Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go - Wade Frazier

[Magda Hassan]

Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go
By Wade Frazier
Version 1.0, published September 2014
Note to Readers: This essay is more easily navigated with a browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox. This essay has internal links to this essay and to other essays on my website, with external links largely to Wikipedia and scientific papers. I have published this essay in other formats: .pdf format (10.7 megabytes) and .pdf format without visible links (the closest experience to reading a book), to honor different methods of digesting this essay, but this html version comprises the online textbook that I intended this essay to be
Dedication
Acronyms Used in This Essay
Summary and Purpose
This Essay's Tables and Timelines
Energy and the Industrialized World
The Toolset of Mainstream Science
The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Energy and Chemistry
Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life
The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth
Early Life on Earth
The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life
Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions
The Cambrian Explosion
Complex Life Colonizes Land
Making Coal, the Rise of Reptiles, and the Greatest Extinction Ever
The Reign of Dinosaurs
The Age of Mammals
Mid-Essay Reflection
The Path to Humanity
Tables of Key Events in the Human Journey
Humanity's First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire
Humanity's Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution
Humanity's Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution
Epochal Event 3.5 The Rise of Europe
Humanity's Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution
Epochal Event 4.5 The Rise of Oil and Electricity
The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization
What Running out of Energy Looks Like
My Adventures and Those of My Fellow Travelers
Humanity's Fifth Epochal Event: Free Energy and an Abundance-Based Political Economy
The Sixth Mass Extinction or the Fifth Epochal Event?
What Has Not Worked So Far, and What Might
Footnotes

Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Professor and Brian, two great men whom it was an immense privilege to know and who spent their lives in a quest for healing this world. I miss them.

Acronyms Used in This Essay
A number of acronyms in this essay are not commonly used and at least one is unique to my work.
They are:
BYA Billion Years Ago
MYA Million Years Ago
KYA Thousand Years Ago
PPM Parts Per Million
FE Free Energy
GC Global Controller
EROI Energy Return on Investment
UP The Universal People
LUCA Last Universal Common Ancestor
ATP - Adenosine Triphosphate
GOE Great Oxygenation Event
BIF Banded Iron Formation
ROS Reactive Oxygen Species
PETM - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Summary and Purpose
Chapter summary:

• My background
  
• Essay summary, including:
  • Journey of life on Earth
    
  • Epochal energy events in human journey
    
  • Potential of abundant, environmentally harmless energy technology, which already exists
    
  
  
• My strategy for manifesting that energy event for humanity's and the planet's benefit.
  

I was born in 1958. NASA recruited my father to work in Mission Control during the Space Race, and I was trained from childhood to be a scientist. My first professional mentor invented as Nikola Tesla did, and among his many inventions was an engine hailed by a federal study as the world's most promising alternative to the internal combustion engine. In 1974, as that engine created a stir in the USA's federal government, I began dreaming of changing the energy industry. In that same year, I had my cultural and mystical awakenings. During my second year of college, I had my first existential crisis, and a paranormal event changed my studies from science to business. I still held my energy dreams, however, and in 1986, eight years after that first paranormal event, I had a second one that suddenly caused me to move up the coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, where I landed in the middle of what is arguably the greatest attempt yet made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. The company sold the best heating system that has ever been on the world market, and it placed that system for free on customers' homes by using the most ingenious marketing plan that I ever saw. That effort was killed by the local electric industry, which saw our technology as a threat to its revenues and profits, and my wild ride began. The owner of the Seattle business left the state to rebuild his effort, and I followed him to Boston and soon became his partner. My partner's experiences in Seattle radicalized him. My use of "radical" intends to convey the original "going to the root" meaning. Radicals seek a fundamental understanding of events (so they aim for the root and do not hack at branches), but more economically than politically in my partner's instance. He would never see the energy industry the same way again after his radicalization (also called "awakening") in Seattle, but he had more radicalization ahead of him.
The day after I arrived in Boston, we began to pursue what is today called free energy, or new energy, which is abundant and harmlessly produced energy generated with almost no operating cost. Today's so-called free energy is usually generated by harnessing the zero-point field, but not always, and our original effort was not trying to harness it. We attracted the interest of a legendary and shadowy group while we were in Boston, and they offered $10 million for the rights to our fledgling technology. I have called that group the Global Controllers, and others have different terms for them. However, they are not the focus of my writings and efforts. I regard them as a symptom of our collective malaise, not a cause. Our fate is in our hands, not theirs. Our efforts also caused great commotion within New England's electric industry and attracted attempts by the local authorities to destroy our business. They were probably trying to protect their economic turf and were not consciously acting on the Global Controllers' behalf, which was probably also the case in Seattle.
In 1987, we moved our business to Ventura, California, where I had been raised, before the sledgehammer in Boston could fall on us. We moved because I had connected us with technologies and talent that made our free energy ideas potentially feasible. Our public awareness efforts became highly successful and we were building free energy prototypes. In early 1988, our efforts were targeted by the local authorities, again at the behest of energy interests, both local and global. In a surprise raid in which the authorities blatantly stole our technical materials, mere weeks after those same authorities assured us that we were not doing anything illegal, my radicalization began. A few months later, my partner was offered about $1 billion to cease our operations by that shadowy global group; the CIA delivered that offer. Soon after my partner refused their offer, he was arrested with a million dollar bail and our nightmare began. The turning point of my life was when I became the defense's key witness and the prosecution made faces at me while I was on the witness stand, as they tried to intimidate me. It helped inspire me to sacrifice my life in an attempt to free my partner, and it incredibly worked, in the greatest miracle that I ever witnessed. I helped free my partner, but my life had been ruined by the events of 1988, and in 1990 I left Ventura and never returned. I had been radicalized ("awakened"), and I then spent the next several years seeking understanding of what I had lived through and why the world worked starkly differently than how I was taught that it did. I began the study and writing that culminated in publishing my first website in 1996, which was also when I briefly rejoined my former partner after he was released from prison, after the courts fraudulently placed him there and prison officials repeatedly put him in position to be murdered. The Global Controllers then raised their game to new, sophisticated levels, and I nearly went to prison.
As I discovered the hard way, contrary to my business school indoctrination, there is little that resembles a free market in the USA, particularly in its energy industry, and there has never been a truly free market, a real democracy, a free press, an objective history, a purely pursued scientific method, or any other imaginary constructs that our dominant institutions promote. They may all be worthy ideals, but none has existed in the real world. Regarding free markets in the energy industry, reality has effectively been inverted, with the world's greatest effort of organized suppression preventing alternative energy technology of any significance from public awareness and use.
Soon after I moved from Ventura, I met a former astronaut who was hired by NASA with a Mars mission in mind and was investigating the free energy field. We eventually became colleagues and co-founded a non-profit organization intended to raise public awareness of new energy. A few days after we began planning the organization's first conference in 2004, the first speaker that we recruited for our conference was murdered, and my astronaut colleague immediately and understandably moved to South America, where he spent the rest of his life. In the spring of 2013, I spent a few days with my former free energy partner and, like my astronaut colleague, he had also been run out of the USA after mounting an effort around high-MPG carburetor technology. The federal government attacked soon after a legendary figure in the oil industry contacted my partner, who also attracted the attention of the sitting USA's president. Every American president since Ronald Reagan knew my partner by name, but they proved to be rather low-ranking in the global power structure.
My astronaut colleague investigated the UFO phenomenon early in his adventures on the frontiers of science and nearly lost his life at the American military's hands. It became evident that the UFO and free energy issues were conjoined. A global elite faction demonstrated some of their exotic and sequestered technologies to a close fellow traveler, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. My astronaut colleague was involved with the same free energy inventor that some around me were, who invented a solid-state free energy prototype that not only produced a million times the energy that went into it, but it also produced antigravity effects. I eventually understood the larger context of our efforts and encountered numerous fellow travelers; they reported similar experiences, of having their technologies seized or otherwise suppressed, of being incarcerated and/or surviving murder attempts, and other outrages inflicted by global elites as they maintained their tyrannical grip over the world economy and, hence, humanity. It was no conspiracy theory, but what my fellow travelers and I learned at great personal cost, which was regularly fatal.
I continued to study and write and became my astronaut colleague's biographer. My former partner is the Indiana Jones of the free energy field, but I eventually realized that while it was awe-inspiring to witness his efforts, one man with a whip and fedora cannot save humanity from itself. I eventually took a different path from both my partner and astronaut colleague, and one fruit of that direction is this essay. Not only was the public largely indifferent to what we were attempting, but those attracted to our efforts usually either came for the spectacle or were opportunists who betrayed us at the first opportunity. As we weathered attacks from the local, state, national, or global power structures, such treacherous opportunities abounded. I witnessed dozens of attempts by my partner's associates to steal his companies from him (1, 2, 3, 4), and my astronaut colleague was twice ejected from organizations that he founded, by the very people that he invited to help him. During my radicalizing years with my partner, I learned that personal integrity is the world's scarcest commodity, and it is the primary reason why humanity is in this predicament. The antics of the global elites are of minor importance; the enemy is us.
I eventually realized that there were not enough heroes on Earth to get free energy over the hump of humanity's inertia and organized suppression. Soon after I completed my present website in 2002, one of R. Buckminster Fuller's pupils called my writings "comprehensivist" and I did not know what he meant. I then read some of Fuller's work and saw the point. My writings since then have been more consciously comprehensivist (also called "generalist") in nature.
This essay is intended to draw a comprehensive picture of life on Earth, the human journey, and energy's role. The references that support this essay are usually to works written for non-scientists or those of only modest academic achievement, so that non-scientists can study the same works without needing specialized scientific training. I am trying to help form a comprehensive awareness in a tiny fraction of the global population. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people is my goal. My hope is that the energy issue can become that tiny fraction's focus. Properly educated, that group might be able to help catalyze an energy effort that can overcome the obstacles. That envisioned group may help humanity in many ways, but my primary goal is manifesting those technologies in the public sphere in a way that nobody risks life or livelihood. I have seen too many wrecked and prematurely ended lives (1, 2) and plan to avoid those fates, for both myself and the group's members.
Here is a brief summary of this essay. Ever since life first appeared more than three billion years ago and about a billion years after the Sun and Earth formed, organisms have continually invented more effective methods to acquire, preserve, and use energy. Complex life appeared after three billion years of evolution and, pound-for-pound, it used energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produced it. The story of life on Earth has been one of evolutionary events impacted by geophysical and geochemical processes, and in turn influencing them. During the eon of complex life that began more than 500 million years ago, there have been many brief golden ages of relative energy abundance for some fortunate species, soon followed by increased energy competition, a relatively stable struggle for energy, and mass extinction events cleared biomes for another golden age by organisms adapted to the new environments. That pattern has characterized the journey of complex life over the past several hundred million years. Intelligence began increasing among some animals, which provided them with a competitive advantage.
About 2.6 million years ago, when our current ice age began, our ancestors learned how to make stone tools, which was soon followed by the control of fire, and the human journey's First Epochal Event(s?) transpired. The human evolutionary line's brain then grew dramatically. About two million years later, the human line evolved to the point where behaviorally modern humans appeared, left Africa, and conquered all inhabitable continents. Their expansion was fueled by driving most of Earth's large animals to extinction. That Second Epochal Event was also the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction. After all the easy meat was extinct and the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer ended, population pressures led to the Third Epochal Event: domesticating plants and animals. That event led to civilization, and many features of the human journey often argued to be human nature, such as slavery and the subjugation of women, were merely artifacts of the energy regime and societal structure of agriculturally based civilizations. Early civilizations were never stable; their energy practices were largely based on deforestation and agriculture, usually on the deforested soils, and such civilizations primarily collapsed due to their unsustainable energy production methods.
As the Old World's civilizations continually rose and fell, Europe's peoples rediscovered ancient teachings that contained the first stirrings of a scientific approach. Europeans used energy technologies from that ancient period, borrowed novel energy practices from other Old World civilizations, and achieved the technological feat of turning the world's oceans into a low-energy transportation lane. Europeans thereby began conquering the world. During that conquest, one imperial contender turned to fossil fuels after their woodlands were depleted by early industrialization. England soon industrialized by using coal and initiated humanity's Fourth Epochal Event. England quickly became Earth's dominant imperial power. As Europeans conquered Earth, elites, who first appeared with the first civilizations, could begin thinking in global terms for the first time, and a global power structure began developing. As we learned the hard way, that power structure is very real, but almost nobody on Earth has a balanced and mature perspective regarding it, as people either deny its existence or obsess about it, seeing it as the root of our problems, when it is really only a side-effect of humanity's current stage of political-economic evolution, which has always been based on its level of energy usage.
Today, industrialized humanity is almost wholly dependent on the energy provided by hydrocarbon fuels that were created by geological processes operating on the remains of organisms, and humanity is mining and burning those hydrocarbon deposits about a million times as fast as they were created. We are reaching peak extraction rates but, more importantly, we have already discovered all of the easily acquired hydrocarbons. We are currently seeking and mining Earth's remaining hydrocarbon deposits, which are of poor energetic quality. It is merely the latest instance of humanity's depleting its energy resources, in which the dregs were mined after the easily acquired energy was consumed. The megafauna extinctions created the energy crisis that led to domestication and civilization, and the energy crisis of early industrialization led to using hydrocarbon energy, and the energy crisis of 1973-1974 attracted my fellow travelers and me to alternative energy. However, far more often over the course of the human journey, depleting energy resources led to population collapses and even local extinctions of humans in remote locations. Expanding and collapsing populations have characterized rising and falling polities during the past several thousand years, ever since the first civilizations appeared.
Today, humanity dominates Earth and is not only depleting its primary energy resources at prodigious rates, but it is also driving species to extinction at a rate that rivals the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Humans may cause Earth's greatest mass extinction, which may take humanity with it. Today, humanity stands on the brink of the abyss, and almost nobody seems to know or care. Humanity is a tunnel-visioned, egocentric species, with almost all people only concerned about their immediate self-interest and oblivious of what lies ahead. Not all humans are so blind, and biologists and climate scientists, among others intimately familiar with the impacts of global civilization, are terrified by what humanity is inflicting onto Earth. Also, those who realize that we are quickly coming to the Hydrocarbon Age's end are beating the drums of doom, and I cannot blame them. We are in a "race of the catastrophes" scenario, with several manmade trends threatening our future existence.
Even the ultra-elites who run Earth from the shadows readily see how their game of chicken with Earth may turn out. Their more extreme members advocate terraforming Mars as their ultimate survival enclave if their games of power and control make Earth uninhabitable. But the saner members, who apparently are now a majority of that global cabal, favor the dissemination of those sequestered technologies. I am nearly certain that members of that disenchanted faction are those who gave my close friend an underground technology demonstration and who would quietly cheer our efforts when I worked with my former partner. They may also be subtly supporting my current efforts, of which this essay comprises a key component, but I have not heard from them and am not counting on them to save the day or help my efforts garner success. It is time for humanity to reach the level of collective sentience and integrity required to manifest humanity's Fifth Epochal Event, which will initiate the Free Energy Epoch. Humanity can then live, for the first time, in an epoch of true and sustainable abundance. It could also halt the Sixth Mass Extinction and humanity could turn Earth into something resembling heaven. With the Fifth Epochal Event, humanity will become a space-faring species, and a future will beckon that nobody on Earth today can truly imagine, just as nobody on Earth could predict how the previous Epochal Events transformed the human journey (1, 2, 3, 4).
Also, each Epochal Event was initiated by a small group of people, perhaps even by one person for the earliest events, and even the Industrial Revolution and its attendant Scientific Revolution had few fathers. However, I came to realize that there is probably nobody else on Earth like my former partner, and even Indiana Jones cannot save the world by himself. With the strategy that I finally developed, I do not look for heroes because I know that there are not enough currently walking Earth. I am attempting something far more modest. The greatest triumph of the ultra-elites running Earth today is making free energy technology and the resulting epoch of abundance unimaginable, and all of today's dominant ideologies assume scarcity in the foundation of their frameworks, which is largely why my former partner and my astronaut colleague were voices in the wilderness and like ducks in a shooting gallery that did not know where the next shot would come from. The most damaging shots were usually fired by their "allies," right into their backs, which nobody could have convinced me of in 1985. But after watching similar scenarios play out dozens of times, I finally had to admit the obvious, and my partner admitted it to me in 2013.
I noticed several crippling weaknesses in all alternative energy efforts that I was involved with or witnessed. Most importantly, when my partner mounted his efforts, people participated primarily to serve their self-interest. While the pursuit of mutual self-interest is the very definition of politics, self-interested people were easily defeated by organized suppression, although the efforts usually self-destructed before suppression efforts became intense. Another deficiency in all mass free energy efforts was that most participants were scientifically illiterate and did not see much beyond the possibility of reducing their energy bills or becoming rich and famous. Once the effort was destroyed (and they always are, if they have any promise), the participants left the alternative energy field. Also, many lives were wrecked as each effort was defeated, so almost nobody was able or willing to try again. Every time that my partner rebuilt his efforts, it was primarily with new people; few individuals lasted for more than one attempt.
I realize that almost nobody on Earth today can pass the integrity tests that my fellow travelers were subjected to, and I do not ask that of anybody whom I will attempt to recruit into my upcoming effort. It will be a non-heroic approach, of "merely" achieving enough heart-centered sentience and awareness to where a world of free energy and abundance is only imagined by a sizeable group who will not stay quiet about it, but who will also not be proselytizing. If they can truly understand this essay's message, they will probably not know anybody else in their daily lives that can.
Those recruits will simply be singing a song of practical abundance that will attract those who have been listening for that song for their entire lives. Once enough people know the song by heart and can sing it, and have attracted a large enough audience that can approach the free energy issue in a way that risks nobody's life and will not be easy for the provocateurs and the effort's "allies" to wreck, then it will be time to take action, but in a way never tried before.
That is my plan, and this essay is intended to form the foundation of my efforts to educate and amass the "choir" that will sing the abundance song. I am looking for singers, not soldiers, and the choir will primarily sing here. My approach takes the lamb's path, not the warrior's. That "choir" may only help a little, it may help a lot, but it will not harm anybody. This effort could be called trying the enlightenment path to free energy, an abundance-based global political economy, and a healed humanity and planet. I believe that the key is approaching the issue as creators instead of victims; from a place of love instead of fear. Those goals may seem grandiose to the uninitiated, and people in this field regularly succumb to a messiah complex and harbor other delusions of grandeur, but I also know that they are attainable if only a tiny fraction of humanity can help initiate that Fifth Epochal Event, just like the previous Epochal Events. This essay is designed to begin the training process. Learning this material will be a formidable undertaking. This material is not designed for those looking for quick and easy answers, but is intended to help my readers attain the levels of understanding that I think are necessary for assisting with this epochal undertaking.

This Essay's Tables and Timelines
In order to make this essay easier to understand, I created some tables and timelines, and they are:
Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History
Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale
Timeline of Earth's Major Ice Ages
Timeline of Earth's Major and Minor Mass Extinction Events
Early Earth Timeline before the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Key Biological Innovations in the Eon of Complex Life
Timeline of Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage
Human Event Timeline Until Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Human Event Timeline Since Europe Began Conquering Humanity
Table of Humanity's Epochs

Energy and the Industrialized World
There are greater contrasts in humanity's collective standard of living than ever before. As of 2014, Bill Gates topped the list of the world's richest people for nearly all years of the previous twenty. In 2000, his net worth was about $100 billion, or about the same as the collective wealth of the poorest hundred million Americans or the poorest half of humanity. Although Gates and other high-technology billionaires can live surprisingly egalitarian lifestyles, for one person to possess the same level of wealth as billions of people collectively is a recent phenomenon. In 2014, about 30 thousand children died each day because of their impoverished conditions.
Ever since I was thrust into an urban hell soon after graduating from college, I became a student of wealth, poverty, and humanity's problems. My teenage dreams of changing humanity's energy paradigm have had a lifelong impact. It took me many years to gain a comprehensive understanding of how energy literally runs the world and always has. A good demonstration of that fact is to consider the average day of an average American professional, who is a member of history's most privileged large demographic group and lives in Earth's most industrialized nation. A typical day in my life during the winter before I wrote this essay can serve as an example.
When I worked twelve-hour days and longer during that winter, which was the busiest time of my year, I often fasted and needed less sleep, so I often awoke before 5:00 A.M. In 2014 as I write this, I live in a fairly large house. When I fast, my body generates less heat, so I feel cold rather easily; I wear thermal underwear under my work attire and have other strategies for staying warm, especially in the winter. I programmed our furnace to begin operation soon before I awakened, so that my day started in a warm environment. I also have a space heater in my home office, so that the rest of the house can stay cold while I work in warmth.
That winter, my first tasks when arising were turning on my computer and drinking a glass of orange juice, which raised my blood sugar. After some hours of reading about world events, answering emails, and working on my writings, I took a hot shower, dressed, and walked to a bus stop. I read a book while awaiting the bus that took me to downtown Bellevue, where I worked in a high-rise office building for an Internet company.
When I arrived at my office, I turned on my lights and computer. When I was eating, I put the food that I brought to work in a refrigerator under my desk. During my work day, I interacted with many people in my air-conditioned, high-technology office environment. My cellular telephone was never far away. The view from my office window of the Cascade Mountains was pleasant. My computer interfaced with our distant data centers and the world at large via the Internet. When my workday was finished, I rode the bus home. In the winter, the furnace is programmed to stop functioning when my wife and I leave for work, and comes on soon before we arrive home, so we never experienced a cold house. In the evening, we might watch a movie on a DVD on our wide-screen plasma TV. When I am not fasting, I usually eat dinner, with the food in my refrigerator usually purchased at a cooperative grocery store that has an enormous produce section, with food grown locally and imported from as far away as New Zealand, China, and Israel.[1] We have a high-tech kitchen, with a "smart" stove, refrigerator, and other appliances.
When I resumed my career in 2003, I became an early riser and consequently went to bed by 9:00 PM on most nights, and often read fantasy literature before I turned out the lights and snuggled into bed (with two comforters in the winter to keep us warm as we sleep).
That was a typical winter's day in early 2013. During that day, around 80 times the calories that fueled my body were burned to support my activities. Those dying children often succumbed to hunger and diseases of poverty, and the daily energy that supported their lives was less than 1% of what I enjoyed that day. How did energy serve my daily activities? How did that disparity between the dying children and me come to be? This essay will address those questions.

The Toolset of Mainstream Science
Humanity is Earth's leading tool-using species, and our tools made us. Twigs, sticks, bones, and other organic materials were undoubtedly used as tools by our protohuman ancestors, but the only tools to survive for millions of years to be studied today are made of stone; the oldest discovered so far are about 2.6-2.5 million years old.[2] Humanity's tools have become increasingly sophisticated since then. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by the Scientific Revolution, and the synergy between scientific and technological advances has been essential and impressive, even leaving aside the many technologies and related theories that have been developed and sequestered in the above-top-secret world.
The history of science is deeply entwined with the state of technology. Improving technology allowed for increasingly sophisticated experiments, and advances in science spurred technological innovation. While many scientific practices and outcomes have been evil, such as vivisection and nuclear weapons, many others have not been destructive to humans or other organisms. The 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century saw great leaps in technological and scientific advancement. My grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child, his son helped send men to the moon, and his grandson pursued world-changing energy technologies and still does. Relativity and quantum theory ended the era of classical physics and, with their increasingly sophisticated toolset, scientists began to investigate phenomena at the galactic and subatomic scales. Space-based telescopes, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, atomic clocks, supercolliders, computers, robots that land on distant moons and planets, and other tools allowed for explorations and experiments that were not possible in earlier times.
Intense organized suppression has existed where scientific and technological advances can threaten economic empires, but many areas of science are not seen as threatening, and reconstructing Earth's distant past and the journey of life on Earth is one of those nonthreatening areas. I have never heard of a classified fossil site or a Precambrian specialist being threatened or bought out in order to keep him/her silent. There is more controversy with human remains and artifacts, but I am skeptical of popular works that argue for technologically advanced ancient civilizations and related notions. Something closer to "pure science" can be practiced regarding those ancient events without the threat of repercussions or the enticements of riches and Nobel Prizes. Much of this essay's subject matter deals with areas where the distortions of political-economic racketeering have been muted, and the theory and tools have been relatively unrestricted.
Mass spectrometers assess the mass of atoms and molecules, and have become increasingly refined since they were first invented in the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Today, samples that can only be seen with microscopes can be tested, and measured down to a billionth of a gram.[3] Elements have different numbers of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of their atoms, and each nuclear variation of an element is called an isotope. Unstable isotopes decay into smaller elements (also called "daughter isotopes"). Scientific investigations have determined that radioactive decay rates are quite stable and are primarily governed by the dynamics in a decaying atom. The dates determined by radioactive dating have been correlated to other observed processes, with the data becoming increasingly robust over the years.[4]
The ability to weigh various isotopes, at increasing levels of precision, with mass spectrometers has provided a gold mine of data. Scientists are continually inventing new methods and ways to use them, new questions are asked and answered, and some examples of methods and findings follow.
Carbon has two primary stable isotopes: carbon-12 and carbon-13. Carbon-14 is the famous unstable isotope used for dating recently deceased life forms, but testing carbon's stable isotopes has yielded invaluable information. Carbon is the backbone of all of life's structures, and life processes often have a preference for using carbon-12, which is lighter than carbon-13 and hence take less energy to manipulate. Scientists have been able to test rocks in which the "fossils" are nothing more than smears, and determine that those smears were the result of life processes, as there is more carbon-12 in the smear than carbon-13 than would be the case if life was not involved.[5] This has also helped date the earliest life forms. Life's preference for lighter isotopes is evident for other key elements such as sulfur and nitrogen, and scientists regularly make use of that preference in their investigations.[6]
The hydrological cycle circulates water through Earth's oceans, atmosphere, and land. The energy of sunlight drives it, and that sunlight is primarily captured at the surface of water bodies, and the oceans in particular. The hydrological cycle's patterns have changed over the eons as Earth's surface has changed its continental configurations and temperature. Today's global weather system generally begins with sunlight hitting the atmosphere, with the equator's air receiving the most direct radiation and becoming warmest. That air rises and cools, which reduces the water vapor that it can hold, so it falls as rain. That is why tropical rainforests are near the equator. The rising equatorial air creates high-pressure dry air that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does not bring precipitation, it absorbs moisture from the land it hits and forms the world's great deserts. That high pressure at the ground at 30[SUP]o [/SUP]latitude pushes air back toward the tropics, and Earth's rotation creates a distinctive bend in the northern and southern hemispheres that create trade winds that pick up moisture as they approach the equator. The pole-ward sides of the mid-latitudes' dry temperate regions also have low pressures and wet climates, and dry high-pressure zones exist at the poles. As clouds pass over land, mountains force them upward and they lose their moisture in precipitation.[7] As that water makes its way back to the oceans to start the cycle again, it provides the freshwater for all land-based ecosystems. Below is a diagram of those dynamics. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)



A water molecule containing oxygen-16 (the most common oxygen isotope) will be lighter than a water molecule containing oxygen-18 (both are stable isotopes), so it takes less energy to liberate an oxygen-16 water molecule than an oxygen-18 water molecule. Also, after evaporation, oxygen-18 water will tend to fall back to Earth more quickly than oxygen-16 water will, because it is heavier. As a consequence, air over Earth's poles will be enriched in oxygen-16 the colder Earth's surface temperature, the less oxygen-18 will evaporate and be carried to the poles and scientists have used this enrichment to reconstruct a record of ocean temperatures. Also, the oxygen-isotope ratio in fossil shellfish (as their life processes prefer the lighter oxygen isotope) has been used to help determine ancient temperatures. During an ice age, because proportionally more oxygen-16 is retained in ice sheets and does not flow back to the oceans, the ocean's surface becomes enriched in oxygen-18 and that difference can be discerned in fossil shells. Sediments are usually laid down in annual layers, and in some places, such as the Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela, undisturbed sediments have been retrieved and analyzed, which has helped determine when ice sheets advanced and retreated during the present ice age.[8]
Mass spectrometers have been invaluable for assigning dates to various rocks and sedimentary layers, as radioactive isotopes and their daughter isotopes are tested, including uranium-lead, potassium-argon, carbon-14, and many other tests.[9] Also, the ratios of elements in a sample can be determined, which can tell where it originated. Many hypotheses and theories have arisen, fallen, and been called into question or modified with the data derived from those increasingly sophisticated methods, and a few examples should suffice to give an idea of what is being discovered.
The moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts are still being tested, as new experiments and hypotheses are devised. In 2012, a study was published which resulted from testing moon rocks for the titanium-50 and titanium-47 ratios (both are stable isotopes), and it has brought into question the hypothesis that the Moon was formed by a planetary collision more than four billion years ago. The titanium ratio was so much like Earth's that a collision with Earth forming the Moon has been questioned (as very little of the hypothesized colliding body became part of the Moon). The collision hypothesis will probably survive, but it may be significantly different from today's hypothesis. Meteorites have been dated, as well as moon rocks, and their ages confirm Earth's age that geologists have derived, and meteorite dates provide more evidence that the solar system probably developed from an accretion disk.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Anasazi and Mayan civilization collapses of around a thousand years ago, or the Mississippian civilization collapse of 500 years ago, have elicited a great deal of investigation. From New Age ideas that the Anasazi and Mayan peoples "ascended" to the Eurocentric conceit that the Mississippian culture was European in origin, many speculations arose that have been disproven by the evidence. It is now known that the Anasazi and Mayan culture collapses were influenced by epic droughts, but that was only the proximate cause. The ultimate cause was that those civilizations were not energetically sustainable. The Anasazi used logs to build their dwellings that today are famous ruins, and scientists have used strontium ratios in the wood to determine where they came from, as well as date the wood using tree-ring analysis and analyzing pack rat middens, and a sobering picture emerged. The region was already arid, but agriculture and deforestation desertified the region around Chaco Canyon, which was the heart of Anasazi civilization. When Anasazi civilization collapsed, at Chaco Canyon they were hauling in timber from mountains more than 70 kilometers away (the strontium ratios could trace each log from the particular mountain that it came from). When the epic droughts delivered their final blows, Anasazi civilization collapsed into a morass of starvation, warfare, and cannibalism, and the forest has yet to begin to recover, nearly a thousand years later.[10]
Another major advance happened in the late 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century: the ability to analyze DNA. DNA's double-helical structure was discovered in 1953. In 1973, the first amino acid sequence for a gene was determined. In 2003, the entire human genome was sequenced. Sequencing the chimpanzee genome was accomplished in 2005, for orangutans in 2011, and for gorillas in 2012. The comparisons of human and great ape DNA have yielded many insights, but the science of DNA analysis is still young. What has yielded far more immediately relevant information has been studying human DNA. The genetic bases of many diseases have been identified. Hundreds of falsely convicted Americans have been released from prison, and nearly twenty from death row, due to DNA evidence's proving their innocence. Human DNA testing has provided startling new insights into the human past. For instance, in Europe it appears that after the ice sheets receded 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, humans repopulated Europe, and for all the bloody history of Europe over the millennia since then, there have not really been mass population replacements in Europe by invasion, migration, genocide, and the like. Europeans just endlessly fought each other and honed the talents that would help them conquer humanity. There were some migrations of Fertile Crescent agriculturalists into Europe, but mostly the "indigenous" populations adopted the energetically superior practices of the agriculturalists and did not migrate, nor were they displaced. DNA testing has demonstrated that all of today's humans are descended from a founder population of about five thousand people, of whom a few hundred left Africa around 60-50 thousand years ago and conquered Earth. The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, as well as genomes of other extinct species, and for a brief, exuberant moment, some scientists thought that they could recover dinosaur DNA, Jurassic-Park-style. Although dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable, organic dinosaur remains have been recovered, and even some proteins have been sequenced, which probably no scientist believed possible in the 1980s.[11]
Since 1992, scientists have been discovering planets in other star systems by using a variety of methods that reflect the improving toolset that scientists can use, especially space-based telescopes. Before those discoveries, there was controversy whether planets were rare phenomena, but scientists now admit that planets are typical members of star systems. Extraterrestrial civilizations are probably visiting Earth, so planets hosting intelligent life may not be all that rare.
Those interrelated and often mutually reinforcing lines of evidence have made many scientific findings difficult to deny. The ever-advancing scientific toolset, and the ingenuity of scientists developing and using them, and particularly the multidisciplinary approach that scientists and scholars are increasingly using, have been making for radical changes in how we view the past. Those radical changes will not end any time soon, and what follows will certainly be modified by new discoveries and interpretations, but I have tried to stay largely within the prevailing findings, hypotheses, and theories, while also poking into the fringes and leading edges somewhat. Any mistakes in fact or interpretation in what follows are mine.

The Orthodox Framework and its Limitations
Chapter summary:

• Early views in the West
  
• The scientific ideal
  
• Suffering of scientific pioneers at the hands of their peers
  
• [url=http://www.ahealedplanet.net/humanity.h

[Magda Hassan]

Energy and Chemistry

Chapter summary:

• Energy may be best seen as motion
  
  
• Electron shells, how they are filled, and reactivity
  
  
• Helium and the noble gases
  
  
• Electron energy and quantum leaping
  
  
• Temperature
  
  
• How atoms react
  
  
• Elements in the human body
  
  
• Types of electron bonds, including hydrogen bonds
  

This chapter presents several energy and chemistry concepts essential to this essay. Even though scientists do not really know what energy is (they do not know what light or gravity are, either), energy is perhaps best seen as motion, whether it is a photon flying through space, the "orbit" of an electron around an atom's nucleus or of Earth around the Sun, an object falling to Earth, a river flowing toward the ocean, air moving through Earth's atmosphere, rising and falling tides, and blood moving through a heart.
In their dance around an atom's nucleus, electrons exist in "shells." The most stable electron configuration exists when the electrons fill the shells and each electron is paired with another, with each electron spinning in the opposite direction of its partner. The classical view of an electron had an electron orbiting the nucleus much in the same way that Earth orbits the Sun, but quantum theory presents a different picture, where an electron is a wave that only appears to be a particle when it is observed. Even then, a hydrogen electron's orbit as presented by quantum theory does not look much different from the classical image, and the classical view largely suffices for this essay in presenting the energetic aspects of the electrons' properties.
When one electron shell is filled, electrons begin to fill shells farther from the nucleus. For the simplest atoms it works that way, but for larger atoms, particularly those of metallic elements, electrons fill shells in more complex fashion; electrons begin to fill subshells not necessarily in the shell closest to the nucleus. When an electron is unpaired or in an unfilled shell, it can be a valence electron, which can form bonds with other atoms. In most circumstances, only unpaired electrons form bonds with other atoms. Electron bonds between atoms provide the basis for chemistry and life on Earth.
For that simplest element, hydrogen, its lone electron has an affinity to pair up with another electron, and that smallest shell contains two electrons. Hydrogen is never found in its monoatomic state in nature, but is bonded to other elements, as that lone electron finds another one to pair with, which also fills that simplest shell. In its pure state in nature, hydrogen is found paired with itself and forms a diatomic molecule. In chemistry notation, it is presented as H[SUB]2[/SUB]. The most common hydrogen combination with another element on Earth is with oxygen ("O" in chemistry notation), forming water, or presented as H[SUB]2[/SUB]O. Oxygen has two unpaired electrons in its electron shell (its outer shell has eight positions for electrons, with six of them filled), and oxygen's electrons pair with electrons in other atoms with a "hunger" that is only surpassed by fluorine, which is the most reactive known element. With the "hungriest" atoms, they can completely strip an electron from nearby atoms and form ions, whereby the resulting atoms have imbalances between their electrons and protons and thus possess net electric charges. An atom that loses an electron in a chemical reaction is called "oxidized," while the atom that gains one is called "reduced." When electrons are transferred or shared, those hungriest atoms will cause the greatest amounts of energy to be released in the reactions. Fluorine is so reactive that if it were sprayed on water, the water would burn.
The element with two protons in its nucleus is helium (the number of protons determines what element the atom is), and its electrons are both paired and its shell is filled. Consequently, helium does not want to share its electrons with anything. Helium is the most non-reactive element known. It has never bonded with any other elements, even fluorine. In the periodic table of the elements, helium is in the family known as noble gases (formerly named "inert"), because they resist reacting with other atoms. Their electron shells are completely filled.
An electron's distance from the nucleus can vary. It is not a smooth variation of distance, but only certain distances are possible. When an electron changes its distance, it jumps in a process known as quantum leaping. That quantum leaping reflects how electrons gain or release energy. When light hits an atom, if it is absorbed by an electron, the photon gives the electron the energy to move to an orbit farther away. When an electron emits light, that lost photon removes energy and the electron falls to a lower orbit. The potential energy in the electron as it orbits the nucleus and the potential energy in a rock that I hold above the ground are similar, as the diagram below demonstrates.

