Wild Globalization 1.0 (250,000-10,000 BCE)

G1.0-Out of Energy, Ice & Waters, Fire…and Darkness  

Wild Globalization (“WG”) starts deep and early. Possibly because of the Hubble telescope’s, and now Webb’s eyes, into deep space and time, human’s “skin of our teeth” march from nature’s seed can be now seen as a story of the Universe, a Solar System, our Earth home, and a remarkable “Bios” that nurtures, or destroys, life-forms. Hyper-natural human innovation-evolution emerges from this holistic “natural” circumstance. WG reminds the reader of the shocking breadth and depth of the natural world’s remarkable, actually miraculous, “Bios” because it sets in play the “order” of all life on Earth.

WG expands, actually, critics might claim it explodes, the definition of “civilization.” Fair enough. By adding “wild” to the mix WG may be changing the rules of perception. Human civilization’s far-reaching and impressive advancements (“creative” forces and “orders”) shadowed, even darkened, however by its horrific barbarities (“destructive” forces and “orders”) witnessed in the 20^th century demand, in our view, expanded data-sets, more comprehensive heuristics, and so wider horizons of interpretation. We are here less concerned with the “correct” answers and more focused on a fuller set of questions, particularly questions that spark critical thought and lively conversation between competing viewpoints.

Pause for a moment to consider others’ takes on “civilization”:

Richard Baldwin: “If nine workers…can produce enough food to feed ten people, the 10^th person can focus on “civilization services” (building monuments, creating religions, writing, collecting taxes, etc.) as well as military services…such services tended to be grouped in cities.  …the connection between cities and civilization is ancient and inevitable (the word “civilization” stems from the Latin word for city, civitas). (Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence – Information Technology and the New Globalization, 2016, p. 26-27)

Peter Berger: …“ ‘civil society’ consists of two parts, one structural, the other cultural.  Structurally, the term refers to the ensemble of institutions that stand in between the private sphere (which probably includes the family), on the one hand, and the macro-institutions of the state and the economy, on the other hand.”  (Peter Berger, Religion and Global Civil Society, Religion in Global Civil Society, 2008, p. 12)

David Fischer:  “Money, of course, is central to commerce and long ago replaced barter as the principle means of exchange for products and services. We know more about the history of money and the prices of things than any other historical subject. As Brandeis University professor David Fischer has pointed out: “Only one type of source material spans the entire range of written history: the record of prices…In the desert of Egypt, scholars have found papyri that record the cost of living in the time of the Pharaohs.” [David Fischer, David, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, 1996; quoted by Mark Mills, The Cloud Revolution, Encounter, 2021, p. 73)

Henry Ford: “The source of material civilization is developed power. If one has this developed power at hand, then a use for it will easily be found. …The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies thorough power; the machine is only an incident.” (Henry Ford, quoted in Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology, 1999, p. 87.)

William Goetzmann: “Cultures are structures of interrelated institutions, language, ideas, values, myths, and symbols.  They tend to be exclusive, even tribal.  Civilizations, on the other hand, are open to new customs and ideas.  They are syncretistic, chaotic, and often confusing societal information systems.  They continue to grow in the richness, variety and complexity of societal experience.”  (William Goetzmann, Beyond the Revolution:  A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism, 2015, p. xii.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “History and societies do not crawl.  They make jumps.  They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between.  Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007, 11)

Alvin & Heidi Toffler: “…the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrialism….This divorce of production from consumption…affected our psyches and our assumptions about personality.  Behavior came to be seen as a set of transactions.  Instead of a society based on friendship, kinship, or tribal or feudal allegiance, there arose in the wake of the Second Wave a civilization based on contractual ties, actual or implied.  (Toffler, The Third Wave,1980, 55-58) 

 “…The revolutionary wealth [of the “knowledge economies”]…is an upheaval similar to but even more sweeping than the industrial revolution – when thousands of seemingly unrelated changes came together to form a new economic system, accompanied by nothing less than a new way of life, a new civilization, called “modernity.”  (Toffler, Alvin & Heidi, Revolutionary Wealth, 2006, xiii-xiv)

David Wootton: “There have been tool-making ‘humans’ on Earth for around 2 million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared 200,000 years ago, and pottery dates back to around 25,000 years ago. But the most important transformation in human history before the invention of science, the Neolithic Revolution, took place comparatively recently, between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago.  It was then that animals were domesticated, agriculture began, and stone tools began to be replaced by metal ones. There have been roughly 600 generations since human beings first ceased to be hunter-gatherers. The first sailing vessel dates back to 7,000 years or so ago, and so does the origin of writing…what we may term historical humankind (humans who have left written records behind them), as opposed to archaeological humankind (humans who have left only artifacts behind them), has existed only for about that length of time, some 300 generations…This is the true length of human history; before that there were two million years of prehistory.”  (David Wootton,  The Invention of Science:  A New History of the Scientific Revolution, 2015, 3-4)

“Wild”
“Wild,” on the other or under hand, works a bit differently. From an undersided and underset of momentums. Wild momentums, both “creative” and “destructive” forces, energies, emergences and emergencies of “order.” Seemingly “spontaneous orders” which incessantly clash and compete. “Wild,” then, is not without “order.” Wild charts an actual evolution of order(s) that have gathered force and momentum over the entire reach of Earth’s and now human history.

Proto-humans and Homo sapiens, our version, changed the rules, began to innovate and so accelerate evolution itself. Rather than moving at the pace of genetic mutation and natural selection, humans competed, scratched, even cheated nature by cleverly inventing tools and techniques that define us even today. Knowledge, the basis of today’s global economy, has its deep roots in a native human intelligence earned by trial and error and so either bestowed by or cheated from nature, herself, hundreds of thousands of years ago. We built on it. We stand on the shoulders of giants who eeked “it” out.  

