Green Group discussion

I am always interested in how our distant ancestors lived, travelled and adapted both culturally and biologically.

Let's collect some books and articles of fact, and books of fiction, here for further reading.

I guess the classics would be
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

and
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Gizmodo has been showing articles on how the genetic studies of populations now prove that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and with the smaller population of Denisovans.

https://gizmodo.com/modern-humans-inh...

DNA from Denisovans has been found more so in Melanesians who would be typefied by New Guinea people.

This paper looks at how Tibetans evolved to tolerate high altitude. Andean people evolved different mechanisms.

https://gizmodo.com/key-mutations-sho...

The Clan of the Cave Bear

The Valley of Horses

The Mammoth Hunters

The Plains of Passage

The Shelters of Stone

The Land of Painted Caves

She Who Remembers


MesoAmerica.

Mother Earth Father Sky


Seal hunters.

My Sister the Moon


Walrus hunters.

The Greenlanders


Excellent depiction of the Greenlandic peoples at the time the Black Death hit mainland Europe. While this isn't prehistory, the only survivors were those who took to living in the prehistoric, Native manner instead of the Danish settlers' manner.

Bronze Age people have been studied and social inequality is mentioned in this paper. Nice illustration of village life.

https://gizmodo.com/social-inequality...

A new Bronze Age hoard, of bronze axes, spearheads and suchlike, was found in gravel near London. To be displayed at the Museum of London, which I visited earlier this year.

https://www.independent.ie/entertainm...

A Group exists to discuss Ancient and Medieval Historical Fiction of course. Lots of interesting book recs.

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Excellent, dramatic fiction reconstructing the lives of the ancestors of the early North Americans.
People of the Wolf

This continues into a series in later times and settings.
People of the Earth

People of the Lightning

A 15,000 year old mammoth trap has been uncovered. I am guessing ground penetrating radar showed some anomalies. And the bones and tusks were still in the trap.

https://gizmodo.com/a-15-000-year-old...

" Archaeologists working at a site near Mexico City have unearthed a 15,000-year-old trap built by humans to capture mammoths, in what’s the first discovery of its kind. "

https://gizmodo.com/prehistoric-human...

This village on the Mediterranean built a wall to keep out the rising sea. As a commenter points out, they lived 7,000 years ago, so 2,000 years before Ur was built.
Somewhat like the fiction of Stone Spring
which is set in prehistoric Doggerland and continues with Bronze Summer and Iron Winter. The latter two are violent and depressing, IMHO but have interesting ideas.

A stone circle in Scotland was centred around evidence of a massive lightning strike.

https://gizmodo.com/prehistoric-stone...

The sea wall is 9 feet under water, a relevant sign of the times. If nothing else, we will be moved off the coast and somehow it looks like sooner is going to win out over latter. All those structures in the water will make good artificial reefs.

But think of the pollution.

There is very little that can be done about the pollution. The current occupation of the shore lines by humans prevents the shore lands from filtering human pollution from getting into the oceans and seas, it amplifies it. Moving back only enough to stay out of the water won't change the situation, but moving back enough to put a buffer zone between the shoreline and developed land would provide a filtering action. It all depends on how harsh the storm surges become. They will raise the levels immediately and it won't matter if it is just for a short time. The slow rise of the normal sea levels probably won't move anyone off the coasts, only just far enough back to stay out of the water.

An article suggests that humans started farming because they had to; they had killed off the megafauna first. Hunted themselves out of food in other words.

https://www.realclearscience.com/arti...

Very interesting article. It was also easier to kill the young offspring of the big animals, which only added to the problem. We are not called planet eaters for nothing. First the animals, then we farmed the land, which worked until we hit 8 billion, so now that option is wide open to innovation.

Not mentioned:
As humans killed off the big leaf-munchers, the big predators had less prey or had to roam further to find it. Humans also scavenged the entire carcass for use as tools, hide etc. so there was nothing left for scavengers.

The carcass was the original all purpose general store. Probably where waste not want not came from.