Below is a diagram of a hydrogen atom as its electron orbits farther from the nucleus when it absorbs energy.

As the diagram depicts, the atom gets larger. When an electron moves into an orbit farther from the nucleus, the atom will vibrate more, like the way a car's engine will vibrate more when it runs faster. Lateral movement (also called translational motion) is called temperature. While finding an accurate definition of temperature can be a frustrating experience, temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy (the energy of motion) in matter. As with the behavior of photons, at the atomic level the concept of temperature can break down, and classical behaviors emerge as groups of atoms lose their quantum properties.[39] When one atom collides with another, there is a transfer of energy, as there is in any collision. The transferred energy can be stored by the electrons leaping into higher orbits. They can in turn release that energy in the form of photons and return to lower orbits.
The increased movement of heated atoms is why substances expand in volume. The more motion, the higher the temperature, and just as an engine will fly apart when the RPMs go too high, when an atom vibrates too fast, an electron can leave the atom entirely, and the atom then becomes an ion. As substances become hotter, the electrons will be in higher orbits, and will fall farther when giving off photonic energy, so the photons have more energy (shorter wavelengths). Get a substance hot enough and it will emit photons that we can see (visible light). Those first visible photons will be on the lower end of the spectrum of light that we can see with our eyes, and will be red. Get the substance hotter and the light can turn white, which means that we are seeing the full visible spectrum of light. Most of the Sun's energy output is in the form of visible light. Get matter hot enough and it becomes plasma, where electrons float in a soup with nuclei. Those electrons are too energetic to be captured by nuclei and placed into shells.
When two atoms come close to each other, if the potential energy of their combined state is less than their potential energy when they are separate, the atoms will tend to react. But the reaction only happens when the electron shells come into an alignment where the reaction can happen. It is an issue of alignment and the atoms' velocity. If the shells do not meet in the proper alignment and velocity, the reaction will not happen and the atoms will bounce away from each other. The faster and more often the atoms collide, the likelier they are to react and reach that lower energy state. Chemical (electron shell) reactions need to reach their activation energy to occur, and this is measured in temperature. The activation energy for hydrogen and oxygen to react and form water is about 560 degrees Celsius (560[SUP]o [/SUP]C). Nuclear reactions work in similar fashion, but for nuclear fusion in the Sun's core, at 16 million degrees Celsius, at a pressure 340 billion times greater than Earth's atmosphere at sea level, in 10 billion years at one trillion collisions per second, a proton has a 50% chance of fusing with another proton.[40] Nuclear fusion is thus far rarer than electron bonding, and far less energy is released when atoms bond via electrons. The fusion of a helium nucleus releases more than a million times the energy that it takes to ionize a hydrogen atom. As will be discussed later, some reactions have a cumulative result of absorbing energy, while others release it. The first can be seen as an investment of energy, while the second can be seen as consuming it. Organisms and civilizations have always faced the investment/consumption decision.
Below is a diagram of two hydrogen atoms before and after reaction, where they bond to form H[SUB]2[/SUB].

Elements with their electron shells mostly, but not completely, filled are, in order of electronegativity: fluorine, oxygen, chlorine, and nitrogen. In that upper right corner of the periodic table, of largely filled electron shells, phosphorus and sulfur also reside. Carbon and hydrogen have their valence shells half filled. With the exception of fluorine, those elements listed above provide virtually all of the human body's atoms. The body also contains metals, particularly sodium, magnesium, calcium, and iron, that "donate" electrons and make key chemical reactions possible. Fluorine forms the smallest negatively charged ions known to science and wrecks organic molecules for reasons discussed later in this essay. Organisms do not use fluorine, except for some plants that use it as a poison.
When atoms combine through shared electrons (called "covalent" bonds), the electrons are not always shared equally. The classic example of this is the water molecule. Oxygen "hogs" the electrons that the hydrogen atoms share with it. Because those electrons spend more time in the oxygen atoms electron shell than they do in the hydrogen atoms' electron shells, the oxygen atom in a water molecule will get a negative charge to it, and the hydrogen atoms will get positive charges. The charges will not be as strong as if they were ionized atoms, but those charges "polarize" the molecule. In a body of water, oxygen atoms will attract hydrogen atoms of neighboring molecules, and a relatively weak attraction known as a hydrogen bond forms. Below is a picture of hydrogen bonds in water. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)


Those hydrogen bonds make water the miraculous substance that it is. The unusual surface tension of water is due to hydrogen bonding. Water has a very high boiling point for its molecular weight (compare the boiling points of water and carbon dioxide, for instance) because of that hydrogen bonding. Water's unique properties made it the essential medium for biochemical reactions; the human body is mostly made of water.
Those energy and chemistry concepts should make this essay easier to digest.

Timelines of Energy, Geology, and Early Life

Timeline of Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History
Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale

Early Earth Timeline before the Eon of Complex Life

[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 871, colspan: 3"]

Significant Energy Events in Earth's and Life's History as of 2014

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"]

Energy Event

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"]

Timeframe

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"]

Significance

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Nuclear fusion begins in the Sun
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 4.6 billion years ago ("bya")
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Provides the power for all of Earth's geophysical, geochemical, and ecological systems, with the only exception being radioactivity within Earth.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Life on Earth begins
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 3.8 3.5 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Organisms begin to capture chemical energy.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Enzymes appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 3.8 3.5 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Enzymes accelerate chemical reactions by millions of times, making all but the simplest life (pre-LUCA) possible.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Photosynthetic organisms first appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 3.5 3.4 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Organisms begin to directly capture photonic solar energy.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Oxygenic photosynthesis first appears
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 3.5 2.8 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Oxygen is generated, which complex life will later use, which makes non-aquatic life possible and also preserves the global ocean.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Aerobic respiration first appears
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.4 1.8 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for more energetic respiration than anaerobic respiration.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Complex cells first appear (eukaryotic)
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.1 1.6 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for larger cells and far greater energy generation capacity pound for pound, a complex cell uses energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun creates it.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First chloroplast created
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 1.6 0.6 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for direct energy capture of complex life, and led to plants.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Dramatic climb in atmospheric oxygen begins, to eventually achieve modern levels, begins
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 850 million years ago ("mya")
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Creates conditions for complex life to appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First animal appears
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 760 to 665 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First large-scale energy users.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Deep oceans oxygenated
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 580 - 560 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Creates conditions for complex life to appear, first in the global ocean.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Cambrian Explosion begins
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 541 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First complex ecosystems appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Teeth appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 540-530 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Concentrated application of muscle energy.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Reef ecosystems appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 513 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The most complex aquatic ecosystem appears.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Land plants appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 470 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Energetic basis for land-based ecosystems appears.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Land animals appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 430-420 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Ability to create non-aquatic ecosystems.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Jaws appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 420 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Greatest energy manipulation enhancement among vertebrates until the rise of humans.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Vascular plants appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 410 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Ability to create vertical ecosystems.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Trees appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 385 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Largest organisms ever, and greatest energy storage and delivery to any biome, and they become the basis for coal.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Fish migrate to land
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 375 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Precursor to dominant land animals.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Seed-reproducing plants appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 375 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Ability to colonize dry lands.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Amniotes appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 320-310 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Ability to survive in dry lands.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Lignin-digesting organism appears
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 290 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Ability to make tree-stored energy available to ecosystems.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Dinosaurs appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 243 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Among the first terrestrial animals with upright posture, enabling great aerobic capacity and domination of terrestrial environments.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Tools first used
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 400-200 mya?
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Conferred energy advantage to tool user.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Flowering plants appear
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 160 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Great energy innovation to reduce reproductive costs, and animals are the beneficiaries, as they act as reproductive enzymes in greatest symbiosis of plant and animal life, which allows flowering plants to dominate terrestrial ecosystems.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The control of fire
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.0-1.0 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows protohumans to leave trees, become Earth's dominant predator, alter ecosystems, and cooked food helped spur dramatic biological changes, including encephalization in human line.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Projectile weapons invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 400 thousand years ago ("kya")
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Changes the terms of engagement with prey and reduced hunting risk of large animals and increases effectiveness.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Boat invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 60 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for first low-energy transportation, and ability to travel to unpopulated continents.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Widespread domestication of plants and animals
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 10 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Provides the local and stable energy supply that allowed for sedentary human populations and civilization.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First metal smelted
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 7 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for tools highly improved over stone, for greater energy effectiveness of human activities.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Plow invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 7 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for greatly increased energy yields from agriculture.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First sailboat invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 6 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First technology to take advantage of non-biological energy.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Wheel invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 5.5 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Reduces energy use for ground-based transportation.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Coal first burned
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 5-4 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First use of non-biomass for chemical energy.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Iron first smelted
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 4.5 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Allows for vastly improved tools.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Coal used to smelt metal
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 3.0 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First use of non-biomass to smelt metal
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Watermill invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.2 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First time the energy of the hydrological cycle is harnessed for use on land.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Windmill invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.0 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First time wind is harnessed for use on land.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Steam engine invented
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 2.0 kya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First time the motive power of fire is harnessed.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Europe learns to sail across the world's oceans
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] The years 1420 1522, common era
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Turns global ocean into low-energy transportation lane allows Europe to conquer the world.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First use of coal for smelting metal in England
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1709
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First act of Industrial Revolution
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First commercial steam engine built
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1710
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First time the motive power of fire is harnessed to perform work.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First practical use of electricity
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 1805
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] New way to use energy would revolutionize civilization.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First commercial oil well drilled
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1859
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The most coveted fuel of the Industrial Revolution is first used.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Incandescent lighting first commercialized
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] c. 1880
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] First commercial use of electricity.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Alternating current technology prevails over direct current
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1891
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The major technical hurdle to electrifying civilization is overcome.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First attempt to create "free energy" technology is abandoned due to lack of funding
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1903
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] This event inaugurates the era of organized suppression of free energy technologies.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] First man-powered flight, and establishment of first company to mass-produce automobiles
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1903
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Major transportation developments begin to be powered by petroleum.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity and equation for converting mass to energy
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1905
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Forms the framework for 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century physics, including the energy that can be liberated from an atom's nucleus.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] British Navy converts from coal to oil
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1911
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Provides incentive for oil-poor United Kingdom to dominate the oil-rich Middle East.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Oil-rich Ottoman Empire dismembered by industrial powers, establishing imperial and neocolonial rule in Middle East
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1918
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The West invades the Middle East and has yet to leave, lured by the oil.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] USA harnesses the atom's power, and first use is vaporizing two cities, and the greatest period of economic prosperity in history begins
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1945
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The nuclear age is born, as well as the Golden Age of American capitalism.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The USA's national security state is born, Roswell incident
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1947
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] By this time, free energy technology has probably been either developed or acquired.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Electrogravitic research goes black
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1950s
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] This is the final technology, along with free energy technology, to make humanity a universally prosperous and space-faring species.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The USA reaches Peak Oil
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1970
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The decline in the American standard of living begins.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] Former astronaut nearly dies immediately after rejecting the American military's UFO research "offer"
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1990s
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The incident is one of many that demonstrate that the UFO issue is very real, but happened to somebody close to me.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] A close personal friend is shown free energy and antigravity technologies, among others; and another close friend had free energy technology demonstrated
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 1980-1990s
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] Those incidents are two of many that demonstrate that the free energy suppression issue is very real, but were witnessed by people close to me.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The world reaches Peak Oil
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 2006
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] The beginning of the end of industrial civilization.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is history's largest
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 2010
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] More evidence of how dangerous humanity's current energy production methods are.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 324"] The Fukushima nuclear event is probably history's greatest
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 237"] 2011
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 309"] More evidence of how dangerous humanity's current energy production methods are.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

The table below presents an abbreviated geologic time scale, with times and events germane to this essay. Please refer to a complete geologic time scale when this one seems inadequate.

[TABLE="width: 952"]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 952, colspan: 7"]

[align=center]Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 103"]

Eon

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"]

Period

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"]

Epoch

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"]

Timeframe

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"]

Global Map Reconstruction

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"]

Geophysical events

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"]

Life events

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 103"] Hadean
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 4.56 to 4.0 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] No land masses yet.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Earth, Moon, and oceans form. Earth is bombarded with planetesimals. Everything is hot. Atmosphere is primarily comprised of carbon dioxide.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] None yet.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 103"] Archaean
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] 4.0 to 2.5 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Too much uncertainty and too little evidence to confidently draw maps, but landmasses existed.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] By the Archaean's end, the Sun is 80% as bright as today. Earth cools to habitable temperature. Continents begin forming and growing. Atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, but oxygen begins to increase. First known glaciation.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] First life appears. Photosynthesis begins. All life is bacterial. Oxygenic photosynthesis first appears.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 103"] Proterozoic
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 2.5 bya to 541 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Maps begin to be made with confidence at about 750 mya.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Earth's two Snowball Earth events (1, 2) bookend the "boring billion years." Banded iron formations coincide with ice ages.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Complex cell (eukaryote) first appears. Aerobic respiration first appears. First chloroplast appears. Sexual reproduction first appears. Grazing of photosynthetic organisms first appears.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Cryogenian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 850 to 635 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Late Cryogenian Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Supercontinent Rodinia breaks up. Second Snowball Earth event. Atmosphere oxygenated to near modern levels. Final banded iron formations appear.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] First animals appear. First land plants may have appeared.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Ediacaran
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 635 to 541 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Ediacaran Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Deep ocean is oxygenated. Proto-Tethys Ocean appears.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Mass extinction of microscopic eukaryotes. First large animals appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 103"] Phanerozoic
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Cambrian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 541 to 485 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Late Cambrian Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Continents primarily in Southern Hemisphere. Oceans are hot.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] First mass diversification of complex life. Most modern phyla appear. First eyes develop. Arthropods dominate biomes.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Ordovician
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 485 to 443 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Late Ordovician Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Paleo-Tethys Ocean begins forming. Ice age begins and causes mass extinction which ends period.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Complex life continues diversifying. First large reefs appear. Mollusks proliferate and diversify. Nautiloids are apex predators. First fossils of land plants recovered from Ordovician sediments. Period ends with first great mass extinction of complex life.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Silurian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 443 to 419 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Silurian Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Hot, shallow seas dominate biomes. Climate and sea level changes cause minor extinctions.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Reefs recover and expand. Fish begin to develop jaws. First invasions of land by animals. First vascular plants appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Devonian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 419 to 359 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Late Devonian Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Continents closing to form Pangaea, ice age begins at end of Devonian and cause mass extinction, possibly initiated by first forests sequestering carbon.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Fishes thrive. First forests appear. First vertebrates invade land.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Carboniferous
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 359 to 299 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Early Carboniferous Map
End-Carboniferous Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Atmospheric oxygen levels highest ever, likely due to carbon sequestration by coal swamps. Ice age increases in extent, causing collapse of rainforest.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Sharks thrive. Gigantic land arthropods. First permanent land colonization by vertebrates. Amphibians thrive. Reptiles appear. Rainforests and swamps proliferate, forming most of Earth's coal deposits. Fungus appears that digests lignin.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Permian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 299 to 252 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Late Permian Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Tethys Ocean forms. Oxygen levels drop. Great mountain-building and volcanism as Pangaea forms, and its formation initiates the greatest mass extinction in eon of complex life. Ice age ends.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Synapsid reptiles dominate land. Conifer forests first appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Triassic
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 252 to 201 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Triassic Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Pangaea begins to break up. Greenhouse Earth begins and lasts the entire Mesozoic Era.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Dinosaurs and mammals appear, and by the Triassic's end, diapsid reptiles dominate land, sea, and air. Stony corals appear as reefs slowly recover.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Jurassic
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 201 to 145 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Early Jurassic Map
Mid-Jurassic Map
Late Jurassic Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Northern continents split from southern continents. Atlantic Ocean begins to form.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Dinosaurs become gigantic. First birds appear.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Cretaceous
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 145 to 66 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Cretaceous Map
End-Cretaceous Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Sea levels dramatically rise. Continents continue to separate. Asteroid impact drives non-bird dinosaurs extinct and ends the Mesozoic Era.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Flowers first appear. Chewing dinosaurs become prominent. Forests near the poles. Rudist bivalves displace coral reefs, but go extinct before the end-Cretaceous extinction.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Paleogene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] Paleocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 66 to 56 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Paleocene Climate Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Greenhouse Earth conditions still prevail, and an anomalous warming occurred to end the epoch.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Mammals grow and diversify to fill empty niches left behind by reptiles.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] Eocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 56 to 34 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Eocene Map
Late Eocene Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Warmest epoch in hundreds of millions of years, but began cooling midway into epoch, beginning Icehouse Earth conditions. Europe collides with Asia, and Asian mammals displace European mammals.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] A Golden Age of Life on Earth, when life thrived all the way to the poles. Whales appear. Cooling in Late Eocene drives warm-climate species to extinction.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] Oligocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 34 to 23 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Oligocene Climate Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Cool epoch, as Antarctic ice sheets form, with warming at epoch's end.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] Early whales die out, replaced by whales adapted to new ocean biomes.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 120"] Neogene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] Miocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 23 to 5.3 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] Mid-Miocene Map
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 172"] First half of epoch is warm, then cools down.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 137"] First half of epoch is warm, and called The Golden Age of Mammals. Apes appear and spread throughout Africa and Eurasia. Apes migrate back to Africa in cooling, while some remain in Southeast Asia.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 97"] Pliocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 152"] c. 5.3 to 2.6 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class:...

[Magda Hassan]

The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life

[TABLE="width: 769"]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 769, colspan: 4"]

Earth's Major Ice Ages

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"]

Major Ice Age

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"]

Duration

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Impact on Ecosphere
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] Suspected Primary Cause(s)
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"] Huronian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"] c. 2.4 to 2.1 bya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Perhaps little only prokaryotes existed.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] Early stage of Great Oxygenation Event.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"] Cryogenian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"] c. 850 to 635 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Perhaps great life may have been nearly extinguished, and rise of complex life followed Cryogenian.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] Supercontinent breakup and resultant runaway effects.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"] Andean-Saharan
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"] c. 460 to 430 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Caused the first great mass extinction.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] Gondwana drifted over the South Pole.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"] Karoo
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"] c. 360 to 260 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Destroyed Earth's first rainforests and resulted in a mass extinction that led to the rise of reptiles.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] Carbon sequestering by rainforests and Gondwana at South Pole.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 201"] Pleistocene
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 153"] c. 2.5 mya to present
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 182"] Growing and retreating ice sheets led to cooling and drying, warming and moistening phases.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 233"] The ultimate cause is declining carbon dioxide levels. The first proximate cause was probably Antarctica covering South Pole and becoming isolated. The second proximate cause was probably the formation of a land bridge between the Americas. The third proximate cause is variation in Earth's orientation to the Sun.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Reconstruction of supercontinent Rodinia at 1.1 bya (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter summary:

• History of thought about ice ages and the Cryogenian Ice Age
  
  
• Beginnings of plate tectonics as a science
  
  
• Role of positive and negative feedbacks in geophysical and geochemical processes
  
  
• Oxygenation of the global ocean
  
  
• Shuram Excursion and Cryogenian Ice Age and oxygenation of the global ocean as examples of the nature of scientific controversies
  
  
• Use of "molecular clock" dating
  
  
• Formation of fossils
  
  
• Appearance of the first animals
  
  
• Appearance of the first large animals
  
  
• Appearance of the first Tethyan ocean
  
  
• First mass extinction of large complex life
  

This essay's section will provide a somewhat detailed review of the Cryogenian Ice Age and its aftermath, including some of the hypotheses regarding it, evidence for it, and its outcomes, as the eon of complex life arose after it. The Cryogenian Period ran from about 850 mya to 635 mya. This review will sketch the complex interactions of life and geophysical processes, and the increasingly multidisciplinary methods being used to investigate such events, which are yielding new and important insights.
The idea of an ice age is only a few hundred years old, and was first publicly proposed as a scientific hypothesis by Louis Agassiz in 1837, who got his first ideas from Karl Schimper and others.[108] There had also been proposals for ice ages in the preceding decades. By the 1860s, most geologists accepted the idea that there had been a cold period in Earth's recent past, attended by advancing and retreating ice sheets, but nobody really knew why.[109] Hypotheses began to proliferate, and in the 1870s, James Croll proposed that the idea that variations in Earth's orientation to the Sun caused the continental ice sheets. Because of problems with matching his hypothesis with dates adduced for ice age events, it fell out of favor and was considered dead by 1900.[110] Croll's work regained its relevance with the publication of a paper by Milutin Milanković (usually spelled Milankovitch in the West) in 1913, and by 1924, Milankovitch was widely known for explaining the timing of the advancing and retreating ice sheets of the current recent ice age.[111]
The book that made Milankovitch famous (Croll's work is still obscure, even though Milankovitch gave full credit to Croll in his work) was co-authored by Alfred Wegener, who a decade earlier first published his hypothesis that the continents had moved over the eons. As is often the case with radical new hypotheses, aspects of it previously existed in various stages of development, but Wegener was the first to propose a comprehensive hypothesis to explain an array of detailed evidence. Wegener was a meteorologist working outside of his specialty when he proposed his "continental drift" hypothesis. His hypothesis was harshly received and dismissed by the day's orthodoxy, and Wegener died in 1930 while setting up a research station on Greenland's ice sheet. His continental drift hypothesis quickly sank into obscurity. It was not until my lifetime, when paleomagnetic studies confirmed his views, that Wegener's work returned from exile and plate tectonics became a cornerstone of geological theory. Ice age data and theory does not pose an immediate threat to the global rackets or "national security," so the history of developing the data and theories has been publicly available.
Wegener concluded, based on his gathered evidence, that there was a global ice age in the Carboniferous and Permian periods. He was right.[112] Nearly 50 years later, in 1964, the same year that the first symposium of the plate tectonic era was held, Brian Harland proposed, based on paleomagnetic evidence, that there was a global ice age immediately preceding the Cambrian Period, where even the tropics were buried under ice. That was the first time that a truly global glaciation was proposed, and Harland's idea developed into what is today called the Snowball Earth hypothesis.
Ice ages are an important area of scientific investigation. Humanity's colossal burning of Earth's hydrocarbon deposits may well be delaying the return of the ice sheets, which have been advancing and retreating in rhythmic fashion for the previous million years.[113] Today, it is accepted that the tipping point for the current pattern has been Earth's orientation toward the Sun, particularly the eccentricity of Earth's orbit, which has a roughly 100,000-year cycle. Earth's orientation is universally considered to be the tipping point variable, but it is not the only influence. The ultimate cause has been steadily declining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Antarctica began developing its ice sheets about 35 mya due to its position near the South Pole and declining carbon dioxide levels. The current ice age began 2.5 mya, and it may have been initiated by the formation of Panama's isthmus three mya, which separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and radically altered oceanic currents. Also, the Arctic Ocean is virtually landlocked. Those factors all contributed to the current ice age.
In investigating how ice ages begin and end, positive and negative feedbacks are considered. A positive feedback will accentuate a dynamic, and a negative feedback will mute it. In the 1970s, James Lovelock and the author of today's endosymbiotic theory, Lynn Margulis, developed the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth has provided feedbacks that maintain environmental homeostasis. Under that hypothesis, environmental variables such as atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, ocean salinity levels, and Earth's surface temperature have been kept in relatively constant by a combination of geophysical, geochemical, and life processes, which have maintained Earth's inhabitability. The homeostatic dynamics were mainly negative feedbacks. If positive feedbacks dominate, then "runaway" conditions happen. In astrophysics, runaway conditions are responsible for a wide range of phenomena. A runaway greenhouse effect may be responsible for the high temperature of Venus's surface. Climate scientists today are concerned that burning the hydrocarbons that fuel the industrial age may result in runaway climatic effects. Mass extinctions are the result of Earth's becoming largely uninhabitable by the life forms existing during the extinction event. The ecosystems then collapse as portions of the food chains go extinct. Mass extinction specialist Peter Ward recently proposed his Medea hypothesis as a direct challenge to the Gaia hypothesis.
Gaian and Medean dynamics have both played roles in the development of Earth and its biosphere, and positive and negative feedbacks have had impacts. Life saved Earth's oceans with its negative feedback on hydrogen's loss to space, without which life as we know it on Earth probably would not exist. But there is also evidence that life contributed to mass extinction events.
Investigating the Cryogenian Ice Age led to finding evidence of runaway effects causing dramatic environmental changes, and the Cryogenian Ice Age's dynamics will be investigated and debated for many years. The position of Antarctica at the South Pole and the landlocked Arctic Ocean have been key variables in initiating the current ice age, and another continental configuration that could contribute to initiating an ice age is when a supercontinent is near the equator, which was the case during the Cryogenian Ice Age. A hypothesis is that Canfield Oceans can accompany supercontinents, so warm water is not pushed to the poles as vigorously.[114] A supercontinent near the equator would not normally have ice sheets, which means that silicate weathering would be enhanced and remove more carbon dioxide than usual. Those conditions could initiate an ice age, beginning at the poles. It would start out as sea ice, floating atop the oceans.
Around when Harland first proposed a global ice age, a climate model developed by Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko concluded that if a Snowball Earth really happened, the runaway positive feedbacks would ensure that the planet would never thaw and become a permanent block of ice.[115] For the next generation, that climate model made a Snowball Earth scenario seem impossible. In 1992, a Cal Tech professor, Joseph Kirschvink, published a short paper that coined the term Snowball Earth. Kirschvink sketched a scenario where the supercontinent near the equator reflected sunlight, as compared to tropical oceans that absorb it. Once the global temperature decline due to reflected sunlight began to grow polar ice, the ice would reflect even more sunlight, and Earth's surface would become even cooler. This could produce a runaway effect where the ice sheets grew into the tropics and buried the supercontinent in ice. Kirschvink also proposed that the situation could become unstable. As the sea ice crept toward the equator, it would kill off all photosynthetic life, and a buried supercontinent would no longer engage in silicate weathering. Those are the two primary ways that carbon is removed from the atmosphere in the carbon cycle. Volcanism would have been the main way that carbon dioxide was introduced to the atmosphere (animal respiration also releases carbon dioxide, but this was before the eon of animals), and with the two primary dynamics for removing it suppressed by the ice, carbon dioxide would have increased in the atmosphere, and the resultant greenhouse effect would have eventually melted the ice and runaway effects would quickly turn Earth from an icehouse into a greenhouse. Kirschvink proposed the idea that Earth could vacillate between icehouse and greenhouse states.
Kirschvink noted that BIFs reappeared in the geological record during the possible Snowball Earth times, after vanishing about a billion years earlier. Kirschvink noted that iron cannot increase to levels where they would create BIFs if the global ocean was oxygenated. Kirschvink proposed that the sea ice not only killed the photosynthesizers, but it also separated the ocean from the atmosphere so that the global ocean became anoxic. Iron from volcanoes on the ocean floor would build up in solution during the icehouse phase, and during the greenhouse phase the oceans would become oxygenated and the iron would fall out in BIFs. Other geological evidence for the vacillating icehouse and greenhouse conditions was the formation of cap carbonates over the glacial till. It was a global phenomenon; wherever the Snowball Earth till was, cap carbonates were atop them. In geological circles, carbonate layers deposited during the past 100 million years are considered to be of tropical origin, so scientists think that the cap carbonates reflected a tropical environment. The fact of cap carbonates atop glacial till is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the Snowball Earth hypothesis. Kirschvink finished his paper by noting that the eon of complex life came on the heels of the Snowball Earth, and scouring the oceans of life would have presented virgin oceans for the rapid spread of life in the greenhouse periods, and this could have initiated the evolutionary novelty that led to complex life.
Kirschvink is a polymath, was soon pursuing other interests, and left his Snowball Earth musings behind.[116] Canadian geologist Paul Hoffman had been an ardent Arctic researcher, but a dispute with a bureaucrat saw him exiled from the Arctic.[117] He landed at Harvard and soon picked Precambrian rocks in Namibia to study, as it was largely unexplored geological territory. The Namibian strata were 600-700 million years old, instead of the two billion years that Hoffman was familiar with. In the Namibian desert, he soon found evidence of glacial till among what were considered tropical strata when created.
Glacial till is composed of "foreign" stones that had been transported there by ice. When ice ages were first conceived, a key piece of evidence was "erratics," which were large stones found far from their place of origin. Erratics found in ocean sediments are called dropstones. Eventually, after plenty of controversy, scientists decided that erratics had usually been deposited by glaciers.[118] Oceanic dropstones were deposited by melting icebergs, the land-based erratics by retreating glaciers.
Hoffman's team tested the carbon-13/12 ratios of the cap carbonates and found them to be lifeless. That was key evidence presented in their 1998 paper that supported Kirschvink's Snowball Earth hypothesis.[119] As Kirschvink did, Hoffman and his colleagues argued that BIFs were evidence of Snowball Earth conditions, and they concluded their paper as Kirschvink did, by stating that the alternating icehouse and greenhouse periods would have produced extreme environmental stress on the ecosystems and may well have led to the explosion of complex life in their aftermath. A few months after publication of the Hoffman team's paper came another seminal paper, by Donald Canfield.[120] Those papers resulted in a flurry of scientific investigations and controversy, as Hoffman engaged in feuds, being Snowball Earth's front man. The Snowball Earth hypothesis has won out, so far. There is a "Slushball Earth" hypothesis that states that the Cryogenian Ice Age was not as severe as Hoffman and his colleagues suggest, and there are other disputes over the Snowball Earth hypothesis, but the idea of a global glaciation is probably here to stay, with a great deal of ongoing investigation. The record during the Cryogenian Ice Age shows immense swings in organic carbon burial, coinciding with forming the late-Proterozoic BIFs.[121] The Proterozoic Eon is the last one before complex life appeared on Earth.
Canfield's original hypothesis, which seems largely valid today, is that the deep oceans were not oxygenated until the Ediacaran Period, which followed the Cryogenian; the process did not begin until about 580 mya and first completed about 560 mya.[122] The wildest carbon-13/12 ratio swing in Earth's entire geological record begins about 575 mya and ends about 550 mya, and is called the Shuram excursion.[123] Explaining the Shuram excursion is one of the most controversial areas of geology today, with numerous proposed hypotheses. Ediacaran fauna, the first large, complex organisms to ever appear on Earth, also first appeared about 575 mya, when the Shuram excursion began.[124] I strongly doubt that Earth's first appearance of large complex life at the exact geological timescale moment of the biggest carbon-isotope anomaly in Earth's history will prove to be a coincidence. The numerous competing hypotheses regarding Shuram excursion include:

• The oxidation of a vast pool of organic carbon in the oceans, aided by the carbon-removal effect of animal feces and dead animals dropping to the ocean floor;[125]
  
  
• The excursion does not mark a genuine event relating to life processes, but is an artifact of geological processes (called diagenesis); this has a high hurdle to overcome, as the excursion has been measured globally and diagenesis is usually a local phenomenon, and no global mechanism has yet been proposed for it;[126]
  
  
• The excursion is the result of an asteroid impact that changed Earth's tilt;[127]
  
  
• The vaporization of methane hydrates on the ocean floor;[128]
  
  
• It was related to a global glaciation, like previous Snowball Earth glaciations;[129]
  
  
• The excursion was real, but there were others, and none of them significantly impacted Precambrian evolution.[130]
  