WG’s big challenge to the reader asks: “Does this take us to a new promontory where “we,” that is, the diverse peoples and tribes and nations of our global community, might be able to take on the daunting and dire survival challenges of the 21st century, and beyond?” “Can we invent, innovate and dream our way forward using the two consummate tools we carried out of the deep savannahs and dark forests – that is, on the one hand, our keen ability to “think the Cosmos” (“Science”), and, on the other hand, our uniquely human “spiritual” desire (“Faith”) to live and express the consumate “soul” of human life, the lives and memory of our families now passed, our communities, our peoples, indeed, what it means to be a living, even prescient, being on this global home, Earth, but even then what any or all life signifies in the being of the Universe, itself, or beyond?
Let us see.

STREAM OF LIFE – ENERGY “ORDERS”

“Starting from nothing 4 billion years ago, life somehow contrived to capture high-grade energy from here and there and used it to assemble more life — so successfully, in fact, that life, a very complex form of order, now covers the planet. A second chain reaction of rising order got started with the dawn of agriculture, about eight thousand years ago. Human societies began selectively planting and breeding crops to capture solar energy systematically, and they used the expanding supplies of energy mainly to breed more people, who planted more crops. Humanity’s total energy consumption doubled about every five to ten centuries thereafter, in step with the (slowly) rising population.”ⁱ 

Peter Huber & Mark Mills 

• In The Bottomless Well (2005) Peter Huber and Mark Mills tell the incredible story of “energy order” as it shapes and powers life on earth. Remarkably, we live today at the “top” of a billions-year-old energy pyramid.
• Current cosmological theory holds that roughly 14 billion years ago the present observable universe is thought to have “come into existence” in a singular “Big Bang” event, an unimaginably violent “explosion” which “ejected” all the matter (visible as well as “dark” matter), and marked the “…beginning of space, time, matter, energy…the Universe.” [Source: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/big+bang]  The “everything” is in quotes here because, just like looking forward 14 billion years into the future, looking backward is also a stretch – it’s a wild imagining but with more possible facts-data-theory to rely on.  That noted, cosmologists even today have no idea what “dark” matter “is” though it may comprise as much as 85-90% of the “stuff” of the universe! 

Here’s the time-line of Earth’s 4.5B year history – note how “Hominins” @2 million years includes our Homo sapiens’ 250,000 years – is just the thin, very, line at the end of the loop:

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Something extremely subtle was taking place along this multi-billion/million-year trek – that is, the “extraction” and accumulation, and ordering, by hit and miss, of energy. The “stream of life,” in its most essential growth (or “scaling” – as we will begin to read it) is about “energy pyramids.” Homo sapien, in our hunting and meat-consuming ways, climbed the energy food-supply-chain to both dominate food resources but of course, at the same time, precariously, and as we are today, to become entirely dependent upon the lower rungs of the chain itself – we ate meat because it was the most energy-intensive food needed for our energy-devouring brains, but that meat had run up a vital pyramid to get to our hearths and tables. Energy is more about “orders” than quantity, it’s about “energy pyramids”:

• Energy “pyramids”: Over the Earth’s 4-5 billion years the process of energy ordering gives rise to the gradual capture of exponentially greater energy concentrations (e.g., solar to carbohydrate to carbon, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium).  Contrary to the possible “entropy” (A Greek term meaning “in-turning,” and which names the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, defined by Huber and Mills as the “winding down,” the “gradual decline toward disorder”) of the larger Universe, Earth’s processes appear to reflect increasing energy “orders.” Example: As Huber & MIlls point out, high-energy modern surgical lasers are powered by the energy supply chain – so, for example, @6,600 Kilowatt Hours (kWh) of base thermal energy powers the fine and focused beam of the surgical laser; but only roughly half of the total energy needed reaches the final “highly ordered” kWh’s of concentrated laser energy, while the remaining energy is lost in generation and transmission (energy waste). So increasing energy order, energy spent to concentrate energy, to focus the energy stream. The same principle holds when we drive our kids to baseball practice – the energy to build the vehicle has already been inputted to build the car, and the final “motive” power (e.g., gasoline or natural-gas or electric) is only the last energy input. 

• Earth’s energy supply-chain: First, solar energy is absorbed by vegetation >>> Herbivores transform @10% of solar energy into carbohydrate energy, expelling the remainder; >>> Carnivores consume herbivores and absorb an exponentially larger energy fraction >>> Human evolution exploits higher food-chain nutrition (meat) to support larger brain-size and intelligence >>> Also, vast amounts of energy gets naturally stored or “sequestered” in the deep fabric of the Earth itself (e.g., hydrocarbons such as petroleum and natural gas) >>> Human evolution exploits these fuels (first wood but then, e.g., coal-oil-natgas-uranium, as well as immediate solar/wind sources). Human innovative intelligence persistently innovates expansive energy resources – for example, WG will track the recent “Second shale revolution” where, from the 1990s to the present, the U.S. electric grid increases its conversion from coal-fired to natural gas-fired power and even though the U.S. economy doubles (gross domestic product or “GDP”) in that same period, CO2 emissions drop to 1990s levels. [Source: Daniel Yergin, The New Map – energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, New York: Penguin Press, 2020, p. 8-13]

• Today 700-800 million people (out of @7.4 billion) do not yet have accesses to electricity; consequently, energy demand will continue to dramatically transform the global economy and its geo-political alliances and inter-dependencies; the new automating and energy-intensive (e.g., robotics, the “Cloud,” digitization) 21^st century production economy will require substantially greater electricity (energy) supplies, than ever. [As you read or peruse WG your iPhone, Android, or iPad, you are “in” the “Cloud” which now uses energy equal to two Japan’s.]    

In each successive level of the food-chain, “Life itself has evolved as an energetic pyramid…‘the animals at the base of a food-chain are relatively abundant, while those at the end are relatively few in numbers, and there is a progressive decrease in between the two extremes.’ ” [Huber & Mills, Bottomless Well, p. 50-51; quoting Charles Elton’s concept of the “grand pattern of life.”] The cleverest hunters end up at the top of things, and that energy food-chain delivers, eventually and exactly what (?) – the evolution of human encephalization – i.e., intelligence. On a purely energetic level, highly advanced human intelligence, which demands exponentially greater metabolic energies, is the product of energy supply chains which originate from sunlight and then scale up the energetic pyramid of life.

