March 20, 2013
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mammoth undertaking
I have been into paleontology long before i studied at university. The second book i ever read in my life was this large book of dinosaurs , which was quite descriptive and very technical. i ate it all up. so you may say i have been into fossils and prehistory earth since i was 5. evolution and biology was my favorite aspects of science and i began to muse the crossover of physical and biological existence within the universal concept early on. needless to say when i was assaulted by the church goers for actually embracing this fantastic reality through my childhood, i began to grow a real resentment towards organized religion. i remember an argument i had with a priest once in a hockey rink. it was late at night, i was alone watching the team that was slated for practice that night. it was an open format, people could come off the street and go watch. i was using this to stay warm and to have a place to escape the perils of being a street denizen. next to the public library , it was the only place i knew at the time where i could just be allowed to go and exist. so i was 15 and homeless, exhausted from forcing myself to stay awake out of falling asleep in the cold and just trying to regenerate with the the coffee i was able to get from the snackbar. i was still very naive about the world of humans at the time and as a result i was trying to formulate the world as i understood it. trying to imagine how prehistoric humans survived. i was thinking of neanderthals and trying to piece together the way they would encounter the cold and living at the mercy of the elements. in retrospect i was looking for hope and guidance.
at any rate , this tall skinny priest walked up and sat next to me as i watched the team circling about like a bunch of circling buzzards on the puck. i lit a smoke and he asked me how i was doing. i have nothing to hide , so i told him basically my plight. wondering if the christian would give me money for food. apparently not. at any rate he began to quote his book. i told him that his book is second hand testimony and he has no real proof of what he is saying. a factor i am sure he has heard before because i remember he responded really quick, not demonstrating any pre-thought towards his response and meaning that it is rehearsed. it was as usual a lot of mumble jumble resulting in an authoritative opinion that equals less conviction then if he remained quiet. seems to be the one mistake these type of people make, they over do the tone and didactic nature of a precept of belief as if it was a fact and you automatically have a pretty good base of their mental state. i actually became concerned for him. imagine this for a second. here i was homeless and messed up emotionally with the fears of the earth at the age of 15. not knowing where and how to survive and i was actually more concerned about the priest then myself.
i asked him what he thought about neanderthals. they apparently were animals with no souls. i asked him why and he said they aren’t human. i said they were our ancestors and they came before us. he said that is just a theory. i go no its not, i said we have teeth just like them, hands and other stuff that is only human. he told me they don’t have a soul and they were animals. i explained if they have no souls, then why were they burying their dead with the possessions of the diseased? i waited while he thought about it. i said , wouldn’t that mean they had a concept of the soul? like the egyptians? but he said if they did they had a false god, they didn’t worship his god. apparently this meant they were soulless and animal. i began to really question his psyche at this point. i asked him what kind of a god that apparently loves all of creation , would condemn a species of human simply because it has a different name for it or quite simply had no way of knowing about it because writing didn’t exist. wouldn’t it be just suffice to have a sense of morality that is just and good and follow a moderate life? he said that they didn’t pray and worship the god he believes in. you know i said, just to survive in this human mess of self inflicted laws that have no basis in the universal reality without going crazy or hurting other people is good enough when it comes to praying to any creator. after all, whatever created us , just wants us to live and try our best to be human. i don’t see the difference between me watching the ballet of seagulls at a shoreline and loving the beauty of their flight to me paying verbal homage to an as yet proven concept of social control.
such is the way i am. i have no problem accepting the universe as it is and i have always been against any belief that wont allow a person to just live. don’t get me wrong though, the ideal of most religions have merit. as they attempt to train the people how to approach the universe and other people in a non hostile or destructive manner. placing moral structure into our conscience and giving us the clarity of choice. things like this proves more needed in our metropolis and major cities then anything else. it is just not the only way and besides, the act of good and morally just actions is not an ownership of any imaginary god. our closest primate relatives demonstrate the very same behaviors. so there remains this need for people to belong to a group and feel part of, which as a teen and for most of my life, i have tried to avoid. i am not a group type of person. i feel this is not a unique thing nowadays. i don’t know, i guess when you learn about the witch hunts and mob mentality as a kid you just tend to stay away from that kind of potential scenario.