Deep-ocean currents, taking atmospheric gases deep into the oceans as they do today, do not seem to have existed during supercontinental times, and atmospheric oxygen was only a few percent at most when the Cryogenian Period began. Canfield's ocean-oxygenation evidence partly came from testing sulfur isotopes. As with carbon, nitrogen, and other elements, life prefers the lighter isotope of sulfur, and sulfur-32 and sulfur-34 are two stable isotopes that can be easily tested in sediments. Canfield proposed that in the pre-Cryogenian ocean's depths, sulfate-reducing bacteria, which are among Earth's earliest life forms and produce hydrogen sulfide as its waste product, abounded. Hydrogen sulfide gives rotten eggs their distinctive aroma, and is highly toxic to plants and animals, as it disables the enzymes used in mitochondrial respiration. Hydrogen sulfide would react with dissolved iron to form iron pyrite and settle out in the ocean floor, just as the iron oxide did that formed the BIFs. The sulfate-reducing bacteria will enrich the sulfur-32/34 ratio by 3% and did so before the Cryogenian, but the Ediacaran iron pyrite sediments showed a 5% enrichment, and a persuasive explanation is recycling sulfur in the oceanic ecosystem, which can only happen in the presence of oxygen.[131]
Part of the hypothesis for skyrocketing oxygen levels during the late Proterozoic was that high carbon dioxide levels, combined with a continent that had been ground down by glaciers, and the resumption of the hydrological cycle, which would have vanished during the Snowball Earth events, would have created conditions of dramatically increased erosion, which would have buried carbon (the cap carbonates are part of that evidence) and thus helped oxygenate the atmosphere. Evidence for that increased erosion also came in the form of strontium isotope analysis. Two of strontium's stable isotopes are strontium-86 and 87. Earth's mantle is enriched in strontium-86, while the crust is enriched in strontium-87, so basalts exposed to the ocean in the oceanic volcanic ridges are enriched in strontium-86, while continental rocks are enriched in strontium-87. If erosion is higher than normal, then the ocean sediments will be enriched in strontium-87, which analysis of Ediacaran ocean sediments confirmed. That evidence, combined with carbon isotope ratios, provided strong evidence of high erosion and high carbon burial, which would have increased atmospheric oxygen levels.[132] There is other evidence of increasing atmospheric oxygen content during the late Proterozoic, such as an increase in rare earth elements in Ediacaran sediments, and the consensus today is that the Cryogenian is when atmospheric oxygen levels began dramatically rising to modern levels, where they have largely stayed, although as this essay will later discuss, oxygen levels have varied widely since the late Proterozoic (from perhaps 13% to 35%).
An increase in atmospheric oxygen usually meant a decline in carbon dioxide, which would have cooled the planet. Recent data and models suggest that during the Cryogenian Period, global surface temperatures declined from around 40[SUP]o [/SUP]C to around 20[SUP]o [/SUP]C, and it has been below 30[SUP]o [/SUP]C ever since, generally fluctuating between 25[SUP]o [/SUP]C and 10[SUP]o [/SUP]C. Today's global surface temperature of around 15[SUP]o [/SUP]C is several degrees warmer than during the glacial periods of the current ice age, but is still among the lowest that Earth has ever experienced, and is generally attributed to atmospheric carbon dioxide's consistent decline during the past 100-150 million years.
Paleontologists were lonely fossil hunters for more than a century, but in my lifetime they found allies in geologists, and with DNA sequencing and genomics, molecular biologists have provided invaluable assistance. In 1996, a paper was published that created a huge splash in paleontological circles.[133] It was the work of molecular biologists that used the concept of the "molecular clock" of genetic divergence among various species. Their work concluded that the stage was set for animal emergence hundreds of millions of years before they appeared in the fossil record, particularly during the Cambrian Explosion. That paper initiated its own explosion of genetic research, and the current range of estimates has the genetic origins of animals somewhere between 1.2 bya and 700 mya, but this field is in its infancy, and more results are surely coming.[134] From an early optimism that molecular clocks could finely calibrate the timing of events, scientists have come to admit that "molecular clocks" do not reliably keep time. Today, the molecular evidence is used more to tell what happened than when. The geological and archeological record is considered more accurate for dating, and that evidence is sued for calibrating the molecular evidence. Even though "molecular clocks" keep far from perfect time, they are being used to do some timekeeping, when they can be bounded by other timing evidence, with a kind of interpolation of the data points.
In particular, the synergies of molecular biology and paleontology have identified the importance of Hox genes in early animals. In bilaterally symmetric animals, Hox genes dictate body development and are effectively identical in a fly and a chicken, which diverged from their common ancestor nearly 700 mya. Hox genes became an anchor in animal development, with the basics still unchanged after more than 600 million years.
In summary, today's orthodox late-Proterozoic hypothesis is that the complex dynamics of a supercontinent breakup somehow triggered the runaway effects that led to a global glaciation. The global glaciation was reversed by runaway effects primarily related to an immense increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. During the Greenhouse Earth events, oceanic life would have been delivered vast amounts of continental nutrients scoured from the rocks by glaciers, and the hot conditions would have combined to create a global explosion of photosynthetic life. A billion years of relative equilibrium between the prokaryotes and eukaryotes was ultimately shattered, and oxygen levels dramatically rose during the Cryogenian and Ediacaran periods toward modern levels. Largely sterilized oceans, which began to be oxygenated at depth for the first time, are now thought to have prepared the way for what came next: the rise of complex life.
Fossils are created by undisturbed life form remains that become saturated with various chemicals, which gradually replace the organic material with rock by several different processes of mineralization.[135] Few life forms ever become fossils, but are instead consumed by other life; rare dynamics lead to fossil formation, usually by anoxic conditions leading to undisturbed sediments that protect the evidence and fossilize it. Scientists estimate that only about 1%-2% of all species that ever existed have left behind fossils that have been recovered. Geological processes are continually creating new land, both on the continents and under the ocean. The seafloor strata do not provide much insight into life's ancient past, particularly fossils, because the process recycles the oceanic crust in "mere" hundreds of millions of years. The basic process is that, in the Atlantic and Pacific sea floors in particular, oceanic volcanic ridges spew out basalt, and the plates flow toward the surrounding continents. When oceanic plates reach continental plates, the heavier mafic (basaltic) oceanic plates are subducted below the lighter felsic (granitic) continental plates. Parts of an oceanic plate were entirely subducted into the mantle more than 100 mya, and left behind plate fragments. On the continents, however, as they have floated on the heavier rocks, tectonic and erosional processes have not obliterated all ancient rocks and fossils. The oldest "indigenous" rocks yet found on Earth are more than four billion years old. Stromatolites have been dated to 3.5 bya, and fossils of individual cyanobacteria have been dated to 1.5 bya.[136] There are recent claims of finding fossils of individual organisms dated to 3.4 bya. The oldest eukaryote fossils found so far are of algae dated to 1.2 bya. The first amoeba-like vase-shaped fossils date from about 750 mya, and there are recent claims of finding the first animal fossils in Namibia, of sponge-like creatures which are up to 760 million years old.[137] Fossils of animals from 665 mya in Australia might be the first animal fossils, and some scientists think that animals may have first appeared about one bya. The first animals, or metazoans, were probably descended from choanoflagellates. The flagellum is a tail-like appendage that protists primarily used to move, and it could also be used to create a current to capture food. Flagella were used to draw food into the first animals, which would have been sponge-like. When the first colonies developed in which unicellular organisms began to specialize and act in concert, animals were born, and it is currently thought that the evolution of animals only happened once.[138] In interpreting the fossil record, there are four general levels of confidence: inevitable conclusions (such as ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles), likely interpretations (ichthyosaurs appeared to give live birth instead of laying eggs), speculations (were ichthyosaurs warm-blooded?), and guesses (what color was an ichthyosaur?).[139]
During the eon of complex life, the geologic time scale is divided by the distinctive fossils found in the sedimentary layers attributed to that time. Before the eon of complex life (that ancient time before complex life first appeared, which represents about 90% of Earth's existence so far, is called the Precambrian supereon today), fossils were microscopic and rare. Over time, geophysical forces eradicate sedimentary layers, and for the earliest animals, their fossils are found in only a few places on Earth. The first animal fossils of significance formed about 600 mya, and are strange creatures to modern eyes. They were first noticed in 1868 in Newfoundland, but the fledgling paleontological profession dismissed them, not recognizing them as fossils.[140] In Namibia in 1933, those Precambrian fossils were again noted but given a Cambrian chronology because the day's prevailing theory placed the beginning of animal life during the Cambrian Explosion. In 1946, in the Ediacara Hills in Australia, more such strange fossils were found in what were thought to be Precambrian rocks, but it was not until 1957, when those fossils were found in England, in rocks positively identified as Precambrian, that the first period of animal life, the Ediacaran, was on its way to recognition (it was not officially named the Ediacaran until 2004, for the first new period recognized since the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century). In China, the Doushantuo Formation has provided fossils from about 635 mya to 550 mya, which covers the Ediacaran Period (c. 635 to 541 mya), and Ediacaran fossils have been found in a few other places. Microscopic algae spores and animal embryos abound in the Doushantuo cherts, and the spores look like little suns and other fanciful shapes. Almost all of them went extinct within a few million years of appearing in the fossil record, for an "invisible" mass extinction.[141] That mass extinction directly preceded the appearance of the first large organisms that Earth ever saw: Ediacaran fauna (also called "Ediacaran biota," in certain scientific circles, as there is debate whether those Ediacaran fossils were animal remains[142]).
Early Ediacaran fossil finds were often dismissed as pseudofossils because they did not fit the prevailing idea of an animal or plant, and Dickinsonia left the most famous Ediacaran fossils. Today, the most likely interpretation seems to be that Dickensonians flopped themselves down on bacterial mats and fed on them. When one finished eating a mat, it flopped its way to another. It was a bilateral-like creature, and is today classified into an extinct phylum with other Ediacaran fauna. Charnia looked like a plant but almost certainly was not, and is classified into another extinct phylum. Phyla are body plans, and the Ediacaran fauna are indeed strange looking. There is debate whether the Ediacaran fauna were plants, animals, or neither, and that debate will not end soon. Spriggina resembled a trilobite, and may have been its ancestor. Paths in the sediments, called feeding traces, have been found, but there was no deep burrowing in the Ediacaran Period. In the last few million years of the Ediacaran, the first skeletons appeared, particularly of the Cloudinids.[143] That characteristic Ediacaran fauna suddenly appeared in the fossil record about 575 mya, and all abruptly disappeared about 542 mya. Below are images of those Ediacaran forms, which can appear so bizarre to people today. (Source for all images: Wikimedia Commons)

There has been controversy regarding why Ediacaran fauna quickly disappeared, and even if their disappearance qualifies as a mass extinction.[144] One prominent idea is that their disappearance was due to predation by what became Cambrian fauna, and another is that they ate their food sources to extinction, but it appears more likely that it may have been an extinction brought on by anoxic oceans, and Cambrian fauna filled the vacant niches and then some, when the oceans became oxygenated again. Although Ediacaran fauna did not move much, their existence was probably owed to some oxygenation of the oceans, and although their metabolisms would have been slow compared to the animals that followed them, they may not have been able to survive in anoxic oceans. Ediacaran anoxic events are also when the first Middle East oil deposits were formed. The Proto-Tethys Ocean appeared in the Ediacaran, followed by the Paleo-Tethys and the Tethys, and those oceanic basins eventually all disappeared and their seafloors were subducted by colliding continents. Those subducted basins became the primary source of Middle East oil, which are extracted from Earth's most gigantic hydrocarbon deposits.
As with all "big idea" hypotheses such as those that gird the foregoing narrative of a global glaciation and the rise of complex life, there are challenges aplenty coming from various corners, and some are:

• There was not really a Snowball Earth, but several regional plateau glaciations have been misinterpreted as a global glaciation, and the reappearing BIFs were only local in nature;[145]
  
  
• There was not really a Snowball Earth, and a naturally wandering axis of rotation has created the illusion of tropical glaciation;[146] another version is that the magnetic poles wandered more than currently believed and made the paleomagnetic evidence invalid, which has created an illusion of tropical glaciation;
  
  
• The trigger for the Snowball Earth episodes was the drawdown in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by life processes; one hypothesis is that land plants did it, as they colonized the continents hundreds of millions of years before popularly supposed, and another is that early animal life did it;[147]
  
  
• Reconstructions of the oxygen record are subject to a wide range of error, so the levels used to make life-related arguments may be invalid;[148]
  
  
• Animal activities may have been responsible for ventilating the oceans, especially near shore, so animals were a cause, not a consequence, of oxygenating the oceans;[149]
  
  
• Even if rising oxygen levels in the atmosphere and oceans coincided with the rise of complex life, it was not necessarily a causal relationship; some animals can respire anaerobically (at up to four times the usual rate for anaerobic respiration and fermentation), and perhaps the rise of complex life happened in an anaerobic environment, and animals only switched to aerobic respiration when oxygen became available;[150]
  
  
• Canfield's sulfur evidence may not be evidence of an oxygen increase, but of an increase in burrowing animals in the ocean sediments;[151]
  
  
• Oceanic salinity may have prevented complex life forming in the ocean, and maybe complex life first evolved on land and only entered the ocean when it was safe to do so, but the fossil record is too sparse to currently prove it; maybe even life itself first evolved in fresh water, not in oceanic volcanic vents;[152]
  
  
• Atmospheric oxygen levels really did not change around the ventilation episode; oxygen may have been no more important to the appearance of complex life than water or photosynthesis were;[153]
  
  
• The coming eon of complex life had no single underlying cause, but was the result of fortuitous circumstances and dynamics that happened when they did.[154]
  

Some hypotheses are stronger, others weaker, and some have already come and gone (and might be resurrected one day, like Birkeland's hypothesis was?). The coming generation of research may resolve most of these issues, but new ones will undoubtedly arise, and there is obviously a long way to go before significant consensus will be reached on those ancient events.
Again, the purpose of this chapter's presentation is to cover, in some depth, the scientific process and the kinds of controversies and numerous competing hypotheses that can appear, and to show how intersecting lines of evidence, brought from diverse disciplines and using increasingly sophisticated tools, are providing new and important insights, not only into the distant past, but which can also have modern-day relevance.
Readers for the collective task that I have in mind need to become familiar with the scientific process, partly so they can develop a critical eye for the kinds of arguments and evidence that attend the pursuit of FE and other fringe science/technology efforts. For the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to refrain from referring to too many scientific papers and getting into too many details of the controversies. Following my references will help readers who want to go deeply into the issues, and many of them are as deep and controversial as the Snowball Earth hypothesis and aftermath has proven to be, or attempts to explain the Shuram excursion. These are relatively new areas of scientific investigation, partly due to an improved scientific toolset and ingenious ways to use them. It is very possible that the controversies in those areas will diminish within the next generation, as new hypotheses account for increasingly sophisticated data, and paradigmatic changes in the near future are nearly certain. But science is always subject to becoming dogmatic and hypotheses can prevail for reasons of wealth, power, rhetorical skill, and the like, not because they are valid. The history of science is plagued with that phenomenon, and probably will be as long as humanity lives in the era of scarcity.
As will become a familiar theme in this essay, whether it was suffering from predation, a food shortage, or a lack of oxygen, in each instance it was primarily an energy issue. Ediacaran fauna either became an energy source for early Cambrian predators, they ran out of food energy, or they ran out of the oxygen necessary to power their metabolisms or lacked some other energy-delivered nutrient. For this essay's purposes, the most important understanding is that the Sun provides all of earthly life's energy, either directly or indirectly (all except nuclear-powered electric lights driving photosynthesis in greenhouses, and that energy came from dead stars). Today's hydrocarbon energy that powers our industrial world comes from captured sunlight. Exciting electrons with photon energy, then stripping off electrons and protons and using their electric potential to power biochemical reactions, is what makes Earth's ecosystems possible. Too little energy, and reactions will not happen (such as ice ages, enzyme poisoning, the darkness of night, food shortages, and lack of key nutrients that support biological reactions), and too much (such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation, temperatures too high for enzyme survival), and life is damaged or destroyed. The journey of life on Earth is all about adapting to varying energy conditions and finding levels where life can survive. For the many hypotheses about those ancient events and what really happened, the answers are always primarily couched in energy terms, such as how it was obtained, how it was preserved, and how it was used. For life scientists, that is always the framework, and they devote themselves to discovering how the energy game was played.

Speciation, Extinction, and Mass Extinctions

[TABLE="width: 883"]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 883, colspan: 6"]

[align=center]Earth's Largest Mass Extinction Events

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"]

Major Extinction Event

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"]

Minor Extinction Event

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"]

Date

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"]

Percent of Species or Genera that Went Extinct

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"]

Suspected Primary Cause(s)

[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"]

Aftermath Dynamics

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Microscopic organisms
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] May have happened numerous times before eon of complex life.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Changing sea temperatures and chemistry.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] The last microscopic mass extinction directly preceded the rise of the first animals that could be seen with the naked eye.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Ediacaran
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 542 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] Unknown, but almost all Ediacaran forms disappeared.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Anoxia
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Cambrian Explosion
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Mid-Cambrian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 517 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] Unknown, but small shelly fauna largely disappear.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Anoxia and changing sea levels.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Trilobite radiation
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Dresbachian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 502 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] 40% of marine genera
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Anoxia
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] End of Golden Age of Trilobites, and brachiopods diminished.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] End-Cambrian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 485 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] Unknown, but half of trilobite species go extinct. Might be regional, but could be a major mass extinction.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Rising sea levels and anoxia.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Ordovician radiation
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] OrdovicianSilurian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 443 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] c. 85% of all species
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Temperature and sea level changes and anoxia.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Ecosystem functioning not fundamentally altered.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Ireviken
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 433
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] 50% of trilobite and 80% of conodont species in seafloor event.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Climate and sea level changes; it was a late ice age event. Chemistry and/or currents changes or anoxia.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Disaster taxa appear afterward, followed by recovery.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Mulde
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 427 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] Seafloor communities devastated
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Climate change, sea level changes, and anoxia.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Lau
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 424 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] Seafloor communities devastated
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Climate change, sea level changes, and anoxia.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] Late Devonian
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] c. 375 to 360 mya
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 128"] c. 70% of all species
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 176"] Series of extinctions. Sea level changes and anoxia. Mountain-building and volcanism could have triggered ice age that caused it.
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 166"] Arthropod and vertebrate colonization of land halted for 14 million years.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 186"] [/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 142"] Mid-Carboniferous
[/TD]
[TD="class: Normal, width: 86"] ...

[Magda Hassan]

Complex Life Colonizes Land

World map in late Devonian (c. 370 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

Chapter summary:

• Ordovician expansion
  
  
• Second Tethyan ocean begins forming
  
  
• First modern-looking reefs form
  
  
• Rise of mollusks
  
  
• Gigantism and dwarfism
  
  
• Dominance of nautiloids
  
  
• First land plants appear
  
  
• Ordovician extinction
  
  
• Ice age begins and ends
  
  
• Reefs greatly expand in Silurian
  
  
• First land animals appear
  
  
• Fish develop first jaws
  
  
• Silurian extinction events
  
  
• Bony fish appear in Devonian
  
  
• Fish migrate to land
  
  
• Amphibians appear
  
  
• Lignin allows for vascular plants and trees to develop
  
  
• Seed plants appear
  
  
• Trees appear
  
  
• Challenges of migrating to land
  
  
• Plants create riverbanks
  
  
• Oxygen levels crash, making breathing difficult for new migrants to land
  
  
• Land ecosystems pull carbon from atmosphere, which initiates ice age
  
  
• Devonian reefs become greatest in Earth's history
  
  
• Series of Devonian extinction events
  
  
• End-Devonian extinction halts vertebrate migration to land
  

With the extinction that ended the Cambrian Period, animal life's greatest period of innovation was finished, but the next geological period, the Ordovician (c. 485 to 443 mya), still had dramatic changes. The Ordovician would not see any new phyla of note, but the Ordovician was a time of great diversification, as new niches were created and inhabited. They reached modern levels of abundance and diversity. Food chains became complex and could be called food webs. More so than the Cambrian Explosion, the Ordovician "explosion" was an adaptive radiation.[218]
The continental configuration when the Ordovician began was like the Cambrian's, with shallow hot tropical seas. The Paleo-Tethys Ocean began forming in the Ordovician. The first reefs that would impress modern observers were formed in the Ordovician. Different animals built the corals (1, 2, 3) than Cambrian reef builders; but there were no schools of fish swimming around them, as the Ordovician predated the rise of fish. Fish existed (1, 2, 3), but they were armored, without jaws, and lived on the seafloor. The first sharks may have appeared in the Ordovician, but because they had cartilaginous skeletons, the fossil record is equivocal. Some fish had scales, and an eel-like fish might have even had the first teeth. Teeth and claws were early energy technologies; energy applied by muscles could be concentrated to hard points or plates that could crush or penetrate other organisms or manipulate the environment.
Planktonic animals became prevalent, and were critical aspects of the growing food chains. Trilobites and brachiopods flourished, but the Ordovician's most spectacular development might have been the rise of the mollusk. Bivalves exploded in number and variety, and nautiloid cephalopods became the apex predators of Ordovician seas, and some were gigantic. One species reached more than three meters long, and another reached six meters or more. The largest trilobite yet found lived in the late Ordovician. Below is an artist's conception of the Ordovician seafloor. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Gigantism is a controversial subject. Islands often produce giant and dwarf species, and result from energy dynamics; in general, on islands, large species tend to get smaller and small species tend to get larger. A landmark study of polar gigantism among modern seafloor crustaceans concluded that the oxygen level was the key variable.[219] Recall that colder water can absorb more oxygen. Size is a key "weapon" used in evolution's arms race. The bigger the prey, the better it could survive predation, and the bigger the predator, the more likely it would kill a meal. Since the 1930s, there have been continual controversies over size and metabolism, energy efficiency, complexity, structural issues such as skeleton size and strength, and so on.[220] In its final cost/benefit analysis, complex life decided that bigger was better, and the Ordovician saw much larger animals than the Cambrian's. Bigger meant more complex, and more complexity meant more parts, usually more moving parts, and those required energy to run. Whether increasing size was due to more oxygen availability, more food availability, greater metabolic efficiency, reduced risk of predation, or increased predatory success, it was always a cost/benefit analyses and the primary parameter was energy; how to get it, how to preserve it, and how to use it.[221] The "analysis" was probably never a conscious one, but result of the "analysis" was what survived and what did not.
Peter Ward suggested that the superior breathing system of nautiloids led to their dominance.[222] Nautiloids do not appear in the fossil record until the Cambrian's end. Only one family of nautiloids survived the end-Cambrian extinction, and they quickly diversified in the Ordovician to become dominant predators and they replaced arthropods atop the food chain. During the Ordovician, nautiloids developed a sturdy build and they began spending time in deep waters, where their superior respiration system enabled them to inhabit environments that would-be competitors could not exploit.
Although the Ordovician's shallow seas were fascinating abodes of biological innovation, of perhaps more interest to humans was the first colonization of our future home: land. Land plants probably evolved from green algae, and although molecular clock studies suggest that plants first appeared on land more than 600 mya, the first fossil evidence of land plants appeared about 470 mya, in the mid-Ordovician, which would have been moss-like plants, and they seem to have preceded land animals by about 40 million years.[223]
The Ordovician was characterized by diversification into new niches, even creating them, but those halcyonic times came to a harsh end in one of the Big Five mass extinctions: the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The event transpired about 443 mya, and was really two extinction events that combined to comprise the second greatest extinction event ever for marine animals. About 85% of all species, nearly 60% of all genera, and around 25% of all families went extinct.[224] The ultimate cause probably was the drifting of Gondwana over the South Pole, which triggered a short, severe ice age. As our current ice age demonstrates, ice sheets can advance and retreat in cycles, and they appeared to do so during the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. There is evidence that the ice age was triggered by the volcanic event that created the Appalachian Mountains. Newly exposed rock from volcanic mountain-building is a carbon sink due to basalt weathering (as contrasted with silicate weathering volcanoes spew basalt) of that fresh volcanic rock. The combination of Appalachian volcanism ending and subsequent sequestering of atmospheric carbon dioxide may have triggered an ice age. The ice age waxed and waned for 30 million years, but the first event was calamitous.
Two primary events drove the first phase of the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction: the ice age caused the sea level to drop drastically and the oceans became colder. When sea levels fell at least 50 meters, the cooling shallow seas receded from continental shelves and eliminated entire biomes.[225] Many millions of years of "easy living" in warm, shallow seas were abruptly halted. Several groups were ravaged, beginning with the plankton that formed the food chain's base. About 50% of brachiopod and trilobite genera went extinct in the first phase, and cool-water species filled the newly vacant niches. Bivalves were largely found in seashore communities, were scourged when the seas retreated, and lost more than half of their genera. Nautiloids were also hit hard, and about 70% of reef and coral genera went extinct. The retreating seas somehow triggered the extinctions, and whether it was due to simply being exposed to the air or changing and cooling currents, nutrient dispersal patterns, ocean chemistry, and other dynamics is still debated, and those extinction events are being subjected to intensive research in the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century.
After as little as a half-million years of bedraggled survivors adapting to ice age seas, the ice sheets retreated and the oceans rose. The thermohaline circulation of the time may have also changed, and upwelling, anoxia, and other dramatic chemistry and nutrient changes happened. Those dynamics are suspected to be responsible for the second wave of extinctions. There also seem to have been hydrogen sulfide events.[226] Atmospheric oxygen levels may have fallen from around 20% to 15% during the Ordovician, which would have contributed to the mass death. Seafloor anoxia seems to have been particularly lethal to continental-shelf biomes, possibly all the way to shore. It took the ecosystems millions of years to recover from the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, but basic ecosystem functioning was not significantly altered in the aftermath, which is why a mass extinction during the Carboniferous has been proposed as a more significant extinction event. The first major oil deposits of the Middle East were laid down by the anoxic events that ended the Ordovician. Most oil deposits were formed in the era of dinosaurs, and the processes of oil deposit formation were similar; they were related to oceanic currents, and when they came to shore via the bottom, and the prevailing winds blew the top waters offshore, it became a nutrient trap, and anoxic sediments could form. When the winds blew onshore and left via the bottom, the waters became clear, and are known as nutrient deserts. The oscillation between nutrient traps and nutrient deserts can be seen in oil deposit sediments.[227]
The Silurian Period, which began 443 mya, is short for the geologic time scale, lasting "only" 24 million years and ending about 419 mya. The Silurian was another hot period with shallow tropical seas, and Gondwana still covered the South Pole. But the ice caps eventually shrank, and that shrinkage played havoc with the sea level and caused minor extinction events (1, 2, 3), the last of which ended the Silurian and also created more Middle East oil deposits. Reefs made a big comeback, extending as far as 50 degrees north latitude (farther north than where I live in Seattle). According to the GEOCARBSULF model, oxygen levels rose greatly during the Silurian and rebounded from a low in the mid-Ordovician; it may have reached 25% by the early Devonian, which followed the Silurian. Coincident with rising oxygen levels, more giants appeared. Scorpion-like eurypterids were the largest arthropods ever, and the largest specimen reached nearly three meters near the Devonian's oxygen highpoint. The first land-dwelling animals - spiders, centipedes, and scorpions - came ashore during the Silurian between 430 mya and 420 mya, and the first insects appeared about that time, and all of the first insects flew.[228] Beetles first appeared in the fossil record in the late Carboniferous. Arthropods became dominant predators once again, although cephalopods patrolled the reefs as apex predators. Brachiopods reached their greatest size ever at that time, although the succeeding Devonian Period has been called the Golden Age of Brachiopods.[229] As oxygen levels rose, trilobites lost segments and, hence, gill surface area, which may have been an ultimately extinctive gamble. When the Devonian extinction happened during anoxic events, trilobites steeply declined and thereafter only eked out an existence until the Permian extinction finally eliminated them from the fossil record. Fish began developing jaws in the Silurian, which was a great evolutionary leap and arguably the most important innovation in vertebrate history. Jaws, tentacles, claws… prehensile features were advantageous, as animals could more effectively manipulate their environments and acquire energy. On land the colonization began, as mossy "forests" abounded, and the first vascular plants made their appearance, although they were generally less than a hand-width tall when the Silurian ended, and nothing reached even waist-high.
Oxygen levels appeared to keep rising into the early Devonian (c. 419 mya to 359 mya) and then declined over most of the period. The Devonian marked the dramatic rise of land plants and fish, in what is called the Golden Age of Fishes, and that period saw the first vertebrates that enjoyed a terrestrial existence. Armored fish supplanted arthropods and cephalopods during the Devonian as the new apex predators and weighed up to several tons. Sharks also began their rise. The Devonian has been called the Golden Age of Armored Fish.[230] Rising oxygen levels have been proposed as causing the spread of plants and large predatory fish, and a school of thought challenges high-oxygen reasons for many evolutionary events. Nick Butterfield is a prominent challenger.[231]
Bony fish (both ray-finned and lobe-finned) first appeared in the late Silurian and thrived in the Devonian. All bony fish could breathe air in the Devonian, which provided more oxygenated blood to their hearts.[232] Ray-finned fish largely lost that ability and their lungs became swim bladders, which aided buoyancy, like gas-filled nautiloid shells. Ray-finned fish can respire while stationary (unlike cartilaginous fish, and sharks most famously) and are the high-performance swimmers of aquatic environments; they comprise about 99% of all fish species today, although they were not dominant during the Devonian. All fish devote a significant portion of their metabolism to maintaining their water concentrations. In salt water, fish have to push out salt, and in fresh water, they have to pull in water, using, on average, about 5% of their resting metabolism to do so. Brine shrimp use about a third of their metabolic energy to manage their water concentration.
Today's lungfish are living fossils that first appeared at the Devonian's beginning, which demonstrates that the ability to breathe air never went completely out of fashion. That was fortuitous, as one class of lobe-finned fish developed limbs and became our ancestor about 395 mya. The first amphibians appeared about 365 mya. In the late Devonian, lobe-finned and armored fish were in their heyday. The first internally fertilized fish appeared in the Devonian, for the first mother that gave birth.[233] A lightweight descendent of nautiloids appeared in the Devonian, and ammonoids subsequently enjoyed more than three hundred million years of existence. They often played a prominent role, until they were finally rendered extinct in the Cretaceous extinction. Nautiloids retreated to deep-water ecosystem margins and still exploit that niche today.
Land colonization was perhaps the Devonian's most interesting event. The adaptations invented by aquatic life to survive in terrestrial environments were many and varied. Most importantly, the organism would no longer be surrounded by water and had to manage desiccation. Nutrient acquisition and reproductive practices would have to change, and the protection that water provided from ultraviolet light was gone; plants and animals devised methods to protect themselves from the Sun's radiation. Also, moving on land and in the air became major bioengineering projects for animals. Breathing air instead of water presented challenges. The pioneers who left water led both aquatic and terrestrial existences. Amphibians had both lungs and gills, and arthropods, whose exoskeletons readily solved the desiccation and structural support problems, evolved book lungs to replace their gills, which were probably book gills.
All such developments had to happen in water, first, for a successful move to land.[234] The evidence seems to support the idea that life first began to colonize land via freshwater ecosystems, which provided a friendlier environment than seashores do. The first arthropods ashore were largely detritivores, eating dead plant matter, and what followed added live plants and early detritivores to their diets.[235] The land-based ecosystems that plants and arthropods created became nutrient sources that benefited shoreline and surface communities, but the vertebrate move to land was not initiated by the winners of aquatic life. To successful aquatic animals, the shore was not a new opportunity to exploit but a hazardous boundary of existence best avoided. Tetrapodomorphs probably made the vertebrate transition to land as marginal animals eking out a frontier existence.[236] The fins that became limbs originally developed for better swimming, and further muscular-skeletal changes enabled them to exploit opportunities on land. Two key reasons for the migration onto land may have been for basking (absorbing energy) and enhanced survival of young from predation (preserving energy).[237] The five digits common to limbed vertebrates were set in this time; early tetrapodomorphs had six, seven, and eight digits, and the digital losses were probably related to using feet on land.[238]
But plants had to migrate before animals did, as they formed the terrestrial food chain's base. Along with desiccation issues, plants needed structures to raise them above the ground, roots, a circulatory system, and new means of reproduction. Large temperature swings between day and night also accompanied life on land. Plants developed cuticles to conserve moisture, a circulatory system that piped water from the roots up into the plant and transported nutrients where they were needed, and plant photosynthesis needed water to function. Vascular plants pumped water through their tissues in tubes by evaporating water from their surface tissues and pulling up more new water behind the evaporating water via the "chain" of water's hydrogen bonds. The last common ancestor of plants and animals reproduced sexually, and sexual reproduction is how nearly all eukaryotes reproduce today, although many ways exist to reproduce asexually. The first vascular plants are considered to have attained their height in order to spread their spores.[239] The Rhynie chert in Scotland is the most famous fossil bed that records complex life's early colonization of land.
The early Devonian was a time of ground-hugging mosses and a strange, lichen-like plant that towered up to eight meters tall. The oldest vascular plant division ("division" in plants is equivalent to "phylum" in animals) still existing first appeared about 410 mya, and today's representatives are mostly mosses. In the late Devonian, horsetails and ferns appeared and still exist. Seed plants also developed in the late Devonian, which enabled plants to quickly spread to higher and dryer elevations and cover the landmasses, as seed plants did not need a water medium to reproduce as spore-based systems did. In spore systems, which are partly asexual but have a sexual stage, a water film was required for the sperm to swim to the ovum. The first trees appeared about 385 mya (1, 2), could be ten meters tall, and formed vast forests, but reproduced with spores and so needed moist environments. The first rainforests appeared in the Devonian and reached their apogee in the Carboniferous. Those rainforests produced Earth's first thick coal beds. The Devonian was the Cambrian Explosion for plants, and enabled animals to colonize land. The plants that best succeeded in the Devonian were those with the highest energy efficiencies, which involved size, stability, photosynthesis, internal transport, and reproduction.[240] Plants had different dynamics of extinction than animals did, as plants are more vulnerable to climate change and extinction via competition, but are less vulnerable to mass extinction events than animals.[241]
One of the most important plant innovations was lignin, which is a polymer whose original purpose appears to have been creating tubes for water transport, and was also used to help provide structural support so that trees could grow tall and strong. Without lignin, there would not have been any true forests and probably not much in the way of complex terrestrial ecosystems. Lignin was also responsible for forming the coal beds that powered the early Industrial Revolution, but that coal-bed formation would not happen in earnest until the next geologic period, the aptly named Carboniferous. It took more than a hundred million years for life forms to appear that could digest lignin. A class of fungus gained the ability to digest lignin about 290 mya, and by that time, most of what became Earth's coal deposits had already been buried in sediments.[242] As with other seminal developments in life's history, the ability to digest lignin seems to have evolved only once. The enzyme that fungi use to digest lignin has also been found in some bacteria, but fungi are the primary lignin-digesters on Earth.
From a biomass perspective, the Devonian's primary change was the proliferation of land plants. Below is an artist's conception of the Devonian forests. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Land plants comprise about half of Earth's biomass today, and prokaryotes provide the other half. Terrestrial biomass is 500 times greater than marine biomass, and terrestrial plants have about a thousand times the biomass of terrestrial animals, so animals constitute less than 0.1% of Earth's biomass. The ecologies of marine and terrestrial environments are radically different. Virtually all primary producers in marine environments are completely eaten and comprise the food chain's foundation, while less than 20% of land plant biomass is eaten.
Creating the huge biomass of land-based ecosystems meant that carbon was removed from the atmosphere. Also, root systems were a new phenomenon, with dramatic environmental impact. Before the rise of vascular plants, rain on the continents ran to the global ocean in sheets and braided rivers. Every rainfall ran toward the oceans in a flash flood, as happens in deserts today. Plant roots stabilized riverbanks and form the rivers that we are familiar with today. Also, roots broke up rock, accelerated weathering, and created soils. Plants break down rock five times as fast as other geophysical processes will.[243] The forests and soils created a huge "sponge" that absorbed precipitation, which the resultant ecosystems depended on. Vast nutrient runoffs from land into the ocean were stimulated by plants' colonization of land, which in turn stimulated ocean life. The reefs of the Devonian were the greatest in Earth's history and reached about ten times the area of today's reefs, with a total area about equal to half of Europe, of about five million square kilometers (two million square miles).[244]
Plants and trees created a "boundary layer" of relatively calm air near the ground which became the primary abode of most land animals. Also, forests created a positive feedback where moisture was recycled in the forests, and kept them moister than purely ocean-sourced precipitation would. Today, somewhere between 35% to 50% or more of the rain that falls in the Amazon rainforest is recycled water via transpiration.[245] Transpiration also cools the plants via the latent heat of vaporization, as well as the resultant cloud cover.[246] Transpiration, by the way it sucks water from the soils, maintains a negative pressure on soils and keeps them aerated. Waterlogged soils cannot support the vast ecosystems of forest soils, so trees are needed to maintain the soil's dynamics that support the base of the forest ecosystem. Rainforest processes thus create positive feedbacks that maintain the rainforest. Conversely, the rampant deforestation of Earth's rainforests in the past century has created negative feedbacks that further destroyed the rainforests.
Forests were a radical innovation that has not been seen before or since. Trees were Earth's first and last truly gigantic organisms, and the largest trees dwarfed the largest animals. Why did trees grow so large? It seems to be because they could. Land life gave plants opportunities that aquatic life could not provide, and plants "leapt" at the chance. Lignin, first developed for vascular transport, became the equivalent of steel girders in skyscrapers. In the final analysis, trees grew tall to give their foliage the most sunlight and to use wind and height to spread their seeds, and in the future that height would help protect the foliage from ground-based animal browsers. The height limit of Earth's trees is an energy issue: the ability to pump water to the treetops.[247] Arid climates prevent trees from growing tall or even growing at all. Energy availability limits leaf size, too.[248] From an ecosystem's perspective, the great biomass of forests was primarily a huge store of energy; trees allowed for prodigious energy storage per square meter of land. That stored energy ultimately became a vast resource for the forest ecosystem, as it eventually became food for other life forms and the basis for soils, which in turn became sponges to soak up precipitation and recycle it via transpiration. Trees created the entire ecosystem that depended on them.
Revisiting how energy enters ecosystems, primarily via the capture of photon energy by photosynthesis, only so much sunlight reaches Earth, and photosynthesis can only capture so much. The energy "budget" available for plants has constraints, and the question is always what to do with it. An organism can break bonds between atoms and release energy or bind atoms together to build biological structures, which uses energy (exothermic reactions release energy, while endothermic reactions absorb energy). Photosynthesis is endothermic, and in biological systems, endothermic reactions are also called anabolic, as they invest energy to build molecules, which is how organisms grow. Catabolic reactions break down molecules in exothermic reactions that release energy for use. Plants faced the same decisions that societies face today: consumption or investment? Only with an energy surplus can there be investments, such as for infrastructure. Plants invested in trunk-and-branch infrastructure to place their energy-collecting and seed-spreading equipment in the best possible position. Plants race for the sky, and trees represent the biggest energy investment of any type of organism. On average, today's plants use a little more than half of the energy that they capture via photosynthesis (called gross primary production) for respiration. Growing forests use most of that gross primary production to grow (called net primary production), and when the structural limits have been reached, most energy is consumed via respiration to run life processes within the infrastructure.[249] Animal development is similar. When humans began building cities and urban infrastructures, the basic process was the same.
Most marine phyla were unable to manage the transition to land and remain aquatic to this day. Arthropods found a way, and scorpions, spiders, and millipedes were early pioneers. The insect and fish clades comprise the most successful terrestrial animals today, as fish led to all terrestrial vertebrates. Gastropods made it to land, mainly as snails and slugs, as did several worm phyla, but the rest of aquatic life generally remained water-bound. Also, many animal clades have moved back-and-forth between water and land, usually hugging the shoreline, sometimes in a single organism's life cycle, which blurred the terrestrial/aquatic divide at times. The first fish to venture past shore seem to have accomplished it in the mid-Devonian, and colonizing land via freshwater environments was a prominent developmental path.
Although the first insects appeared in today's fossil record about 400 mya, they were fairly developed, which meant that they have an older lineage, probably beginning in the Silurian. The first land animals would have been vegetarians, as something had to start the food chain from plants, and early insects were adapted for plant-eating. Plants would have then begun to co-evolve with animals, as they tried to avoid being eaten.
When life colonized land, global weather systems began dramatically impacting life, as land plants and animals would be at the mercy of the elements as never before, and forests and deserts formed. The continents also began coming together and eventually formed Pangaea in the Permian, and converging plates meant subduction and mountain-building. Mountains in the British Isles and Scandinavia were formed in the Devonian, the Appalachians became larger, and the mountains of the USA's Great Basin also began developing. Colliding tectonic plates can build mountains, and mountain ranges greatly impacted weather systems during terrestrial life's future, which also profoundly influenced oceanic ecosystems.
As with previous critical events, such as saving the oceans and life on Earth itself, life helped terraform Earth. But the late Devonian is an instance when the rise of land plants may have also had Medean effects. Carbon dioxide sequestering, which reduced the atmosphere's carbon dioxide concentration by up to 80%, may have cooled Earth's surface enough so that an ice age began and another one of Earth's mass extinctions began. As with the Ordovician extinction, the ultimate cause for the Devonian extinctions seems to have been rising and falling sea levels, associated with growing and receding ice caps, as Gondwana still covered the South Pole. The Devonian extinction events began happening more than 380 mya, and a major one happened about 375 mya, called the Kellwasser event. The reasons for the Kellwasser event are today generally attributed to the water becoming cold and anoxic.[250] A bolide impact has been invoked in some scientific circles, but the evidence is weak.[251] Mountain-building and volcanic events also happened as continents began colliding to eventually form Pangaea (and the resultant silicate and basaltic weathering removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and those dynamics may have been like what precipitated the previous major mass extinction.[252] Black shales abounded during and after the Kellwasser event, and they are always evidence of anoxic conditions and how the oil deposits initially formed. However, the Kellwasser event anoxia may have not only been due to low atmospheric oxygen, but was also the result of eroding the newly exposed land and the detritus of the new forest biomes, which created a vast nutrient runoff into the oceans that may have initiated huge algal blooms that caused anoxic events near shore.[253]
Unlike the short, severe Ordovician events, the Devonian extinctions may have stretched for up to 25 million years, with periodic pulses of extinction. The Kellwasser event seems to be comprised of several extinction events, and when they ended, at least 70% of all marine species went extinct and the greatest reefs in Earth's history were 99.98% eradicated. It took 100 million years before major reef systems again appeared.[254] Armored fish and jawless fish lost half of their species, and armored fish were rendered entirely extinct in the event that ended the Devonian.
What was most relevant to humans, however, was the almost-complete extinction during the Kellwasser event of the tetrapods that had come ashore. Tetrapods did not reappear in the fossil record until several million years after the Kellwasser event, and has even been referred to as the Fammenian Gap (the Fammenian Age is the Devonian's last age).[255] The Kellwasser event also appeared to be a period of low atmospheric oxygen content, and some evidence is the lack of charcoal in fossil deposits. Recent research has demonstrated that getting wood to burn at oxygen levels of less than 13-15% may be impossible.[256] Because all periods of complex land life show evidence of forest fires, it is today thought that oxygen levels have not dropped below 13-15% since the Devonian, but during the "charcoal gap" of the late Devonian, when the first landlubbing tetrapods went extinct, oxygen levels reached their lowest levels ever, which must have impacted the first animals trying to breathe air instead of water. During the Kellwasser event, there is no charcoal evidence at all, which leads to the notion that oxygen levels may have even dropped below 13%.[257] This drop may be related to severe climatic stresses on the new mono-species forests, which are probably related to the ice age that the forests helped bring about due to their carbon sequestering. That is an attractively explanatory scenario, but the controversy and research continues. The first seed plants probably appeared before the Kellwasser event, but it was not until after the Fammenian Gap that seed plants began to proliferate.[258]
The Kellwasser event ended the first invasion of land by vertebrates and created an evolutionary bottleneck. Some stragglers survived the Kellwasser event, but the fossil record for the next seven million years has been devoid of tetrapod fossils with the exception of one species.[259] After the Fammenian Gap ended about 368 mya, tetrapods renewed their invasion of land, and those tetrapods with many toes appeared in the fossil record with the second invasion. Ichthyostega was Earth's largest land animal in those days. The tetrapods of the time may have not yet been true amphibians, but they were making the adjustments needed to become true land animals, such as losing their gills and improving their locomotion. No new arthropods appeared on land during that time.
After several million years of adaptation, tetrapods seemed ready to become the dominant land animals, but then came the second major Devonian extinction event, today called the Hangenberg event. While the ice age conditions around the Kellwasser event are debated, there is no uncertainty about the Hangenberg event; there were massive, continental ice sheets, accompanied by falling sea levels and anoxic events, as evidenced by huge black shales.[260] The event's frigidity was probably a key extinction factor, and anoxia was the other killing mechanism. The Hangenberg event had devastating consequences; it meant the end of armored fish, the near-extinction of the new ammonoids (perhaps only one genus survived), oceanic eurypterids went extinct, trilobites began to make their exit as seafloor communities were devastated, lobe-finned fish reached their peak influence, and archaeopteris forests collapsed.[261]
Trees first appeared during a plant diversity crisis, and the arrival of seed plants and ferns ended the dominance of the first trees, so the plant crises may have been more about evolutionary experiments than environmental conditions, although a carbon dioxide crash and ice age conditions would have impacted photosynthesizers. The earliest woody plants that gave rise to trees and seed plants largely went extinct at the Devonian's end. But what might have been the most dramatic extinction, as far as humans are concerned, was the impact on land vertebrates. During the Devonian extinction about 20% of all families, 50% of all genera, and 70% of all species disappeared forever.
There seems to have been convergent evolution among the early tetrapods, but they were beaten back twice during the late- and end-Devonian extinction events, and what emerged the third time was different than what came before.[262] As with many mass extinction events, evolution's course was significantly altered in the extinction's aftermath. As with studies of human history, events are always contingent and not foreordained in Whiggish fashion. Although the increase in "intelligence" may well be an inherent purpose of being in physical reality, the evolutionary path to the man writing these words had false starts, "detours," singular events, expansions, bottlenecks, catastrophes, and the like. Evolutionary experiments on other planets probably had radically different outcomes. A mystical source that I respect once stated that there are one million sentient species in our galaxy, with a diversity that is staggering, and from what I have been exposed to (and here), I will not challenge it.