In its most essential reach, human globalizing evolution is an energy-flow: “Over the broad arch of human history, from the nomadic hunter-gatherer to Rome to modern America, the rise of population, life expectancy, great cities, military might, and scientific knowledge has been propelled  by rising energy consumption. It is by mastering power itself — the capture and release of energy—that societies master everything else.” [Source: Huber & Mills, Ibid, xxix-xxx]

But energy is more than the metabolic food-chain. It’s also about “motive” (as in Baldwin’s “moving things, ideas, and people”) but actually it’s about moving and incessantly tapping into more energy, itself – energy chasing and “ordering” energy. Globalizing civilization doesn’t live under the “constraint” of energy. Rather, it lives and thrives as energy achieves higher orders. Even as the 21st century’s toys and devices are innovated to be more efficient, we actually need and use more energy as more of us get our hands on an iPhone or iPad or EV. We live in an “energy order.” [Source: Huber, Peter W., and Mills, Mark P., The Bottomless Well – The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. xxix-xxx, 50; Huber & Mills are quoting work by Charles Elton, Animal Ecology, 1st ed., 1927, Sidgwick and Jackson, London.]

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Along the way, energy order innovation creates greater efficiency – we constantly do more with less.  As market demand increases, innovation and competition bring us cheaper and more efficient iPhones and IPads, cars and trucks, homes and buildings, aircraft, spacecraft (e.g., NASA’s Shuttle cost more than $1B per launch over its program life; SpaceX may be less than $100M/launch.) [Source: Vidya Sagar Reddy, New Space June 2018, 125-134, http://doi.org/10.1089/space.2017.0032]. But as Huber and Mills emphasize, efficiency and lower costs actually trigger greater (much) energy demand, not less: “Today’s aircraft, for example, are three times as energy efficient as the first commercial passenger jets in the 1950s. That didn’t reduce fuel use but propelled air traffic to soar and, with it, a four-fold rise in jet fuel burned. Similarly, it was the astounding gains in computing’s energy efficiency that drove the meteoric rise in data traffic on the internet – which resulted in far more energy used by computing. Global computing and communication now consumes the energy equivalent of 3 billion barrels of oil per year, more energy than global aviation.” [Source: “The ‘New Energy Economy’:  An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” Manhattan Institute, March 2019, Manhattan Institute, 3-2019, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf; Alice Larkin et al., “Air Transport, Climate Change and Tourism,” Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development 6, no. 1 (April 2009): 7–20; 89 International Council on Clean Transportation, “Fuel Efficiency Trends for New Commercial Jet Aircraft: 1960 to 2014,” August 2015; Mark P. Mills, “Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 1: Bitcoins & Behemoth Datacenters,” Real Clear Energy, Sept. 19, 2018; Mark P. Mills, “Energy and the Information Infrastructure Part 3: The Digital ‘Engines of Innovation’ & Jevons’ Delicious Paradox,” Real Clear Energy, Dec. 11, 2018.]

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Human civilization lives in the time and space and flow of energy. Even the Big Bang’s trace energy, its background “noise,” is still detectable. We can hear it.  Its voice remains immersed in a kind of cosmic vibration still detectable today. How does science “know” this? The answer is brilliant scientific theory by physicists Ralph Alpher, George Gamow, and Hans Bethe, and then, not so theoretically, bird poop. You see, the actual empirical evidence of the Big Bang was discovered accidentally in 1965 by two Bell Labs astronomists (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson) who were getting a background “hiss-like” static on their radar instruments which they first thought was caused by bird droppings, but when they cleaned the poop the hiss persisted:  “It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace vibrations of the birth of the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation (“CMB”).” [Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007, p. 167-168.] The physicists’ map suddenly became real, wildly real.  We live today in the subtle vibrating “tone” of the original universal Big Bang. Cosmic “bird poop on radars” might be a stunning example of “cairn” trekking – Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for working out a practical research problem.

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Out of the ice & WATERS – Global climate: 

“These three fundamental frequencies of climatic oscillation are termed Milankovitch frequencies…after Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch…who [calculated] the first handmade graphs of Earth’s recent climatic history…”

“Milankovitch’s insight, following that of the self-taught British geologist and physicist John Croll…was to appreciate that the distribution of radiant solar energy received across planet Earth changes through time in correspondence with fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit. These orbital variations are caused by gravitational interaction with the other planets of the Solar System, and affect both the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit around the sun… the path of the orbit varies from more or less elliptical on a 100,000 year scale; the tilt of the Earth’s axis varies slightly, between 22.1˚ and 24.5˚ on a 41,000 cycle; and, third, the Earth’s tilted axis also precesses (‘wobbles’) on a roughly 20,000 year cycle.”

“The changing geometries exert a marked effect on Earth’s seasonality, which in turn controls the accumulation of snow and ice at the high latitudes at which the great northern hemisphere ice sheets accumulated over the last few million years.”

“Since about 0.6 million years ago…each major glacial-interglacial oscillation has occurred on the longer, 100,000-year periodicity.”

“For more than 90% of this time the Earth’s mean temperature was cooler, and often much cooler (up to ~6˚C), than today.”

“Warm interglacial periods comprised less than 10% of the time, and on average last only 10,000 years.”

“Civilization and our modern society developed during the most recent warm interglacial period (the Holocene), which has lasted 10,000 years. In many places, temperatures…were up to 1-2˚C warmer than today.”

Robert M Carter

Water. We came from the waters. Water covers seventy per cent of this blue planet Earth and is essential to the global Bios. Fifty-sixty percent of the human body is comprised of water and with a salinity (salt content) thought to reflect the salinity of the oceans when life first emerged from it. An Austrian bricklayer survived locked in a jail cell for 18 days (the Guinness Record) but the average survival rate without replenishment is just 3 days.

Here on America’s High Plains and at the foot of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains what water is doing, or not, defines our weather, crops, most everything – we get @18 inches of rain and another 70 or so of snow. Yet our westerly “Chinook” or “snoweater” winds move a lot of it out into the Great Plains and so our civilization depends on annual snowmelts caught, or not, in mountain reservoirs.

