In Conan's Land

As I have made clear in my postings, the ice age polar ice cap needed to be centered on the pole as much as possible to minimize growing imbalance in the crust. We have already dealt with the real slipperiness of the crust itself and shown that this objection is no objection at all.

We have asserted that humanity chose to trigger a crustal movement about 12900 BP in order to position the crust in such a way as to induce the full effect of the Gulf Stream and usher in the Holocene. This was clearly a precisely targeted event induced by a Comet strike on the pole itself. It is literally too good to be true if it was not planned deliberately.

However, it appears that a similar crustal movement occurred coincident with the peak of the ice age at around 19,000 BP that was a natural outcome of the building imbalance of the crust and though a random event, it did begin the process of deglaciation itself, but not nearly so effectively as the 12,900 BP event which completed the job in a couple of millennia.

The best evidence for this occurring is simply the fact that the second event was planned at all. You would only try that if you knew it would work.

A little bit of Pleistocene geography now needs to be reconstructed. Firstly, the temperate zone was the home of our known Pleistocene menagerie of mammoths, bison, mega lions, huge bears and of course humanity. Because it was in the temperate belt a long growing season was available. However it was all dominated by glacial weather that kept temperature variation changing over several degrees making agriculture very difficult and unlikely.

In Eurasia, this zone was most of two thousand kilometers wide and several thousand kilometers long. It was well watered and replete with ample plant fodder to support the massive herds. There were also ample semi protected valleys in which humanity could commence pastoralism and perhaps even some garden plot agriculture. The human population was likely huge because of the ease of big game hunting.

Secondly, the Indian sub continent was positioned on the equator and had a climate similar to the Amazon, Indonesia and the Congo. Human populations would have been organized as hunter gatherers as common in these regions. Successful agriculture has only occurred on tropical soils with the advent of terra preta in the Amazon five thousand years ago and more recently with some application of modern capital intensive methods.

That made it unattractive to northern hunting cultures that could migrate easily from Central Asia.

We can also surmise from the forgoing that these populations had ample prewarning of the coming impact event of 12,900 BP and were able to properly shelter themselves from the atmospheric shock waves.

Pleistocene Central Asia in particular was thirty degrees in latitude further south and obviously a much moister environment that was rich in food and fodder for the Pleistocene menagerie. It was certainly well populated with human hunters to a density comparable to such societies in Africa. Thus we have a dominant Central Asian culture with a southern tropical perimeter not unlike the surrounds of the Congo and the Amazon. They had plausibly already domesticated cattle to stabilize their lifeway and liberate themselves from following the wild herds were all the predators were.

My point is that the Northern Pleistocene was far richer and dominant than we have ever imagined and once understood in that light the later emergence of derivative populations becomes understandable. This huge areal expanse interacted with a likely host of local tribal groupings on the perimeter that to day are still recognizable as Europeans, Aryans and Chinese with all gradations in between.

The claim in the Vedas that the Indian populations and culture arose from an influx from the ‘Arctic’ and environs then is clearly explained. That influx was ongoing long before the 12,900 BP event, but lacked the necessary large herds to support hunting unless they brought cattle with them. If they brought cattle herds then they would have established large populations early on just as we are doing so in the Amazon today.

The crustal shift northward changed all that into the present climate regime and effectively forced populations out of their old hunting grounds as they dried out. They would naturally have gone south to join their kinsmen.

We have always been assuming geographical association with specific characteristics. The littoral of central Asia was rich and well connected for the mixing of a wide range of characteristics to be able to accommodate all of this in a population that was notably brown skinned but also highly variable.

Thus we can make a first basic generalization about the pre agricultural human populations. There were two obvious lifeways. The one was centered in tropical conditions, of which a modern day example is Papua - New Guinea. Their lifeway engaged in local gardening and small game hunting and inter tribal predatory warfare.

The second dominant lifeway was the temperate big game hunting society with a plausible application of pastoralism. We have images of Conan confronting these monsters with a spear in hand. Somehow, that never happened. Stampeding such an animal over a cliff is much safer or crowding it into a sealable box canyon, or as in Africa, simply dig a really good pit fall. You still need the big spear, but you will not be endangering yourself.