Making Coal, the Rise of Reptiles, and the Greatest Extinction Ever

World map in early Carboniferous Period (c. 340 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

World map at end of Carboniferous Period (c. 300 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

World map in late Permian Period (c. 260 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

Chapter summary:

• Vertebrates resume their invasion of land after 14 million years
  
  
• Structural respiration limitation for amphibians and early reptiles
  
  
• Oxygen levels rise to highest ever on Earth, caused by first rainforests
  
  
• Giant arthropods appear
  
  
• Amniotes appear
  
  
• Sharks and ray-finned fish rise to dominance
  
  
• Ice age leads to Carboniferous rainforest collapse, ending greatest period of coal formation in Earth's history
  
  
• Lignin digesting white rot appears, ending possibility of a comparable coal-building period happening again
  
  
• Tethys Ocean begins forming in the Permian
  
  
• Conifer forests appear
  
  
• Pangaea supercontinent forms
  
  
• Synapsids dominate terrestrial biomes
  
  
• Early instance of display features for sexual selection
  
  
• Reptiles develop more upright posture, improving breathing, while oxygen levels crash
  
  
• First extinction event of Permian extinction
  
  
• Volcanism ends ice age and initiates 200 million year Greenhouse Earth phase
  
  
• Animals adapt to low oxygen levels
  
  
• Mammalian ancestors appear
  
  
• Reefs begin recovering from Devonian extinction
  
  
• Greatest extinction event ever
  

The period succeeding the Devonian is called the Carboniferous (c. 359 to 299 mya), for reasons that will become evident. The Hangenberg event cut short the second attempt of vertebrates to invade land and there was another 14-million-year gap in the fossil record called the Tournaisian Gap, which is part of Romer's Gap (which is considered to be about a 30-million-year gap).[263] After all mass extinctions, it took millions of years for ecosystems to recover, even tens of millions of years, and markedly different ecosystems and plant/animal assemblages often replaced what existed before the extinction. The Devonian spore-forests were destroyed, and outside of the peat swamps, the tallest trees in the Tournaisian Gap were about as tall as I am, and even in the swamps, the tallest trees were about ten meters tall, as they were before the Hangenberg event.[264]
Peter Ward led an effort to catalog the fossil record before and after Romer's Gap, which found a dramatic halt in tetrapod and arthropod colonization that did not resume until about 340-330 mya. Romer's Gap seems to have coincided with low-oxygen levels of the late Devonian and early Carboniferous.[265] If low oxygen coincided with a halt in colonization, just as the adaptation to breathing air was beginning, the obvious implication is that low oxygen levels hampered early land animals. Not just the lung had to evolve for the up-and-coming amphibians, but the entire chest cavity had to evolve to expand and contract while also allowing for a new mode of locomotion. When amphibians and splay-footed reptiles run, they cannot breathe, as their mechanics of locomotion prevent running and breathing at the same time. Even walking and breathing is generally difficult. This means that they cannot perform any endurance locomotion, but have to move in short spurts. This is why today's predatory amphibians and reptiles are ambush predators. They can only move in short bursts, and then have to stop, breathe, and recover their oxygen deficit. In short, they have no stamina. This limitation is called Carrier's Constraint. The below image shows the evolutionary adaptations that led to overcoming Carrier's Constraint. Dinosaurs overcame it first, and it probably was related to their dominance and the extinction or marginalization of their competitors. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The heart became steadily more complex during complex life's evolutionary journeys. Fish hearts have one pump and two chambers. Amphibians developed three-chambered hearts, wherein oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are not structurally separated, but mix. That arrangement is obviously not as energy-efficient as separating oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. Some later reptiles evolved four-chambered hearts, which their surviving descendants, crocodilians and birds, possess, and somewhere along the line, mammals also evolved four-chambered hearts, perhaps before they became mammals.
While oxygen level changes of the GEOCARBSULF model show early fluctuations that the COPSE model does not, both models agree on a huge rise in oxygen levels in the late Devonian and Carboniferous, in tandem with collapsing carbon dioxide levels. There is also virtually universal agreement that that situation is due to rainforest development. Rainforests dominated the Carboniferous Period. If the Devonian could be considered terrestrial life's Cambrian Explosion, then the Carboniferous was its Ordovician. In the Devonian, plants developed vascular systems, photosynthetic foliage, seeds, roots, and bark, and true forests first appeared. Those basics remain unchanged to this day, but in the Carboniferous there was great diversification within those body plans, and Carboniferous plants formed the foundation for the first complex land-based ecosystems. Ever since the Snowball Earth episodes, there has almost always been a continent at or near the South Pole, and the [url=http://www.ahealedplanet.net/humanity.htm#ice

[Magda Hassan]

The Age of Mammals
World map in early-Eocene (c. 50 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

World map in early-Miocene (c. 20 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)

Chapter summary:

• Recovery from the Cretaceous extinction
  
• Development of mammals
  
• Mammalian reproductive practices
  
• Ecological guilds
  
• Mammalian convergent evolution with dinosaurs
  
• Mammals reach maximum size
  
• Hindgut and foregut digestion
  
• Primate development
  
• Non-mammalian apex predators of Cenozoic
  
• Rise of grass and C4 carbon fixation
  
• Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
  
• Eocene's Golden Age of Life
  
• Mammals migrate to oceans and become whales
  
• Mammals easily migrate between continents via Arctic region
  
• India, Africa, and Arabia begin colliding with Eurasia, forming mountain ranges
  
• How geological processes make oil
  
• New Zealand's bird-dominated biomes evolve in isolation until humans arrive
  
• 200-million-year Greenhouse Earth phase ends, and Earth begins cooling
  
• Mid-Eocene extinction
  
• End-Eocene extinction largely confined to Europe
  
• Antarctic ice sheet begins developing
  
• Original whales go extinct, and whales adapted to new biomes appear
  
• Africa evolves in isolation; elephants appear
  
• Monkeys appear
  
• Many modern mammal families appear
  
• Oligocene warms into Miocene
  
• Global currents dramatically change
  
• Asian invasion of North America
  
• Africa collides with Eurasia, and mass cross-migration begins
  
• South America and Australia evolve in isolation
  
• Mid-Miocene cooling; Greenland ice sheets begin to develop
  
• Cause of mid-Miocene cooling
  
• Mountain-building events
  
• Grasslands appear
  
• Mammals adapt to eating dry-climate plants
  
• Tethys Ocean finally disappears
  
• Pliocene Epoch and Great American Interchange
  
• Changing ocean currents initiate current ice age
  
• Ice Age begins, along with Quaternary Period
  

As smoke cleared and dust settled, literally, from the cataclysm that ended the dinosaurs' reign, the few surviving mammals and birds crept from their refuges, seeds and spores grew into plants, and the Cenozoic Era began, which is also called the Age of Mammals, as they have dominated that era. The Cenozoic's first period is the Paleogene, which ran from about 66 mya to 23 mya. As this essay enters the era of most interest to humans, I will slice the timeline a little finer and use the geological time scale concept of epochs. The Paleogene's first epoch is called the Paleocene (c. 66 mya to 56 mya).
Compared to the recovery from the mass extinctions that ended the Devonian, Permian, and Triassic periods, the recovery from the end-Cretaceous extinction was relatively swift. The seafloor ecosystem was fully reestablished within two million years.[361] But the story on land was spectacularly different. By the Paleocene's end, ten million years after the end-Cretaceous event, all mammalian orders had appeared in what I will call the "Mammalian Explosion." While the fossil record for Paleocene mammals is relatively thin, the Mammalian Explosion is one of the most spectacular evolutionary radiations on record.[362] Because of its younger age, the Cenozoic Era's fossil record is generally more complete than those of previous eras.
So far in this essay, mammals have received scant attention, but the mammals' development before the Cenozoic is important for understanding their rise to dominance. The therapsids that led to mammals, called cynodonts, first appeared in the late Permian, about 260 mya, and they had key mammalian characteristics. Their jaws and teeth were markedly different from other reptiles; their teeth were specialized for more thorough chewing, which extracts more energy from food, and that was likely a key aspect of ornithischian success more than 100 million years later. Cynodonts also developed a secondary palate so that they could chew and breathe at the same time, which was more energy efficient. Cynodonts eventually ceased the reptilian practice of continually growing and shedding teeth, and their specialized and precisely fitted teeth rarely changed.[363] Mammals replace their teeth a maximum of once. Along with tooth changes, jawbones changed roles. Fewer and stronger bones anchored the jaw, which allowed for stronger jaw musculature and led to the mammalian masseter muscle (clench your teeth and you can feel your masseter muscle). Bones previously anchoring the jaw were no longer needed and became bones of the mammalian middle ear.[364] The jaw's rearrangement led to the most auspicious proto-mammalian development: it allowed the braincase to expand. Mammals had relatively large brains from the very beginning, and it was probably initially related to developing a keen sense of smell. Mammals are the only animals with a cerebral cortex, which eventually led to human intelligence. As dinosaurian dominance drove mammals to the margins, where they lived underground and emerged to feed at night, mammals needed improved senses to survive, and auditory and olfactory senses heightened, as did the mammalian sense of touch. Increased processing of stimuli required a larger brain, and brains have high energy requirements. In humans, only livers use more energy than brains.[365] Cynodonts also had turbinal bones, which suggest that they were warm-blooded. Soon after the Permian extinction, a cynodont appeared that may have had a diaphragm; it was another respiratory innovation that served it well in those low-oxygen times, functioning like pump gills in aquatic environments.
Further along the evolutionary path, here are two animals (1, 2) that may be direct ancestors of mammals; one herbivorous and the other carnivorous/insectivorous. They both resembled rats and probably lived in that niche as burrowing, nocturnal feeders. Mammaliaformes included animals that were probably warm-blooded, had fur, and nursed their young, but laid eggs, like today's platypus. Nursing one's offspring is the defining mammalian trait today, but there has been great controversy over just which mammaliaformes are mammals' direct ancestors and which one can be called the first mammal.[366] According to the most commonly accepted definition of a mammal, the first ones appeared in the mid-Triassic, about 225 mya, nearly 20 million years after dinosaurs first appeared. The only remaining therapsids after a mass extinction at 230 mya were small (the largest was dog-sized), including the mammalian clade, and archosaurs dominated all Earthly biomes from that extinction event until the end-Cretaceous extinction.
Dinosaurs fortunately never became as small as typical Mesozoic mammals, or else mammals might have been out-competed into extinction. Mammals stayed small in the Mesozoic, and the largest Mesozoic mammal yet known was raccoon-size, and its diet included baby dinosaurs. Dinosaurs returned the favor, and digging up mammals from their burrows to snack on them is known dinosaurian behavior.[367]
The issue of early mammalian thermoregulation is controversial and unsettled; even today, mammals engage in a wide array of thermoregulatory practices. Today's primitive mammals have lower metabolic levels than modern ones. Therapsids did not overcome Carrier's Constraint as dinosaurs did; they were not high-performance animals. However, early mammals did not see the Sun, and their larger brains required more energy. Early mammals probably were endothermic, but the condition may have included regular torpor, when they went into a brief "hibernation" phase, and their active body temperature may have been several degrees Celsius lower than today's modern mammals. Birds and mammals are often born without endothermy, but develop it as they grow.[368] Mammals solved Carrier's Constraint when they adopted erect postures in the early Jurassic.[369]
Mammalian reproductive practices separate them into their primary categories. Some "primitive" mammals still lay eggs. The first placental mammal appeared about 160 mya, the marsupial split began about 35 million years later, and the first true marsupial appeared about 65 mya. The marsupial/placental "decision," as with many other lines of evolution, seems to have been a cost-benefit one rooted in energy. Marsupials have far less energy invested in their young at birth than placentals do. Marsupials and birds readily abandon their offspring when hardship strikes. Placentals have a great deal more invested in giving birth to offspring and are therefore less likely to "cut their losses" as easily as birds and marsupials do.[370] In certain environments, marsupials had the advantage over placentals. The earliest known marsupial-line mammal appeared in China 125 mya, and marsupials and placentals co-existed on the fringes. From there they migrated to North America, and then South America. About when the end-Cretaceous holocaust happened, South America separated from North America, but South America was still connected to Antarctica. About 50 mya, marsupials crossed from Antarctica to Australia, perhaps by crossing a narrow sea, and placental mammals died out in Australia, probably outcompeted by marsupials. Earth's only egg-laying mammals today live in New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. An entire order of early mammals, which were like marsupial and monotreme rodents, existed for about 120 million years, longer than any other mammalian lineage, to only go extinct in the Oligocene, probably outcompeted by rodents. They were probably the first mammals to disperse nuts, and were probably responsible for a great deal of coevolution between nut trees and animals.[371] All living marsupials have ancestors from South America. In North America and Eurasia, marsupials died out, probably outcompeted by placentals. Africa was not connected to any of those landmasses during those times and thus never hosted marsupials. In South America, marsupials and birds were apex predators (1, 2), but a diverse and unique assemblage of placental ungulates flourished in South America during about 60 million years of relative isolation from all other landmasses.
As with the origins of animals, the molecular evidence shows that virtually all major orders of mammals existed before the end-Cretaceous extinction. The Paleocenes Mammalian Explosion appears to have not been a genetic event, but an ecological one; mammals quickly adapted to empty niches that non-avian dinosaurs left behind.[372] The kinds of mammals that appeared in the Paleocene and afterward illustrate the idea that body features and size are conditioned by their environment, which includes other organisms. With the sauropods' demise, high grazers of conifers never reappeared, but many mammals developed ornithischian eating habits and many attained a similar size. That phenomenon illustrates the ecological concept of guilds, in which assemblages of vastly different animals can inhabit similar ecological niches. The guild concept is obvious with the many kinds of animals that formed reefs in the past; the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous reefs all had similarities, particularly in their shape and location, but the organisms comprising them, from reef-forming organisms to reef denizens and the apex predators patrolling them, had radical changes during the eon of complex life. If you squinted and blurred your vision, most of those reefs from different periods would appear strikingly similar, but when you focused, the variation in organisms could be astounding. The woodpecker guild is comprised of animals that eat insects living under tree bark. But in Madagascar, where no woodpeckers live, a lemur fills that niche, with a middle finger that acts as the woodpecker's bill. In New Guinea, a marsupial fills that role. In the Galapagos Islands, a finch uses cactus needles to acquire those insects. In Australia, cockatoos have filled the niche, but unlike the others, they have not developed a probing body part, nor do they use tools, but just rip off the bark with the brute force of their beaks.[373]
After the dinosaurs, empty niches filled with animals that looked remarkably like dinosaurs, if we squinted. Most large browsing ornithischians weighed in the five-to-seven metric ton range, and by the late Paleocene, uintatheres appeared in North America and China and attained about rhinoceros size, to be supplanted in the Eocene by larger titanotheres, and by the Oligocene, in Eurasia lived the largest land mammals of all time, including the truly dinosaur-sized Paraceratherium. The largest yet found weighed 16 metric tons and was about five meters tall at the shoulders and eight meters in length. Even a T-rex might have thought twice before attacking one of those. It took about 25 million years for land mammals to reach their maximum size, and for the succeeding 40 million years, the maximum size remained fairly constant.[374] Scientists hypothesize that mammalian growth to dinosaurian size was dependent on energy parameters, including continent size and climate, and cooler climates encouraged larger bodies.
Huge mammals persist to this day, although the spread of humans was coincident with the immediate extinction of virtually all large animals with the exception of those in Africa and, to a lesser extent, Asia. The five-to-seven-metric-ton browser formed a guild common to dinosaurs and mammals, and is probably related to metabolic limits and the relatively low calorie density that browsing and foraging affords.[375] Sometimes, the similarity between dinosaurs and mammals could be eerie, such as ankylosaurs and glyptodonts, which is a startling example of convergent evolution, which is the process by which distantly related organisms develop similar features to solve similar problems. They were even about the same size, at least for the most common ankylosaurs, which were about the size of a car. Ankylosaurs appeared in the early Cretaceous and abounded all the way to the Cretaceous's end. Glyptodonts appeared in the Miocene and prospered for millions of years.
The Cenozoic equivalent of a bolide impact was the arrival of humans, as glyptodonts went extinct with all other large South American megafauna shortly after human arrival. The largest endemic South American animals to survive the Great American Interchange of three mya, when North American placentals prevailed over South American marsupials, and the arrival of humans to the Western Hemisphere beginning less than 15 kya, are the capybara and giant anteater, which are tiny compared to their ancient South American brethren. The giant anteater is classified as a sloth, and sloths were a particularly South American animal. The largest sloths were bigger than African bush elephants, which are Earth's largest land animals today. After car-sized glyptodonts went extinct, dog-sized giant armadillos became the line's largest remaining representative.
Among herbivores, their mode of digestion was important. Hindgut fermenters attained the largest size among land mammals, and elephants, rhinos, and horses have that digestive process. Cattle, camels, deer, giraffes, and many other herbivorous mammals are foregut fermenters and many are ruminants, which have four-chambered stomachs, while the others have only three chambers. While foregut fermenters are more energy efficient, hindgut fermenters can ingest more food. Hindgut fermenters gain an advantage when forage is of low quality. What they lack in efficiency they more than make up for in volume. There are drawbacks to that advantage, however, such as when there is not much forage or its quality is poor, such as dead vegetation. A cow, for instance, digests as much as 75% of the protein that it eats, while a horse digests around 25%. Live grass contains about four times the protein as dead grass. Cattle can subsist on the dead grass of droughts or hard winters and horses cannot, which was a tradeoff in pastoral societies.[376]
Angiosperms began overtaking gymnosperms in the early Cenozoic, but it did not immediately happen. In Paleocene coal beds laid down in today's Wyoming, gymnosperms still dominated the swamps, and the undergrowth was mainly comprised of ferns and horsetails.[377] But angiosperms were on their way to dominance, and mammals, birds, and insects began major adaptations to them.
The present consensus is that primates appeared in the late Cretaceous between 85 mya and 65 mya, perhaps in China, but the earliest known primate fossils are from the late Paleocene around 55 mya and were found in Northern Africa. The first primates were tree-dwellers that ate insects, nectar, seeds, and fruit. Their eyes point forward (they rely on sight more than other senses, and have pronounced binocular vision), and most have opposable digits on their hands/feet, which are ideal for canopy-living. Primates generally have larger brains than other mammals, which may have developed to rely more on eyesight and process the stimuli of binocular vision, and primates rely less on the olfactory sense. That change assisted the primate increase in intelligence. Lemurs diverged early in the primate line and rafted over to the newly isolated Madagascar in the early Eocene, and lemurs were Madagascar's only primates until humans arrived about two thousand years ago (and the largest lemurs, which were gorilla-sized, immediately went extinct). A rodent-like sister group to primates that lived in North America and Europe went extinct in the Paleocene, as did many early mammalian lines. In general, Paleocene mammals had relatively small brains, and many from that epoch are called "primitive," although it did not necessarily mean functionally primitive when compared to modern mammals. However, evolutionary "progress" is a legitimate concept. The energy efficiency of ray-finned fish is probably responsible for their success, and the change from "primitive" to "modern" was usually related to the energy issue. Evolutionary progress is an unfashionable concept in some scientific circles, but it is a clear trend over life's history on Earth, and can be quite obvious during the eon of complex life.[378]
Paleocene mammals were rarely apex predators. Crocodilians survived the end-Cretaceous extinction and remained dominant in freshwater environments, although turtles lived in their Golden Age in the Paleocene Americas, and might have even become apex predators for a brief time. The largest snakes ever recorded (1, 2) lived in the Paleocene and could swallow crocodiles whole. In addition to birds' being among South America's apex predators, a huge flightless bird in North America and Europe was also probably a Paleocene apex predator and survived to the mid-Eocene, although the herbivore hypothesis regarding it is currently debated. When the Great American Interchange began three mya, one of those flightless South American birds quickly became a successful North American predator.
People are usually surprised to hear that grass is a relatively recent plant innovation. Grasses are angiosperms and only became common in the late Cretaceous, along with flowering plants. With grass, some dinosaurs learned to graze, and grazers have been plentiful Cenozoic herbivores. According to GEOCARBFSULF, carbon dioxide levels have been falling nearly continuously for the past 150-100 million years. Not only has that decline progressively cooled Earth to the point where we live in an ice age today, but carbon starvation is currently considered the key reason why complex life may become extinct on Earth in several hundred million years. In the Oligocene, between 32 mya and 25 mya some plants developed a new form of carbon fixation during photosynthesis known as C[SUB]4[/SUB] carbon fixation. It allowed plants to adapt to reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. C[SUB]4[/SUB] plants became ecologically prevalent about 6-7 mya in the Miocene, and grasses are today's most common C[SUB]4[/SUB] plants and comprise more than 60% of all C[SUB]4 [/SUB]species. The rest of Earth's photosynthesizers use C[SUB]3 [/SUB]carbon fixation or CAM photosynthesis, which is a water-conserving process used in arid biomes.
In Paleocene oceans, sharks filled the empty niches left by aquatic reptiles, but it took coral reefs ten million years to begin to recover, as usual. As Africa and India moved northward, the Tethys Ocean shrank, and in the late Paleocene and early Eocene, the last Tethyan anoxic events laid down Middle East oil, and the last Paleocene climate event is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ("PETM"). The PETM has been the focus of a great deal of recent research because of its parallels to today's industrial era, when carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are massively vented to the atmosphere, causing a warming atmosphere and acidifying oceans. The seafloor communities suffered a mass extinction, and the PETM's causes are uncertain, but the release of methane hydrates when the global ocean warmed sufficiently is a prominent hypothesis, but scientists also look to the usual suspects of volcanism, changes in oceanic circulation, and a bolide impact.
The PETM, according to carbon isotope excursions, "only" lasted about 120-170 thousand years. The early Eocene (c. 56 to 34 mya), which followed the PETM, is also known as one of Earth's Golden Ages of Life. It has also been called a Golden Age of Mammals, but all life on Earth thrived then. In 1912, the doomed Scott Expedition spent a day collecting Antarctic fossils and still had them a month later when the entire team died in a blizzard. The fossils were recovered and examined in London, and surprisingly yielded evidence that tropical forests once existed near the South Pole. They were Permian plants. That was not long after Wegener first proposed his continental drift hypothesis, and was generations before orthodoxy accepted Wegener's idea. Antarctica has rarely strayed far from the South Pole during the past 500 million years, so the fossils really represented polar forests. A generation before the Scott Expedition's Antarctic fossils were discovered, scientists had been finding similar evidence of polar forests in the Arctic, within several hundred kilometers of the North Pole, on Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Scientists were finding Cretaceous plants in the Arctic, which were much younger than Permian plants.[379]
Polar forests reappeared in the Eocene after the PETM, and the Eocene's first ten million years was the Cenozoic's warmest time and even warmer than the dinosaurian heyday.[380] Not only did alligators live near the North Pole, but the continents and oceans hosted an abundance and diversity of life that Earth may have not seen before or since. When that ten million year period ended, as Earth began cooling off and headed toward the current ice age, has been called the original Paradise Lost.[381] One way that methane has been implicated in those hot times is that leaves have stomata, which regulate the air they take in to obtain carbon dioxide and oxygen, needed for photosynthesis and respiration. Plants also lose water vapor through their stomata, so balancing gas input needs against water losses are key stomata functions, and it is thought that in periods of high carbon dioxide concentration, plants will have fewer stomata. Scientists can count stomata density in fossil leaves, which led some scientists to conclude that carbon dioxide levels were not high enough to produce the PETM, so methane became a candidate greenhouse gas that produced the PETM and Eocene Optimum, and the controversy and research continues.[382]
However the hot times were created and sustained, Earth's life reveled in the conditions. Similar to reptiles' beating the heat and migrating into the oceans, some mammals did the same thing nearly 200 million years later, and cetaceans appeared. Scientists were surprised when molecular studies found that whales share a common ancestor with even-toed ungulates and the hippopotamus in particular. Whales evolved in and near India, beginning about 50 mya, when the earliest "whale" surely did not resemble one and lived near water. By 49 mya, whales could walk or swim. A few million years later they resembled amphibians, and by 40 mya they became fully aquatic, for a transition from land to sea that "only" took 10 million years. Whales quickly became the dominant marine predators. However, sharks did not go quietly and began an arms race with whales, which culminated 28 mya in C. megalodon, the most fearsome marine predator ever: a shark reaching nearly 20 meters in length and weighing 50 metric tons. It could have swallowed a great white shark whole, as seen below (C. megalodon in gray, great white shark in green, and next to that is a man taking a break in C. megalodon's mouth). (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