In Santorini, the Greek island formed from the explosion of the volcano Thera, archaeologists have been studying frescoes depicting monkeys. They have now enlisted primatologists to help identify the species, to look at trade routes of the Ancient World.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-greek-m...

A structure 41 ft long was built with mammoth bones. The archaeologists aren't sure why, or indeed how it was roofed.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-discov...
Jean Auel explains perfectly. The whole community can winter here. They can store food caches in pits below the permafrost line. Burn wood and mammoth bone. Melt snow. Roof it with mammoth hides. Nice and snug.
The Mammoth Hunters

The roof structure was probably modeled on the bone structure of the mammoth as they could easily see how that worked to keep the hide on the back of the mammoths.

Ostrich eggs, or rather their shells, were decorated and sold 5,000 years ago. At that time ostriches lived in places around the Med where they are now extinct.

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-year-ol...

University of Bristol looks at the extensive eggshell trade.

University of Exeter looks at how the earliest Amazonian settlers, started adapting the landscape and the plants.

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/homepage...

Very interesting article. If we could look under more rocks, there is probably a lot more to rediscover. We keep pushing back the date of the existence of organized, methodical, well thought out activities of early people. Using natural resources to their best match to the land is just as important as changing the appearance of natural foods to make them more plentiful.

Hunter gatherer was probably not the main type of occupation but more likely just another way, among many different ways, to make a living. It's main endorsement could simply be dreams created by Hollywood.

Planting seeds is a very simple, yet very powerful way of harvesting natural resources. I don't think it was known to only a few people. More than likely, individual farming efforts gave way to communal enterprise, the same way small stores get swallowed up by mega stores.

The mega stores did not develop out of nothing, they are mega projections of formerly separate activities everyone use to do. The only remains we are probably finding are those that have been protected by unplanned means and were present in large quantities.

The development of community agricultural efforts probably mirrors the development of small time, flexible, individual entrepreneurs into rigid corporate structures that work until they fall down. Just because corporate status is reached, that in no way guarantees long term success.

You're right - going back to the Stone Age, we tend to uncover a flint knapping workshop when probably most people worked flint wherever they were setting up campfire and the flakes got lost to time.

Artefacts melting out of a glaciated landscape dating back to the Viking period.

https://www.ecowatch.com/melting-ice-...

Uni of Bristol has produced a new way of dating pottery with great accuracy - date the fats that soaked into the pores of the pots. To compare, they tested against pots from sites with sticks and bones that had been carbon-dated.

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-revolut...

Good tracking process. Might even give a range of use. All of these new discoveries keep pushing back the age of modern human activities.

People in Florida ate a lot of oysters way back then. Especially when they put on feasts.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-tough-a...

"Duke and his collaborators collected samples from mounds and middens at the two ceremonial sites, identifying the species present and calculating the weight of the meat they would have contained. They found that feasts at hard-strapped Roberts Island featured far fewer species. Meat from oysters and other bivalves accounted for 75% of the weight of Robert Island samples and roughly 25% of the weight from Crystal River. Meat from deer and other mammals made up 45% of the weight in Crystal River samples and less then 3% from Roberts Island."

University of Exeter has been finding dozens of unrecorded prehistoric, medieval and Roman structures while volunteers are based at home studying LIDAR and topography.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-dozens-...

The southerly tip of Africa had a land shelf which got covered in water. Now we can see what and who lived there, and how they prospered.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-migrati...

In the nicely described 'preamble to the Bronze Age', populations around Lake Baikal in Siberia have shown genetic links to the first inhabitants of North America.
They also carried plague.
Who knew plague was that old?

"This individual from southern Siberia, along with a younger Mesolithic one from northeastern Siberia, shares the same genetic mixture of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) and Northeast Asian (NEA) ancestry found in Native Americans, and suggests that the ancestry which later gave rise to Native Americans in North- and South America was much more widely distributed than previously assumed."

"The surprising presence of Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing pathogen, points to further wide-ranging contacts.

