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The Deep Anthropocene

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Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#21

Post by ncmncm »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #12
wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating indeed. Climate change goes far beyond CO2 levels. Another thing that we miss is our history before the last ice age, which still lies in complete mistery.

Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery.

There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them.

That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery.

Miles and miles of undersea construction off India, on seabed last exposed more than 7000 years ago.

The very oldest known stone construction, in both Egypt and Peru, used the very biggest chunks of rock, often 50 tons and more, (apparently) before even pulleys. Blocks get progressively smaller and clunkier in later work.

Egyptian sculpture made of basalt and granite, smoothed to a satin finish. Basalt boxes, 50 tons and more, with perfectly right-angled and smooth interior cuts, without tool marks.

I'm not saying it's aliens, because... why the hell would aliens care about rocks? But people were doing things that we don't understand, and cannot reproduce with the tools they should have had.

There is a great deal more to learn about the prehistoric past than we have even begun to get a handle on.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#22

Post by AlotOfReading »

ncmncm wrote: post #21
AlotOfReading wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery. There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them. That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery. Miles and mile…

My personal field experience is that cultures were not consistent across millennia and miles, but it can often be difficult to distinguish cultures purely from their material record, especially to modern eyes. In general, people tend to both underestimate what's possible and mistake natural landforms for human constructions. The Bosnian Pyramids and the Yonaguni Monument are prime examples.

Even experts sometimes screw this up. I've seen my share of cropmarks and straight "walls" on imagery that turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. My first field season was particularly memorable. I spent days sitting in a muddy trench, convinced I had found a posthole. A few feet below was the remains of a collapsed rabbit warren. Archaeology can be hard.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#23

Post by Chakazul »

ncmncm wrote: post #19

Funny how the authors think the Chinese started out farming rice. The Chinese grew wheat for thousands of years before they caught onto rice.

Chinese got the rice culture from SE Asian people e.g. Tai-Kadai, who at that time inhabited S China.

From Ricepedia: "Recent genetic evidence show that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, come from a single domestication event that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China."

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#24

Post by ncmncm »

svrb wrote: post #10

TL;DR: TFA claims climate change don't real. Money quotes: "Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster." (implying that what's happened after 1950 isn't an ecological disaster) "In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm ... human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least…

Rather, the opposite: Comparing to a baseline before humans made big changes in the landscape, the changes today are larger than had been assumed.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#25

Post by ncmncm »

Chakazul wrote: post #23
ncmncm wrote: post #19

Funny how the authors think the Chinese started out farming rice. The Chinese grew wheat for thousands of years before they caught onto rice.

Chinese got the rice culture from SE Asian people e.g. Tai-Kadai, who at that time inhabited S China. From Ricepedia: "Recent genetic evidence show that all forms of Asian rice, both indica and japonica, come from a single domestication event that occurred 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China."

It is amazing how long it took for rice to spread and take over. Guessing it depended on advances in irrigation systems.

Growing it in flooded padis, to control weeds, came surprisingly late, like 4000 ya. Putting fish in the padis to eat mosquito larvae and provide protein started only ~1800 ya.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#26

Post by DoingIsLearning »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #18
xixo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are key points in the article, but I didn't read them in the way you did. This article is largely about many research groups coming together to build a more nuanced understanding of our impact on the environment over the past thousands of years. It also suggests the prevailing views of climate change are simplistic. We, even in much more "primitive" times, have been mucking up the earth to our benefit. It's bou…

Yes I would argue they aren't denying CO2. They are saying that humans have been doing massive changes to global-scale systems for a while now. That mean they are trying to say that the simple chemical property of increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases heat retention isn't false, or that humans aren't doing it. I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to hu…

> I'd say it's more akin to them warning there may be more insidious or less-well-understood dangers to human civilization and the Earth biome than just global warming.

> Personally, mass extinction of species comes to mind. A wide variety of species enables equilibriums to be established with changing conditions, given a proper allowed rate of evolution.

From what I understand, the main existencial issue of CO2 and the subsequent global warming is the extinction of oxygen producing plankton in the oceans, which are apparently much more significant O2 producers than a typical forest.

This isn't a large multi causal multi-species antropogenic extinction, it is a single group extinction failure mode, directly caused by 'just global warming' which will automatically mean game over. We absolutely do need to curb greenhouse gases (not just CO2) and decelerate the trend of global temperature increase.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#27

Post by blonde_ocean »

ncmncm wrote: post #21
AlotOfReading wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery. There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them. That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery. Miles and mile…

Can you link me some sources to your claims? Super fascinated and I wanna read more!

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#28

Post by yongjik »

sebmellen wrote: post #2

This is fascinating. Whenever something like this comes up, I think of people like Terence McKenna or Graham Hancock. People who, admittedly, had some very out there ideas, but maybe not completely unfounded. Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this: > Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation fro…

Obviously this is oversimplified because some of the trips needed to cross huge oceans, but from Papua New Guinea to Ethiopia is only ~12,000 km. If people with bananas move 10 km every year, they will cross that distance in "only" 1,200 years.

And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#29

Post by inglor_cz »

user_ wrote: post #15
inglor_cz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, anyone bothers if they get really hungry. Stone Age people were fairly resourceful when it came to food. A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.

Care to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)

The best one is probably this from the early 2000s.

They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days.

They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent.

Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste.

No health consequences.

Re: The Deep Anthropocene

#30

Post by ncmncm »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #22
ncmncm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery. There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them. That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery. Miles and mile…

My personal field experience is that cultures were not consistent across millennia and miles, but it can often be difficult to distinguish cultures purely from their material record, especially to modern eyes. In general, people tend to both underestimate what's possible and mistake natural landforms for human constructions. The Bosnian Pyramids and the Yonaguni Monument are prime examples. Even experts sometimes scr…

I refer to

https://www.ted.com/talks/genevieve_von_petzinger_why_are_th...

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