C. megalodon preyed on whales and had the greatest bite force in Earth's history (although some estimates of T-rex bite strength equal it). C. megalodon went extinct less than two mya, due to the current ice age's vagaries.
Because of early Eocene Arctic forests, animals moved freely between Asia, Europe, Greenland, and North America, which were all nearly connected around the North Pole, and great mammalian radiations occurred in the early Eocene. Many familiar mammals first appeared by the mid-Eocene, such as modern rodents, elephants, bats, and horses. The earliest monkeys may have first appeared in Asia and migrated to India, Africa, and the Americas. Europe was not yet connected with Asia, however, as the Turgai Strait separated them. Modern observers might be startled to know where many animals originated. Camels evolved in North America and lived there for more than 40 million years, until humans arrived. Their only surviving descendants in the Western Hemisphere are llamas. As with lemurs migrating to Madagascar from Africa, or marsupials to Australia via Antarctica, or monkeys migrating from Africa to the Americas, or Eocene mammalian migrations via polar routes, the migrants often involuntarily "sailed" on vegetation mats that crossed relatively short gaps between the continents. Such a migration depended on fortuitous prevailing currents and other factors, but it happened often enough.
Several of the Eocene's geologic events had long-lasting impact. About 50 mya, the plates under India and Southern Asia began their epic collision and started creating the Himalayas, and Australia split from Antarctica. The collisions of the African, Arabian, and Indian plates with the Eurasian plate created the mountain ranges that stretch from Western Europe to New Guinea. After the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is the world's most seismically active region. Those colliding plates eventually squeezed the Tethys Ocean out of existence. That event ended more than 500 million years of Tethyan sedimentation, beginning with the Proto-Tethys Ocean in the Ediacaran, continuing with the Paleo-Tethys Ocean in the Ordovician, and the Tethys Ocean appeared in the late Permian. The Tethys Ocean's existence spanned the entire Mesozoic and finally vanished less than six mya, at the Miocene's end.[383] Most of the world's oil formed in the sediments of those Tethyan oceans and very little has formed since the Eocene.
The process of transforming anoxic sediments into oil requires millions of years. When organic sediments are buried, most of the oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur of dead organisms is released, leaving behind carbon and some hydrogen in a substance called kerogen, in a process that is like reversed photosynthesis. Plate tectonics can subduct sediments, particularly where oceanic plates meet continental plates. There is an "oil window" roughly between 2,000 and 5,000 meters deep, where if kerogen-rich sediments are buried at those depths for long enough (millions of years), geological processes (which produce high temperature and pressure) break down complex organic molecules and the result is the hydrocarbons that comprise petroleum. If organic sediments never get that deep, they remain kerogen. If they are subducted deeper than that for long enough, all carbon-carbon bonds are broken and the result is methane, which is also called natural gas. Today, the geological processes that make oil can be reproduced in industrial settings that can turn organic matter into oil in a matter of hours. Many hydrocarbon sources touted today as replacements for conventional oil were never in the oil window, so were not "refined" into oil and remain kerogen. The so-called oil shales and oil sands are made of kerogen (bitumen is soluble kerogen). It takes a great deal of energy to refine kerogen into oil, which is why kerogen is an inferior energy resource. Nearly a century ago in East Texas oil fields it took less than one barrel of oil energy to produce one hundred barrels, for an energy return on investment ("EROI" or "EROEI") of more than 100, in the Golden Age of Oil. Global EROI is declining fast and will fall to about 10 by 2020. The EROIs of those oil shales and oil sands are less than five and as low as two.
During the early Eocene's Golden Age of Life, forests blanketed virtually all lands all the way to the poles, modern orders of most mammals appeared, today's largest order of sharks appeared, and coral reefs again appeared beyond 50 degrees latitude. Many animals would also appear bizarre today. One crocodile developed hooves, and an order of hooved mammalian predators lived, including the largest terrestrial mammalian predator/scavenger ever, which looked like a giant wolf with hooves. The ancestors of modern carnivores began displacing those primitive predatory mammals in the Eocene, after starting out small. A family of predatory placentals called bear dogs lived from the mid-Eocene to less than two mya. Rhino-sized uintatheres and their bigger cousins the brontotheres were the Eocene's dominant herbivores in North America and Asia. Primates flourished in the tropical canopies of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Deserts are largely an Icehouse Earth phenomenon, and during the previous Greenhouse Earths, virtually all lands were warm and moist. Australia was not a desert in the early Eocene, but was largely covered by rainforests. It must have been a marsupial paradise, as it would have been in Antarctica and South America, but the fossil record is currently thin as rainforests are poor fossil preservers.
In the late Cretaceous, about 75 mya, New Zealand split from Gondwana, and by the end-Cretaceous event it, Madagascar, and India were alone in the oceans. Madagascar was close enough to Africa for lemurs to migrate to it, but the only animals that repopulated New Zealand's lands after the end-Cretaceous holocaust were those that flew. From the end-Cretaceous event until the Maoris arrived around 1250-1300 CE (CE stands for "Common Era," formerly designated with AD), birds were New Zealand's dominant animals and had no rivals. The only mammals were a few species of bat that migrated there in the Oligocene. A recent finding of a mouse-sized mammal fossil shows that some land mammals lived in New Zealand long ago, possibly Mesozoic survivors and unrelated to any living mammals, but they died out many millions of years ago. A few small reptiles and amphibians also lived there, and even a crocodile that died out in the Miocene, but New Zealand, unlike any other major landmass in Earth's history, was the realm of birds. The Maoris encountered giant birds, ecological niches filled with mammals elsewhere were filled by birds, and gigantic moas were the equivalent of mammalian browsers. Before the arrival of humans, moas were only preyed upon by the largest eagle ever. Of all ecosystems that would have appeared strange to modern eyes, New Zealand's pre-human ecosystem has been perhaps the most intriguing to me, perhaps because it still existed less than a millennium ago. It seemed like something that sprang out of Dr. Seuss's imagination. The Seuss-like kiwi is one of the few surviving specialized birds of that time. The Maoris drove all moas to extinction in less than a century, and quickly destroyed about half of New Zealand's forests via burning.
For several million years, life in the Eocene was halcyonic, and at 50 mya, the Greenhouse Earth state had prevailed for 200 million years, ever since the end-Permian extinction. But just as whales began invading the oceans 49 mya, Earth began cooling off. The ultimate reason was atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that had been steadily declining for tens of millions of years. The intense volcanism of the previous 200 million years waned and the carbon cycle inexorably sequestered carbon into Earth's crust and mantle. While falling carbon dioxide levels were the ultimate cause, the first proximate cause was probably the isolation of Antarctica at the South Pole and changes in global ocean currents. During the early Eocene, the global ocean floor's water temperature was about 13[SUP]o[/SUP]C (55[SUP]o[/SUP]F), warm enough to swim in, which was a far cry from today's near-freezing and below-freezing temperatures. The North Sea was warm as bathwater. Radical current changes accompanied the PETM of about 56 mya, warming the ocean floor, and perhaps that boiled off the methane hydrates. Whatever the causes were, the oceans were warm from top to bottom, from pole to pole. But between 50 to 45 mya, Australia made its final split from Antarctica and moved northward, India began crashing into Asia and cut off the Tethys Ocean and the global tropical circulation, and South America also moved northward, away from Antarctica. Although the debate is still fierce over the cooling's exact causes, the evidence (much is from oxygen isotope analyses) is that the oceans cooled off over the next twelve million years, very consistently, and a brief small reversal transpired at about 40 mya.[384] By 37-38 mya, the 200-million-year-plus Greenhouse Earth phase ended and the transition into today's ice age was underway. In the late Eocene, as the trend toward Icehouse Earth conditions began, deserts such as the Saharan, South African, and Australian formed.
That cooling caused the greatest mass extinction of the entire Cenozoic Era, at least until today's incipient Sixth Mass Extinction. With continents now scattered across Earth's surface, there was no event that wiped nearly everything out as the end-Permian extinction did, nor were bolide events convincingly implicated. But mass extinctions punctuated a 12-million-year period when Earth's global ocean and surface temperatures steadily declined. When it was finished, there were no more polar forests, no more alligators in Greenland or palm trees in Alaska, and Antarctica was developing its ice sheets. A few million years later, another mass extinction event in Europe marked the Eocene's end and the Oligocene's beginning, but the middle-Eocene extinctions were more significant.[385] All in all, there was about a 14-million-year period of cooling and extinction, which encompassed the mid-Eocene to early Oligocene, and Icehouse Earth conditions reappeared after a more-than-200-million-year hiatus.[386]
The Oligocene Epoch (c. 34 to 23 mya) was relatively cold. In the 1960s, a global effort was launched to drill deep sea cores, the Glomar Challenger recovered nearly 20,000 cores from Earth's oceans, and scientists had paradigm-shift learning experiences from studying those cores. One finding was that Antarctica developed its ice sheets far earlier than previously supposed, and the cores pushed back the initial ice sheet formation by 20 million years, to about 34-35 mya; the first Antarctic glaciers formed as early as 49 mya. The evidence included dropstones in Southern Ocean sediments, which meant icebergs.[387] The event that led to Antarctic ice sheets was the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which began to form about 40 mya and was firmly established by 34 mya, when the Antarctic ice sheets grew in earnest. The current's formation was caused by Antarctica's increasing isolation from Australia and South America, which gradually allowed an uninterrupted current to form that circled Antarctica and isolated it so that it no longer received tropical currents. That situation eventually turned Antarctica into the big sheet of ice that it is today. It also radically changed global oceanic currents. Antarctic Bottom Water formed, which cooled the oceans as well as oxygenated its depths, and it comprises more than half of the water in today's oceans. North Atlantic Deep Water began forming around the same time.[388]
Those oceanic changes profoundly impacted Earth's ecosystems. Not only did most warm-climate species go extinct, at least locally, but new species appeared, adapted to the new environment. Early whales all died out about 35 mya and were replaced by whales adapted to the new oceanic ecosystems that are still with us today: toothed whales, which include dolphins, orcas and porpoises; and baleen whales, which adapted to the rich plankton blooms caused by upwellings of the new circulation and in the Southern Ocean in particular.[389] Sharks adapted to the new whales, which culminated with C. megalodon in the Oligocene. With the land bridges and small seas between the northern continents unavailable in colder times, the easy travel between those continents that characterized the Eocene's warm times ended and the continents began developing endemic ecosystems. Europe became isolated from all other continents by the mid-Eocene and developed its own peculiar fauna. At the Oligocene's beginning, the Turgai Strait was no longer a barrier between Europe and Asia and the more cosmopolitan Asian mammals replaced the provincial European mammals, although from competition, an extinction event, or other causes is still debated, although competition is favored. About half of European mammalian genera went extinct, replaced by immigrants from Asia, and some from North America via Asia.[390]
Africa was also isolated from other continents during those times and developed its own unique fauna. The first proboscideans evolved in Africa about 60 mya, and Africa remained their evolutionary home, and the one leading to today's elephants lived in Africa in the mid-Oligocene. Hyraxes are relatives of elephants, they have never strayed far from their initial home in Africa, and were Africa's dominant herbivore for many millions of years, beginning in the Oligocene. Some reached horse size, and a close relative looked very much like a rhino, with rhino size. The rhinoceros line itself seems to have begun in North America in the early Eocene, and rhinos did not reach Africa until the Miocene.
But the African Oligocene event of most interest to humans was African primate evolution. By the Eocene's end, primates were extinct in Europe and North America, and largely gone in Asia. Africa became the Oligocene's refuge for primates as they lived in the remaining rainforest. The first animals that we would call monkeys evolved in the late Eocene, and what appears to be a direct ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes appeared in Africa at the Oligocene's beginning, about 35-33 mya. But ancestral to that creature was one that also led to those that migrated to South America, probably via vegetation rafts (with perhaps a land bridge helping), around the same time. Those South American monkeys are known as New World monkeys today and they evolved in isolation for more than 30 million years. For those that stayed behind in Africa, what became apes first appeared around the same time as those New World monkeys migrated; they diverged from Old World monkeys. Scientists today think that somewhere between about 35 mya and 29 mya the splits between those three lineages happened. Old World and New World monkeys have not changed much in the intervening years, but apes sure have.
The size issue is dominant in evolutionary inquiries, and scientists have found that in Greenhouse Earth conditions, animal size is relatively evenly distributed, and all niches are taken. When Icehouse Earth conditions prevail, the cooling and drying encourages some animal sizes and not others, and mid-sized animals suffer, such as those early primates. That may be why primates went extinct outside the tropics in the late Eocene.[391] Tropical canopies are rich in leaves, nectar, flowers, fruit, seeds, and insects, while temperate canopies are not, particularly in winter. Large herbivores lost a great deal of diversity in late-Eocene cooling, but the survivors were gigantic, and the largest land mammal ever thundered across Eurasia in the Oligocene. Mid-sized species were rare in that guild.[392]
The earliest bears appeared in North America in the late Eocene and early Oligocene, and raccoons first appeared in Europe in the late Oligocene. It might be amusing to consider, but cats and dogs are close cousins and a common ancestor lived about 50 mya. Canines first appeared in the early Oligocene in North America about 34 mya, and felines first appeared in Eurasia in the late Oligocene about 25 mya. Beavers appeared in North America and Europe in the late Eocene and early Oligocene, and the first deer in Europe in the Oligocene. The common ancestor of today's sloths lived in the late Eocene; South American giant ground sloths appeared in the late Oligocene. The kangaroo family may have begun in the Oligocene. The horse was adapting and growing in North America in the Oligocene. By the late Eocene, the pig and cattle suborders had appeared, and squirrels had appeared in North America.
In summary, numerous mammals appeared by the Oligocene that resemble their modern descendants. They were all adapted to the colder, dryer Icehouse Earth conditions, the poorer quality forage, and the food chains that depended on them. In subsequent epochs, conditions warmed and cooled, ice sheets advanced and retreated, and deserts, grasslands, woodlands, rainforests, and tundra grew and shrank, but with a few notable exceptions, Earth's basic flora and fauna has not significantly changed during the past 30 million years.
The Oligocene ended with a sudden global warming that continued into the Miocene Epoch (c. 23 to 5.3 mya). The Miocene was also the first epoch of the Neogene Period (c. 23 to 2.6 mya). Although nowhere near as warm as the Eocene Optimum, England had palm trees again, Antarctic ice sheets melted, and oceans rose. The Miocene is also called the Golden Age of Mammals. Scientists still wrestle with why Earth's temperature increased in the late Oligocene, but there is no doubt that it did. As the study of ice ages has demonstrated, many dynamics impact Earth's climate, and positiv

[Magda Hassan]

Humanity's First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire
Chapter summary:

• Macaque social organization
  
• Chimp and orangutan culture
  
• Human-line brain begins growing
  
• First stone tool culture
  
• Human brain compared to ape brains
  
• Social navigation and brain requirements
  
• Energy tradeoffs with brain growth
  
• Chimp and gorilla diets and digestion
  
• Appearance of Homo habilis
  
• Campfires and predators
  
• Chimp coalitionary killing
  
• Appearance of Homo erectus
  
• Extinction of humanity's cousins
  
• Human evolutionary tree
  
• Turkana Boy and anatomical changes in Homo erectus
  
• Controversies over human-line descent
  
• Control of fire and human-line evolution
  
• Human-line sleeping on the ground
  
• Cooking Hypothesis
  
• First human-line migration from Africa
  
• Second stone tool culture
  
• Nutrition and brain development
  
• What fire is
  
• Fire as first great human ecosystem robbery
  
• Non-geological timescale definition of "epochal"
  
• Imagining where the control of fire and stone tools would lead
  
• Ice-age impacts on human evolution
  
• Origin of spoken language
  
• Bonobo social organization and overcoming male violence
  
• "Out of Africa" and multiregional theories of human evolution
  
• One million years of stagnant human culture
  
• Fertile nexus of Africa, Asia, and Europe
  
• Appearance of Homo heidelbergensis
  
• Human transition from hunted to hunter
  
• Improving Middle Stone Age toolset
  
• Neanderthals appear
  
• Neanderthals invent third stone tool culture
  
• Homo sapiens appears
  
• Ice-age impacts on human movements
  
• First Homo sapiens migration past Africa
  
• DNA evidence for founder population that left Africa
  

When that likely human ancestor made the first stone tool, it was the culmination of a process of increasing encephalization and manipulative ability that probably began its ascent with the appearance of apes and accelerated when humanity's ancestors became bipedal. Studying great apes today and applying those findings to humanity's ancestors is problematic, but there has probably not been significant evolution in great apes since they descended from the last common ancestor that they shared with humans, particularly chimpanzees. About one mya, bonobos split from other chimpanzee populations and became a separate species, but for many years scientists did not realize it. Another chimpanzee split about 1.5 mya created east and west chimp species that are virtually indistinguishable today. It is widely considered to be very likely that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans looked like a chimp.[448]
Other than humans, rhesus macaques are Earth's most widespread primates, and both species are generalists whose ability to adapt has been responsible for their success. Rhesus macaques are significantly encephalized, about twice that of dogs and cats, and nearly as much as chimpanzees. Rhesus macaques have what is called Machiavellian social organization, in which everybody is continually vying for rank and power is everything. Those with rhesus power get the most and best food, the best and safest sleeping places, mating privileges, the nicest environments to live in, and endless grooming by subordinates, whom the dominants can beat and harass whenever they want, while those low in the hierarchies get the scraps and are usually the first to succumb to the vagaries of rhesus life, including predation.[449] It is the same energy game that all species play. But even the lowliest macaque will become patriotic cannon fodder if his society faces an external threat, as even a macaque knows that a miserable life is better than no life at all. The violence inflicted seems economically optimized; within a society the violence is mostly harassment, but when rival societies first come in contact, the violence is often lethal, as the initially established dominance can last for lifetimes. Within a society, killing a subordinate does not make economic sense, as that subordinate supports the hierarchy. Potentates rely on slaves. The human smile evolved from the teeth-baring display of monkeys that connotes fear or submission.[450]
For all of their seeming cunning and behaviors right out of The Prince, rhesus monkeys cannot pass the mirror test; they attack their images, as they see themselves as just another rival monkey. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, pass the mirror test, and the threshold of sentience, whatever sentience really is, may not be far removed from the ability to pass the mirror test, or perhaps humanity has not yet achieved it. Capuchin monkeys, considered the most intelligent New World monkeys, have socially based learning, in which the young watch and imitate their elders. Different capuchin societies have different cultures and different tool-using behaviors reflected in different solutions to similar foraging problems.[451] Capuchins, isolated from African and Asian monkeys for about 30 million years, have striking similarities to their Old World counterparts, with female-centric societies and lethal hierarchical politics. As with chimpanzees and humans, ganging up on lone victims is the preferred method, which increases the chance of success and reduces the risk to the murderers.[452] Unlike rhesus monkeys, for instance, capuchin males can help with infant rearing, but they will also kill infants that they did not father, as rhesus, chimpanzees, and gorillas also do (that behavior has been observed in 50 primate species).[453] Those comparisons provide evidence that simian social organization results from the connection between simian biology and environment; their societies formed to solve the problems of feeding, safety, and reproduction.
Chimps and orangutans have distinct cultures and ways of transmitting knowledge, usually confined to observation. They have regional variations in tool use, and orangutans can display startling intelligence in captivity that is not witnessed in the wild, which may be like country bumpkins moving to the city where they can develop their intellects or get a chance to use them.[454] Chimps can negotiate, deceive, hunt in ranked groups, learn sign language, use more than one tool in a process, problem-solve, and engage in other human-like activities. Developmentally, a chimp is ahead of a human until about age two, and chimps can also express empathy.[455] Research has suggested that imitation (performing somebody else's actions) and empathy (feeling what somebody else feels) are related neurologically.[456] Humans, however, are far better than chimps in their social-cognitive skills, which brings in the "theory of mind," which is thinking what others are thinking. This is suspected to be the key developmental trait that set humans apart from their cousins.[457]
Many observable aspects of today's simians probably reflect ancestral traits predating the evolutionary splits that led to humans. A chimpanzee's brain is about 360 cubic centimeters ("ccs") in size, and that gracile australopithecine that probably made those early stone tools had a brain of about 450 ccs. That brain growth reflected millions of years of evolution since the chimpanzee line split, at least a million years of bipedal existence, and hands adapted to manipulating tools. The cognitive and manipulative abilities of the species that made early stone tools seem to have been significantly advanced over chimps. Below is a comparison of the skull of a modern human, and orangutan, a chimpanzee, and a macaque. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The human brain weighs more than three times the orangutan's and chimpanzee's, and more than ten times the macaque's. Beginning about 2.5 million years ago, around when the first stone tools were invented, the human line's jaws became weaker and jaw muscles were no longer attached to the braincase.[458] Some scientists think that that change helped the human line's brain grow.
The rise of humans was dependent on numerous factors, but the most important may have been the ability to increase humanity's collective knowledge. If each invention during human history had to be continually reinvented from scratch, there would not be people today. The cultural transmission of innovations was critical to growing humanity's collective technology, skills, and intelligence. Striking stones to fashion tools was new on Earth, and it was likely invented once, and then proliferated as others learned the skill. The pattern of proliferation of stone tool culture in Africa supports that idea.
Those first stone tools are called pebble tools, and anthropologists have placed the protohumans who made them in the Oldowan culture (also called the Oldowan industry, or Mode 1 on the stone tool scale). The rocks used for Oldowan tools were already nearly the shape needed and were made by banging candidate rocks on a rock "anvil," and the fractured rock's sharp edge was the tool. Those first stone tool makers were largely still the hunted, not hunters, and stone edges would have been like claws and teeth that would have made scavenging predator kills easy in a way that primates had never before experienced. Modern researchers have used Oldowan tools to quickly butcher elephants. Sawing a limb from a predator kill and stealing it would have been quick and easy.[459] Stone tools also crushed bones to extract marrow, and would have made harvesting and processing plant foods far easier.[460]
Below are relics of the five stone tool cultures that scientists have discovered. (Source for all images: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists today think that above all else, the first stone tools began humanity's Age of Meat. Meat is a nutrient-dense food and is highly prized among wild chimpanzees that use it as a key social tool, and male chimps have used it as payment for sex.[461] The human brain is more than three times the size of a chimpanzee's, but recent research suggests that the human brain's size is normal for its body size, and great ape brains seem relatively small because their bodies became relatively large, possibly due to sexual selection that resulted from vying for mates.[462] Humans developed relatively larger brains and relatively smaller and weaker bodies, which was probably an energy tradeoff; something had to give.[463] Protohumans began relying on brains more than brawn. The studies of brain size, encephalization, neocortex function, intelligence, and their relationships are in their infancy. The current leading hypothesis for the stimulant of simian brain growth is social navigation. Larger brains were needed for navigating increasing social complexity, and not only the number of individuals in a society, but the sophistication of interactions.[464] It is also argued that smarter brains allowed for greater social complexity, in another possible instance of mutually reinforcing positive feedbacks. Societies can perform tasks that individuals cannot. Those Machiavellian rhesus macaques engage in wars and revolutions. They can procure a food source and secure the territory, which creates the energetic means for developing a society. Tool-making may have been a bonus of that enlarged brain needed for social navigation, and walking bipedally coincidentally provided new opportunities for hands. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the rise of human intelligence, and all proposed dynamics may have had their influences. Brains have very high energy requirements, about 10 times the energy needs of equivalent muscle mass, and primates cannot consciously turn their brains off any more than they can turn their livers off. Few studies have been performed on the relationships between energy, brains, and sleep, but a recent one found that sleep seems to be how brains recharge themselves.[465]
Larger brains had to confer immediate advantages or else they would not have evolved, especially as energy-demanding as they are. Evolutionary pressures ensure that there is no cost without an immediate benefit. As humans have demonstrated, intelligence combined with manipulative ability led to a domination of Earth that no other organism ever achieved. Humans weigh about 50% more than chimpanzees, but human brains are at least 250% heavier. A human brain comprises about 2% of the body's mass, but uses nearly 20% of its energy at rest. Growing an energy-demanding organ was funded with the coin of energy. How did protohumans manage it?
There are a number of possible solutions to obtaining the energy to fuel the growing protohuman brain, and they all fall under these categories:

• Increase total energy input;
  
• Reduce total energy output;
  
• Rob energy from other tissues and processes; they will either become smaller, more energy efficient, or will be discarded.
  

Studies have shown that humans and chimpanzees have the same basal metabolism, so the first possibility is considered very unlikely in our ancestors, although large brains in general seem to require higher metabolic rates.[466] The subject of reducing energy output has an intriguing hypothesis: bipedal motion allowed humans to move by using less energy than our pre-bipedal ancestors. Human bipedal locomotion requires only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzee locomotion does, and chimps use about a quarter of their metabolism walking, although whether this was a key evolutionary event is controversial.[467] Even though protohumans would have taken advantage of bipedal walking to range farther than chimps (humans can average 11 miles a day, while chimps can only achieve six[468]), thereby using a relatively larger proportion of their energy on locomotion; bipedal locomotion energy savings alone might largely account for the growing brain's energy needs. The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis was developed to account for the required energy, which proposed that energy to fuel the growing brain came from reducing digestion costs, which was initially provided by eating more meat.[469]
Gorillas and chimpanzees are hindgut fermenters and can digest cellulose; humans cannot. The human digestive tract is only about 60% of the size expected for a primate of our size.[470] Human guts are far smaller than chimp and especially gorilla guts, which process all of that low-calorie foliage. Chimps and gorilla rib cages flare outward from top-to-bottom, like a dress, as did australopithecine rib cages, to accommodate large guts, as shown below.
When chimpanzees eat meat, they put large, tough leaves in their mouths. That helps them overachieve as meat eaters, as their teeth and jaws are poorly adapted for chewing meat. Mountain gorillas eat no meat at all. In the wild, great apes spend about half of their day chewing. Chimpanzees are the most carnivorous great ape, and although meat is the greatest treasure in chimpanzee societies, they often stop eating meat after chewing it for an hour or two and revert to fruit and other softer foods if they can get it. Chimpanzees hunt animals primarily during the dry season when their staple, fruit, is scarce. Chimps have been seen killing monkeys, eating their organs, and then abandoning the carcasses to find more monkeys to kill. Organ meats and intestines are far easier to chew, and a poor meat chewer like a chimpanzee prefers soft meats.[471] Just as chimpanzees prefer soft meats, predators will eat soft organs first and leave the tougher muscle for later, if they eat it at all. It depends on how plentiful the available flesh is, but the pattern across all predator groups is clear: eat the best, first, and leave the lesser quality foods to the end or let scavengers have them. It will always be a cost/benefit decision. All things being equal, the less time and energy needed to eat something, the sooner it will be eaten. If extra time and effort is needed to procure food, then the nutritional reward (primarily in energy) has to be exceptional to justify it. Evolutionary pressures have made animals into excellent accountants.[472] The human sweet tooth is a relic of humanity's fruit-eating ape heritage, and the desire for fatty foods reflects an adaptation to prefer that energy-richest of foods. Fat (made of hydrocarbons) is the ultimate energy windfall of all foods.
A recent study has challenged The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis, at least as far as robbing energy from the digestive system to fuel the brain.[473] The study compared brain and intestinal size in mammals and found no strong correlation, but there was an inverse correlation between brain size and body fat. But since human fat does not impede our locomotion much, humans have combined both strategies for reducing the risk of starvation. Whales have bucked the trend, also because being fatter does not impede their locomotion and provides energy-conserving insulation. A human infant's brain uses about 75% of its energy, and baby fat seems to be brain protection, so that it does not easily run out of fuel. However, the rapid evolutionary growth of an energy-demanding organ like the human brain seems unique or nearly so in the history of life on Earth, and comparative anatomy studies may have limited explanatory utility. There are great debates today on how fast the human brain grew, what coevolutionary constraints may have limited the brain's development (1, 2, 3), and scientific investigations are in their early days.
About a quarter-million years after Oldowan culture began, a new species appeared called Homo habilis, named by Louis Leakey in 1964. Whether Homo habilis is really the first member of the human genus has been debated ever since. As with all of its primate ancestors, Homo habilis was adapted for tree climbing. Virtually all apes and monkeys sleep in trees, especially those in Africa. Silverback gorillas are about the lone exception, along with some isolated chimps. Homo habilis certainly slept in trees. The predators of African woodlands and grasslands have been formidable for millions of years, and predators of Homo habilis in those days included Dinofelis, Megantereon, and Homotherium. Night camera footage is readily available on the Internet today showing the nighttime behaviors engaged in by hyenas, lions, and others. The African woodlands and plains are extremely dangerous at night, just from roving predators, not to mention being stumbled into by elephants, rhinos, and water buffalos. Today's African hunter-gatherers sleep around the campfire to keep predators and interlopers at bay; a sentinel keeps watch as everybody sleeps in shifts through the twelve-hour nights. They are safer from predation at night in camp than they are in daytime as they roam.[474]
The anatomy of habilines (members of Homo habilis) spoke volumes about their lives. They had brains of about 640 ccs, with an estimated range of 600 to 700 ccs, nearly 50% larger than their australopithecine ancestors and nearly twice that of chimps, and the artifacts they left behind denoted advanced cognitive abilities. They stood about 1.5 meters tall (five feet), and weighed around 50 kilograms (120 pounds). With the first appearance of habilines about 2.3 mya, Oldowan culture spread widely in East Africa, and also radiated to South Africa. Habiline skeletal adaptations to tree climbing meant that they slept there at night, just as their ancestral line did. Their teeth were large, which meant that they heavily chewed their food. Habiline sites have large rock hammers that they pounded food on, to break bones and crack nuts. Those habiline stone hammers may well have also been used to soften meat, roots, and other foods before eating them.[475] Sleeping in trees meant that habilines were preyed on, mostly by big cats. Today, the leopard is the only regular predator of chimpanzees and gorillas, and leopards have developed a taste for humans at times. But if modern studies of chimpanzees are relevant, our ancestors engaged in warfare for the past several million years, and monkeys have wars, so simian intra-species mass killings may have tens of millions of years of heritage. Habilines were not only wary of predators, but also of members of their own species.
Monkeys, apes, and humans have many traits in common, and one is that members of "out-groups" are fair game. Chimpanzees are the only non-human animals today that form ranked hunting parties, and they are also the only ones that form hunting parties to kill members of their own species.[476] Distinct from the killer ape hypothesis, which posits that humans are instinctually violent, the chimpanzee violence hypothesis proposes that chimps only engage in warfare when it makes economic sense: when the benefits of eliminating rivals outweigh the risks/costs. Macaque wars and revolutions appear spontaneously, but chimp wars have calculation behind them, which befits a chimp's advanced cognitive abilities; they plan murderous raids and carry them out. It is quite probable that the advancing toolset of protohumans was used for coalitionary killing when perceived benefits exceeded assessed risks/costs. Just as with other behaviors that humans and chimps have in common, these traits probably also existed in our last common ancestor. Other animals also engage in intra-species violence, which includes spiders when key resources are scarce and contested, and when ant colonies have power imbalances, they can trigger invasion and extermination by the larger colony.[477] But human and chimpanzee warfare is uniquely organized and calculating.
Habilines and australopithecines coexisted, and the last gracile australopiths discovered so far went extinct about 2.0 mya. Robust australopiths survived to about 1.2 mya (1, 2), and habilines disappeared about 1.4 mya, so they overlapped the tenure of a species about which there is no doubt of its genus: Homo erectus, which first appeared about 2.0-1.8 mya, and the first fossils are dated to 1.8 mya. Homo erectus is the first human-line species whose members could pass for humans on a city street, if they dressed up and wore minor prosthetics on their heads and faces. Homo erectus had a protruding nose and was probably relatively hairless, the first of the human line to be that way. That was probably related to shedding heat in new, hot environments, as well as cooling its large brain(molecular data with head and body lice supports arguments that the human line became relatively hairless even before australopiths).[478] There are great controversies about that overlap among those three distinct lines that might all have ancestral relationships. Oldowan culture was a multi-species one. There is plenty of speculation that the rise of Homo habilis and its successors caused the extinction of other hominids, driving them to extinction by competition, predation, warfare, or some combination of them. What is certain is that "competing" protohumans went extinct after coexisting with the human line for hundreds of thousands of years. The suspicion that evolving humans drove their cousins to extinction becomes more common as the timeline progresses toward today.[479]
The fossil record is thin for early humans, and any portrayal of the human family tree of those times always carries the disclaimer that it is speculative.[480] Below is a current depiction of the human family tree, with geographical distributions presented. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

and below is one from a leading scientist of human evolution, Christopher Stringer. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

With the paucity of fossils, particularly between 2.5 and 1.0 mya, a timeframe in which the bones of only about 50 individuals have been found so far, discoveries are regularly announced that can be promoted as finds that will shake up the human family tree. That recently discovered australopith kept evolving hands better suited for tool-making, in parallel to developing humans, and perhaps is even a human ancestor, which would relegate Homo habilis to an extinct offshoot, not a human ancestor.[481] With such a scanty existing record, such announcements can be more than hyperbole. There are often heated controversies over the dates of fossils and artifacts, in which changing a date can radically alter how the evidence is viewed. Many findings can change from minor curiosity to paradigm-shifting discovery and back again, depending on the dates assigned to them.
The most complete early fossil find for the genus Homo is called Turkana Boy, who lived about 1.5 mya. He was a child or juvenile, and would have stood more than 1.6 meters tall as an adult, about as tall as an average woman today (earlier estimates that he would have been more than 1.8 meters tall (six feet) in adulthood appear overstated today). He is the ultimate Homo erectus find so far, and changes from his ancestral species were substantial. His teeth shrank the most between species in the entire line from the chimp/human split, by about 20%, his jaw shrank as well, and perhaps most importantly, his guts shrank, as his rib cage is nearly modern in being more barrel-shaped than flaring at the bottom. This was also the most dramatic rib cage change in the human line. His hips became narrower and he no longer had the shoulder, arm, and hand adaptations needed for sleeping in trees; he was fully adapted for living on the ground. Here are skeleton comparisons between gorillas, chimpanzees, Homo erectus, and today's humans. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Homo erectus may have been the first member of its line since the chimp/human split to leave Africa, and was certainly the first to become widespread. The Homo erectus story is a big one, and covers several subjects pertinent to this essay.
I am taking some liberties in calling Turkana Boy a Homo erectus; he is technically a member of Homo ergaster, which is often considered ancestral to Homo erectus, which is the Asian variant's name. There is great debate regarding how the human family tree branches between Ardi and Homo heidelbergensis. Some call the various erectus-type species all subspecies of Homo erectus, while others argue for several distinct species. I will not stray far from the orthodox narrative here, for good reason. The reconstructed early human tale is based on very limited evidence, but that evidence will only grow over time, and the tools and techniques for using them will become more sophisticated. Although there may be some upcoming radical changes in the view of the early human journey, efforts of countless scientist and fossil hunter lifetimes support the narrative that this essay sketches, and I respect their findings and opinions, even though I acknowledge many limitations. The human ego, it seems, becomes more involved as the story of life on Earth moves closer to its human chapters.
Some further examples of the complexity and debate follow. About when Homo erectus is supposed to have appeared, a fossil formed in a similar location, which was at least contemporary with Homo habilis. Where it fits in the human family tree is unknown at this time, but today it is called Homo rudolfensis. This is perhaps a descendant of Kenyanthropus platyops, which Maeve Leakey (who led the team that discovered it) argued is a member of a new genus. Because there is Neanderthal DNA in the modern human genome, under the classic definition of a species, Neanderthals have been placed within Homo sapiens by some anthropologists. Some small Homo erectus fossils in Georgia were initially classified in their own species, but are now designated as a Homo erectus subspecies. The "hobbit" fossils recently discovered on Flores Island have been widely considered as island-dwarfed Homo erecti, but they have features that suggest that they may have been habilines or even australopithecines, which would dramatically change the current view on the first migrations past Africa. They may well have been Oldowan culture australopiths that migrated from Africa about when Homo erectus did, and they also controlled fire. Similarly, a relative of Homo erectus that precedes Homo heidelbergensis is called Homo antecessor, but may also be a Homo erectus subspecies. The confusion and debate is partly because the differences between those "species" are minor and more on the order of regional variation than any radical change. They perhaps could have all interbred with each other. Other than the "hobbits," there are no great anatomical changes and few noticeable cultural ones among the various specimens for more than a million years of evolution, so I refer to them all as Homo erectus, as do many anthropologists, particularly when writing for the lay audience.[482] For those who want to explore the relatively fine distinctions, the material is readily available for study and can be another useful example of the process of science, if one of the more heated illustrations.
The most-accepted hypothesis today is that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis and first appeared in East Africa between 2.0 and 1.8 mya. If those are not the exact species that the human line descended through during those times, our actual ancestors were close cousins. The early Homo erectus adults had brains of about 850 ccs, and some later specimens reached 1,100 ccs, or triple the mass of a chimpanzee's brain. Today's human brain only averages about 1,200 ccs (women 1,130 and men 1,260). Homo erectus, as with other members of the line, had a brain that was another third larger than Homo habilis, and probably was responsible for its relatively sophisticated material culture. But important as was its growing brain, other anatomical changes were more telling. Homo erectus was fully adapted for living on the ground and walking great distances. For the first quarter-million years of Homo erectus's existence, they lived in the Oldowan culture, which used tools and weapons that were little more than rocks with sharpened edges, and probably some shaped sticks. They evolved in a highly dangerous environment and all of their ancestors slept in trees. How could they have slept on the ground? In a word: fire.
More than any other technical innovation, the control of fire marked humanity's rise. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin called making fire humanity's greatest achievement. The only possible exception that he noted was the invention of language. Even today, in our industrialized and technological world, almost all of our energy practices are merely more sophisticated ways of controlling fire. The initial control of fire was at once a social act, a mental act, and a technical act.[483] Although making stone tools represented the big break between the human line and its ancestry, it only allowed apes to mimic what other animals could do. Stone tools represented artificial claws, teeth, and jaws of animals far larger and more capable than apes at killing and eating flesh and bones. Protohumans with stone tools could scavenge more effectively and maybe defend themselves and even attack others, but it was not initially different in kind from what other animals could do, and was a pathetically small advantage when their first stone tools were merely rocks with sharpened edges, about on the order of brass knuckles. Would you want to fend off a lion predation attack (and perhaps multiple lions) with a rock, and at night? Controlling fire was the radical break from all other organisms that ever lived on Earth.
A bonobo named Kanzi built a fire (using matches) and roasted marshmallows on his own, and made Oldowan-style tools after being taught. But those who invented stone tools and the control of fire were the Einsteins and Teslas of their day. Hunter-gatherers today often start fires by banging flint against pyrite stones, which is a combination that produces generous sparks. Habilines probably used such stones when making tools. Even Darwin suggested that that may have been how protohumans discovered how to make fire, as they banged rocks together.[484] I have not seen anybody else advocate it, but as with the likelihood that protohumans learned to make stone tools once and the practice then spread, I consider it very likely that the control of fire was learned only once, and then spread. Richard Wrangham thinks that habilines first controlled fire, which led to the evolution of Homo erectus.[485] He could be right, and my reasoning follows.
First and foremost, I have a very difficult time imagining that Homo erectus could have slept on the ground without something to keep Africa's predators at bay, and I am not the only one.[486] I doubt that slender apes, much smaller than humans, swinging sharpened rocks and sticks at saber-toothed cats, hyenas, and the like (or throwing them) would have done much to scare them off. Those days predated spears, arrows, and other sophisticated weapons by more than a million years. The strongest plausible deterrent is fire, and I doubt that Homo erectus was simply vigilant and the sentry awoke everybody when the cats came and they all scrambled up trees (or lived in large enough groups so that they could mass attack any predators). Those apes certainly could not have outrun them. Cats are ambush predators, and woodland apes sleeping on the ground would have likely been easy meat. Without fire, Homo erectus would have been in the same situation as its ancestors, going back tens of millions of years: they slept in trees and other lofty refuges so that predators could not attack them. But all animals respect and fear fire. Fire is the ultimate protection and weapon for humans, even to this day.
Wrangham made the ability to sleep on the ground a key part of his Cooking Hypothesis. Homo erectus was not only adapted for ground living, its guts and teeth also shrank, which would have reflected eating soft and easy-to-digest food. Along with organ meats, cooked food is the leading candidate for soft foods. If habilines mastered fire, they would have almost immediately used it for cooking.
In the 1990s, Wrangham began to develop his Cooking Hypothesis, which he more fully elucidated in Catching Fire, published in 2009. Wrangham marshaled numerous lines of evidence to support his hypothesis, which was widely pilloried by his colleagues.[487] Wrangham conceded that the archeological record was scarce for the early control of fire, but he countered that evidence for early fires would rarely survive. Most caves last a quarter million years or so; they are made from soft stone, and the geological dynamics that create caves also destroy them. Also, early humans, just like gorillas and chimpanzees today, and even early hunter-gatherers, would have been constantly on the move, never sleeping in the same place twice. If the first fires were made in the African woodlands and grasslands, the evidence would not survive for long, just as the remnants of today's hunter-gatherer fires on the African savanna quickly disappear. The gist of Wrangham's Cooking Hypothesis is this:

• Humans cannot solely subsist today on raw food (they cannot get enough calories by eating raw food), but need their food cooked, and all human societies cook their food;
  
• Cooked food reduces the energy required to digest food and also allows more calories to be absorbed from food, sometimes greatly more, such as doubling;
  
• Anatomical changes, beginning with Homo erectus and perhaps even earlier, provide evidence that humans have cooked their food for a very long time, up to two million years; the control of fire may be responsible for the appearance of Homo erectus;
  
• The control of fire allowed Homo erectus to leave the trees and sleep on the ground, which was a first for the human line (or perhaps habilines or australopiths were the first to sleep on the ground with fire, but Homo erectus was the first human-line member biologically adapted to it);
  
• The energy boost from cooked food helped fuel the continued expansion of the human brain, from habilines to today's humans;
  
• Cooking reduced chewing time from the six hours per day that other great apes chew to less than an hour for humans; this allowed humans to pursue other activities with their enlarged brain, and was one of the positive feedback loops that led to modern humans;
  
• Fire became the center of human social life after it was controlled, and the changes attending that development profoundly affected the human journey.
  