Water, as ice, gas or liquid, moves. At the margins, as gas it moves subtly, serreptitiously in the climate’s atmospheric winds, or catastrophically in the fury of thunder storms and tornadoes on land or as hurricanes and typhoons in the great oceans.

Water also moves without the push of weather and climate. The Earth Bios is home to tsunami waves that are triggered by geologic events such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, and landslides collapsing into fjords and oceans. Climax “mega”-tsuanmis move with almost divine force and scale – as they rush across open oceans their momentums submerge, but reaching landfall megatsuanmis can grow to hundreds of feet high moving at hundreds of miles per hour. Ocean waters adjacent to volcanoes are particularly vulnerable to megatsunamis – the Hawaiin Islands fragile slopes imperil Pacific coastlines, and the Atlantic’s Canary Islands’ Cumbre Vieja volcano threatens Africa and all of the America’s eastern seaboards.

Our Blue Planet is blue because of water. How life, including and especially human life, lives beside and with the Earth’s waters portends much of the planet’s, and our global civilization’s, future survival. We’ve always lived in and around oceans – yet today 3 billion of us live precariously within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of coastal seaboards and so vulnerable to the waters’ hurricanes, typhoons, and tsunamis.

Globalization has moved over and on (and now under) Earth’s waters for 100,000 years. Current “Out of Africa” theories (see below) postulate that humans spread out from that continent, beginning around 75-100,000 BP (“Before the Present”), reaching the Americas by 14,000 BP. In just 3-4,000 generations Homo sapien had occupied and begun to dominate the Earth’s spaces. We’ve been “globalizaing” for 100,000 years. And under – today, 85% of all global commerce moves on the seas, 90% of global data flows through undersea communcation cables, and vast amounts of energy (oil and natural gas) are extracted from the global economy’s ocean-borne rigs.* [Source: Bruce Jones, To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers, New York: Scribner, 2021, Kindle Edition, p. 48-50.)

Map of early human migations based onthe Out of Africa theory; figures are in thousands of years ago (kya). Source pubs.usgs.gov; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Early_migrations_mercator.svg

The oceans’ waters also move on universal momentums as the Moon’s local gravity pulls tides “in” and “out.” Subtle, even “magical,” because just like “dark matter” (see further forward) science has yet to understand gravity’s force. These solar system momentums were theorized in the 19th century by, among others, a self-taught Scottish scientist named John Croll while he worked as a janitor at Glasgow’s Andersonian University museum. A true self-taught, “cairn-trekker” thinker! The concepts in Croll’s 1875 Climate and Time were finally applied to mathematical and physical calculations in the early 20th century by the Serbian astronomer and climatologist Miluntin Milanković. What can the Milankovitch Cycles tell us? 

Milankovitch Cycles Tracking Croll and Milanković, 20th and 21st century climatologists are (just) beginning to understand (and debate) how the variations in the Earth’s flight through the Solar System trigger, and may even dominate, long-term climate.   

Human Evolution and Climate: @2-3 million years of the genus homo and @200-250,000 years of our Homo sapien’s run occurred in the throes of global glaciation events which paleo-climatologists project will likely persist into the future. Curiously, and unlike the eminent paleo-climatologist, Robert Carter, quoted above, few observers appear to appreciate that human “civilization” (@10-15,000 years BCE to present) has emerged (just barely) during the most recent “climate optimum,” or the “normal” 10-15,000 year pauses in Milankovitch cycled glaciations. For example, as recently as 20,000 years ago the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of North America to depths up to 2 miles (3.2 km), rendering most of Canada uninhabitable for thousands of years. Human numbers are estimated to have declined to as few as 30,000 souls during climate and global-winter extremes. Imagine our world today under a 100,000 year glaciation period. Climate was a much rougher deal for these early folks – they shivered whle we bask in an “optimum.”

Three sets of disciplines, each with many sub-disciplines, study climate science:  

• Paleoclimatology includes many diverse earth sciences in the study of the deep history of climate. These sciences use a variety of “proxy” or indirect, and sub-discipline methods (for example, growth patterns of tree rings, istotope measuresments from deep ice cores, ancient pollen, coral, micro-fossil and other organic and inorganic geologic data) to estimate the past conditions of the Earth’s climates and atmosphere. For example, atmospheric data stretches many hundreds of years (ice cores at depths of 770 meters) to many thousands (ice cores at 2500 meters) to hundreds of thousands (ice cores at 3000 meters) deep. These sciences have emerged primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries as a result of new, advanced research technologies and methods.
• Meteorology includes a diverse set of atmospheric sciences primarily concerned with weather forecasting. Meterology has ancient roots, particularly in marine weather forecasting. It has advanced in the last 100 years with the development of sub-disciplines including atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, and computer (“numerical”) weather modelling (e.g., hurricane forecasting). 

• IT (Information Technology) or “Numerical” Weather Modeling includes short-term hurricane prediction and has also been deployed to project weather many decades into the future. It is still an emerging science and its models have been vulnerable to inaccurate longer-term predictions. Even with super-computer modelling, for example, numerical forecasting has been unable to accurately model or reconstruct past weather events using known data.  

The above summary over-simplifies the complexity of the many diverse fields of climatology. Actually, climatology flourishes under literally scores of sub-disciplines and sciences. From WG’s “layman” view it’s essential to note that the constant emergence of new data, new technologies, even entirely new sub-sciences just in the recent past 50 years reveals a set of disciplines in exciting and dynamic, and often early development. That’s just to say that this is cutting edge stuff and that scientists are in many if not most cases struggling to decipher, interpret and inter-relate the steams of new data. Naturally, there is disagreement and even sharply differing conclusions even within sub-disciplines and before (if ever) all of the multiple disciplines might even try to sit down in the same room and haggle, arm-wrestle, or “beer” their differences.

