Guest essay by Susan Corwin

Agriculture started about 13,000 YAG when “it became possible”.

This is a continuation of the “top down” investigation of how civilization happened to develop.

.1.1 Answer is written in the dust: Ice Ages Were Very,Very Grim:

One need only look at the pictures from the “dust bowl” years of the 1930s in the mid part of the U.S. It brings to experience what happens when plants can’t grow. (eye candy deleted)

While that particular phenomena was caused by drought, the plants “died out”. Yes, trees, etc “survived” but they grew very, very, very slowly: like not being able to fertilize the crops on a farm, only this was due to lack of CO2.

The dust indicates that the world was pretty much a barren, empty place.

Homo Sapiens came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.

.1.2 Living in a Dust Storm: the Genetic and Behavioral Bottleneck

For over 60,000 years, about 3000 generations, far longer than the time back to the stone age, the struggle to survive was huge.

=> likely, all species of land occupants were “endangered”: plants, animals, insects, etc.

Why are there few to no records, artifacts, etc?

=> There was “no one home”.

Why did early humans “come down from the trees?

= > a) they were hungry, and b) the trees were nearly dead.

Everyone was hungry all the time as there was little food to be had. Many children died and few able to survive. Families struggled to feed not just themselves, but their offspring. Family and (tiny) tribes were critical to defending any food found. Greed, bullying, and dominance had value. Grabbing resources successfully to feed “pregnant spouse and kids” was huge (if you are here).

I note that

=> the Neanderthals didn’t make it.

.2 Backup graphs/etc

.3 References:

Pulling links, etc from my notes, if you want more on the platter

there is this marvelous invention call “the computer” you might want to find out about.

Lambert et al. 2012 EPICA Dome C Ice Core Dust Flux Data http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.html vostok.icecore.co2 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/ice-core edc-co2-2008.txt ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/ DomeC-800000-air_bubbles_historical.jpg

Carpe Diem: What you can envision, you can achieve!(sm)

© 2016 Susan Corwin, all rights reserved

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