Wrangham's hypothesis is more robust and subtle than this essay can do justice to, but I will survey some of the findings, implications, and controversy. Raw food has various nutritional properties that are superior to cooked food, such as vitamins, but because cooked food provides more digestible calories for humans than raw food, it represented an evolutionary advantage. Meat, starches, and seeds are far more digestible when cooked, and are much easier to chew. Today, chimps in Senegal will not eat raw seeds of Afzelia trees, but when a fire passes through the savanna, they search the ground below the Afzelia trees and eat their cooked seeds.[488]
People and animals universally prefer the taste of cooked food over raw, except for fruit, which was designed by the plant to be eaten by animals; no other foods were designed to be eaten and digested (except nectar, blossoms, and mother's milk). The toxins created by cooking, such as Maillard compounds, can cause health problems in humans, including chronic diseases. But cooking also destroys some toxins, making otherwise inedible food palatable. Cooking also reduces collagen, which makes meat tough, to gelatin (called denaturing the protein, when it falls apart), and converts raw starch to a far more digestible form. However, as far as species viability is concerned, humans only have to live long enough to produce offspring. The degenerative diseases (especially artery disease, cancer, and diabetes) that shorten human lives today would have been irrelevant in the ancient past, when virtually nobody lived long enough to die of old age and they could reproduce long before the deleterious effects of cooked food caught up with them. Many detriments of cooking and food processing have only become important to human welfare with the advent of civilization. Cooking would have been an undisputed advantage long ago.
Were the dramatic changes in Turkana Boy's anatomy a result of cooked food, or was Turkana Boy eating organs as his species became hunters instead of hunted, and the stone tools softened up the meat and plant foods so that he did not need to chew as much? Wrangham co-authored a study on shrinking teeth in the human line that began with Homo erectus. It concluded that food processing, cooking in particular, accounted for the effect.[489] Cooked food versus raw food and the number of neurons that can be supported in a brain has been the focus of recent research.[490] The primary reason why Wrangham's hypothesis was initially dismissed was that archeological evidence for fires that long ago is almost nonexistent. When Catching Fire was published, the earliest evidence with wide acceptance only supported fires beginning around 800 kya, where Israel is today, which is more than a million years after Wrangham's estimated timeframe. Wrangham did what all bold scientists do: he made falsifiable predictions. If it turned out that no evidence of early fires was ever found, his hypothesis could begin looking shaky.
Animals can quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions that impact their food supply. For example, in recent studies of Galapagos finches during a severe drought, small-beaked finches largely died out, because large and hard seeds became dominant. The surviving finch population had measurably larger beaks in one year. It took fifteen years of normal conditions for finch beaks to return to their pre-drought length.[491] Wrangham argued that the biological changes attending cooked food would have been immediately evident, and Homo erectus's anatomy presented the most dramatic changes seen in the human line. The only other plausible candidate would have been Homo heidelbergensis, but it was only a more robust version of Homo sapiens.
The derision was loud from Wrangham's colleagues…until evidence of fire being used a million years ago was found at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa by using new tools and techniques. The chortling is subsiding somewhat and scientists are now looking for the faint evidence, and long-disputed evidence of 1.5-1.7 mya controlled fires is being reconsidered, although his hypothesis is still widely considered as being only "mildly compelling" at best..[492] New tools may push back the control of fire to a time that matches Wrangham's audacious hypothesis. Wrangham cited the Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis as partially supporting the Cooking Hypothesis, but as discussed previously, the energy to power the human brain may not have solely derived from cooked food's energy benefits. Wrangham has cited numerous lines of evidence, one of which is a bird called the honeyguide that has coevolved with humans to find honeybee hives and smoke them out; the humans get the honey and the honeyguide gets the larvae and wax. According to recent molecular evidence, the evolutionary split of the honeyguide from its ancestors happened up to three mya, which supports the early-control-of-fire hypothesis. There is great controversy regarding these subjects, from recent findings that some chimps make ground nests today to scientists making arguments that meat instead of cooking led to the anatomical changes to the social impacts of campfires. This section of this essay will probably be one of the first to be revised in future versions, as new evidence is adduced and new hypotheses are proposed.
Two major events happened soon after Homo erectus appeared, and their sequence seems to support the Cooking Hypotheses. The first of which was the migration of Homo erectus from Africa as early as 2.0-1.9 mya; they spread to Georgia and Java by 1.8 mya (perhaps 1.6 mya in the case of Java), and China by 1.7 mya. It was the first mass migration from Africa by apes since the Miocene, and Homo erectus may have become the first multi-continental member of the human line, and certainly the first widespread one. Favorable climates and a lower Himalaya range and Tibetan Plateau may have encouraged that migration.[493] Unlike Miocene apes that began to migrate from Africa 16.5 mya, there was no unbroken forest to sustain Homo erectus's journey to East Asia. Those Homo erecti migrants would have had to sleep on the ground for much of the journey, and were not adapted for sleeping in trees, as already discussed. From today's viewpoint, it may seem that they were adventurers, but as will also become obvious with the spread of Homo sapiens, in one individual's lifetime, there was probably only modest movement, expanding into the next uninhabited valley or two. Such an expansion happened one valley at a time, one generation at a time, to make it across a continent in a few thousand years for those that could adapt to changing biomes. Migrating at the same latitude would not have presented great climatic issues. As those migrations happened during the ice age, they were along southern Eurasia. There is no evidence yet that Homo erectus ever made it to Australia, probably because of the ocean crossing required for passage.
The other big event happened about 1.8-1.7 mya, when African stone tools took a leap in sophistication, and Acheulean culture (also called Acheulean industry or Mode 2) appeared and lasted for more than a million years. The quintessential Acheulean tool is the hand axe, and the makers used bone, antler, and wood to shape the axes. Some argue that the axes were not really axes at all, but used for other purposes, even including just the leftover core after flakes were removed. Some gigantic hand axes have been discovered that could not have been easily used by human hands, and may have been early status symbols.[494] Not only were axes made, but also flakes, scrapers, cleavers, and other relatively sophisticated tools. There is almost no doubt among anthropologists that Homo erectus invented Acheulean tools and developed them from Oldowan tools. The axes have a very distinctive shape and could even be called a product of craftsmanship, which reflected minds greatly advanced from today's great apes.
A plausible series of events, when fire came first and Acheulean industry second, is that the Homo erecti that traveled to East and Southeast Asia did not have Acheulean tools, but the primitive Oldowan toolset, and the most remote ones never used Acheulean tools. I consider it quite possible that early Homo erecti migrated from Africa (and maybe even an earlier protohuman, if the "hobbits" were descended from habilines or australopiths) wielding fire. Cooking came with it, and hundreds of thousands of years later, those Homo erecti that stayed home in cosmopolitan Africa invented a new level of technology, Acheulean tools, and that culture never made it to the remote corners of East Asia. Some have speculated that those East Asian Homo erecti used bamboo more than stone, which would not be preserved for study today, or that as they moved east they lost the art of making Acheulean tools.[495] I think the likelier explanation is that they never had Acheulean tools, which means that they left Africa before they were invented, but they brought fire with them, which was the essential technology.
The Homo erecti that arrived in East Asia and the islands off of Southeast Asia existed, and virtually no changes are evident in their anatomy or technology for more than 1.5 million years, only to disappear about when Homo sapiens arrived. Like tarsiers finding refuge in the islands near Southeast Asia, those Homo erecti at the far end of the "known" world seem to have lived like country bumpkins for well over one million years, without any outside disturbances or benefits from their cosmopolitan homeland. The foregoing is largely my speculation on the issue, which could collapse like a house of cards with the Next Great Finding, and the lack of evidence for early fires is the biggest hurdle. Like Wrangham, I will follow those investigations of early fire with great interest. I strongly doubt that any species that ever acquired the greatest technology in Earth's history would ever lose it, as it would have quickly become indispensable.
Growing the human brain was about more than energy. There is speculation that meat protein helped human evolutionary brain development, and there is also evidence that oils help. There are surely nutritional requirements besides calories, but calories comprise the vast majority of nutrition. About 80% of what is called human nutrition consists of calories. If animals can obtain enough energy, the other dietary constraints are usually minor issues.
Apes make poor carnivores and are adapted for eating fruit as their staple, and fruit is the ideal human food. The dietary shift to meat, probably out of necessity, came with a price. If humans get more than half of their calories from protein, they will die from protein poisoning.[496] Chimpanzees get about ten percent of their calories from protein today, which is about the same level that humans seem to need, but it is not necessary to get that protein from meat. I have not eaten meat since the 1980s.
Moreover, the rise of the human brain was not only about size, even if the human brain turns out to "only" be a linearly scaled primate brain. The human cerebral cortex is four times the size of a chimp's, and the cerebral cortex is considered to be where all higher human brain functions originate. For all the influences of using hands, tools, cooking, and the like, they largely only laid the foundation for the cerebral cortex to grow. A mystic might say that the growing cerebral cortex allowed for the human brain to host a more sophisticated consciousness, which originates in other dimensions. This is a question largely unanswerable by today's mainstream science, although Black Science probably has some pretty good ideas. As with mainstream scientists, I will not attempt to address that question, at least in this part of the essay. In the final analysis, the cerebral cortex's growth made humans radically different from any other land animal in Earth's history. Cetaceans may have similar levels of brain functioning, perhaps even greater, but they cannot manipulate their environments like humans can, and they cannot make fires. Humans are significantly juvenilized when compared to chimps, for instance; humans retained traits of chimp infants. An infant chimp's flat face appears far closer to a human's than an adult chimp's does. That juvenilization is partly why humans are far weaker, physically, than other great apes. As the human line increasingly relied on its brain, it lost even more of its brawn.
In summary, becoming bipedal had great portent for evolving protohumans, and the suspicion is very strong among scientists that it led to feedback loops in which tool use became advanced, which allowed for a richer diet, which helped lead to larger and more complex brains, which led to more advanced thinking and behaviors, which led to more advanced tools, which led to more acquired energy, better protection, and larger brains, and so it went. But the control of fire was a watershed event. Although better tools improved the viability of early humans, nothing on Earth could challenge fire-wielding humans. With the control of fire, humans never had to worry again about being preyed on, nor as a threat to species viability, except by other humans. Naturally, fire was eventually used for offense instead of defense.
What is fire? That may seem too-elementary a question, but understanding what it is and where it came from is vitally important for understanding the human journey. The first fires were the quick release of stored sunlight energy that life forms, plants in that instance, had used to build themselves as they made their energy budget "decisions," and it was from vegetation that recently died and was dry enough to burn. The energy was released from burning so fast that it became far hotter (because the molecules were violently "pushed" by the reaction that also released photons) than the biological process of making animals warm-blooded. Hot enough in fact that the released photons' wavelengths were short enough (energetic enough) and human eyes could see them, in a phenomenon called flames. Flames are visible side-effects of that intense energy release. The rapid movement of the molecules as they rocketed due to that gre

[Magda Hassan]

Humanity's Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution

Chapter summary:

• Seasonal variation beyond rainforest homes of humanity's ancestors
  
  
• First permanent human settlements
  
  
• Natufian culture
  
  
• Humanity's four pristine civilizations
  
  
• Connection between agriculture and civilization
  
  
• Earth's carrying capacity and the human population before the Domestication Revolution
  
  
• Group selection and human societies
  
  
• Çatal Höyük
  
  
• Climate change and the beginnings of agriculture
  
  
• Developing class systems, and difference in the diet of the sexes
  
  
• Animal domestication
  
  
• Plundering Earth's forests begins
  
  
• Plow and smelted metal
  
  
• Quick environmental demise of early civilizations
  
  
• Energetic benefits of water travel
  
  
• "Tyranny of distance" and civilization
  
  
• Cities led to professions
  
  
• World's first city
  
  
• Invention of the sailboat
  
  
• Bronze Age
  
  
• Wheel
  
  
• Mass warfare begins, and its brutality
  
  
• Repression of original religions in cities
  
  
• Divine status of elites
  
  
• Appearance of the palace
  
  
• Legitimacy of pristine states
  
  
• Religious indoctrination and justification of elites and states
  
  
• Using abstract symbology to manipulate the mass mind
  
  
• Invention of writing
  
  
• Epic of Gilgamesh
  
  
• Salination and siltation wreck Sumer
  
  
• Akkadian conquest of Sumer, resurgence of Ur, and barbaric laws
  
  
• Floods and droughts of deforested Mesopotamia
  
  
• Modern debates over societal collapse
  
  
• Cities and the obsolescence of clan organization
  
  
• Domestication around the world
  
  
• This essay's departures from orthodoxy
  
  
• Reasons for civilization, and the thin agricultural surplus of early civilization
  
  
• Early civilizations' effect on atmosphere
  
  
• Basics of civilization
  
  
• Scarcity assumption beneath all ideologies
  
  
• Early conservation efforts
  
  
• Mesopotamia's environmental refugees, including Abraham, and the hazards of taking the myths of religion literally
  
  
• Old Testament's purpose
  
  
• Reliable food supply of the Nile River Valley
  
  
• Extinction of the Nile's megafauna
  
  
• A pharaoh's "job" of controlling the Nile's flood
  
  
• Egypt's Old Kingdom and building the necropolis at Giza
  
  
• Extinction of the Mediterranean megafauna
  
  
• Mesopotamia's scarcity of wood, and settling the Eastern Mediterranean
  
  
• Rise and fall of the Minoan civilization of Crete
  
  
• Rise and fall of civilization on Cyprus
  
  
• Iron Age
  
  
• Rise of Mycenaean civilization
  
  
• Troy and the Trojan War
  
  
• Collapse of Bronze Age civilizations of Eastern Mediterranean
  
  
• Peak of Phoenician civilization
  
  
• Rise of Greek civilization after centuries of forest recovery
  
  
• Athens enters its classic period
  
  
• Greek wars with Persia
  
  
• Athenian war with Sparta begins
  
  
• Desertification of Athenian hinterland
  
  
• Athens's Sicilian expedition
  
  
• Greeks discover conservation, but too late
  
  
• Greek classic period ends, and Alexander the Great conquers most known civilizations
  
  
• Rome founded
  
  
• Thick forests near early Rome
  
  
• Roman Republic founded
  
  
• Rome expands and conquers Carthage and Corinth
  
  
• Rome controls entire Mediterranean
  
  
• Roman civil wars begin
  
  
• Roman Republic ends and Roman Empire begins
  
  
• Rome's brutality toward people, animals, and hinterland
  
  
• Roman astonishment that Italy was once heavily forested
  
  
• Romans discover conservation, but too late
  
  
• Rome's rape-and-plunder economy
  
  
• Today's arid moonscapes of the Mediterranean periphery, where lush forests once stood
  
  
• Rome invades the British Isles and establishes short-lived iron industry
  
  
• Cyprus is again deforested to provide Roman bronze
  
  
• Rome's bath fleet scours Mediterranean periphery for wood
  
  
• Importance of the Roman Emperor's wheat fleet
  
  
• Unsustainability of all early civilizations
  
  
• Manipulating economic yardsticks
  
  
• Two centuries of Roman "peace" ends as Rome begins running out of energy
  
  
• Rome debases its currency
  
  
• Energy as the meaningful measure of macroeconomic health
  
  
• Declining EROI of declining civilizations
  
  
• Rome's decline and fall
  
  
• Civilization's unsustainable energy practices, not climate, was always primarily responsible for their demise
  
  
• China's developmental trajectory
  
  
• The invasions of pastoral societies into agricultural societies
  
  
• Human genetic adaptations to northern climates blond hair, white skin, blue eyes
  
  
• Decline of women's status in civilization
  
  
• European invasions and the rise of violence
  
  
• Bantu expansion
  
  
• Mesoamerica's developmental trajectory
  
  
• Relative environmental gentleness of the Western Hemisphere's Stone Age cultures
  
  
• Escalation of indigenous violence with European weapons
  
  
• Unsustainability of deforestation and agriculture
  
  
• Inability of hunter-gatherer peoples to imagine civilization
  

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, and they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle familiar to today's humans. A sexual division of labor existed; men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.
Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity's first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population's survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost "freezers." Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.
Although eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting nuts and seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today's Israel and Syria, about 13.5 kya the Kebaran culture (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a dietary staple.[570] Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women. Domestication often meant artificial selection to reduce/remove plant features that protected against grazing. That made the plants more palatable to humans, but it also made it more attractive to other animals. Many of today's domestic crops could not survive in the wild, and protecting crops from other animals and competition with other plants has been an integral part of the Domestication Revolution.[571] Similarly, many domestic animals would have a difficult time surviving in the wild, including people.
The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today's Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested "wild gardens" of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth's first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had grown to several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypothesis is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare's presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters.[572] In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations, fed by the first crops, began growing into states. Those states are called "pristine" states, as no other states influenced their development. Also, it is considered likely that a primary impetus for beginning agriculture in those regions was the decimation of animals to hunt. Not only was the easy meat rendered largely extinct, but those animals would have also been competitors for crops. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, in which women's status was closer to men's than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.
Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Whenever agriculture appeared, cities nearly always eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later.[573] Agriculture's chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, and population densities hundreds of times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. The debates on the subject may never end, but today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the agriculture's appearance.[574] The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner's practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth's carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around 10 million people, and the actual population was somewhat less, maybe as low as four million.[575] On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth's population was nearly a billion, and again was considered to be about half of Earth's carrying capacity under that energy regime. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for two hundred peasants armed with hoes. Today, people practicing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle are usually dependent on the production of nearby agricultural societies. Pure hunter-gathering, of the kind performed before the Domestication Revolution, has almost entirely vanished.[576]
Darwin made the case for group selection, but believed that natural selection primarily worked at the individual level. The idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social creatures such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, which has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of "uncooperative" genes.[577] When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which was why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies.[578] Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies possessing domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies. Whether they are species or human civilizations, the generation of energy surplus determines their viability.
Another early Fertile Crescent village, Çatal Höyük, in today's Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya, and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people. It was arguably Earth's first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features typically associated with cities.[579] The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. This is one of the brief social Golden Ages that feminists have studied. The first domesticated sheep appeared at Çatal Höyük, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Çatal Höyük's residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major crafts, and those people made the world's first known map. Çatal Höyük did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many "shrines" dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Çatal Höyük was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Çatal Höyük, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.
In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was probably caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but it still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures occurred.
Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands and desertified the region, and the settlements were permanently abandoned. In the Jordan Valley, settlements were abandoned at the same time, which is thought to be because a thousand years of agricultural settlements eroded and deforested the land, and sufficient crops could no longer be grown.[580] Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.[581]
A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet.[582] Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, and is also where pigs may have been first domesticated. Many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. The apple may have been the first domesticated tree fruit, and was raised in that region as early as 8.5 kya. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, and flax was among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reoriented that subject population's efforts, which led to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when the British forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after the British conquered it.
Goats were first domesticated in today's Iran about 10 kya. Pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early. Farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, and humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors probably made their efforts more successful.
Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world's megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees are Earth's "megaflora," and they suffered the same fate as megafauna wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, which began more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent in which bronze axes easily deforested the land. The exposed soil was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, and this increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests into deserts. Earth was also deforested by the enormously energy-intensive Bronze Age smelting of metal. During the Mediterranean region's Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees.[583] Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.
In virtually all civilizations, there was an early Golden Age that later generations often looked back to wistfully, where life was relatively easy and peaceful, at least until deforestation, soil destruction, and overpopulation took their inevitable toll. In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea's periphery became civilized, the same pattern was repeated; forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains.[584] Everyplace that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested.[585] Humanity has reduced Earth's biomass by more than a third since agriculture began. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they regenerated their forests by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a small minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a prelude. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit and left behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth's other species, not other humans, may be humanity's greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and our great task of devastating Earth and her denizens may be far from finished.
Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes. Before the Industrial Revolution, these lanes were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such as a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico's lakes to Tenochtitlán as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways.[586] In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to American shores from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.[587] In England, in the 13[SUP]th[/SUP] century CE, it cost about as much to transport coal across five hundred kilometers of water as it took to move it across five kilometers of land.[588]
The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was often reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard pattern of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities thereby became hubs of exchange. The so-called "tyranny of distance," which means how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland and thus limited a city's size.[589] More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, which allowed cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In preindustrial Islamic cultures, the camel was often a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.[590]
Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others. Just as language was the first "Internet," cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.[591]
The world's first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was established near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE ("Before Common Era," also called BC, for "Before Christ", but BCE is today's convention, just as "CE" has replaced "AD"). Eridu had a population of about 5,000 people at its peak. Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Çayönü Tepesi was in the Tigris's watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterizes cities to the present day: they harnessed gravity; upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods were brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion.
Sumerian city-states engaged in irrigation, which raised the water-tables. When the water table in those waterlogged soils reached the surface, the soils turned white with salt, especially with the high evaporation of those hot lands, and it would no longer support crops. The only solution was to stop irrigating and let the land go fallow as the water table fell, but the population pressures did not allow for it, so the process inexorably created saline soils, silt-filled canals due to upland deforestation, and today those Sumerian cities are all buried in silt in a desert. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland. But before silt and salt wrecked that civilization, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.
About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates; Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. The ruins of seaside Ur reside more than 200 kilometers inland today.[592] (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The word "urban" is derived from the Sumerian "ur."[593] About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria's first great city, with a population of about 50,000 at its peak. About 5000 BCE, people began smelting copper. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today's Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent's Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared; the Harappan Civilization formed in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley formed about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children's toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of several millennia earlier.
Warfare, in which polities fought over water and land, began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE) was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were all killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved.[594] Slavery began appearing at the beginning of the Domestication Revolution. Slavery only made economic sense in sedentary populations, and by the time of early civilizations and writing, slavery was a universal institution. Enslaving somebody when people lived nomadically would have been impractical.
Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE. One of the first walled cities was Uruk's colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, which was founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today's Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which were largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border.[595] Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization's art forms.
Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands that they exploit comprise civilization's primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary preindustrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, which depicted a tradition that probably lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began to disappear from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion. Western religions have been stifling "ecstatic" religions ever since. Today's Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization.[596] The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and "ecstatic" states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and "faith" replaced direct experience, and later, "sacred" texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind. The priesthood not only monopolized the texts but also their interpretation, and again became well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.
Early elites claimed divine status, and the priesthood abetted the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture. The ziggurat was the first such structure. Anthropologists think that monumental architecture may be a form of societal/elite display, where a society can flaunt the resources used to make such overawing showings, both to encourage submission to the society's obvious wealth and power, and to also discourage attempts to compete with it. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold. The priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization. Their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals; mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form, bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a "voluntary" one that discharged religious obligations. Although those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.[597]
Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, as a kind of invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets.[598] In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions.[599] Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened. They all had similar features, which included: male domination, divinely sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted "cannon fodder" infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on.[600] All pristine states passed through similar developmental stages, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which probably reflected human "nature," in which UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.
After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:

"Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully re-invented' consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of calculated' repression."[601]

The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those that they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer's elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman emperors.[602] The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world's monumental architecture was primarily built with "free" labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, with the words "under God" as part of their daily recitations.
The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization's earliest days. Fixating people on irrational symbols, and then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols; as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally charged symbols. The effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim's lifetime. When people mistake symbols for reality, they are easily manipulated. Large-scale ideological indoctrination probably began in Sumer, as the priesthood concocted and promoted various beliefs. Symbology replaced reality, including the acceptance of the secular elite as deific, getting slaves to accept their status, and getting commoners to give food to the priesthood to fulfill some divinely ordained obligation. Religion passed from experience to belief with the rise of civilization. I am not suggesting that pre-civilized religions were necessarily enlightened. They had shamanic intermediaries too, but with the rise of civilization, the priest class had to work hard to justify the obviously unfair social organization that accompanied stratified populations. Direct religious experience was disparaged and suppressed while the priesthood's religious indoctrination was promoted.
Although there is evidence that writing began about 5000 BCE, Sumer became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform around 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and elite accounting was typical of the first writing systems, or tales to aggrandize the elite. For instance, the quipu of the preliterate Incas was an accounting tool. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be supplanted by gold a millennium later, probably due to Egyptian influence.[603]
One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic's first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk's young women the night before marriage, and his subjects beseeched the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a "wild man" to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon's cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod's head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man's untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament's tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh's sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.
The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh's war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations.[604] The city-states of southern Mesopotamia made regular journeys to Lebanon's cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfill his grandiose schemes.[605] The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys and rafted logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today's Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad's rulers placed names on mountains corresponding with what tree predominantly grew on each one.[606]
What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, so salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur's port navigable once again, which had already been filled with silt.[607] Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, when Sumer became the world's first literate society, their tablets record Sumer's decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer's crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, and a steady decline reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE.[608] Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer's population declined by more than half, and famine was a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.
Upriver from Sumer, the Akkadian Empire began to form, which was the world's first empire. Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad's first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power, captured Uruk, and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE; the oldest preserved laws were then written. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they notably documented the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (when the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (when the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. "Eye for an eye" came from the Code of Hammurabi.
Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle. Rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers and the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was probably related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. There are arguments that the legend of Atlantis related to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean, but I think that an increasingly deforested Sumerian hinterland gave rise to the floods of legend.
Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. The battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, but all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from humanity (their in-group) have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales within 50 years, via deforestation and sheep grazing.[609] Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the "sponge" of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation. Atlantic islands were quickly denuded and desertified by invading Spaniards and Portuguese.
Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond sees collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.[610] Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization's EROI.[611] Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts.[612] What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran

[Magda Hassan]

Epochal Event 3.5 The Rise of Europe

Chapter summary:

• Emperor Constantine tries gambits to hold Roman Empire together
  
  
• Rome falls, invasions of Roman lands by Germanic tribes, the rise of Islam, and Moorish invasion of Iberia Peninsula
  
  
• Dark Ages followed by Medieval Warm Period and Viking invasions begin
  
  
• High Middle Ages begin in Europe
  
  
• "Pagan" technologies such as horse collar and watermill used in Europe
  
  
• Explosion in watermill use, and windmills introduced in Europe
  
  
• Reintroduction of Greek teachings to Christian Europe
  
  
• Catholic Church's struggles with secular rulers, and the Crusades
  
  
• Mongol invasions and the devastation of Islam
  
  
• Medieval Warm Period ends, and the catastrophic 1300s begin
  
  
• Renaissance begins in northern Italy
  
  
• Turks conquer Constantinople
  
  
• Portugal learns to sail the Atlantic Ocean
  
  
• Portugal initiates a new era of slavery
  
  
• Portugal's and Spain's pursuit of slaves and gold in the 1500s
  
  
• Europe turns global ocean into low-energy transportation lane and begins conquering the world
  
  
• English and Dutch rise to imperial dominance, and France dominates Continental Europe
  
  
• England's path to industrialization
  
  
• Deforested English countryside
  
  
• Coal pollution in England
  
  
• England resumes iron industry where Rome did, and the area is again quickly deforested
  
  
• A pirate becomes England's richest private citizen, and England conquers Scotland
  
  
• Deforested England invades and conquers Ireland, and establishes Ulster Plantation
  
  
• English invasion of North American begins
  
  
• Dispossessed English peasants become coal miners and live in new coal towns
  
  
• The importance of mast wood for ocean-going ships
  
  
• Struggle over European mast wood
  
  
• English invasion of New England for mast wood
  
  
• Dispossession of English peasants with Game and Enclosure laws create the workforce for the Industrial Revolution
  