“Modern,” very-high-tech climatology has emerged in just the past 50-100 years, and really just the last 1-2 generations of scientists. It’s not unrealistic to observe that they have learned a lot, more than ever, yet perhaps “enough” to realize that they’ve just scratched the surface, that what they do know is just a sketch of what they don’t know and have yet to learn. Robert Carter, quoted above, and a recognized Australian climatologist, states it this way: “My reference files categorize climate change into more than one hundred subdiscipline areas of relevant knowledge.  Like most other climate scientists, I possess deep expertise in at most two or three of these subdisciplines.” [Source: Carter, Climate: The Counter-Consensus, 2010, p. 27.) Essex and McKitrick, addressing the “heated” political topic of global warming, observe: “Global warming is a topic that sprawls in a thousand directions.  There is no such thing as an ‘expert‘ on global warming, because no one can master all the relevant subjects.  On the subject of climate change everyone is an amateur on many if not most of the relevant topics.” [Source: Essex, C., & McKitrick, R., 2002 Taken by Storm. – The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, Key Porter Books, Toronto, p. 12.)

Wild Globalization asks why there there appears to be such an apparent lack of cummunication, even at times positive regard, between the multiple climate disciplines? Why have these sciences apparently become subject to, even apparently dominated by, the public policy (political) arenas? Is there a viable consensus, and is science even about consensus – is that how it works?

Opposing data-sets and divided (sharply) “opinions” rule the 21st century day. Over the last 50 years here in Colorado there’s no doubt that winters are shorter, spring snowmelts come sooner, our ski areas are worried and now depend on human snowmaking. Global temps are up roughly 1˚Celsius (1.8˚ Fahrenheit) the Industrial Revolution got legs:

It’s also warmer in the Arctic – its summer sea-ice is diminished, and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Center for Biological Diversity warn us that the polar bears will starve and soon drown, as soon as 2050. But hold on! – Susan Crockford, a recognized polar bear expert, thinks there are more bears now than ever in the past 50 years they’ve been tracking the 13 sub-populations, and studies indicate that the bears in the warmest Chukchi Sea population with the most ice loss are now a lot bigger and heavier (females by 70 lbs/30 kg and the males by 100 lbs/50 kg) than their cohorts in other groups. (Source: Crockford SJ (2015) Polar bear population estimates, 1960 – 2017. wp.me/p2CaNngP2.] OK, should we worry about putting the Chukchi folks on a diet? What?

As recent as 2005, the United Nations’ Environment Program warned that by 2010 rising sea levels would force as many as 50 million “climate refugees” from their coastal homes. [Source: N. Myers, ‘Environmental refugees, an emergent security issue’, 13. Economic forum, Prague, OSCE, May 2005, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005.] OK, but it not only didn’t happen, the islands most at risk (Bahamas & St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and the Solomons in the Western Pacific) actually saw their populations increase, the Seychelles by 100,000. What’s going on? [Source: Atkins, G. (2011) “What happened to the climate refugees?” https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/04/what-happened-to-the-climate-refugees/#BaTVoqe4ZRMjLr7K.97.] The UN removed the 2005 report from their website, but then added a new prediction for 2020 – again, 50 million refugees, etc. It’s 2022, I think, and there’s a lot of news about folks moving to cities (1-1.5 million every week) and WG tracks that, but 50 million moving away from the coasts, not so much.

So when the data-set is moved back from the 1850s, as above, say from the 17th century Maunder Minimum (Little Ice Age’s blue dip, see #10, below), or even further back, say to the beginning of the present climate “optimum” and the beginning of “civilization,” or @10,000 years, we get a different, very, perspective:

They probably had great skiing during the Maunder! Why? Well, it seems that the Sun took a long break and sunspot activity virtually disappeared, from fewer than 50 observations in the 1672-1699 period when “normally” as many as 40,000-50,000 would have been expected. [Source:  John E. Beckman & Terence J. Mahoney (1998). The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change: Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?. Library and Information Services in Astronomy III. ASP Conference Series. Vol. 153. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife: Astronomical Society of the Pacific.]

WG doesn’t affirm or deny global warming, cooling, or degrees between. [OK, actually, point of confession, this author, an avid alpine skier, favors a bit more cooling and deep powder days, thank you!] Rather, we’re raising the question: Why aren’t scientists sitting down and arm wrestling it out, or better, in the 13,000 year tradition of fermented spirits, namely beer, why not just chill out (no pun intended) and put all the facts and data on the table alongside a good craft brew? A quick WG response would be that it appears to be not just about science any longer – it’s about wild governance which, and this is our curiosity, has insinuated itself into the equation? Our tentative conclusion is this: weather and climate are wild, that is, they are constantly emerging spontaneous orders and we are along for the ride – surely we can’t affect the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, or the planets’ random gravatational leverages on Earth, we can’t know (yet, if ever) future sunspot activity – it all defies prediction because even the equation can’t predict data, affects, or the unknowable pulls and pushes of the Solar System or Universe in the future. Tracking our billiard ball analogy, it’s wild!

Out of Fire – Global Volcanism:

“…we live on a planet that is very hot and dynamic in its interior…and [that] constantly feeds material to the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere that was generated by degassing of the Earth in the first place. 

…A volcano is merely representing…one of several arrested stages in the flux of matter and energy from the Earth’s interior to its surface… 

…Volcanic eruptions were responsible for the creation of the first crust on our planet about 4.6 billion years ago. This volcanic crust was subsequently modified by erosion, covered by sediments, folded and buckled by mountain-building, and transformed through metamorphism. The fact that processes such as crust formation occur on a grand scale day by day is a relatively new development in geology, springing from the second major controversy in the history of Earth science. 

… To understand the origin of large composite volcanic massifs…volcanoes had to be viewed in their overall global tectonic framework.”^v  Hans-Ulrich Schminke

Summers with the Volcanoes: Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

In the 1970s, with the U.S. economy in “stagflated” recessions, energy crises, post-Viet Nam War disruption, and while trying to work summer jobs to pay for college, my high school footbal coach was able to get me into wildland firefighting which led, after a “boot-camp” summer as a CalFire frontline “pogue,” to a helitack job in Alaska and then to a backcountry horse-ranger job in Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. (Rather than “Lassen,” named for a 19th century European pioneer, let us defer to the native people’s more spiritually grounded names such as the Mountain Maidu’s Amblu Kai meaning “Mountain Ripped Apart” or “Fire Mountain”; or the Yahi, whom we’ll study in G2.0, who called it Waganupa, meaning “Center of the World”.)