Although spreading of Y. pestis was postulated to be facilitated by migrations from the steppe, the two individuals here identified with the pathogen were genetically northeastern Asian-like. Isotope analysis of one of the infected individuals revealed a non-local signal, suggesting origins outside the region of discovery. In addition, the strains of Y. pestis the pair carried is most closely related to a contemporaneous strain identified in an individual from the Baltic region of northeastern Europe, further supporting the high mobility of those Bronze age pathogens and likely also people."


https://phys.org/news/2020-05-oldest-...

Going back even further, climate modelling and population spread modelling are now being carried out on supercomputers to explain the disappearance of Neanderthals.

As most of us suspected, it was our doing all along.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-superco...

""Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for the last 300,000 years and experienced and adapted to abrupt climate shifts, that were even more dramatic than those that occurred during the time of Neanderthal disappearance. It is not a coincidence that Neanderthals vanished just at the time, when Homo sapiens started to spread into Europe," says Timmermann. He adds "The new computer model simulations show clearly that this event was the first major extinction caused by our own species."

A research team at the IBS Center for Climate Physics is now improving the computer model to also include megafauna and implement more realistic climate forcings. "This is a new field of research in which climate scientists can interact with mathematicians, geneticists, archeologists and anthropologists," said Axel Timmermann."

A study two years earlier was looking at the climate during the same period. They suggested humans moved in after Neanderthals died out - today's study suggests we pushed them.
In general, populations move on (as opposed to seasonal migration) because of populations coming behind them putting them under pressure. Neanderthals lived across a lot of south and central Europe, then ended up in Spain, final home in Gibraltar. From the shores of the ocean there was nowhere further they could go.

"Their study highlighted two cold and dry periods. One began about 44,000 years ago and lasted about 1,000 years. The other began about 40,800 years ago and lasted six centuries. The timing of those events matches the periods when artifacts from Neanderthals disappear and signs of H. sapiens appear in sites within the Danube River valley and in France, they noted.

The climate shifts would have replaced forest with shrub-filled grassland, and H. sapiens may have been better adapted to that new environment than the Neanderthals were, so they could move in after Neanderthals disappeared, the researchers wrote."

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-cold-cl...

A study of Central American habitations showed that as people came together they increased in prosperity.

This has been well shown from the Bronze Age to Iron Age in Europe so I'm puzzled as to why we're told 'scientists thought economic growth didn't happen until the industrial Revolution.'

Of course it did, look at major trading centres of the Bronze Age like Troy, Crete, Thera. Athens and Rome, for goodness' sake. As people lived closer, some were able to specialise so they became more skilled - the flint-knapper, the wood-worker, the bronze-smith, the tinsmith, the ceramics maker, the iron-smith - so those around them gained advantages.

"That growth, the team discovered, also seemed to follow a pattern that researchers on the Social Reactors Project have seen in a range of civilizations throughout history. Every time villages doubled in size, markers of economic growth increased by about 16% on average.

Ortman said that the effect doesn't happen in the same way everywhere. Factors like inequality and racism, for example, can keep urban residents from working together even when they live in cramped spaces.

But, Ortman added, these Pueblo communities hold an important lesson for modern-day societies: the more people can connect with others, the more prosperous they become.

"All other things being equal, urbanization should lead to improvements in the material conditions of life for people everywhere," he said. "We suspect this is why the world continues to urbanize, despite all of the associated problems.""

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ancient...

Ice cores and tree rings pinpoint the cause of severely cold weather which contributed to the fall of Rome. You guessed it, a volcano - but it was in Alaska.

"An international team of scientists and historians has found evidence connecting an unexplained period of extreme cold in ancient Rome with an unlikely source: a massive eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano, located on the opposite side of the Earth.

Around the time of Julius Caesar's death in 44 BCE, written sources describe a period of unusually cold climate, crop failures, famine, disease, and unrest in the Mediterranean Region -impacts that ultimately contributed to the downfall of the Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. Historians have long suspected a volcano to be the cause, but have been unable to pinpoint where or when such an eruption had occurred, or how severe it was."