The Roman Empire suffered from the devastation that it inflicted on Europe and the Mediterranean's periphery, as its EROI steadily declined, and Emperor Constantine tried some gambits. One was moving the capital from Rome, and the Greek city Byzantium became Constantinople and remained the imperial capital for more than a millennium and fell to pastoral invaders, the Turks, in 1453. Another ploy was uniting the fragmenting empire under one religion, and Christianity became the Roman Empire's state religion. Christianity by 300 would have probably been largely unrecognizable to Jesus, and especially after it became a state religion a generation later. By 476, Rome had officially fallen, and Italy's first king, Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus. Germanic tribes conquered Europe's Roman lands, and in the Near East, Islam began its rise in the late 600s. In 711, Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula, overthrew Visigothic rule, and Islamic Iberia became Europe's most civilized location for centuries. While the Roman Catholic Church specialized in burning libraries and "pagan" literature, Islamic culture preserved it. The Church completely eradicated Classic Greek writings in Western Europe, and although there is vociferous debate on the issue, in many ways medieval Europe was in a dark age for centuries. The Dark Ages were related to Rome's devastation inflicted on its subject peoples and environments. After centuries of recovery, around 800 Europe's Medieval Warm Period began (although some put the date in the 900s), and Frankish king Charlemagne tried to revive the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval Warm Period was a time of unprecedented prosperity and progress in northern Europe, and led to widespread Viking invasions among other usually violent migrations, but the climate that made northern Europe amenable to civilization-building caused epic droughts around the world and helped lead to the fall of the Classic Mayans and Anasazi, the decline of Angkor Wat, and may have been responsible for initiating the devastating Mongol invasions.[701]
The Medieval Warm Period led to the High Middle Ages, which began around 1000. It was a time of great city-building in northern Europe and about 75% of northern and central Europe's forests were razed and put under the plow. The success of northern Europe partly was partly attributable its heavy ice age soils, which did not erode as rapidly as the thinner southern soils of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean regions. Not until adopting the horse-pulled heavy plow did northern Europe's soils became sufficiently arable to feed Europe's High Middle Age peoples.[702] The teams pulling heavy plows were more than a single farmer could afford, so communal financing of horse teams for heavy plows has been considered a proto-capitalistic development. Even so, rivers filled with the mud of erosion, and the same deforestation and soil-loss process happened in northern Europe, but arguably slower than in those earlier civilizations.
Although the Church obliterated "pagan" teachings, they did not defend Europe from pagan technology. The Chinese horse collar arrived in Europe by 1000 and it quickly became the standard. As the Roman Empire became depopulated, the Greek watermill helped compensate for labor shortages. Watermills were active across Italy in the Roman Empire's early days, for running hammers, and were heavily used in Rome's mines. Constantine's predecessor Diocletian made a price edict regarding watermills. The advantages of motive power not produced by muscles were obvious.[703] The thick forests of northern Europe had steady Atlantic precipitation to thank (as well as the warm Gulf Stream), and Central and Western Europe was blessed with streams and rivers in abundance. The spread of the watermill is the first time that humanity harnessed widespread non-animal energy (other than sailboats, but they were far less widespread), and it helped propel Europe's rise. Humanity learned how to exploit the hydrological cycle's energy in an unprecedented way, but not everybody embraced it as Europe did. In eighth-century China, using water for irrigation and transportation had higher priority than mills, and they were regularly dismantled.[704]
But in medieval Europe, the watermill reached its peak use in the preindustrial world, beginning with Germanic lords as Rome was falling. Not only did the watermill spread throughout Europe, but new mills such as the ship mill and tide mill appeared. Today's France is where most medieval mill innovations appeared, but watermills became universal on the streams and rivers of Europe. In 800, only a few watermills existed in Western Europe, but by 1000 there were hundreds. The Domesday Survey of 1086 recorded nearly six thousand watermills in England alone, and the true number was some thousands more. The Kingdom of France had 10 thousand watermills at that time, and their number doubled in the next two centuries, as did England's.[705] Each mill produced at least two-to-three horsepower, which was the equivalent labor of about 50 men. In 11[SUP]th[/SUP]-century France, its mills produced the labor of a quarter of its population. Medieval European watermills produced the work of millions of people and reduced the need for slaves. It was a prelude to the Industrial Revolution. When Columbus sailed in 1492, watermills performed the work of at least 10 million people in Europe, which had a population of about 75 million.[706] When watermill sites became filled, Europeans began using windmills, which first appeared in France in 1080, although the first undisputed European windmill appeared in Yorkshire in 1185.[707] The social organization of medieval Europe was feudal; peasants labored for landowners in return for a portion of the harvest. The watermill became the center of a struggle between feudal and Church authorities and the peasantry; the windmill was established partly to circumvent lordly claims on waters that passed over their lands, as nobody yet owned the air.[708]
A seminal event in Europe's rise was the reintroduction of Classic Greek writings. It happened during the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies in what is today called the Reconquest. Islamic libraries housed Greek writings, and when the library at Toledo was captured in 1085, Christian scholars from across Europe traveled to that library, where those works were translated, and Europe was never the same. The rise of science and reason in medieval Europe thus began.
When that australopithecine Tesla made the first stone tool, his/her invention was transmitted via culture, probably by demonstration. When Homo erecti made Acheulean hand axes, they were engaging in a craft that lasted more than a million years; it was obviously a standardized training, as all axes looked similar. When that founder group left Africa, they had full command of language, a sophisticated toolset, and ideas were readily communicated, although it can be interesting to wonder what their beliefs were, if they had many. Those indoctrinating priests concocted complex thought forms to seduce and control the masses. Monumental structures in early civilizations were often architectural and engineering marvels, and the ancient Greeks began thinking in ways that could be called scientific. When that approach took root in Europe, which already used Greek technology to great benefit, it led to the Scientific Revolution, which accompanied and mutually stimulated the Industrial Revolution. In short, along with greater energy usage, mental feats also increased and were usually required for the next Epochal Event to manifest. The Teslas and Einsteins of their day initiated the breakthroughs and the masses took the ride in the subsequent epoch and raised their level of mental prowess. Calculus was only invented once (twice, really, as Leibniz and Newton did it independently), but it has been taught to students ever since as part of the mathematics curriculum. Each energy epoch was initiated by and accompanied by increased mental accomplishment, and each breakthrough helped form the foundation of the next one, which Newton stated most famously.
The medieval Catholic Church owned about a quarter of Europe's land and constantly vied for power with secular rulers. They became infamously corrupt, called Crusades that helped thin out the ranks of its ecstatic members, and even called Crusades onto its subjects when they strayed from the flock. In the 1200s, among others, Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile Church dogma with rediscovered Greek teachings. High Middle Age Europe also saw the troubadour phenomenon, with its themes of chivalry and courtly love.
Islamic culture enjoyed humanity's highest standard of living in about 1200, and although Europe was rising in that period, it was also seen as backward compared to the refined cultures of the Eastern Roman Empire (which never lost the ancient Greek teachings) and Islamic lands. But late Medieval Warm Period droughts may have unleashed a scourge that would be unsurpassed in ferocious destruction until the Nazis in the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century: the Mongol invasions initiated by Genghis Khan. Islam never fully recovered from the Mongol invasions. Persia's population declined by about 90%, and Baghdad was Islam's leading city before its virtually complete destruction and wholesale slaughter of its residents. Places such as China, Russia, and Hungary lost up to half of their populations. A recent study suggested that the tens of millions of deaths at the Mongols' hands may have initiated reforestation that absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to such an extent that it helped end the Medieval Warm Period.[709] The impact was only about 1 PPM, and the coming Little Ice Age has several proposed causes, including the Western Hemisphere's depopulation and reforestation due to the Spanish invasions of the 1500s.
By 1300, Earth was cooling down, High Middle Ages Europe was largely deforested and nearly all arable land was under the plow. Europe had reached the Malthusian limit of its means of preindustrial production. The 1300s were a century of unending calamity for Europe, beginning with famines in 1304, 1305, and 1310, and a major famine began in 1315 that lasted three years. Famines visited Europe at least once a generation in the 1300s. In 1337, England and France began a series of wars that lasted more than a century. Those events were only a hint at what lied ahead. Plagues and famines tend to be conjoined: weakened bodies are susceptible to disease. The Black Death pandemic probably originated in war-torn and famine-plagued China as early as 1338. In 1346 it reached Europe. By 1350, around half of Europe had died, and the plague kept reappearing. War, famine, and epidemics were so prevalent in the 1300s that the Danse Macabre became an art form in the 1400s and 1500s, after the troubadour profession died out with the Black Death. Europe became a hell on Earth. But the work that watermills performed was not subject to famine and disease, and the work of millions of "energy slaves" surely helped hold Europe together. Labor was in such shortage after the catastrophes that worker wages rose dramatically.[710]
In the late 1300s, in northern Italy's city-states, the ferment initiated by the rediscovery of ancient Greek teachings flowered in the Renaissance as humanism began its rise in Europe. Constantinople, which helped preserve ancient Greek teachings instead of destroying them, never fully recovered from the sacking that its "allies" gave it during the Fourth Crusade, and this led to Venice's lucrative dominance of Europe's spice trade. In 1453, Constantinople fell to Ottoman Turks, ending the Roman Empire's last vestige (other than the Roman Catholic Church), and humanist scholars fled to Europe, which further reinforced Renaissance humanism.
When Turks conquered Constantinople, Venice lost its spice monopoly and perhaps the seminal event of Europe's rise happened: attempts to find another route to obtain spices. Spices are often made of defensive chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves from animals, and many have antibacterial properties. These properties were important for preserving food, particularly animal products (mainly meat), in warm climates before the advent of refrigeration, but the antibacterial properties of spices are important even today in warm-climate nations. Spices essentially preserved food energy so that humans could consume it rather than microbes.
The Iberian Peninsula had been the site of wars for several centuries by the Fall of Constantinople, and the Christian/Islamic animosity there was pronounced; enslaving captured opponents was standard practice. Portugal began the maritime innovations that would see them seize the spice trade from their Islamic rivals. Henry the Navigator is closely associated with the rise of Portuguese maritime knowledge and practice. How responsible Henry was for Portugal's maritime prowess has long been debated, but what is not debatable is that Portugal began developing the necessary knowledge and skills for accomplishing an unprecedented feat: sailing the world's oceans. Until that time, only the Indian Ocean was regularly traveled because of its relatively gentle and predictable nature.[711] Not until Europe's rise were the Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans regularly traveled. Genoese sailors sought India via the Atlantic since the 1200s, unsuccessfully, and even settled some Atlantic islands, but Portugal was humanity's first successful practitioner of transoceanic navigation. Many technical issues were resolved, and Portuguese sailors with Henry's patronage sailed down the Atlantic Coast of Africa and across the Atlantic. The Portuguese began colonizing the Madeira Islands in 1420, the Azores in 1433, and in 1434, Portugal became the first European power to sail south of Cape Bojador on the African coast.
Serfdom largely replaced slavery in Europe by about 1000, but was still a form of forced servitude. By 1434, the first captured Africans to use as slaves were delivered to Lisbon. The sitting pope officially approved of enslaving non-Christians in 1452, and one of humanity's greatest disasters began. Portugal dominated the transatlantic slave trade for more than three centuries. The other Portuguese commercial obsession, before they seized the spice trade, beginning in 1500, was gold. African gold began pouring into Lisbon when the slaves did, and the Portuguese began minting gold coins in 1452. The pursuit of slaves and gold characterized Portuguese and Spanish efforts in the Western Hemisphere during the 16[SUP]th[/SUP] century, which caused history's greatest demographic catastrophe: most of a hemisphere's population died off within a century. Life was also cheap in the imperial nations. The average mortality rate for the crew during the centuries that Portugal used its spice route was about 25% per voyage. Scurvy was the primary cause, and Europe ignored the cures for centuries.
When Pangaea formed and the Permian extinction wiped out nearly everything, long years of evolution on separate continents came to an end when one supercontinent formed and Lystrosaurus became Earth's dominant land animal for a brief time. The Great American Biotic Interchange was another example of merging continents spelling the extinction of the less adaptable species. Some have argued that the biological effect of Europe's conquest of the world was like continents merging, but it happened 250 million years before the new supercontinent will form.[712]
Europe's rise was made possible when it turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Portugal was in the early lead, but Spain was close behind, and within a century they were both caught and surpassed by English, Dutch, and French efforts. Until that time, the oceanic sailing ship was by far the greatest energy-capturing technology in world history and remained that way until the steam engine appeared. Europe's watermills achieved an average of three horsepower per mill by the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century's end.[713] When Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492, the day's 100-ton sailing ships generated between 500 and 700 horsepower when traveling at 10 knots, which was more than 50 times the power that the muscles of the 80-man crew generated.[714] By the 1800s, the most efficient sailing ships generated more than 200 times the human power needed to operate them. Using bodies of water as low-energy transportation lanes was one of civilization's most important inventions, from Sumer to Rome to Tenochtitlán to Europe's global dominance.
Other traits that led to European dominance were their violence and greed. Europe's 16[SUP]th[/SUP] century in the New World was essentially a century-long gold rush. Europe's incessant wars and technological advances devoted to inventing ever-deadlier weaponry, as well as its group fighting tactics and insatiable greed, made it an irresistible force that swept over the world's peoples. Greed was transformed from a vice into a virtue by Europe's economic ideologists. This dynamic will be explored in the next chapter.
Rome was a huge parasite. Its citizens did not understand that their methods were unsustainable, not to mention evil, and would lead to their civilization's collapse. The Spaniards' obsession with gold, which was responsible for exterminating a hemisphere, suffered from a similar blindness. Although warned by Spanish scholars that importing mountains of gold and silver to Spain would do little economically for Spain other than create inflation, the Spanish sovereigns did not heed the advice. The first bankruptcy that marked the effective end of Spain's imperial aspirations was in 1557, which was a mere generation after the initial Incan plunder began arriving in Spain. Crown bankruptcies continued, and Spain in 1600 was arguably worse off than in 1500. Spain and Portugal became the first imperial also-rans during Europe's rise. Portugal's violent seizure of the spice trade acquired some real if ephemeral wealth during its century of dominance. Portugal also imperially overreached, but closer to home. When its ruling class was decimated by an ill-advised invasion of Northern Africa, Spain annexed Portugal. With their imperial fortunes thus conjoined, they declined at the same time.
The English and Dutch dominated the high seas during the 1600s. The Netherlands declined in the late 1600s and France replaced them as England's rival in the 1700s. The French lost their wars against the British, and got vengeance by helping Great Britain's most successful colonies become independent via the American Revolution. After the humiliation of the War of 1812, the Americans engaged in a friendlier rivalry with the British in the late 1800s, to take the imperial crown in the early 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century as it became history's richest and most powerful nation. When imperial latecomers arrived (primarily Germany and Japan), other imperial nations had already laid claim to nearly the entire planet. Earth's industrialized nations then had two devastating wars that determined global plunder rights, and the USA emerged with unprecedented dominance. The USA was really an empire by the early 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century, but its social managers always promoted the fiction that America was not playing Europe's imperial games, even though they were obvious to everybody on Earth except for perhaps the empire's equivalent of plebeians and naïve patricians who actually believed the propaganda.
While European powers plundered the planet, something happened in one country that led to its dominance and eventually transformed the world with the Fourth Epochal Event: harnessing the energy of hydrocarbon fuels. It began by mining coal laid down in the Carboniferous Period, and after a couple of centuries of rising industrialization, oil deposits were mined. Oil has been the primary focus of geopolitical conflict ever since the British Navy adopted oil as its primary fuel in 1911, on Winston Churchill's initiative. The imperial powers have not allowed Middle East peoples their de facto independence ever since.
The rest of this chapter will survey the path that led to England's initiation of the Industrial Revolution, and the next few chapters will tend to focus on England and its succeeding states, called Great Britain (1707 to 1800) and the United Kingdom ("UK" - 1800 to present, after adding Northern Ireland to its polity), and its rebellious colonies in North America, today called the USA. They may well seem an unnecessary focus to many global readers, but I do it for a few reasons. One is that England was the first nation to industrialize and helped set the pattern for other industrialization events. England's industrialization, with its attendant capitalism, was the only pristine one. Another is that England became Earth's greatest imperial power since Rome. It had a truly global reach and altered the societal development of most of the world's peoples, sometimes profoundly. Another is that England's descendant, the colonies that became the original USA, is the world's leading power as of 2014. As bragged by a presidential advisor soon after its unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq, the USA is an empire and arguably was one long before it obliterated temperate North America's natives. The USA's first president set the blueprint for stealing a continent, and it wrested lands from everybody in the way. The theft of most of Mexico, in two steps (1, 2), added to the USA's plunder in the first half of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century, and its land grabs and imperial behavior only increased afterward, and a century after its early larcenous acts it emerged from history's greatest imperial war with unchallenged global hegemony. But the primary reason why I focus on those nations/empires is that they were history's greatest energy users, and the USA has used more energy than any other nation (it was passed by China in 2010, but uses four times as much per capita). Far more than any other dynamic, humanity's energy practices will determine its future. Although Americans are not my target audience and I doubt that the energy breakthroughs for initiating humanity's Fifth Epochal Event will originate from within the USA, America has been leading global energy trends for more than a century, and most attempts to initiate the Fifth Epochal Event have originated within the USA. Also, I am an American and know my nation better than any other, so it is the nation that I am best qualified to write about. One day, perhaps soon, the USA will no longer be the focus of so much global attention, and if humanity experiences its Fifth Epochal Event instead of meeting its demise in the Sixth Mass Extinction, I expect that nations will become obsolete political entities and take their place among other relics of the human journey.
The developments that led to England's use of coal in industry arguably began when the first sailboats plied Mesopotamian rivers, as it was the first time that non-muscle power was significantly used. When Hellenic innovators developed the watermill, windmill, and the first steam engine, it became the path to the Industrial Revolution. The rise of waterpower and wind power in medieval Europe, first with windmills and then with oceangoing sailing ships, already had Europe riding an obvious energy wave, even if thermodynamics and other energy sciences were not yet invented.
The Domesday Survey, published in 1086, recorded that 85% of the English countryside was deforested, as well as 90% of England's arable land, and the remaining forest were largely reserved for royalty and nobility for hunting. But studies of lake and river sediments show that most of England's deforestation had been accomplished before Rome invaded two millennia ago.[715] By 900, the brown bear was nearly extinct on the British Isles and the wolf was not far behind. English coal had been mined by Romans, and China also mined some coal, but deforested England became the world's first nation to rely on coal. As the High Middle Ages were ending in the 1200s, deforested and cooling England began turning to coal. Most of Earth's coal came from a brief geological period before any organism learned to digest lignin, and geological processes made trees into today's coal deposits. The level of geological "processing" determines the grade of coal, and the typical progression is from peat to lignite to bituminous coal to anthracite, which is like a rock and the cleanest burning. Pennsylvania's anthracite deposits were long the most desirable coal in the USA, and Wales has anthracite deposits. But England generally burned bituminous coal, and pollution issues were obvious from the beginning. In 1257 Queen Eleanor visited Nottingham, and the coal smoke used in local industry drove her away, as she could not stand the smell and feared for her health.[716] In 1285, a commission was established in London, led by Eleanor's son Edward I, to address the coal smoke problem. In 1306, coal was banned in London, to little practical effect. Coal smoke was so noxious that it was not yet used in homes. Fuel-hungry operations, such as blacksmiths and brewers, are where England's early coal pollution originated.[717] As with the "green effect" of the Mongol hordes, the Black Death gave England's forests a brief reprieve when half of England died. England's population did not begin to grow again until the 1500s, when it was in the Little Ice Age's grip, which lasted until the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century.
The Catholic Church owned England's coal mines until Henry VIII kicked out the Catholic Church, partly because it would not give him an annulment, and he appropriated its English assets, including its mines. During Elizabeth I's reign, England began its ascent to industrialization and England's woods were once again decimated. Elizabeth established commissions to investigate the dire state of England's woods, and the results were unanimous: they were largely gone.[718] Until Elizabeth I's reign, England was relatively backward, and the Netherlands was far ahead in economic development. The geographic isolation of the British Isles made them culturally quaint compared to their continental neighbors, which can still be seen today with the British reverence for its royalty.[719] Japan is the other isolated island industrialized nation, on the opposite side of the Eurasian landmass, with a similar religious fervor toward its royalty. The Netherlands was Europe's most urbanized place although it was resource-poor and began intensive agricultural efforts to reduce its dependence on imported food, and grain in particular. The land-poor Dutch even began to claim land from the North Sea, in history's greatest effort of oceanic land reclamation. During Henry VIII's reign, England had a primitive economy that provided raw materials to the Low Countries, where they dyed English cloth and sent it back to them, and southern England exported wood to deforested France.[720]
England imported its munitions from the Low Countries, and when the Continental wars began that would culminate in the devastating Thirty Years' War, Henry noted England's vulnerability and began developing its arms industry. England's iron industry began in 1543.[721] When Rome invaded, it established iron operations in what became Sussex, which deforested the area within a century. In the same place, more than a millennium later, Henry revived England's iron industry. Sussex was quickly deforested, and hearings were held only five years later, in 1548, regarding the deforestation and ruination of the commoners by the new iron industry, as the price of wood skyrocketed. Although the commission was concerned, the Crown did nothing about the situation, as an important industry could not be thwarted. Sussex's residents took matters into their own hands and attacked a local forge, which coincided with rebellions in other counties; they were brutally suppressed by the lords and Crown.[722]
While Spain and Portugal were busy plundering humanity, England was still getting its domestic house in order and began emulating Dutch practices. During the last half of the 1500s, England's "contribution" to the world's rape was largely limited to harrying the Spanish. England's richest private citizen was the pirate Francis Drake, whose claim to fame was stealing Spanish silver by surprise raids of its Pacific ports and circumnavigating Earth as the only way to return home with the loot. While Drake was sailing around Earth with his booty, Martin Frobisher hauled back thousands of tons of fool's gold to England from a bay named after him. England's first colony in the Western Hemisphere disappeared without a trace. Such were the follies of England's early imperial efforts. Before England became an imperial aspirant, it conquered its neighbors. Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall to keep out the "barbarians" of what became Scotland. A second wall was built farther north a generation later. England first invaded Scotland in 1296, and that region's Scots were subjected to incessant warfare. The Scots fought alongside France in the Hundred Years' War, and my family name reflects that heritage; I have a surname with French roots and spelling, but my direct ancestor came from Scotland. Scotland formally united with England in 1707 and became Great Britain, but warred with England until 1745. A period of Scottish peace with England began in 1560. As England ran out of wood it invaded Ireland, and the conquest was not completed until 1603. An English businessman first suggested moving wood-hungry English glassworks to Ireland in 1589; after the conquest was complete in 1603, the rapid decimation of Ireland's remaining forests commenced.[723] Ireland has yet to recover its forests. The English established a colony in Ireland at Ulster, and used Borderer Scots and other lower-class subjects to populate the colony as a kind of cannon fodder who were promised land for "settling" where the fiercest resistance to the English invasion had been. That colony formed the toehold that became Northern Ireland, and post-colonial strife with Ireland lasted to this century.
England began invading North America with the fort at Jamestown in 1607, and wayward religious fanatics got lost on the way to the mouth of the Hudson River in 1620 and stumbled into today's Massachusetts and became the "pilgrims" of American lore. They brought the witch-hunting craze with them, and witches were executed in trumped-up trials until 1693. North America was "settled" in similar fashion to Ireland's invasion, in that the English gentry got the best land in the valleys while the Scots-Irish "settlers" populated the hills as a buffer people. If they could violently wrest land from the rapidly dispossessed Indians, they were welcome to it, until they lost it to arriving gentry once the frontier was settled.[724] That is where America's "hillbillies" came from, and the borderer culture of the British Isles, with its constant warring, gave birth to the USA's preferred infantryman. That is part of my family's heritage and that of the USA's white underclass. Often-pejorative terms such as "redneck," "cracker," and "Hoosier" originated in the British Isles to describe residents of the borders and highlands.[725] The word "lynching" came from the vigilante "justice" that those border and backwoods peoples engaged in. They largely settled the western USA as they sought free land and gold and performed some of the greatest atrocities against Indians in the final days of the Western Hemisphere's conquest. The genocide of inland tribes in California was inflicted by poor rural whites with dreams of easy gold. Even though it is part of my heritage, I bore the brunt of Appalachian xenophobia when they tried to get me fired from a temporary job that I had at a bank in southern Ohio (by lying to my supervisor about my actions) before I secured permanent employment at a trucking company. Most of our drivers were from Appalachia; I understood their miserable existences and longed to fix it.
By the early 1600s, coal was England's primary fuel, and "coal towns" formed where workforces for new mines lived. Mining towns were ramshackle affairs, populated by migrant workers, and the English class system became pronounced due to the gulf between coal miners and the rest of English society. That ghetto-like existence was new in the British Isles. In Scotland, coal miners were actually slaves, even wearing collars that identified their owners.[726] Coal mining was hellish work, particularly in underground mines, which were dominant on the isle of Great Britain. Miners were killed by mine gas (methane) explosions, asphyxiated by mine gas (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which is why they used canaries in coal mines), died in cave-ins, and suffered myriad other horrific fates. Drowning not only became a common way to die as mines began digging below the water table, but solving the water problem became a key event in the Industrial Revolution, and arguably the key event, which will be explored in the next chapter. Coal miners eventually organized to get better working conditions, and coal miners were prominent in the USA's labor movement.[727]
From civilization's earliest days, the sailing ship was humanity's greatest energy technology. Today, the term "prime mover" refers to an engine's component that transforms one kind of energy into another, usually by converting heat energy into mechanical energy (but it is the energy of motion in both instances). But also when environmental energy is captured and turned into mechanical energy, it is accomplished via a prime mover. In that regard, a water wheel and crankshaft is a watermill's prime mover, and a windmill's sail and crankshaft is its prime mover. The prime mover is the machinery's most important component and its heart, where the most advanced technology and materials are brought to bear, as that part endures the greatest stresses. In an automobile, for instance, the prime mover is the combination of combustion cylinders and their attached crankshaft. Chemical energy in gasoline is thereby transformed into mechanical energy via the controlled explosions of rapid fuel combustion, which liberated that solar energy captured so long ago. In a sailing ship, the prime mover is the sail and mast, where wind energy is transferred to the ship. The mast is a sailing ship's most important component, and is like an engine's crankshaft.
The two primary uses of wood in civilizations have always been fuel and making structures. Just as 90% of Rome's wood was used for fuel, burning wood has always been its greatest use on Earth, even to the present day. Firewood does not need to be long and straight, and coppice and "waste" wood has long been used for firewood and in pulp mills. Other stands of trees were allowed to grow for a century and more to provide long, straight wood for making structures. For seafaring nations, that always meant ships; securing wood for shipbuilding was a major goal in the earliest seafaring civilizations, and became an obsession during the rise of Mediterranean civilizations. The war between Athens and Sparta largely centered over wood to build navies.
As Europe learned to sail the high seas, ships became larger and so did the masts. The naval ship was humanity's highest-performance equipment well into the industrial age, and technological innovations were first used in Europe's navies if they could be, as they were the key equipment in vying for imperial dominance. Military ships were the largest ones on the high seas, and their masts needed to be the largest. A military ship's mainmast was the greatest energy-generating technology on Earth, and research showed that single-tree masts were superior for military ships, partly because they held together better when hit by a cannonball and they weathered storms better.[728] Although the English began deforesting Ireland as soon as they could, mast wood was largely supplied by Scandinavian polities (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). By the late 1600s, after centuries of providing most of Europe's mast wood, Baltic nations not only refused to sell England trees greater than about a half-meter in diameter (22 inches), they no longer had trees greater than 0.7 meter (28 inches). By 1850, Sweden was deforested and starving, and a great wave of migration from Sweden to the USA began.[729] That environmental catastrophe is also part of my heritage, as a Swedish-American ancestor married into my mother's Norwegian family that migrated to the USA in the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. The Pacific Northwest had a fishing industry and environs that reminded my ancestors of their homeland. Europe could not provide mast wood large enough to meet England's needs in its imperial arms races. While the Dutch and English were both fighting Spain, they were friendly, but by the middle of the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century they became bitter rivals, and their first war began in 1652. The day's naval ships carried up to 100 guns. England's "ships of the line" needed to be increasingly large to defeat England's rivals, and ever-larger masts were critical to their success. By 1900, masts for merchant ships reached 60 meters tall, and the British Navy began adopting steam power before the mid-19[SUP]th[/SUP] century.
In 1602, the first Englishmen visited what became New England, and the expedition's primary finding was that the gigantic trees that they found, particularly the tall, straight white pine, would provide England with an independent source of mast wood. By 1634, mast wood was shipped to England from New England, and within a generation, several hundred masts per year were shipped. The Netherlands tried to deny England access to Baltic mast wood in 1658, between their first two wars, and seized some of New England's first mast wood shipments. Eventually, as with the Spanish silver fleet, which was an armada designed to fend off piracy of Spain's New World plunder, England developed its mast fleet, which was anticipated with nearly as much anxiety as Rome's wheat fleet from Africa was. By 1700, all English "ships of the line" were masted with New England's timber.[730] The Dutch won their wars with the English in the 1600s but lost to France, and were on their way by the late 1600s to becoming another imperial also-ran. A seemingly minor outcome of their wars against England was that the Dutch lost their North American colonies, but this could be seen as an early step in the development of the polity that became the USA. After defeating the Dutch, France then became the premier Continental power and England's primary imperial rival. The late 1600s and early 1700s also marked the heart of the Little Ice Age, as sunspot activity fell to a nadir called the Maunder Minimum.
No historian has argued that England had a grand plan of industrialization, but the Epochal Event was the culmination of several trends. Although the science of energy had yet to be invented, the obvious advantages of watermills, windmills, and sailing ships were not lost on people, and the control of arable land, forests, low-energy transportation lanes, workforces, and markets was always the road to riches from Sumer onward. People knew what they were doing, even if they had little or no long-term perspective.
A key trend for England's industrialization was removing peasants from the land so that they could no longer feed themselves. Those dispossessed peasants became the Industrial Revolution's workforce, and the dispossession began in England with the forest laws enacted by William the Conqueror; deer were reserved for hunting by the elite, not commoners. Sherwood Forest was one of many royal forests, where "criminals" such as Robin Hood hunted the King's deer. Modern English Game Laws began in 1671, and in 1723 the infamous Black Act was passed, which made "poaching" a capital crime.[731] Europe's feudal era was anything but halcyonic, but slaves became serfs, and as bad as serfdom was, they still had some rights, and provisioning themselves from the "commons" in the open field system was a universal right in feudal Europe. As England began its rise to dominance, English landowners began removing peasants from the land via Enclosure Laws, beginning in the 1200s, usually to establish "deer parks" for elite hunting grounds. In the late 1400s, Enclosure measures were stepped up with anti-Enclosure laws. The first anti-Enclosure rebellion began in 1549, and revolts continued into the 1600s. But the landowners won and became England's first capitalists, as they raised food for sale after the "primitive accumulation" gained by dispossessing the peasantry. The mechanization of farming began in earnest with the lands cleared of peasants, and England's agricultural revolution began.
Agricultural output increased, England's population rose, and those dispossessed peasants toiled in English mines and mills. One common misconception regarding the Industrial Revolution is that it was an urban phenomenon, but it really began in the countryside, where the energy was.[732] England's watermills, necessaril

[Magda Hassan]

Epochal Event 4.5 The Rise of Oil and Electricity

Chapter summary:

• American whaling peaks
  
  
• The first commercial oil well is drilled
  
  
• American plutocracy and political assassinations
  
  
• Gilded Age, the rise of the robber barons, and John D. Rockefeller
  
  
• Encounters of FE and related activists with Rockefeller interests
  
  
• Relative unimportance of American presidents
  
  
• Ultra-elite power games I have known
  
  
• Global elite and psychopaths in their employ
  
  
• Conspiracism and hacking at branches
  
  
• Organized suppression of alternative and free energy
  
  
• Robber baron influence in fluoridation
  
  
• Nuclear industry influence in fluoridation
  
  
• Influence of J.P. Morgan
  
  
• First uses of electricity
  
  
• Tesla, Edison, and Morgan
  
  
• First "free energy" threat to the robber barons
  
  
• Modern uses of electricity
  
  
• Interacting dynamics of industrialization
  
  
• Human "morality" and imperial competitions
  
  
• La Belle Époque and the starvation of imperial subjects
  
  
• Rise of oil in transportation
  
  
• West's dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and its oil politics and genocides ever since
  
  
• Rockefeller control of economics and how neoclassical economics ignores energy
  
  
• Fear and greed become cornerstones of modern economic theory
  
  
• Modern economics is not a science
  
  
• Disdain that scientists hold for economists
  
  
• Professional racketeering the elite benefit derived from it
  
  
• Robber baron control of the medical establishment
  
  
• Crescendo of American nationalism and Japanese attempts to catch up to the West
  