Anyway, hanging out on our horses in the Park’s majestic 100,000 acre backcountry, in particular the “Painted Dunes,” “Cinder Cone,” and the “Fantastic Lava Beds,” my ranger buds and I were able to observe and live in the midst of the geological features left from the verocious power and raw explosive beautry of volcanoes. I climbed Cinder Cone and Waganupa Peak many times, even working a high-altitude, nighttime mountain rescue. In the winter we skied the vast 1,000 foot north face on “skinny” skis and taught Nordic skiing and snow-camping.

Waganupa is a lava dome volcano that last erupted in the 1914-1917 period. The area was designated a National Monument in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt and then a National Park in 1916. The volcano arose on the northeastern slope of a much larger, Pleistocene era “stratovolcano,” Mount Tehama (possibly derived from the Wintun word for “high water” but also “salmon.”) Tehama was active @600,000-400,000 years ago; the larger area’s volcanic “complex” has been active for 3 million years. As depicted in the sketch of its height and breadth in the photo below, Tehama (its remaining western face is named “Brokeoff Mountain”; its eastern slope Mount Conrad) was a monster compared to its remnants. Tehama’s largest event is thought to have occured when it first exploded and then collapsed into itself, an event estimated to have released as much as 50 times the energy of the 1980 Mt. Saint Helens event, the largest eruption in recorded U.S. history.

By Keller, Lynn, K. – Lassen Volcanic National Park: geologic resources inventory report. Natural resources report NPS/NRSS/GRD/NRR – 2014/755, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58963259

Why would WG bring up Waganupa? Well, first, this writer grew up and played on its iconic slopes and features and came to respect, even hold in awe, the raw and wildly sculpted remnants of its great natural forces. And, to skip forward, Waganupa will be the stage, indeed, the “Center of the World,” for G2.0’s re-telling of the life of the local Yahi people who called Waganupa home, and in particular the 20th century story of Ishi, their last surviving member and probably the final North American interloper between the Stone Age and modernity, so G1.0 to G3.0.

As well, from the global perspective we are bushwhacking volcanoes because, from the Earth’s lifeworld “view,” we 21st centurions are mere guests in their midst – global civilization itself lives on, actually, we “float” around on, the Earth’s vast sub-surfaces, Her tectonic “plates.” All nearly 8 billon of us, many living fragile high-tech lives, are more vulnereable than ever to the unrestrained power and devastation of volcanoes. Ask the Vesuvians, or the two billions living on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” so the Fukushimans, or Seattleites living under the looming presence of another Tehama-like stratovolcano, Mount Rainier (called “Tahoma” in native parlance, for “Mother of Waters.”). Rainier sits only 60 miles from the burgeoning Seattle-Tacoma metro area, home to 4 million Americans today – and ominously, Rainier is on the “Decade Volcanoes” list that tracks active, high-risk volcanoes lying near dense population centers. If you live in Rainer’s majestic presence, you know, or should, that it could well be the next Tehama in waiting.

Volcanism lurks beneath and within the surfaces of our deep and wild natural world. Indeed, to engage the Yahi’s prescient vision, volcanoes immanate from the “Center of the World.” We live the Earth’s beautiful surfaces, even thinking we “own” its real estate. But jump in your car and drive downtown, say 10-12 miles at 35 mph – you’re there in 20 minutes, and you’ve just covered the average depth of the Earth’s crust. That’s how close we live to the Earth’s immeasurable power and verocious real.

Tracking volcanism, here are key trekker concepts scientists use:

Supervolcanoes: Super’s dot Earth’s surface in the 21^st century: America’s Yellowstone Caldera, roughly 1200 square miles (3150 square kilometers…!) is the Earth’s largest.^vi  And it is active, very, and in geologic time, recent, very. There are 6 known Super’s on Earth today, and three are in the Western U.S. (Yellowstone, east-central California’s Long Valley, and northern New Mexico’s Valles).* [*Source: https://www.ranker.com/list/the-world_s-6-known-supervolcanoes/analise.dubner] For example, here’s a map that shows how volcanologists have mapped out Yellowstone, below:

Plate tectonics: These are processes and properties that dominate the Earth’s crust and provide a methodology for understanding the forces and causes of earthquakes and volcanic “belts” that are active along the plates’ collision borders (e.g., the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” of the Earth’s tectonic plates.)^vii 

• Supervolcanic eruptions appear to date to 466 million years BP (Before the Present), minimally, since evidence disappears as it is absorbed in the natural processes of tectonic activity.^viii 

• Super-eruptions may trigger catastrophic “global volcanic winters”: volcanic ash and sulfuric acid ejected into Earth’s stratosphere may reduce global temperatures causing vegetation and agriculture failure leading to famines, e.g., Iceland’s 1159 BCE Hekla 3 eruption may have contributed to late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean.^ix 

• Volcanic Explosivity Index (“VEI”) Volcanologists have evidence of @40 VEI-8 magnitude eruptions within the last 132 million years, and 10 VEI-7 eruptions in the last 11,700 years (period of human civilization).

Volcanic Explosivity Index (“VEI”) 

OBSERVATIONS: 

• Plate tectonics provides the “geo-context” for the increasingly complex, technology- and supply-chain driven, and more vulnerable(!), “global economy.” 

• The Earth’s ecosystem, and the 21^st century’s 8 billion human inhabitants, “floats” atop the Earth’s tectonic plates. Global civilization has yet to take seriously the presence of volcanoes in our midst and how we might survive their next great disruption of Earth’s eco-life forms.

• At this juncture it appears difficult for science to “predict” anything more than very near-term volcanic activity – Yellowstone’s next event is “thought” to be hundreds or possibly thousands of years “out.” 

Out of DARKNESS

Energy, ice and fire are what we “see” in the visible light spectrum. Actually, though, darkness is the Universe’s most pervasive aesthetic reality. Light, it appears, is the exception.