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-eruptio...

The Maya built reservoirs to hold water from the rainy season. Climate changing to drier weather is thought to have been the main push for the people to leave cities.

But some of those reservoirs were toxic, through algae, bacteria or mercury contamination. Since the toxins differed, so must have the causes.

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ancient...

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization


Central America and climate shifts feature in this book which looks at how a wetter one half of the globe made for a drier other half, or a colder thousand years wrecked a civilisation.

The Word for World is Forest


One of my favorite SF novellas by Ursula K. Le Guin, a poignant look at the clash of imperialism and unconstrained, destructive use of technology on a distant colony world. Rich with environmental themes. A masterwork!

SF is fantastic for allegory.

Turns out Native American people did meet Polynesians. And they brought sweet potatoes.

""We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands," Ioannidis said. "It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event." In other words, Polynesians and Native Americans met at one point in history, and during that time people from the two cultures produced children with both Native American and Polynesian DNA.
Statistical analyses confirmed the event occurred in the Middle Ages, around A.D. 1200, which is "around the time that these islands were originally being settled by native Polynesians," Ioannidis said. Using computational methods developed as part of Ioannidis' graduate work, the team then localized the source of the Native American DNA to modern-day Colombia."

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-polynes...

The people of Carthage, in North Africa, set up an Empire which was only defeated by the Romans. They traded across the Mediterranean. Now clues from early languages imply that the Germanic people used words from Carthage for coins and agriculture. Shekel was the origin of schilling and shilling. Pene was the origin of penny. The Germanic people didn't have their own coins, but they had the words for them.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-shillin...

If anyone is interested in learning more about early languages and linguistics, I recommend, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris

and Mrs. Moreau's Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names

Here's an article from 2017 about the PIE.
"Most historical linguists agree that words such as 'wheel', 'wagon', 'horse', 'sheep', 'cow', 'milk' and 'wool' can be attributed to the Yamnaya people who migrated into Europe from the Caspian steppe 5,000 years ago. The nomadic and pastoral Yamnayans introduced their material culture to the local peoples through a new language known as Proto-Indo-European, from which most European languages descend."

.....
"Historical linguist Guus Kroonen points to a number of words for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates that the incoming speakers of Indo-European could not have brought with them to southern Scandinavia.

"There is a cluster of words in European languages such as Danish, English, and German - the Germanic languages - which stand out because they do not conform to the established sound changes of Indo-European vocabulary. It is words like sturgeon, shrimp, pea, bean and turnip that cannot be reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European ancestor," Guus Kroonen explains"

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-scandin...

The spiny murex sea snail produces a purple dye which was used by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans, but the few people who made it kept trade secrets. One man in Tunisia has determinedly re-created the dye by trial and error.

"Now, after years of trial and error—and after getting used to the foul stench—he uses a hammer and small stone mortar to carefully break open the spiny murex shells.

What happens next is part of a secret guarded so closely that it disappeared hundreds of years ago.

A symbol of power and prestige, the celebrated purple colour was traditionally used for royal and imperial robes.

Production of the dye was among the main sources of wealth for the ancient Phoenicians, and then for the Carthaginian and Roman empires, said Ali Drine, who heads the research division of Tunisia's National Heritage Institute.

The industry was "under the control of the emperors because it brought a lot of money to the imperial coffers", he said."

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-passion...

Imperial Purple


A weaver has to make a toga with stripes of purple, but becomes suspicious that treason is involved.

Horses of Heaven


Another by the same author, Gillian Bradshaw, this time about:
" In 140 B.C., narrator Tomryis, age 18, is chosen by Saka King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan), to attend his new wife, Heliokleia, a Greek from the kingdom of Bactra. The marriage is a political alliance, and Mauakes makes it clear that beautiful, intelligent Heliokleia is to have only limited powers. The aloof queen decides to seek her soul's release by being the perfect ruler."

Horses are involved. Bradshaw has also written an Arthurian trilogy.