Dissent podcast interview with Jessica Thompson, archaeologist
using their relation with fire in a NEW way to intentional extract resources....
A rare example of an explicit BMTC in the Late Pleistocene of Africa
derives from northern Malawi, where both paleoenvironmental and
archeological data are available from the same region.
However, ca. 85 ka, during a wet period following the
last prolonged arid period, the long-term relationship between climate
and vegetation was decoupled. Lake levels remained high for the last
85 kyr but species richness never recovered, and instead remained at
low values previously associated with the driest intervals of the last
600 kyr. All four previous low points were associated with a severe
arid period, whereas the Late Pleistocene collapse occurred in concert
with consistently high rainfall conditions. By ca. 85 ka, vegetation
composition also changed to a previously unobserved state, in which
montane forest taxa were largely replaced by grasses and fire-tolerant
trees and shrubs.
Unlike their Middle Pleistocene counterparts, however,https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/evan.21877
these humans used burning to halt the typical cycle of forest
recolonization by producing large quantities of ignitions that were
outside the normal seasonality of lightning strikes.
This catalyzed a BMTC, and
extended to the landscape itself, where erosion regimes were altered
by a novel combination of high precipitation and low forest cover. It
was at this time, in the Late Pleistocene, that regional alluvial fans
began to activate and entrain the first direct archeological evidence of
human presence (Figure 3). A tipping point had been reached, and a
new vegetation and burning regime was established by ca. 72 ka.
However, there is evidence that at some point near the Middle-Late Pleistocene boundary humans under-went a threshold-crossing shift in their behavior that is detectably
different from what came before. The sustained, transformative
effects of these behaviors on sculpting ecosystem functions extend
deep into the human past and the evolution of these systems are
inextricably bound to the evolution of our species itself.
99 The end result has been a ratcheting up in both cultural complexity
100 and environmental changes 101 to accommodate new ecological realities.
https://campuspress.yale.edu/jcthompson/
Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: the role of fire in the broad spectrum revolution
especially the use of landscape fire, could be fundamentally entangled with many broad-spectrum revolutions associated with intensified foraging systems.
The immediate function of Martu
burning operates at the scale of the
patch and is designed to clear off
large stands of hummock grass (spi-
nifex, Triodia spp.) in order to
increase the efficiency of searching
for and tracking small animals, primarily burrowed ones
The Eland Bull Male has the most fat around the heart and so the San Bushmen consider the Fat of the Eland male Bull as the best source of N/om (same as Daoist Jing energy - effectively ionized electrochemical neurohormones turned into increased neurotransmitters to create laser healing energy). Study Dr. Brad Keeney's youtube channel for detail - his article, "Re-Entry into First Creation" free pdf - has details. The oldest spiritual dance is the Eland Bull Dance where the female at first menstruation as the strongest N/om and so she turns into a male Eland Bull that also has the strongest N/om due to the most FAT around the heart.
Jessica Thompson on fat and the origins of modern humans - vid
Ancient Bones and the Origin of the Human Diet
Lucy's Kind did not have big canines, like a Chimpanzee, meaning that she was not needing to tear her meat.... (indicating tool use to prepare the meat)...
The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago.
We argue that concepts of meat-eating and tool use are too loosely defined: outside-bone nutrients (e.g., meat) and inside-bone nutrients (e.g., marrow and brains) have different macronutrient characteristics (protein vs. fat), mechanical requirements for access (cutting vs. percussion), search, handling and competitive costs, encounter rates, and net returns. Thus, they would have demanded distinct technological and behavioral solutions. We propose that the regular exploitation of large-animal resources—the “human predatory pattern”—began with an emphasis on percussion-based scavenging of inside-bone nutrients, independent of the emergence of flaked stone tool use. This leads to a series of empirical test implications that differ from previous “meat-eating” origins scenarios.
By ca. 3.5 Ma, with later australopiths,
brain size had undergone an increase proportional to the increase
it would later see with Homo (Kimbel and Villmoare
2016), and canine size had already long been significantly reduced
in both males and females. Hand proportions were also
more humanlike than apelike, and adaptations for terrestriality
were present throughout the skeleton (Ward, Kimbel, and
Johanson 2011). Diversity in habitat preference characterized
these and other later australopiths, with habitat reconstructions
that range from relatively wet, closed woodlands to much more
open conditions (Rowan and Reed 2015).
Carbon isotopic evidence from Au. afarensis (Wynn et al.
2013) and Au. africanus (van der Merwe et al. 2003) indicates
increased use of open habitats but a diet highly variable between
individuals. At least some individuals had diets largely
based on foods that use the C4 photosynthetic pathway (tropical
grasses and sedges) or herbivores/insects that fed upon those
foods. In contrast, earlier hominins such as Au. anamensis or the
even earlier Ardipithecus ramidus (White et al. 2009) included
relatively few C4/CAM foods in their diet, showing stronger C3
signalsmore consistentwith feeding off parts of shrubs and trees
(Cerling et al. 2013). This provides further support for later
australopiths as versatile omnivores that could exploit a range
of resources across many habitats (Alemseged 2015).
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