Wednesday, December 29, 2021

What Year did we cross the tipping point? As far back as the cognitive revolution more than 30,000 years ago? Or was it Fire use?

 3000 BCE to 5000 BCE most males were killed off by warfare

So there was a "genetic bottleneck" in humanity as metal weapons were produced....during the Bronze Age...

 Most of the male population across Asia, Europe and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women.

I guess the "New World" was sparred but there was a "genetic bottleneck" in the New World just due to the Bering Strait migration that caused a split into two small groups - one going to South America...

 "Our belief used to be that the center of humans leaving Africa was in East Africa. This paper focuses attention on southern Africa, and in particular to a group of hunter-gatherers, the Bushmen, who speak one of the Khoisan languages," said Feldman. These languages are characterized by the presence of "click" sounds.

https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/feldman-africa-genetics-030411.html 

Contrary to the claim of GEE McPherSon - the "cognitive revolution" was well-before 30,000 years ago....

 So GEE McFearSun is claiming the Mt. Toba supervolcano created the loss of the stratospheric ozone 

the loss of stratospheric ozone...that occurred also in the past about 74000 years ago when the Toba supervolcano went off...
GEE McFearSun... But they cite just one paper that is just an analysis without the archaeological evidence while there is conflicting evidence stating otherwise:

 Supervolcano Not to Blame for Humanity's Near-Extinction

GEE McFearSun quote: starting around 15 minutes:

Some thousands of years ago, several thousands of years ago, so maybe when we started growing brains at scale is when we made the fundamental mistake and went into human population overshoot. Or maybe it's worse than that. Maybe it was during the cognitive revolution, more than 30,000 years ago when humans, for reasons that are still not explained, humans became the first species that were able to imagine things that they did not personally experience - even without being able to taste and smell and see things: Humans were able to imagine things. And one of the consequences of that cognitive revolution was humans viewed themselves as superior to other organisms; superior to other - up until the cognitive revolution that didn't happen. We viewed ourselves as just another in a vast array of species. But during the cognitive revolution, we somehow came up with the idea that we are SUPERIOR to all the other species on Earth and what that did was gave us the right to kill and eat other species.. it gave us the right, in our minds, to torture other organisms... And you know that was at least 30,000 years ago....

This is one of the reasons that I have been promulgating the message that only love remains for such a very long time: No shame and no blame...somebody who lived more than 30,000 years ago? That doesn't make any sense. 

Actually I just documented from the "Radical Anthropology" scholars that our original human culture - the Baka culture - did intentionally not overkill animals - and had a peaceful culture without war, with spiritual healing as the foundation....

So no the "cognitive revolution" was NOT the cause of the tipping point....

The "cognitive revolution" was way before 30,000 years ago - more like 100,000 years ago in the Baka-San Bushmen culture....

Apart from the click-speaking hunter-gatherer populations from South Africa and Tanzania, they also studied Pygmies and 21 agriculturalist populations. Statistical analysis showed that the Bushmen had the greatest genetic variation and are most likely to be the source population from which all other African populations diverged.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07164-9  (2018 study)

 These preliminary results suggest that more than 40,000 years ago, two of the groups — the San and the Baka Pygmy — were roughly twice the size of other ethnic groups present at the time, and that the San and Baka overlapped in central-eastern or southern Africa. Researchers presented these as-yet unpublished results at an American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) meeting in San Diego, California, last week.

 No I'm not going to "shame and blame someone who lived more than 30,000 years ago" as GEE McFEarSun claims because the San Bushmen-Baka Pygmy culture is based on protecting ecology!!

Statistical models of the data indicate that the Hadza and the Sandawe people of Tanzania shared an ancestor in the past 30,000 years.

The findings also suggest that there was intermingling during that period between the Hadza, the San in southern Africa and the Baka in central Africa, all of whom were traditionally hunter-gatherers. “I think we are seeing an ancient common ancestry between the major hunter-gatherer groups in Africa,” Tishkoff says.

Some of the findings align with signals of mixed Hadza and San ancestry in DNA extracted from 2,500- to 8,100-year-old human remains1, says Pontus Skoglund, a palaeogeneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “I had been thinking about an interconnected hunter-gatherer population stretching from present-day Tanzania to South Africa.”

 fascinating.

 2020 study:

all Khoe-San groups display genetic diversity approaching the levels in other African groups and a reduction in effective population size starting around 100,000 years ago. Hence, all human groups show a reduction in effective population size commencing around the time of the Out-of-Africa migrations, which coincides with changes in the paleoclimate records, changes that potentially impacted all humans at the time.

 OK....

 we found the mean divergence time of all Khoe-San populations from all other groups to be within the 200–300 ka range

 The Mbuti then diverged around ∼220 ka, SD 10 ka (TT method: 215 ka, SD 9 ka), with the other population divergences occurring subsequently.

 WOW THE BAKA diverged from the Khoe-San around 220 ka?? amazing.

Population divergence estimates. (A) Schematic overview of the estimated population divergences. The colored nodes correspond to the population divergences that were estimated with the TT method and GPhoCS, and the estimates are presented in (B). (B) Distribution of divergence time estimates based on GPhoCS (unscaled estimates, means, and medians available in supplementary table S7.1, Supplementary Material online) and mean ± standard error of the divergence time estimated with the TT method (supplementary table S7.2, Supplementary Material online).

https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/118482841/A_two_million_year_long_hydroclimatic_context_for_hominin_evolution_in_southeastern_Africa.pdf

OK so I previously blogged on this:

https://elixirfield.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-earliest-anthropogenic-landscape-in.html

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.

 Unlike their Middle Pleistocene counterparts, however,
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.

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.

So the question is - do we know if the San Bushmen still use fire to change their landscape?

The use of fire in group hunting is more common in the grassland savannah areas. Members of the group are positioned strategically around a patch of grassland known to contain wild animals. The area is then set on fire and animals are killed with cutlasses and clubs as they run out of the area to escape the fire.

https://www.fao.org/3/W7540E/w7540e0i.htm

The thing is that I have NEVER seen that method of hunting described being used by the San Bushmen!!!

 Afolayan, 1980; Martin. 1983

Those are the references. I think I read that Martin book already for a University class! It's just a general overview book. Calvin Martin I think.

 Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade, Calvin Martin, 23 Nat. Resources J. 281 (1983).

Yeah - wouldn't expect that to be a good source of the Kalahari!!

So the other one?

 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2028.1980.tb00272.x

The influence of seasonality on the distribution of large mammals in the Yankari Game Reserve, Nigeria

Yeah that's NOT going to be on the San Bushmen either.... Oops.

By converting the natural seasonal rhythm of wildfire into something more controlled, people can encourage specific areas of vegetation to grow at different stages. This so-called “pyrodiversity” establishes miniature habitat patches and diversifies opportunities for foraging, kind of like increasing product selection at a supermarket.

 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/early-humans-used-fire-to-permanently-change-the-landscape

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164 

 Figure 2.

 

 

Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: the role of fire in the broad spectrum revolution

 That's on Australia....

Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene:
Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model

 

 yeah I don't know - scant evidence to be sure!

Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa

 F. Scherjon, C. Bakels, K. MacDonald, W. Roebroeks, Burning the land: An ethnographic study of off-site fire use by current and historically documented foragers and implications for the interpretation of past fire practices in the landscape. Curr. Anthropol. 56, 299–326 (2015).

 Herders in AFrica - but STILL no San Bushmen evidence!!


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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