The Apollo missions captured some of the first images of the Earth from the Moon. What do we see? Most will notice the “Blue Earth” suspended in “space.” Just as amazing is the “background” – the vast, incommensurable reach of the universe in which the Earth lives. Darkness.

The brilliant American astronomer, Vera Rubin (1928-2016), was instrumental in convincing scientists “…that at least 90% of the total spiral mass, and hence the total mass of the Universe, is dominated by nonluminous (“dark”) matter. It took 50 years for the discoveries of Zwicky (1933) and Smith (1936) – that clusters of galazies contained unseen matter – to make it to mainstream astronomy.”9

Wild, universal darkness is, it seems, a “dark fullness.” A residual. WG will think a lot about residuals.

“Natural” to “Hyper-Natural” (Homo sapien sapien) EVOLUTION 

“For most of our own evolutionary history our lineage was no different from any other. Our ancestors were among those…that survived and reproduced. Over billions of generations, [their] genomes accumulated mutations and our lineage adapted. Climates changed, habitats shifted, niches emerged and disappeared. Our lineage became animals, then mammals, then primates, then apes…then our ancestors figured out how to break the rules. They learned to work together to overrule chance, to help others rather than allow those less fit among them to die. They learned to fashion their surroundings rather than be changed by them. They learned to direct evolution—to determine both their own evolutionary trajectories and those of the species with which they interacted rather than be subject to its whims. And while paleoanthropologists still don’t fully understand where or when or how this happened, this is how we became different, unquestionably, from every other species that lives or has ever lived on Earth.  This is what it means to be human.”^xi  

Beth Shapiro

Primate evolution is thought to trace back 57-85 million BP (“Before the Present”). Hominid primates appear in the African fossil record around 4-7 million BP including our genus Homo genus perhaps 2-3 million BP. 

Our very early human ancestors started to do at least four things differently:  First, @3-6 million BP, they started to favor and eventually tranform their gait to “bipedalism” or walking on two legs – this probably allowed better vision over the high savannah grasses and improved hunting success as they began to hunt in teams; Second, @2.5-1.5 million BP, standing upright freed their arms and hands to evolve opposing thumbs and increasingly complex dexterity which facilitated early tool-making; Third, improved hunting, teamwork communication, and toolmaking required more calories (meat) to support larger (much) brains, what physical anthropologists call “encephalization”; Finally, and most impressively, living in small social units, and gathering and hunting in teams, our clever “survivalist” ancestors gradually improved their communication skills including speaking in complex or “symbolic” language – “we” had started to become intelligent, inventive, and so “cultural.” [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution.]

Notice how all four of these factors would have interacted, overlapped, and so likely evolved together. We don’t get smart without bigger brains; we don’t get bigger brains without lots more calories; we don’t get more calories from eating just gathered grains and fruits or crawfish alone – we needed meat, lots; we don’t get more meat, as in larger prey, if we don’t work together and invent clever tools and techniques, without (see above) atlatl-aided power; we don’t make better tools and free our arms to throw spears without standing upright; we can’t do any of this without eventually talking and learning together. Collective learning and memory (teaching the kids how to make a spear or stone knife, or how to approach the herd) come about because we were doing all these things, together. We had to. To survive. Evolution, especially the human version, is a cumulative process that builds over time and generations. Human evolution can now emerge suddenly, sharply, at the knife’s edge, at the now leveraged speed of the atlatl-thrown spear. One gain begets another. All gains work synchronously. Trial, error, defeat, and wins give rise to the next spontaneous order.

Once we figured something out it could be remembered and passed down to rising generations. Innovation and invention (management of our physical world) along with memory and communication of our accumulating skills and prowess (cultural learning) were our new survival secrets. Sophisticated intelligence and language represent the most significant differentiators of the human way, and possibly the wildest, most radical and miraculous evolutionary ploy ever ventured by nature herself.   

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“Human”…the “hyper-natural”: 

Above is a sketch of an atlatl thrower, a kind of precursor to a modern Jai alai player or, possibly, an American football “quarterback.” Except that here, the spear is aimed at the pig whereas for, say Joe Namath or Joe Montana, the spear is the pig, or rather the “pigskin.”

We introduced the atlatl in our notes about Wild Tech. We noticed, or suggested, that the atlatl is a curious “device” – it transforms and expands the power of the human arm, even if the arm itself has not changed say, biologically. The “arm” remains “natural.” But then we can wonder, “Is it?” OK, alone, the arm is the “same.” But with atlatl, not “quite.” By taking hold of the atlatl, and the spear, the human arm now commands a radically new, a kind synthetic strength, synthetic because it’s a “synthesis” of nature and something entirely unknown at the scene of the kill, that is human artificially crafted innovation. The atlatl thrower is an entirely new evolutionary phenomenon. An innovation-order of evolution. 

Wild Tech then asked, “So what’s “natural” or “un-natural” here, and is that even a relevant or interesting question?” And what, if anything, do we gain by making the difference? Or, in the same line of inquiry, is nature herself “different?” Or, rather, has one of its creatures merely come up with a new twist from the fuller set of options that nature herself dreamt up? So, let’s consider: First, aching, biting hunger and many mouths to feed, combined with, next, a survival instinct, then combined with some clever dude wanting to go for the kill from a distance rather than exposing his vulnerable little human fanny to the rage or the fangs or horns of the beast, all of these rippling through the long-won and nature-bestowed human brain, and voilá – we have the atlatl. Artillery!

The “nature” game and the human game have, indeed, changed, and “things” will never be quite the same as long as these scrawny bipeds are running around the planet. They have the atlatl, for heaven’s sake (!), and lots more meat, and now everyone in the neighborhood is running. Away. Quickly. Suddenly, these wily Homo sapiens (Note: the atlatl is thought to have entered the historical record about 30,000 years ago) rule the grassy or the forested roost. For now. Until…the next big-small thing, the next atlatl-like gadget, the next crossbow or atomic bomb, comes along… 

Human evolution is “natural” but with a twist, it’s now hyper-natural evolution. It’s now intelligence-innovation driven adaptation and growth (sudden, accelerated, super-biological) versus biology alone (mutation, natural selection). The atlatl hunter and his cohorts set the stage, the new orders of evolution that emerge spontaneously from their trek and trace, are set in play in G1.0. These are the game-changing drivers that will track all of future human history. 