so there i was , as i am now, only not as educated , thinking and asking myself about our ancient prehistory.wanting to understand humans the way the universe made us and not our directorates want us to believe.it seemed like a good way to understand the earth and life. seeing as how, unlike the rest of the extinct species of life, i am an existing survivor and i can talk with other surviving members of my species. if i could talk to sharks or birds, well actually trees even, i would gladly drop our tom foolery and just try to find whatever it is i am looking for. however, i cant and so i discovered anthropology and have been in love with it since. it was anthropology and the fossil record of our species that gave me exactly what i was looking for all my life. proof that i belong and am part of the universe. that i am anchored and the earth is my place of birth. i was made for this wonderful doomed beauty (when the sun goes into red stage, the earth will be gone). however, my conviction is not based on belief, it is formulated from existing facts. things that can be demonstrated and pretty much proven beyond doubt. we come from a branch of primates. of this there is no question. of course this is just as scary to me as it would be for any religious type to accept. why wouldn’t it be? i mean , it is frustratingly harsh to have to constantly remind oneself they are an animal and they are in the universal sense really no different or better then any other animal. believe me, when it comes to animals, we really don’t hold up to what some of the wonderful forms of life have. this is why i get a kick when i inform people about ants. i love how the concept that basically they are superior to us in many ways. just luck and fate has it differently. the universe and chance creates such amazing results. it created the variation of all life. so it should be pretty effective in other areas too.
chance and fate. no stranger to the primates. it was chance and fate that enabled us humans to exist in the first place. however, mysteries persist. one of the hardest ones to understand is when and how did we get so spread out. the most prolific wanderer was homo erectus. this prehuman has been all over. but we know it didn’t quite understand how to control fire. not like us. but somehow they survived. i have and always will argue that we humans as a species are not aggressively violent. it seems to go against our need to communicate and various physiological response that we exhibit when in groups as an individual. i don’t really believe that we would attack each other without provocation. however, seeing as how all we had at the time, as erectus was this stone axe. that is trademark for that species plus no real indication of controlling fire. ( an example we would look for is what we find in neanderthal dig sites. where there is fire spots that are encircled by stones. thereby containing and therefore a control of fire. nothing like this has been found in any of the erectus sites and the only maybe or possibility to date is a group of spears that have been hardened on the tips in fire. these may have belonged to erectus, but there is no real effective way these humans could have held them. their hands were always facing palm outwards , due to a structural anomaly. a trait they all shared.) but how did we spread out so far before our genus even exist?
i have learned over time that what that priest calls soul is interchangeable to the concept of sentience. this understanding has been reinforced by the fact that as usual, we humans think we are the only sentience around. this is of course simply not true. elephants are sentient. this is really one of those facts that they wont come clean about. but it is always written down as a serious consideration. i have always wondered if the poaching of elephants classifies as murder. a question i had once asked a friend. no,was the answer, it isn’t human. i said in response, well no wonder no little green men will come to earth. when they see what we treat other sentient species that aren’t human , who can blame them? i know i wouldn’t. i would just keep on moving and go hobnob with microbes on titan or something. but anyways, elephants are sentient. i have no problem with accepting that and it makes real sense to me. but i remember, i was trying to figure out how, like where did this advanced form of social behavior come from. i was watching an African animal show, with the typical elephant parade going through the bright hot savanna. lions wanted nothing to do with them and gave them a clear path. i remember thinking how cool it is that they can just walk in their slow elephant way knowing that nothing wants to mess with them. i also noticed that a lot of other grazers and herbivores hung around them. it got me to thinking.
so, as you know, we and neanderthal (mostly) lived off of the elephants ancestors. mammoths and mastadons. the precursors to them existed pretty far back, all the way to hominids like Australopithecus and gigantopithecus ( i think, i seem to remember one species that didn’t have a fully long nose like the ones we have now, it wasn’t that big either). but we were not always hunters. we were scavengers, pretty much up to homo erectus. i began to visualize the fact that we must have hung around them a lot. they would be free protection. plus, they cant see well at night, nothing provides a good alert like a bunch of freaked out primates scared in the dark. so i think, we must have hung with them and our interaction somehow conditioned them to adapt and create their own form of sentience. it could very well be an exchange. a similar type of possibility exists with the Capuchin monkeys that have this amazing system for preparing nuts and using a flat bed rock with stones to hammer the nuts when ripe. i think they are copying a behavior witnessed by them of some ancient tribe that is no longer there. we very well could have used them to get the tree’s fruit for us by dropping certain ones to the ground.fossilized behaviour fascinates me no end. the possabilties are incredible.
so, it may be that we teamed up with the mammoths precursors and that enabled us to travel and reach places that make no sense otherwise. since we originated in africa largely, and somehow erectus has been found even in australia in fossil beds. we may have actively started to hunt them when we would get trapped in the frozen tundra, with no food to eat, we may have graduated from eating the dead carrion that we would find of them to eating them as fresh kills in the neanderthal stage.only the earth knows. i believe that such a true connection to the ancient past is what we need as a race in modern times to understand and fully accept our effect and causation within the ecology of the earth’s environments. we are highly opportunistic and practice a form of one sided symbiosis that i have only seen in one other animal, ants. so, in the end, if, my fascination leaves me stranded on earth for eternity, i could be no happier. because the earth is so beautiful i would want to belong to nothing else.