Converting the meat into strips for drying and producing pemmican was surely the principle method of using all such meat. Most of it was tough and needing prolonged stewing otherwise. Obviously a single mammoth would provide many thousands of pounds of fresh meat which could be dried and preserved in fat after pulverizing to produce thousands of individual daily rations. It is realistic to expect a single mammoth to provide a year’s rations for a single hunting band totaling up to twenty members. Pretty good return on a month’s effort.

That also explains the general economy of the plains Indians who maintained buffalo jumps. Once the preserved meat was in place, all other hunting was a pleasant pastime.

Thus we find that the post 12,900 BP world became difficult for the northern populations at the same time that the southern perimeter dried out and became more amenable to the lifeways of pastoralists. Of course they migrated bringing a more productive lifeway with them.

Eating Kangeroo to Combat Climate Change

This small item out of Australia revisits one of my hobby horses. That sound animal husbandry needs to be applied throughout the world and oceans in order to optimize the ecological footprint. This does not happen naturally without human input. What happens naturally is that you get a predator prey boom and bust cycle that usually is ended with major damage to the sustaining environment.

It then starts all over again from a seriously weakened base. This is presently been demonstrated by the global collapse of fisheries due to unmanaged human predation. Both the folly and the cure are obvious but the predators never unite to preserve their futures until extinction is faced and even then they have the option of merely exiting the business and abandoning the wreckage.

We have already visited the clear benefits of a restoration of bison to both its historical range and also to European and Asian ranges in which their counterparts were hunted to extinction. I have also posted on the rising need to commence direct management of the wild deer herds everywhere through ownership and culling. In North America, the herd sizes are becoming visible and thus about to become far too large to be left alone. And in spite of the occasional comments by very silly people, we do not want a rebuilding of the wolf and grizzly populations. Primate children are even easier morsels for these predators.

This article shows we have the same style of problem with the kangaroo in Australia. Prolific herbivores create huge populations in difficult environments because they are adapted to it. They have to be managed and certainly systematically harvested. It is not even a particularly difficult problem because the actual weights of most of these animals are within our normal handling range. The only thing extra that we will likely want to do is to find a way to corral them and fatten them for a short time to reduce any toughness and gaminess in the meat. Again this is all within our ability. The fact that we are easily taming the buffalo bodes very well for the future of this endeavor.

We have learned that the beef animal that we rely on has been pushed into many ecological niches to which it is less suited. We have done this with all our domesticates and it is actually unnecessary. It is not too obvious, but the taste differences between different meat varieties are not all that significant and will even diminish as husbandry takes charge and eliminates the causes of gaminess and other off flavors. We all forget that we are terribly spoiled today when it comes to the meats we eat. Does anyone recall the flavor of old hen and mutton?

North America can possibly produce venison at the same magnitude as it today produces beef without much ecological overlap. The same may partially hold true for kangaroo meat and is certainly true for a huge number of herbivores worldwide. We just have to get into the business of individually owning the animals and then managing their productivity.

As is so well highlighted in this article, the environmental dividend is always positive because we are managing for optimization rather than either replacement or elimination.

Eating kangaroos to combat climate change?

Fri, 08/08/2008 - 1:04pm

TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images

If going green isn't cool anymore in today's economic climate, this recent batch of news isn't going to help. According to a recent study published in the journal Conservation Letters, farming and eating kangaroos instead of cattle and sheep would made a dent in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike sheep and cattle, kangaroos emit little methane, which accounts for 11 percent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. The study suggests that increasing the kangaroo population to 175 million while simultaneously decreasing the number of other livestock would lower emissions by 3 percent over the next 12 years. The plan would have added benefits for soil conservation, drought response, and water quality as a result of reducing the number of hard-hoofed livestock.