The spontaneous wild orders of human evolution emerge in G1.0: Ecology’s natural “given” order finds us gradually co-habitating (loving, caring, protecting, fighting, competing, reproducing) in the forests and savannahs, and give rise to demographic orders; over just a few million years nature gradually hands down increasingly upright, vision-empowered postures, hand’s-free bipedal motion, and consequently ever larger brains, and now we start to build on nature’s own teamwork-aided hunting skills (we’re not unlike other species who work and hunt in teams – witness a wolf or coyote or magpie kill – we just took it to new levels); and so to compete with these other critters, we come up with new stuff they don’t have, that is, very clever and artificial technologies, and we start to use fire instead of run from it; we get better, we learn to not just kill but to over-kill, and so produce economies of excess; but then, wait (!), now we have to figure out how how to manage “that!,” all that stuff, and so we start to think ahead, to turn to the more clever and wizened in our clan, we have to come up with governance.

So we can look back with our really cool and ingenious iPhones, we can send distant photos from our spaceships as we fly to the Moon or Mars or beyond, and we can might think we can condescend and brand these early folk as “primitives.” The fact is, however, that the essence and requisite order of everything we are today begins, it gets hands and feet and legs and most decisively, brains(!), in G1.0. It took time, trial and error, lots. Two steps forward, then 1 back, or two, but it was building, accumulating, nonetheless. If we’re gauging tools, well, maybe it takes 1-3 million years. If we’re talking fire maybe we figure that out a million years ago. (See the timeline, below.)

The spear-point of our short human history points to the fact that this human evolution thing is utterly cumulative – it builds and gets a leg up always from those who trekked and bushwhacked the wild before us. G2.0’s “civilization” is not conceivable, it cannot itself emerge, without all these earliest of peoples eking out and rising above their, and our, contiguous path out of the original wilderness. Viewed wholistically, in spite of all our 21st century marvels and magics, what happened in G1.0, say 1-2 million years to 10,000 years ago, represents the most astonishing transformation in nature’s own history, that is, the transformation from a purely biologic driven nature to now a hyper-natural and innovation-intelligence-logic driven nature.

G1.0 globalization occurs as Homo sapiens are thought to have spread over the Earth’s entire land mass. And as we did we either absorbed trace DNA of other genus Homo players (including Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo neanderthalensis) or we eliminated them from the field.

Moving Out – Homo Sapien goes global…from “deep” Africa 200,000 years ago to the present.

Map of early human migations based onthe Out of Africa theory; figures are in thousands of years ago (kya). Source pubs.usgs.gov; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Early_migrations_mercator.svg

 

 

Working Questions and Possible Observations: 

• “Modern” human evolution continues to emerge and manifest its “wild,” “hyper”-nature. 

• So-called “civilization” functions like a black box – that is, we can imagine and estimate/measure what goes into the equation (Ecology+Demographics+Tech+Economy+Culture) and, likewise, we can observe, measure, debate and haggle over, what emerges from the black box, yet the internal, super-“inter-variability” of the drivers at play remain unpredictable, some would say “stochastic,” that is, akin to predicting the flight of the morning dove or hawk, they resist precise measure or complete knowledge, or even, some would claim, “decidability” because the outcome is always and fully “in play,” changing moment to moment, and so, at the margin, vulnerable to gray (“known unknowns”) and black (“unknown unknowns”) swans. 

• The human capacity to govern struggles to keep up, to pay attention to and respond to feedback loops, it sits incessantly vulnerable to human frailties (vanity, greed, power ambitions, competition). Modern, hyper-globalizing evolution is further vulnerable to asymmetric growth and competition between nations with lesser or greater (“asymmetrically” competing) states of technical and economic development.  Human governance responses are often too slow or late, awkward, often “grid-locked,” and, at the extreme, catastrophic. 

• Vitally, the “wild” black box equation has now SCALED – in the depths of the previous ice ages, or in the aftermaths of ancient global volcanic winters, the human tribe is thought to have dwindled to just thousands of souls. Yet now, under these same natural threats, along with those new threats manifesting in the current political-cultural economy (nuclear war, fiscal debt, hyper-urbanization), Earth supports 7.5 billion human members – in spite of, or as a result of, our clever technologies, the wild Earth and, more so, our own “wildness,” make our endurance in this obscure corner of the universe more fragile, vulnerable, than ever. 

Time-Line of the Universe/Solar/Earth/Bios Homo sapien sapien (“BYA”-billion / “MYA”-million; “TYA”- thousands years ago):  

• 14 billion years BP (“Before the Present”): Present observable universe “came into existence” in a singular “Big Bang” event, i.e., an “explosion” which “ejected” all the matter (visible as well as “dark” matter), and marked the “…beginning of space, time, matter, energy…the Universe.”^xiv 

• 4.55 billion years BP: Formation of planet Earth; 4.5 billion years BP Moon forms. 

• 4 billion years BP: First life on Earth; 3.2 billion years BP Photosynthesis.   

• 2.3 billion years BP: Major increase in atmospheric oxygen; first glaciation. 

• 2.3 billion years BP: Milankovitch Cycle glaciations (Eccentricity-Obliquity-Precession of Earth’s solar orbit). 

• 466 million years BP: Brook Formation largest volcanic event known (2-12K cubic kilometers; 2-12 times larger than the Yellowstone’s eruption 640 thousand years BP).  

• 380 million years BP: First vertebrates. 

• 230-66 million years BP: Dinosaurs. 

• 85 million years BP: Primates. 

• Chicxulub meteroite event strikes Northern Yucatan Peninsula in modern Mexico; global winter, and likely extinction of the dinosaurs.
• 2.4 million years BP to Present: Global volcanic winters – Yellowstone, U.S., erupts every 600k years; 100 times greater than the 1980 Mt. Saint Helen’s event.  

• 3-4 million years BP: Genus Homo & finally homo sapien sapien emerges (.00066% of Earth history; @1 min. of a 24 hr. day¹).