11 ms·

The Deep Anthropocene

124 points by diodorus 6y ago

sebmellen 6y ago
This is fascinating. Whenever something like this comes up, I think of people like Terence McKenna or Graham Hancock. People who, admittedly, had some very out there ideas, but maybe not completely unfounded. Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this: > Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa Did that happen without any societal involvement. Did humans just carry seeds like birds might, or was there an organized effort to spread agriculture like this? > ... it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles." I hope that we'll continue to learn more.
- jbotz 6y ago
  Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliberate, people carried banana culms around with them in order to plant them as they traveled from island to island.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Um, that is only modern bananas. "old" bananas are mostly seed.
    - jbotz 6y ago
      Yes, that's why I said "edible" bananas... those "mostly seed" ones aren't really edible, there's nothing to eat. The mutation / hybridization that resulted in seedless edible bananas must have preceded their being spread around by humans or we wouldn't have bothered.
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        Oh, anyone bothers if they get really hungry. Stone Age people were fairly resourceful when it came to food. A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.
        user_ 6y ago
        Care to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        The best one is probably this from the early 2000s. They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days. They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent. Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste. No health consequences.
        hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
        Southern France/Northern Spain is not a total wilderness. That level hunger after a two day detour implies a serious level of poor planning.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        Well, it was their second tour of the Pyrenees. They have come back almost every year since 2001 and learned from their mistakes.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Eating skin cream after two days without food? There are people who recreationally fast for that length. There's something missing from this story.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Musa acuminata bananas, native to SE-Asia, and probably the sort talked about in this article, do have seeds, though the domesticated variants have significantly less. It seems highly unlikely that these particular bananas had no seeds. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata
- wh1t3n01s3 6y ago
  Fascinating indeed. Climate change goes far beyond CO2 levels. Another thing that we miss is our history before the last ice age, which still lies in complete mistery.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.
    - smhost 6y ago
      What about a small industrial society?
      - AlotOfReading 6y ago
        When we start getting into hypotheticals, it's useful to reframe the discussion in more concrete terms. What would it mean to have a "small industrial society"? I can think of a number of "things" that would fit that term: 1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis. 2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones. 3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  > banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Hmm, seems so, though a different Guinea! Very interesting: > Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineo
- yongjik 6y ago
  Obviously this is oversimplified because some of the trips needed to cross huge oceans, but from Papua New Guinea to Ethiopia is only ~12,000 km. If people with bananas move 10 km every year, they will cross that distance in "only" 1,200 years. And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
svrb 6y ago
TL;DR: TFA claims climate change don't real. Money quotes: "Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster." (implying that what's happened after 1950 isn't an ecological disaster) "In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm ... human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world." (implying that human-caused climate change is a "myth") If you read the article you'll find it's using a lot of double negatives like the ones above, and a lot of innuendo, but it ultimately boils down to denying that humans are causing climate change right now and we need immediate political change to reverse it.
- xixo 6y ago
  Those are key points in the article, but I didn't read them in the way you did. This article is largely about many research groups coming together to build a more nuanced understanding of our impact on the environment over the past thousands of years. It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bound to happen, of course. All that energy must come from somewhere. I don't think the article suggests that the situation we're in now isn't happening. The article reads almost breathless—in on the knowledge that we're in a dire situation. Do we really need more reasons to illustrate our impact on the environment? It also speaks to our strange compulsion to believe in the duality of human and nature. How do you get the public to recognize that there is no such thing, only one symbiotic whole? I hope we can figure out how to work together.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Yes I would argue they aren't denying CO2. They are saying that humans have been doing massive changes to global-scale systems for a while now. That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it. I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming. Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution. Current anthropomorphic changes to the world are far faster than typical climate shifts, which occurred on the scale of 1000s of years, not decades. Combined with humanity reducing the number of available species to adapt, mass extinctions seem akin to us playing russian roulette: - did killing off this species collapse the entire system? No? - how about this one? No? - how about this one? Uhoh.
ncmncm 6y ago
Funny how the authors think the Chinese started out farming rice. The Chinese grew wheat for thousands of years before they caught onto rice.
- Chakazul 6y ago
  Chinese got the rice culture from SE Asian people e.g. Tai-Kadai, who at that time inhabited S China. From Ricepedia: "Recent genetic evidence show that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, come from a single domestication event that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China."
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    It is amazing how long it took for rice to spread and take over. Guessing it depended on advances in irrigation systems. Growing it in flooded padis, to control weeds, came surprisingly late, like 4000 ya. Putting fish in the padis to eat mosquito larvae and provide protein started only ~1800 ya.
danjac 6y ago
I recommend the latest season of Patrick Wyman's Tides of History podcast [1] for an overview of the latest discoveries in archeology and related fields. [1] https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/
atomack 6y ago
Interesting to put this view of the anthropocene next to David Graeber's and how he thinks it shaped the evolution of human society https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"