Still, there's the small issue of kangaroos being a national icon and all:

The change will require large cultural and social adjustments and reinvestment. One of the impediments to change is protective legislation and the status of kangaroos as a national icon," [the study] said.

Greatest Human Ecological Disaster

The global warming debate is driven by growing public unease throughout the world over our visible disregard for good husbandry practices in our industrial economy. It is expressing itself most clearly over the CO2 issue, even though this is most likely a red herring. The direct linkage to global warming is at least controversial, and I for one have a great deal of faith in the Earth’s carbon cycle and its ability to restore such imbalances.

More importantly, the ecological movement is about good husbandry. And strange as it may sound, it is not about conservation. Mankind has already transformed most of the environment to serve its needs thousands of years ago, and mankind’s task increasingly is to improve on this legacy. The only areas that we can rightly conserve are inimical to human habitation and even that often needs the fine hand of good husbandry practice.

With the true wild a policy of haven maintenance must be implemented to properly manage human exploitation. An ideal model of this is to overlay a checkerboard and designate every ninth square as a haven. Of course in practice, this must be negotiated and studied in detail to ensure proper sizing sufficient to the various needs. For example, it makes plenty more sense to preserve old growth forests as a corridor along river beds. Once stake holders understand what is at stake, it can sort itself out quickly.

Let us put this argument in reverse. Extinction is the direct result of a loss of habitat havens. Distributed havens of old growth forests sufficient to support the spotted owl ends threats to that species and as the forests recover their range naturally expands. If we learn to manage havens then our industrial scale exploitation can be recovered from.

Remember, the bison succumbed to the global shoe leather market. Had havens not existed in Canada, the current 500,000 animal herd would simply not exist. Today that herd is on the way back to its millions and people living today will live to see many millions of bison on the prairie because it is simply a better meat animal for that particular climate. I also expect to see the bison introduced into the steppes of central Asia, restoring the native bison hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. That is good husbandry.

It came as a complete surprise to me to learn that the areal extent of the terra preta in the Amazon basin equals that of France. If this is true, then the acreage and the corn and cassava culture would easily have supported massive populations equal to that of contemporaneous India and China. What really stunned me is the fact that if it was not for the soil itself, we would have no evidence whatsoever that such a culture even existed. The Amazon was a lousy place to build permanent structures that could be found in the jungle, although we now will be looking.

What I find most sobering is that tens of millions of individuals have lived theirs lives and passed leaving almost no trace of their existence. How often has this happened globally over the past 10,000 years? Societies do not build with stone unless they are highly organized so a lack of such evidence is very misleading. The so called Stone Age for example did an excellent job of leaving evidence of its existence behind, even though a better name would be the wood and bone age. I have no difficulty setting out to construct a very sufficient tool kit with those two items as the Indians in the Amazon do to this day.

When copper became available and later iron, both metals were too valuable to throw out, so the material was constantly recycled. Yet populations expanded and social complexity increased. The only evidence left would be in the form of pottery. You can also bet that even broken pottery had some commercial value and was largely recycled.

We all know that large populations existed in the Middle East and even Europe, simply because we have looked hard enough. The Sahara desert represents several million square miles and it was once populated and the climate was amenable to agriculture. At least they raised goats. Recall today that the southern edge of this desert currently houses 100,000,000 people in conditions almost as technically primitive as 6,000 years ago on perhaps ten percent of the Saharan littoral. The fools still raise goats.

It has been argued that the collapse of the Sahara was a natural disaster. I suspect that just the opposite is true. It was instead the greatest human caused ecological disaster ever. It is as if China or India disappeared abruptly. Of course we do not know to what extent the desert was fully covered with vegetation. Since an extensive lake system existed I am inclined to err on the side of a nearly one hundred percent coverage, however fragile and terribly susceptible to easy devastation by the grazing of goats.

It is just now in our power to restore this desert back to human agriculture and general fertility just as it is possible to restore the terra preta fields of the Amazon to agriculture. It would be nice to actually absorb that big chunk of solar energy hitting the Sahara and bouncing back out. And a Sahara restored can support a couple of billion people at least.