 mya Homo sapiens slowly spreads out of Africa as K-strategists to southern Eurasia (population max <1 million)
1 mya H. sapiens in Africa subspeciates to form a west African form (unnamed, no fossils found yet). H. sapiens population = 100k
900 kya = 1k (severe ancestorial bottleneck lasting 117k years, near extinction event #1)
0.765 mya H. sapiens in Eurasia subspeciates into ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans
0.4–0.35 mya Homo sapiens sapiens (1 of 5 subspecies) evolves in Africa from east African H. sapiens (pop. = 0 then counting)
0.3 mya H. sapiens in Sino region subspeciates, may be named Homo sapiens hualongdong
0.22 mya H.s. denisova inhabits Asia
0.075 mya or 75 kya (thousand years ago) the ancestor of all Modern humans (except San, Hadza, Pygmy) emerges to expand within Africa. May be given a new subspecies name, e.g. H.s. insapiens, but is a variant of H.s.s., so may be refered to as H.s.s. var. narrator.
55 kya the expansionist form of Modern humans spreads out of Africa to Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, to complete its taking of a planet in Oceania by 0.65 kya prior to likely climax in the 21st century.
Homo sapiens (and subspecies) Total Population
1.3 million BC = 0
1712 Newcomen steam engine, fossil fueled energy slaves proliferate
1804 = 1000m (1k million or 1 billion) up from zero in 1.3 million years
1927 = 2000m in 123 years
1960 = 3000m in 33 years
1974 = 4000m in 14 years
1987 = 5000m in 13 years
1999 = 6000m in 12 years
2011 = 7000m in 12 years
2022 = 8000m in 11 years
2037 = 9 billion? in 15 years
2058 = 10 billion? in 21 years
2100 = 11 billion? in 42 years — or zero to 2 billion on the downslope?
2200 = Zero to 1 billion?
2300 = Zero to
500 million?
2400 = Zero to 200 million?
2500 = Zero to 100 million?
2600 = 7–35 million if humans renormalize (or, as Nature is unkind, zero works).
SUBNOTE TO FILE 9/29/2024
A more detailed look at Y-chromosome haplogroups and possible migration routes. By the time of Y-DNA Adam and mitochondria Eve, humans had spread throughout Africa and out of Africa into Eurasia. The last common ancestors of the San, Hadza, Sandawe, Pygmy and modern expansionist humans lived in West Africa.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
K-strategists are evolved to live within limits. K-culture is antithetical to r-culture, especially the modern form.
If we modern techno-industrialized humans, who as inecolate (not systems aware, lacking foresight) expansionists are far from normal animals (such as our ancestors prior to about 60k years ago had to have been to persist), are many generations (2-2k) removed from ancestral norms, we may fail to again endeavor to live within limits as our ancestors did. 
Extinction of other hominins not included in tally of 174 above, nor megafauna on smaller islands, e.g. three on Malta. 
The archaeogenetics is not telling us that all H. s. sapiens were killed by the Toba supervolcano except for our exceptionalist ancestors who then spread out to replenish the planet. Nature (the nature of things) via data is telling us that we all descend from a small population that was in some way different (expansionistic), that enabled our ancestors to 'displace' all other humans and hominins on the planet (except two) though it took us 50k years to do so. 
.
Technology empowered hominins, prior to evolving self-limiting controls if significant harm is possible, face extinction (significant harm). Significant empowerment of an animal by technology began with fire making/using hominins (Homo erectus, et al.) who may have started out by putting everything that would burn to the torch because doing so, burning forests and grasslands (at both ends) gives a lovely light! 
Thanks to paleogenetics, we now have enough evidence (data) to surmise (guess) that as we interbred with Neanderthal and Denisova (and an unnamed West African form and others out of Africa), that all are subspecies of Homo sapiens (aka Homo heidelbergensis). We are a subspecies of Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens sapiens. And we humans of the last 75k years are an expansionist form of Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator. We are not Homo sapiens (heidelbergensis is not a subspecies and so using Homo sapiens heidelbergensis is a misnomer). And Neanderthals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Denisovans are H. s. denisova, and the 'Hobbit' on Flores is H. e. floresiensis with whom we likely tried, but failed, to interbred with. But we don't actually know that. For all we 'know', H. floresiensis was in decline and our ancestors worked for centuries to help them survive, but despite all their efforts, the Hobbit went extinct. Science tells no true stories, but does endeavor to tell the most likely story.
Oh, and H. s. sapiens mutated into an especially expansionistic form about 50k to 60k years ago to spread within and out of Africa to exterminate all non-expansionist forms of hominins except for the San, Hadza, and Pygmy forms of H. s. sapiens (not to mention a lot of other megafauna). This new form, though anatomically H. s. sapiens, is behaviorally (memetically, culturally) a new form of human (the last one standing) that may merit a different name, e.g. Homo sapiens insapiens) who may not expand into space to build a Dyson sphere before expanding Borg-like into the Cosmos. But some H. s. insapiens are not obligate patriarchal expansionists genetically or memetically (even if 99+% are). We modern form of human are not a subspecies but a variant of one, a short-term maximizer for a time (i.e. non-evolvable metastatic form). 