124 points by diodorus 6y ago

This is fascinating. Whenever something like this comes up, I think of people like Terence McKenna or Graham Hancock. People who, admittedly, had some very out there ideas, but maybe not completely unfounded. Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this: > Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa Did that happen without any societal involvement. Did humans just carry seeds like birds might, or was there an organized effort to spread agriculture like this? > ... it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles." I hope that we'll continue to learn more.

jbotz 6y ago
Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliberate, people carried banana culms around with them in order to plant them as they traveled from island to island.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Um, that is only modern bananas. "old" bananas are mostly seed.
  - jbotz 6y ago
    Yes, that's why I said "edible" bananas... those "mostly seed" ones aren't really edible, there's nothing to eat. The mutation / hybridization that resulted in seedless edible bananas must have preceded their being spread around by humans or we wouldn't have bothered.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Oh, anyone bothers if they get really hungry. Stone Age people were fairly resourceful when it came to food. A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.
      - user_ 6y ago
        Care to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        The best one is probably this from the early 2000s. They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days. They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent. Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste. No health consequences.
        hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
        Southern France/Northern Spain is not a total wilderness. That level hunger after a two day detour implies a serious level of poor planning.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        Well, it was their second tour of the Pyrenees. They have come back almost every year since 2001 and learned from their mistakes.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Eating skin cream after two days without food? There are people who recreationally fast for that length. There's something missing from this story.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Musa acuminata bananas, native to SE-Asia, and probably the sort talked about in this article, do have seeds, though the domesticated variants have significantly less. It seems highly unlikely that these particular bananas had no seeds. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata
wh1t3n01s3 6y ago
Fascinating indeed. Climate change goes far beyond CO2 levels. Another thing that we miss is our history before the last ice age, which still lies in complete mistery.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.
  - smhost 6y ago
    What about a small industrial society?
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      When we start getting into hypotheticals, it's useful to reframe the discussion in more concrete terms. What would it mean to have a "small industrial society"? I can think of a number of "things" that would fit that term: 1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis. 2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones. 3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.
ta1234567890 6y ago
> banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Hmm, seems so, though a different Guinea! Very interesting: > Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineo
yongjik 6y ago
Obviously this is oversimplified because some of the trips needed to cross huge oceans, but from Papua New Guinea to Ethiopia is only ~12,000 km. If people with bananas move 10 km every year, they will cross that distance in "only" 1,200 years. And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

svrb 6y ago

TL;DR: TFA claims climate change don't real. Money quotes: "Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster." (implying that what's happened after 1950 isn't an ecological disaster) "In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm ... human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world." (implying that human-caused climate change is a "myth") If you read the article you'll find it's using a lot of double negatives like the ones above, and a lot of innuendo, but it ultimately boils down to denying that humans are causing climate change right now and we need immediate political change to reverse it.

xixo 6y ago
Those are key points in the article, but I didn't read them in the way you did. This article is largely about many research groups coming together to build a more nuanced understanding of our impact on the environment over the past thousands of years. It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bound to happen, of course. All that energy must come from somewhere. I don't think the article suggests that the situation we're in now isn't happening. The article reads almost breathless—in on the knowledge that we're in a dire situation. Do we really need more reasons to illustrate our impact on the environment? It also speaks to our strange compulsion to believe in the duality of human and nature. How do you get the public to recognize that there is no such thing, only one symbiotic whole? I hope we can figure out how to work together.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Yes I would argue they aren't denying CO2. They are saying that humans have been doing massive changes to global-scale systems for a while now. That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it. I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming. Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution. Current anthropomorphic changes to the world are far faster than typical climate shifts, which occurred on the scale of 1000s of years, not decades. Combined with humanity reducing the number of available species to adapt, mass extinctions seem akin to us playing russian roulette: - did killing off this species collapse the entire system? No? - how about this one? No? - how about this one? Uhoh.

ncmncm 6y ago

Funny how the authors think the Chinese started out farming rice. The Chinese grew wheat for thousands of years before they caught onto rice.

Chakazul 6y ago
Chinese got the rice culture from SE Asian people e.g. Tai-Kadai, who at that time inhabited S China. From Ricepedia: "Recent genetic evidence show that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, come from a single domestication event that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China."
- ncmncm 6y ago
  It is amazing how long it took for rice to spread and take over. Guessing it depended on advances in irrigation systems. Growing it in flooded padis, to control weeds, came surprisingly late, like 4000 ya. Putting fish in the padis to eat mosquito larvae and provide protein started only ~1800 ya.

danjac 6y ago

I recommend the latest season of Patrick Wyman's Tides of History podcast [1] for an overview of the latest discoveries in archeology and related fields. [1] https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/

atomack 6y ago

Interesting to put this view of the anthropocene next to David Graeber's and how he thinks it shaped the evolution of human society https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"