  
• Economic motivation behind World Wars
  
  
• The UK's rape of India
  
  
• German scientific advances
  
  
• Jewish intellectual achievement
  
  
• American industrialist support for Hitler
  
  
• Childishness of imperial ideology and those adhering to it
  
  
• Hitler learned his racist ideology Henry Ford
  
  
• Social managers' scientific population management
  
  
• Industrial Revolution's reliance on fossil fuel energy
  
  
• West rides on the backs of a trillion energy slaves
  
  
• True economic benefit of oil
  
  
• Imagining the role of energy in our world
  
  
• Energy efficiency and societies
  
  
• Industrial Revolution's dramatic rise in energy consumption
  
  
• Capitalism's formation of the ownership class
  
  
• Capitalism's speculative frenzies
  
  
• Hitler's mistakes
  
  
• The USA founding its CIA with death camp Nazis
  
  
• First application of nuclear energy
  

When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, published in 1851, American whaling expeditions had lengthened from brief excursions near Nantucket to three-year voyages that circled the world, which hunted the remaining whales. American whaling peaked in 1847, in a classic resource depletion scenario, as whaling's EROI fell fast. The primary whale "product" was oil for lighting lamps. In 1848, the USA completed the theft of more than half of Mexico, which began with the seizure of Texas. The same year, the biggest gold rush in American history began, and those seeking the easy money got to California any way they could. The genocide of California's remaining natives began in earnest, and California's first governor declared an open season on natives. The Pacific whaling fleet was crippled when its crews deserted in San Francisco and swarmed into the Sierra's gold fields.
In 1859, the USA's first commercial oil well was drilled, and its Civil War began in 1861. The southern rebels sank most of the Pacific whaling fleet during the war, and that, combined with the petroleum industry's establishment, spelled the end of American whaling. Railroads were the USA's first big businesses, and in the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad was built. The telegraph was an early use of electricity, and it proliferated with the railroads; telegraph lines ran alongside the rails as the USA expanded across the continent. Those railroads were instrumental in the extinction of the passenger pigeon, the near-extinction of the bison, and the disappearance of the American frontier. As with World War II, the USA's Civil War stimulated its industrial production. In 1830, the USA's industrial production was a quarter of the UK's, a third in 1860, two-thirds in 1880, and a third greater in 1900.[780] On the eve of World War I, the USA's industrial production was more than twice the UK's, and the USA was far and away Earth's greatest industrial power. It grew even more dominant by 1929, and was virtually alone on the world stage in 1945.[781]
The USA has been a plutocracy since the very beginning. George Washington was the USA's richest man; he was a slave-owning land baron whose armies he commanded made him richer. John Jay was the USA's first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and strongly believed that those who own the nation should govern it. Possibly beginning with Zachary Taylor, assassinating American presidents became a sport, with Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Kennedy, Ford, and Reagan and others subject to assassination attempts that were often successful, and presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace were also subjected to assassination attempts. Other political figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Fred Hampton, and John Lennon were assassinated, and they may well have all died in operations like those that killed the Kennedys and other attempts of that era. Only the Lincoln assassination has been widely acknowledged to have been part of a conspiracy. Every other time it was attributed to a "lone nut" assassin, if the weak conclusion given by the second official John Kennedy assassination investigation is ignored. I have no doubt that John Kennedy's death resulted from a conspiracy, and in 2013, for the first time ever, the Kennedy family publicly stated the truth: the Kennedy family never believed the "lone nut" theory regarding John's murder, and Robert Kennedy considered the Warren Report to be a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship." Robert Kennedy's son made that public admission, and if the Kennedys never believed the official story for John's murder, they certainly do not believe it for Robert's murder. The Kennedys have not revealed that opinion yet, but probably do not need to.[782] Fear probably kept them silent for 50 years. I consider it very possible that none of the prominent assassinations and attempts were the work of "lone nuts." The spooks were busy in 1960s and 1970s, and assassinating American political figures would have been a modest undertaking compared to the Phoenix Program and killing several million people in Southeast Asia. Creating scapegoats to deflect attention from covert activities may have become a science in certain circles.
With its skyrocketing industrial growth, economic empires expanded as never before and the USA's Gilded Age was born, which was dominated by robber barons. Industrial, financial, pharmaceutical, and other empires were born or began steep growth trajectories during the Civil War, and John Davison Rockefeller's oil empire was the most notorious and successful. Rockefeller established an oil refining business in 1863 after careful study of the new industry. As with bears and early elites, Rockefeller quickly realized that controlling production was unnecessary. If he positioned himself properly between the producers and market, then he could seize control of the entire industry. Rockefeller's father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who mentored his sons and was John's early financier. John used the rich man's exemption to buy his way out of military service in the Civil War and began building his empire. He decided that controlling refining and distribution was the path to dominance. John Rockefeller was a genius. He negotiated kickbacks from the railroads used to transport oil, but took it further when he negotiated kickbacks on the railroad traffic of his competitors, in one of history's most clever and unscrupulous plans. Beginning in Cleveland, he used his shrewd kickback scheme and various carrots and sticks to wipe out or buy out all other refiners. Rockefeller's Standard Oil eliminated the hundreds of small refiners that formed the initial industry. By 1879, his empire controlled 95% of American oil refining, which set the stage for him to become history's richest person, with several times Bill Gates's relative wealth. Recalcitrant Standard Oil competitors could have mysterious explosions destroy their refineries, and more than one came to an untimely demise, but if Rockefeller's prey put up a good fight or showed talent, he hired them and soon amassed a team unmatched in capability and ruthlessness. John Rockefeller only became excited when pondering how rich he would become.[783] He became a "philanthropist" early on but he was a standard phony humanitarian, as became evident with the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.
The Rockefeller Empire's tale is far from an irrelevant historical curiosity. During my days of pursuing FE, we encountered the Rockefeller name many times. Companies they controlled were directly involved with wiping out energy companies that we worked with. When my partner was offered about a billion dollars to abandon his efforts, the Rockefellers may well have been involved, and we later had direct dealings with Rockefeller heirs, including one of the biggest names. The Rockefeller Empire probably inflicted some of the organized suppression activities that we suffered. Long after I "retired" from the field, my partner kept trying to make an impact before he was run out of the USA, soon after direct contact from the Rockefeller Empire. Rothschild interests were also involved. The Rockefeller and Rothschild dynasties are subjected to many conspiracy theories in the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, and our encounters demonstrated that the allegations may not be groundless. However, the fact that they identified themselves by name means, to me, that they are no longer at the top of the global power structure, if they ever really were. The people who really run the world are not household names. I call them the Global Controllers ("GCs"), my partner called them the Big Boys, a leading name in the FE field called them "Godzilla," and other terms such as "Sinister Secret Government" and "Shadow Government" have been applied. Whatever name is used, the organization is real. We also had dealings with them, more than I can publicly disclose, and they do not identify themselves by name. They act through intermediaries and have developed their cloak-and-dagger methods into a science. Whether it was the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or GCs, we never contacted them, but they contacted us.
Anybody knowledgeable about that milieu realizes that naming names is dangerous and I usually make it a point to not know the names. Others who should know have named some organizations or, more accurately, factions of some organizations. We also had encounters with provocateurs from one of those organizations when they helped destroy our companies. This can be a difficult and delicate subject, and what follows is my view as of early 2014, which has not changed much since the early 2000s. Sitting American presidents operate far below the tops of those organizations, in the dark and out of the loop, and they all know that they are not near the top. They have power of a sort, but are largely actors, not necessarily following orders, but they know their place or have a good idea what it is, and they cannot impact important issues. The last president who thought that he could was John Kennedy, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.
From the beginnings of civilization, all elites have always played the same basic games, which were concerned with gaining economic power as a path to political power. All ruling classes exploited those they ruled. The elites of city-states, whether they were in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica, tried to militarily conquer their neighbors and form larger polities. Nations and empires have constantly formed, fragmented, and fallen over the millennia, and they almost always disintegrated because they ran out of energy. Greed and megalomania can never be satiated, and those in their thrall continually feed their addictions. Psychologists have found that psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their affliction is advantageous when amassing wealth and power are primary organizational goals. For those who have encountered today's ultra-elite and lived to tell about it, the evils that they relate about such environments are difficult for "normal" people to understand. Those at the top have elevated greed and a lust for power to nearly inconceivable levels. Just as John Rockefeller hired talented psychopaths, so do the GCs. I have encountered their agents and they were talented; I will grant them that. The man responsible for the death of a woman in our organization tried to blame my former partner for her death at the funeral. He probably worked for the GCs, but was a contract agent, as many are. He later defrauded the public with the same tactics he used to help destroy our company, as did another contract agent provocateur, who sat in prison as of 2014. People like them do not have consciences. They could have done well in Hitler's SS, for instance.
What psychologists call psychopaths or sociopaths, mystics call dark pathers and other terms. Such people have simply made self-service a science (their in-group is one person: themselves), and reaching high levels of "evil" requires great commitment. Genghis Kahn was a busy man, slaughtering millions and producing millions of descendants. That takes hard work and a sense of duty. Dark path professionals were sicced on us, and being on the receiving end of their evil deeds engendered a certain kind of awe and was an effective way to lose one's naïveté.
But the dark path can be quite dark, and although indoctrination and other kinds of limbic conditioning help form "cohesion" in societies, in GC and other criminal enterprises the carrots and sticks uniting those organizations can be breathtaking. I avoid knowing very much about it, as that knowledge can be damaging to a normal person's psyche. I was damaged by merely studying the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide of the Western Hemisphere's natives, and today's recent and continuing imperial genocides inflicted by my nation. Those diabolical global organizations are always in danger of fragmenting as everybody vies for wealth and power, and I doubt that there is an unbroken line of conspiring elites that stretches back to civilization's beginnings. They have risen and fallen along with their civilizations, and they could only play a regional game at most. However, with Europe's conquest of the world, power-addicted elites could begin thinking on a global scale for the first time. I would not be surprised to discover that some ultra-elite organizations have a pedigree that stretches back for centuries, and conspiracists have long traced those lineages. But my impression is that turnover regularly happens at the top, which is generally beyond the purview of conspiracists. With retail dynasties (Rome, Mayans, European royalty, China, etc.), they could trust relatives more than others, so heredity played a role, and apparently also does with the GCs. A close relative nearly tried to recruit me into the family "business," and his employers played at a higher level than John Perkins's employers did, but it still seemed down a level or two from the GCs' stratum.
One major problem with making a positive impact on a global level, ultra-elite machinations aside, is that almost nobody focuses on what is important, which I hope to help remedy with this essay. Almost everybody hacks at branches if they hack at all. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, which is of dubious benefit to begin with, but they often become paranoid and also confuse retail elites or other interests with the GCs. Bill Gates and David Rockefeller are probably not members of the GCs' organization. Also, I learned that ultra-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The GCs are only a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. They cannot be beaten at their game, and it is counterproductive and can even be suicidal to try. Making them obsolete is probably the best that we can do. While conspiracists often fixate on ultra-elite machinations, intellectuals, academics, and scientists tend to deny that such activities even exist or are meaningful. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging ultra-elite existence, and I think it partly relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that considers consciousness to be nothing more than a byproduct of biochemical reactions. They have an ideological aversion to the notion that anybody manipulates events on a global scale, and believe that what seems conspiratorial is only anarchic elites competing with each other, which is like Darwin's view of evolution. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists, or that the situation can be explained without invoking conscious intent, like materialistic hypotheses of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have openly admitted their ideological objections to the existence of such elites; such an idea scares them. Neither obsession nor denial helps people attain productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, is their primary limitation. Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces, and energy ranks above all else. Victims are reactive instead of proactive, and only combined positive intention and resulting action has a prayer of working, in my opinion.
I do not make it a point to collect stories, but I am aware that there are literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, of cases of technology suppression, largely performed by the GCs' agents, and I have not only survived a few episodes of such activities, but I have heard of many others, either firsthand or secondhand. Most involve alternative and free energy, but they also include exotic materials, antigravity technology, and technologies that would make almost all of humanity's major industries immediately obsolete. Much of what has been suppressed would appear magical to the masses. The GCs and other private interests often use governments and other public organizations to their ends. That happened each time our companies were wiped out. Public officials wielded the public ax, always acting in concert with the media, but they always performed on behalf of their private interest patrons.
The GCs have deep pockets, and keeping FE and related technologies such as antigravity under wraps is perhaps their greatest priority. If there is any good news to relate, it is that all informed observers know that humanity is quickly making Earth uninhabitable, which has made most GCs uneasy. They do not want to live in their underground and off-world survival enclaves if Earth's surface becomes at least temporarily uninhabitable, and members of that disenchanted faction gave a close friend an underground exotic technology show. In my circles, receiving such a demonstration was unexceptional.
Later in this essay, I will return to that theme. One lesson that I learned during my adventures is that with global events, far more happens than meets the public eye. Accepting events at face value is rarely appropriate. That stated, documented history and archeological and other physical evidence can provide important insights, and this essay will continue along a scientist's/historian's path for now.
Other robber baron empires profoundly affected not only industrial and national trajectories, but the very path of science and medicine. Andrew Mellon parlayed his robber baron heritage into becoming the USA's Secretary of the Treasury, and presided over fluoride (ionized fluorine) beginning its surreal makeover from toxic industrial waste to a tooth's best friend. Mellon controlled the world's largest fluoride polluter at the time. It was also the world's largest aluminum producer, and enjoyed an American monopoly. There is virtually no credible data or theory that justifies fluoride's status as a safe or effective cavity preventative for children. Also, indisputable evidence demonstrates that it is a highly effective enzyme poison, used in biological laboratories today for that purpose, and it also destroys teeth instead of protecting them. To revisit that "lock-and-key" analogy for enzymes, hydrogen bonds help form the lock's shape. An ion with an extra electron will be more negatively charged than any part of an uncharged molecule that unevenly shares electrons, such as in water and certain organic molecules, in which hydrogen atoms attain a slight positive charge, and the atoms that the hydrogen are bonded to have a slight negative charge. Consequently, negatively charged ions will attract hydrogen atoms that form hydrogen bonds more than what they were originally bonded to, particularly if the ions are small enough to slip into the molecules' structure. Because they are the smallest negatively charged ions known to science, fluorine ions readily displace hydrogen bonds in organic molecules. When fluorine ions disrupt an enzyme's hydrogen bonds, the lock becomes "bent" and the key no longer fits. That is how fluoride poisons enzymes. DNA's double helix is also held together by hydrogen bonds. The story of how industrial interests transformed fluoride into "medicine" is stupefying, and shows how severe the distortion of mainstream science and medicine has become. Lead, aluminum, and other industrial elements also received makeovers, and had early toxicity studies performed at an industrially funded laboratory that predictably gave a clean bill of health to all of them, at the same time that the medical establishment promoted cigarettes while citing similar industrial "research."
Other industries were also fluoride polluters and helped shape the "science" of fluoridation, most notably the nuclear industry, beginning with the Manhattan Project; its involvement has been partly revealed by declassified documents. The Manhattan Project's research into fluorine toxicity is still largely classified (although what has been declassified is disturbing enough), but a study performed by that industrially funded lab showed fluoride's dramatic harm to animals, and the results were buried because they did not provide an industry-friendly result. Because that study was performed by an industrial lab and not the federal government, a researcher discovered it while performing research for a book published in 2004. Among the more alarming effects of fluoride is brain damage. A scientist who stumbled into that connection had her career wrecked, and the man who ran the Manhattan Project's still-classified fluorine studies "consulted" on that scientist's research. The average American, who is history's most fluoridated person, has no awareness of the situation. The fluoride issue is one of many in which physical, biological, and medical science became subservient to economic interests. Is fluoride a population management tool used to help dumb down the public? Reality could be turned upside down, poison turned into "medicine," and such situations last to this day. People trying to rectify the situations can lose their careers or be branded "quacks," "pseudoscientists," "conspiracy theorists," and the like. Edward Bernays designed the propaganda campaigns to fluoridate the USA's water supplies and addict American women to tobacco.
The Rockefeller and Mellon empires were only two of many built during and after the Civil War. J.P. Morgan got his start just before the Civil War began and made a quick ascent as a banker and financier. He participated in some of the most momentous events in American and industrial history, such as forming U.S. Steel. It is a big story that this essay cannot do justice to, but Morgan was ubiquitous, including masterminding what became arguably the biggest swindle of the American government to that time: the purchase of land for the Panama Canal in 1903; which was the largest payment yet made by the USA's federal government. The future "trust-busting" president and Supreme Court Chief Justice was at the trough with Morgan on that scheme. After milking the government, Morgan rode to the "rescue" in 1907 to quell a bank panic, and several years later, the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through when Capitol Hill was virtually empty, two days before Christmas. Earlier in that same year of 1913, the Income Tax Amendment was passed, which prepared the USA's government to attain truly imperial stature. Those events were grist for conspiracists for the succeeding century, and many allegations may well be true. The most powerful Senator on Capitol Hill was Mark "Dollar" Hanna, who was a schoolboy friend of John Rockefeller and political fixer for Standard Oil at a time when the corruption was open in Washington, with politicians routinely bought by robber barons.[784]
The first practical use of electricity was for electroplating in about 1805, but the invention was suppressed by the French Academy of Sciences for the next generation. In 1816, the next use of electricity was the telegraph, but it was not until Thomas Edison's teams perfected incandescent lighting in 1879 that electricity production was industrialized. Perhaps Morgan's most portentous industrial undertaking was participating in the epic battle between Edison and his former employee, Nikola Tesla. Edison himself was not a particularly brilliant inventor; many of his inventions were the result of his employees' hard work. Electric lighting is a good example; his team engaged in brute force experimentation with thousands of filaments before they hit on something that worked in 1879, perhaps at Edison's suggestion for the filament that finally worked. When the Wizard of Menlo Park demonstrated electric lights near his laboratory, he was widely pilloried for his "idiotic" idea, which was called a "fraud" foisted on the public by scientists who would not leave the comfort of their armchairs to go see for themselves. Morgan financed Edison's electric light company and had the first home in New York lit by electricity. Edison was also notorious for stealing inventions, and there is even a tale of a rival inventor "disappearing," Mafia-style. It was simply a sign of the times, and an era that we still live in.
In the flood of immigrants to the USA during the 1880s came the Serbian Tesla, who had already worked for an Edison company in France. After a dispute in 1885 when Tesla redesigned Edison's inefficient motors and generators, and the reward that Tesla said that Edison promised was not given, Tesla quit and began his own electric company. The investors soon kicked him out, which left Tesla digging ditches in 1886-1887, and then he started another company.
Edison's companies were beginning to electrify the world in the late 1880s, but Edison used direct current. Direct current has advantages over alternating current, but its great limitation is that resistance in electric lines quickly saps low-voltage direct current in heat losses. The higher the voltage of current transmitted over electric lines, the less proportional energy is lost to heating. Alternating current's voltage could be stepped up by transformers and transmitted great distances with little line loss and then stepped back down for use, while direct current could not be manipulated that way. The primary upshot was that only one generator was needed to supply many miles of electric lines carrying alternating current, while direct current needed a generator every kilometer or so. The efficiencies of alternating current transmission and the economies of scale of centralized generation made direct current a poor alternative for electrifying the world. Edison was beaten from the beginning but did not go quietly; he is a household name today, while Tesla's name languishes in obscurity (at least until a car company was named after him).
High voltages are dangerous for various reasons, but the risk of electrocution is the main one. Even though he was beaten by a superior technology, Edison engaged in a disgraceful campaign against alternating current. He had thousands of animals electrocuted in demonstrations of the hazards of alternating current, including horses and even an elephant in 1903. Although Edison was personally opposed to the death penalty, his commercial sensibilities overcame his personal qualms and he made his most notorious invention, the electric chair, powered with alternating current. The first execution with Edison's new contraption was performed in 1890, and the victim was roasted. By that time, Tesla had partnered with George Westinghouse in the battle against Edison, and Edison tried coining the term for execution by electrocution as being "Westinghoused." By 1891, the short-lived "war" was largely over, and alternating current prevailed. In 1892, Edison's company was absorbed into what became General Electric, which J.P. Morgan controlled, and Morgan was also Westinghouse's financier. When you finance both sides, you will always win, such as arming both sides in a war or being the "house" in a poker game. In the courtroom, the lawyers always win. Enabling the combatants, not being one, is a tried-and-true strategy.
The War of Currents nearly bankrupted Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla relinquished his patent rights to his alternating current technology to Westinghouse for a modest lump sum in 1897. Tesla's original royalty agreement would have made him one of the world's richest men, and humanity might have taken a different direction if not for the battle with Edison. Tesla immediately began thinking in terms of what could be called free energy. Tesla's inventions were legion and were sometimes stolen by contemporaries such as Marconi. In 1898, Tesla began designing a tower for producing radio signals, and construction commenced in 1901. Morgan was Tesla's financier and was making money hand-over-fist with the alternating current technology that Tesla had relinquished his rights to. Tesla may have felt entitled to Morgan's support.[785] As Tesla built his radio tower, he began telling of grander goals, such as producing energy that could be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere on Earth. His initial idea was tapping the electric potential between Earth and its upper atmosphere, and anybody on Earth could easily and freely use the current that Tesla induced. When Tesla made those proposals, however, robber barons were making big investments in copper mines to wire the nation for electricity. Morgan stopped funding Tesla's idea in 1903, just when he and the Guggenheim family financed what became the world's greatest copper mine. Many years later, Tesla's official biographer, who knew him, said that when Tesla began writing "free energy" articles and talked publicly about it, another Wall Street financier who was heavily invested in copper mines told Morgan that Tesla was acting "crazy" with proposing free energy for everybody that nobody could meter.[786] Wall Street then abandoned Tesla and he never regained his momentum. Tesla also advocated what today could be called Zero-point energy, although he couched it in the form of harnessing cosmic rays.[787] Tesla also originated an idea for a "death ray" weapon and other inventions that have cast him as an enigmatic figure.[788] Upon his death in 1943, the FBI seized his papers, and there is plenty of conjecture and some evidence that there was a surreptitious previous seizure by other agents.[789] There are some way-out allegations about Tesla, including time travel and myriad exotic technologies. I have looked into them somewhat, and knowing what some around me have witnessed makes the rumored technologies far from unreasonable. The publicly available evidence is relatively thin, however, but would be if they were genuine technologies and events, as many powerful interests would want them kept secret and under their control.
The modern use of electricity is little more than pumping electrons to power electrical equipment, in the same basic fashion that running water was used to run mills. The electron flow, like running water, is not the ultimate source of energy, but is just an energy flow that humans harnessed. With electricity, the first major applications had waterfalls as energy sources. But coal-fired electric generators quickly became the standard, for the same reason that coal overcame water and wind generations earlier, and coal power today provides nearly half of the USA's and world's electricity. Electrons pumped across copper wires became a major innovation that led to modern homes and cities. Before electricity was used to transmit energy, power was only available at the site where usable energy was produced. Watermills, windmills, and heat engines transmitted pre-electrical energy via gears, straps, and pulleys, which were cumbersome and dangerous. With the introduction of electricity to transmit energy, factories became far more versatile and humane, and as cities and homes were electrified, they were radically transformed. The USA led the world in introducing electrical appliances to homes; refrigerators, thermostatically controlled central heating and air conditioning, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, dish washers, radios, televisions, and computers, to name a few innovations, made the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century's home virtually unrecognizable to a home-dweller during the USA's Civil War. Electricity also powers the process used today to refine aluminum, and modern equipment of all kinds would simply be infeasible without electricity.
Isolating scientific, economic, social, and political dynamics is probably unworkable for analyzing the Industrial Revolution, as they all interacted like never before. In some ways the story was familiar, as a new class of elites ended the previous regime's primacy. But many changes were either unprecedented or reflected changes in dynamics with thousands of years of history. The trajectory of slavery demonstrated that how people treated each other was dependent on the economic situation, and makes the idea of an inherent human "morality" difficult to support. Virtually all wars have had economic motivation behind them, from the very beginning. Even though chattel slavery became obsolete with industrialization, imperial exploitation regularly reached genocidal levels. From the rubber boom during Europe's Scramble for Africa to wiping out the remaining American Indians that lived on coveted land to today's imperial genocides inflicted by the USA, the record is grim for such "civilized" peoples. Competing over world conquest kept Europeans from fighting each other while the plunder was plentiful. Most violence was directed toward relatively helpless preindustrialized peoples, as they were easy prey, no different in kind than chimp coalitionary violence or why male monkeys and apes murder infants that they did not sire. The USA's Civil War and the Crimean War, however, were both wars of empire, with one to hold a nascent empire together and the other a battle between rising empires carving up a declining empire. In 1870, France and a rising Prussia had a war that resulted in a Germanic victory. The victors imposed onerous war reparations on France. France returned the favor at World War I's end, which helped lead to World War II.
Between 1871 and 1914, Europe lived in a Golden Age called La Belle Époque. Between 1860 and 1910, English life expectancy rose from about 40 to more than 50, and obesity was no longer confined to the elite. It was one of humanity's most fecund artistic eras, when some of my favorite artists lived, including my all-time favorite. The Renaissance was also a time of great artistic advances, and the Enlightenment and Romantic eras produced the greatest music yet made. Those artistically fertile periods had relative economic abundance in common. However, while the imperial heartland had cultural awakenings and lived the good life, the sufferings of their imperial subjects were often greater than ancient Rome's. The "philanthropic" genocide in the African rainforests was one of the greatest ever for Old World peoples, with all European powers involved. The famines that began in 1875 were largely imperial creations, and another series of El-Niño-related famines began in the late 1890s, which hit China and India particularly hard, as their traditional famine-prevention systems were destroyed by imperial interference, especially British.[790] The famine in China led to the Boxer Rebellion, which the imperial powers brutally repressed. European powers used those droughts to further establish their capitalistic raping of Earth's preindustrial peoples, which contemporary observers noted.[791] India became the home of peaceful activists such as Mohandas Gandhi only after the British bloodily suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. The imperial powers always framed native resistance as "rebellions," "mutinies," and other terms designed to portray the conquerors as legitimate rulers. The famines of the 1870s and 1890s killed between 30 and 60 million people, while imperial Europe lived in an obesity-encouraging Golden Age.[792] There have been many academic attempts to separately analyze the rise of capitalism from Europe's conquest of the world, but they were deeply interrelated. There is even a school of thought called realism that tries to separate political from economic dynamics, with predictably strange results. While the USA was stealing North America from its natives and neighboring nations such as Mexico, it was not called imperial conquest but "settling" the continent by heroic pioneers and fulfilling a nation's divine destiny.
The rise of oil was the other radical energy event of the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Rockefeller's empire was originally built on replacing whale oil for lighting, but Edison's light bulb soon ended that need, and little did Rockefeller suspect it, but oil's big days were just ahead. Oil is the world's most coveted resource for a few reasons. Liquids are near-solids in partial-lattice states, where the temperature (energy of motion) is high enough so that lattices continually break and reform. Raise the temperature higher, and those partial lattices disintegrate and the liquid becomes a gas. Solids cannot flow, and liquids are far denser than gases, so a liquid energy resource will be far superior to a solid (coal) or gaseous (natural gas) fuel. A metric ton of oil contains nearly twice the energy of a metric ton of coal and can be pumped through pipes. Until World War I, most ships and trains were powered by coal (by the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century, some boats and trains used oil, but they were a distinct minority). In 1769, as Watt was working on his first steam engine, a Frenchman invented a steam vehicle to use on roads, and coal-powered cars were the standard until internal combustion engines replaced them. Electric and gas-powered vehicles also existed in those early days, but oil was quickly seen as a superior fuel for those reasons stated above, and Henry Ford's company, established in 1903, quickly led to the dominance of oil-powered cars. The Wright brothers could not have flown in 1903 with anything other than an oil-powered engine.
Rockefeller became a robber baron extraordinaire with the rise of oil in transportation. In the USA in 2011, more than 90% of all transportation energy was provided by oil, and the proportion is about the same for global industrial transportation. In the West, nearly all coal is used to produce electricity. A watershed event in oil's use in transportation was when Winston Churchill, after observing the rigors of loading ships with coal in 1911, converted the British Navy to oil. The UK did not have domestic sources of oil as the USA did, and thus began the West's domination of the oil-rich Middle East, which continues into the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century. By 1920, Churchill advocated chemical warfare against the peoples of what became Iraq, as the UK secured the region for oil interests, and before World War II was over, Churchill called for the complete genocide of the Japanese people, approved fire bombings of German cities, advocated poison gas and anthrax attacks on Germany, and his policies starved millions of people in Bengal, once again. His imperial crimes were numerous, but he is primarily remembered in the West as the great statesman who stood up to Hitler. Similarly, Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure that Dracula is based on and whose cruelties are legendary, is seen as a Romanian hero for fighting off the Ottoman Empire.
From carving up the Ottoman Empire at World War I's end to overthrowing Iran's government in 1953 to supporting both sides in the Iraqi-Iranian war of the 1980s to the first Gulf War and subsequent genocidal sanctions to the USA's invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the current oppression of Iran, it has been all about the oil. Everything else is a sideshow. Iraq's oil fields were history's greatest material prize, now controlled by American oil companies, and no informed observers were fooled for an instant by the "war on terror" pre-invasion rhetoric by the oil-executive-dominated Bush administration (Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. Rice even had an oil tanker named after her). Both World Wars had control over oil as a critical strategic goal, and arguably the critical goal.
John Rockefeller was a [url=http

[Magda Hassan]

Humanity's Fifth Epochal Event: Free Energy and an Abundance-Based Political Economy
Chapter summary:

• Ideal free energy device
  
• Immediate material changes with appearance of free energy
  
• Cognitive and social changes
  
• Longer-term changes
  
• Obsolescence of elites
  
• End of capitalist distortion of science and medicine
  
• Changes in family structure
  
• Human changes to evolution
  
• Fear is the enemy, and can only be defeated by love
  
• Golden ages of the past
  
• Relationship of ET presence and free energy and antigravity suppression
  
• Necessity of energy abundance for any abundance ideas to work
  
• Visions of the future
  

Many different technologies have been developed that attempted to harness the zero-point field, and devices made from rotating magnets seem to be the most common prototypes (the effect begins to appear at about 2,000 RPMs in properly constructed devices), but a solid-state device similar to what Sparky Sweet developed would be the likely "winner" in any FE device contest. Sparky's explanation of how his device operated included concepts such as manipulating the space-time continuum, inter-dimensional energy transfer, and other fantastic ideas that nobody has an easy time comprehending. Sparky's paper could be seen as merely pretty and fanciful theorizing, but his device worked. I will never forget the awe in my close associate's voice as he described ice forming on Sparky's device as it began churning out electricity, and the wiring configuration defied conventional notions of electricity. Ice forming on it, as it begins outputting great amounts of energy (Sparky's device produced one million times more energy than went into it), is not confined to Sparky's device; in the FE field, that effect is one of the most impressive pieces of evidence that a device is accessing the zero-point field. A radically different physics than is taught to mainstream scientists in the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century explains why Sparky's device worked. Sparky's device also produced antigravity effects, and the electrogravity technologies for which the research went black in the 1950s needed vast amounts of energy to operate. Those technologies have been developed far past what Sparky created in his home. FE and antigravity are interrelated in more ways than one, and the vision presented in this chapter will assume that those technologies are universally used by humanity.
There is some evidence that people can become ill if they remain near the energy field generated by those devices, but it also seems that either a way has been developed to shield the field within the device, or the devices have to operate a little ways from biological organisms, so they might have to be in a separate room in a home or compartment in a vehicle. That problem may also have been solved, and I will assume that it has been. The device I have in mind is solid-state, cheaply made, and produces, for all intents and purposes, as much energy as a person wants.
Also, I am aware, directly from event participants, that many exotic materials have also been developed and systematically suppressed. Flubber is not all that fictional. Also, innumerable technologies that would make almost all of today's industries and professions immediately obsolete have been suppressed. For the following vision, I will assume that those technologies also made it into the public's hands. What kind of world could appear if those technologies were in regular use by humanity?
The appearance of FE would be humanity's Fifth Epochal Event, and by far the greatest of them all. Here is what a global political-economy based on FE could look like, as well as its impact on Earth and the solar system.
Immediate Material Changes
The immediate material changes would push both humanity and Earth's ecosystems back from the brink of destruction that they currently sit on, and this section explores some of those changes.

1. The immediate effect of FE technology would be the almost immediate cessation of combustion to generate energy, from wood to hydrocarbons. Burning organic material to generate energy would quickly become archaic and rarely done. Some applications may need a flame, and for such situations, burning hydrogen would seem ideal, as water is split to make it, and burning it results in water again. Burning hydrogen created by FE would have no environmental impact. That can also be taken further into exotic substances such as Brown's Gas, which also create Low Energy Nuclear Reactions and can remediate nuclear waste into harmless substances. Combustion, especially the kind that alters the atmosphere's composition, would immediately end.
   
2. Burning fossil fuels causes most air pollution, including acid rain. Virtually all air pollution would immediately disappear. Global respiratory problems would largely vanish, as would stress on trees and other plant life, which makes them susceptible to disease and is killing forests today and acidifying the oceans.
   
3. The 400 PPM of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere today could be reduced using FE-powered technologies to regain preindustrial levels. That could easily be accomplished within a generation, and perhaps far more quickly. There are even mainstream organizations devoted today to that issue, but they usually need to burn fossil fuels to get the energy to extract carbon dioxide, which defeats the purpose. With FE, it would be technically easy to attain whatever atmospheric composition humanity desired, but since Earth's ecosystems were adapted to less than 300 PPM before humans began their era of combustion, lowering it to preindustrial levels is probably best for today's ecosphere. The same reduction could easily be accomplished for methane, artificial chemicals, and the like.
   
4. Humanity's water-use practices are currently unsustainable, and water tables are plunging worldwide, largely due to over-pumping for irrigation. It is creating widespread environmental devastation, including soil salination. With FE, intelligently and wisely implemented, environmentally harmless desalination plants could exist in the oceans, desalinating ocean water and pumping it to land. The most enlightened first use is filling back up the depleted water tables. The two biggest killers of children worldwide today are polluted water and air. Although the World Bank and IMF are behind privatizing the world's water supplies, even in the USA, which has led to disease outbreaks already among the poor, desalinated ocean water would also make universally free and pure water available to all humans.
   
5. Mining on Earth would largely disappear, and whatever continued would have no environmental impact. One large asteroid would provide enough metal to supply all of humanity's needs for the near future. By using FE and antigravity technologies, those asteroids would be easily mined and their results brought to Earth or used for colonies around the solar system.
   
6. Every use of wood today can be replaced with FE, and even the land used for forests would not be needed, and the forests can all grow back, even replanted and nurtured by enlightened humans. The practice of using wood for energy, or any other use, would immediately cease. All of humanity could be easily housed in steel and glass homes, or even more advanced materials, at no cost to Earth's ecosystems.
   
7. In 2007, it was calculated that humanity was harvesting Earth's ecosystems at a rate of 150% of their productivity. In financial terms, that is called eating into the capital, not living on the interest. The most dramatic change that FE will have on Earth is that humans will no longer exploit ecosystems to survive, and humanity can even live abundantly with no harm to Earth's ecosystems. At Japanese rice farmer levels of productivity, an American suburban yard could provide the food for the family that lives in the house. Imagine an indoor environment that can be as hot, cold, light, dark, wet, or dry as desired, and however much water and other nutrients were needed were freely available. Growing racks could be stacked three high or more, for example, with continual lighting, and food productivity under those conditions could reduce that food footprint to the "basement" of the spacious home sitting atop it. Would the family want to raise tropical fruits? Root crops? Seed crops? Fruit and nut trees? The septic system could be made to recycle the sewage into clean nutrients for crops. Water could be continually recycled, to begin each cycle with distilled-level purity. A completely self-contained family living system could be readily developed, and it would contain "luxuries" scarcely imaginable today. It could also be self-contained regarding its gases, constantly recycled, and could be placed on Mars or in the Kuiper belt. It is not much of a leap to quickly approach something like the replicators on Star Trek, in which mass is continually recycled, with energy added and the elements recombined in useful ways. The food-to-waste-to-food cycle is how our ecosystems operate, with the Sun's energy adding the needed boost.
   
8. Oil spills, the environmental devastation of oil drilling and nuclear accidents, coal mining, deforestation, and other effects of humanity's energy-acquisition practices would immediately cease.
   

Cognitive and Social Changes
For humanity's previous Epochal Events, the energy event was the Epochal Event, and initiated great cognitive, social, and even anatomical changes. As the level of energy production with FE would dwarf all previous levels, the cognitive and social changes would also be unprecedented and radical, and there will even be anatomical changes, and this section explores some of them.

1. FE would mean the end of economic desperation for all peoples for all time. The entire human journey has been about the acquisition, preservation, and consumption of energy, and the supply has always been scarce or finite. A paradigm has accompanied the human journey for the past 10,000 years or more, which I have called the Zero-Sum Game. It is the idea that the only way to improve one's station in life is by exploiting others. No other event could help shatter the illusion of scarcity and the Zero-Sum-Game paradigm better than FE. If people begin seeing beyond the Zero-Sum-Game blinders, vistas scarcely imagined today can be glimpsed.
   
2. Many concepts used today to describe economic and environmental reality will be superseded. One is called the carbon footprint, which is a result of burning hydrocarbons to get our energy. That will become immediately anachronistic and meaningless. There are similar "footprint" concepts that would become obsolete, such as the footprint that humanity has on Earth's ecosystems.
   
3. Economic motives have always been at the root of all wars, and Fuller noted the same motivation behind all soldiers. Even one of Hitler's henchmen observed how any society can be motivated to war by fear, so why would wars break out when everybody lived in abundance? There are some legitimate transition fears, and I advocate a global peacekeeping force, ideally staffed with grandmothers, who would ensure that the transition to a world based on abundance was not marred by warfare. Today, the GCs can detect when anybody accesses the zero-point field, and weaponization of FE technology could probably be detected and just as easily disabled. I would happily deputize grandmothers to take the toys away from the boys who cannot seem to play nicely, until the utter stupidity of such behavior becomes universally obvious and nobody needs to be reminded anymore. I envision a solar-system-wide government forming, but its only charges would be safety, ensuring that everybody had life's necessities, and promoting a dynamic unity among all peoples. It would be a government based on love and abundance, not fear and scarcity. That government will not be about amassing power, catering to economic elites, defending borders, and playing the primitive games that we see on today's world stage.
   
4. Today's organized religions will all become obsolete, as the roots of religion were based in winning wars, and today's religions are all priesthood-serving distortions of valid perceptions of spiritual masters. They have all waned in influence with industrialization, and when abundance reigns instead of scarcity, no enlightened ideas will be distorted into methods of social control and supporting economic rackets. There will be spiritual practices, but they will not rest on the violence-, fear-, and scarcity-based foundations of today's religions. There will not be punitive legal systems and prisons, but justice and healing would always be the goal. What today are called "criminals" would be recognized as sick people in need of help, not punishment. The most recalcitrant might be sequestered from society, but placed in environments of healing and education, not punishment. Criminal mentalities would not last long, either, nor could they be successfully hidden as they are today. The innumerable secret games being played today will largely vanish, and almost nobody would see the point of playing them. Abundance would make many behaviors called "human nature" today simply disappear.
   
5. The invader mentality will disappear from human consciousness as economic abundance was universally enjoyed. When the economic motivation for wars and exploitation becomes obsolete, humanity will achieve new levels of collective conscience, and invading environments of other life forms will quickly be seen as a great offense that only those with the most primitive mentalities engage in. If humans begin to explore Mars or Venus, for instance, and somebody else already lives there and may not welcome us, my hope is that the "settler" mentality of those earlier European migrants would be extinct, and that we would not intrude where we were not wanted. The short-term effect of making and distributing FE machines would be a global economic boom and redistribution of wealth of unprecedented proportion. Although there might be short-term "losers," the same awakening that would manifest the possibilities of FE can also bring to awareness the need to lessen the short-term discomfort of those relying on fossil fuel revenues. No human would need to suffer in the transition to a world economy based on FE.
   
6. As further discussed below, elites will become obsolete, as will ideas of rich, poor, and middle class. Elites appeared with civilization and they will disappear with the arrival of FE, which is largely why they have been preventing FE's public dissemination.
   
7. What is called "education" today is usually indoctrination into scarcity-based ideologies and practices in which social control is the primary goal. Often the result is negative learning and beating creativity and insight out of people. Those kinds of mind-and-soul-numbing practices will vanish, and learning will become fun.
   
8. The primary reasons for cities to appear were ease of communication and social interaction, and the surplus energy delivered from the hinterland to urban environments allowed for the specialization that led to professions. The energetic exploitation of a hinterland and low-energy transportation lanes to deliver the goods made cities possible. With the ability to travel and communicate anywhere on Earth nearly instantly, and with the myriad problems of urban civilization, who would want to live cheek-by-jowl in cities? With the kinds of lifestyles made possible by those technologies, nobody I know would choose to live in a city. Urban environments would probably become obsolete, or the function of what remained would radically change. There will be social gatherings, perhaps large ones, and there might be something resembling factories, farms, offices, and the like, but there would not be any reason to cram them together, as energy scarcity underlies most urban features (low-energy transportation lanes, high-density dwellings at the end of those lanes). A modern city is essentially a huge, energy-concentrating device, in which the energy efficiencies of centralized production, distribution, and consumption are critical features, but would become meaningless in an FE-based world. Places such as Manhattan could be remediated back into forest. Even the "wonders" of the world, such as the necropolis at Giza, would be remediated back to nature; they were self-aggrandizing elite monuments, not exactly something with an inspiring purpose, but meant to flaunt wealth and power, and nobody will miss their disappearance. However, holographic tours of such "wonders" will always be available for people to explore, just like holographic explorations of what the life of dinosaurs was probably like (or what war was like, or the daily lives of slum and penthouse dwellers) would also be available to anybody who wanted those experiences.
   
9. With the appearance of FE and related technologies, all human needs would be easily met with almost no human effort. Think of the "workday" of an average adult being about an hour, to provide all of humanity's necessities at a standard of living that makes Bill Gates appear a pauper. Just as the world's richest man in 1700 lived a primitive life compared to the average American, in an FE-based economy, future generations will marvel that the world's richest man in the year 2000 never even left his home planet, like some galactic bumpkin. Instead of riding hundreds of energy slaves, each human would ride thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even more. In our scarcity-based world, the idea of all humans having their basic needs met is decried as "socialism" and worse, but if all of humanity could almost effortlessly be fed, housed, and clothed, and transportation and communication were also easily accomplished, why would anybody be denied them on the basis of somebody else's greed? That is the case today, with the games that the elites play, but this chapter is about imagining that that initial hurdle was cleared. All of the world's nations, other than the USA, have long advocated that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education should be universal human rights. The only nation that officially vetoed that idea is history's richest and most powerful. What is wrong with that picture?
   
10. The concept of nations will be among the first ideas to become obsolete, as will all such territorial ideologies. Other dramatic changes in humanity, that may not be obvious at first, will happen. Humanity's races are the result of evolution; geographic isolation and environmental adaption have led to incipient speciation, and hair, skin, and eye color are superficial changes. All human races can interbreed, and when geographic isolation ends with a humanity that can easily travel throughout the solar system, not only will racism end, but so will race. There will be only one race, probably within a few hundred years after FE appears, and racism is already under siege in nations such as the USA. Racism, along with all such "isms," always had an economic rationale that elevated the in-group at the expense of the out-group. All of those scarcity-based systems, judgments, and ideologies will quickly become senseless, just as so many others have during the course of human civilization. Just as the races are a product of geographic and genetic isolation that will disappear as the isolation does, humanity will probably use only one language. As with disappearing races, the process of languages disappearing will likely take centuries. Perhaps something like Esperanto will rise again, or a lingua franca such as English will persist for a time (and computer-based language translation is increasingly common and sophisticated in 2014), but eventually one language will unify humanity. Science and math have been called universal languages, but the universal conversational language will probably resemble an English/Chinese blend or something similar. All human languages are UP's languages, so that universal language will be easily learned by all. Maybe some "mother tongues" will survive, or a few languages will survive, as they are used for various purposes (such as one being more scientific, while another is more social/mystical in nature, and so on), but they may not survive for long.
    
11. Professions involved in exchange will all become pointless in a world of economic abundance, which include accountants, cashiers, lawyers, police, and soldiers. Entire industries, such as banking and insurance, will disappear. Politicians will largely cease to exist, especially those on today's world stage, who are puppets of economic interests. Even seemingly worthwhile professions are largely rackets today, such as Western medicine. With most people performing intrinsically worthless activities today, what will happen when such professions and industries disappear? Will everybody just lie around, watch TV, get fat, and egocentric hedonism becomes the dominant lifestyle? I doubt it. I do not have enough years in my lifetime to get my life list done. Many activities that are designed to relieve stress, cope with fear, and the like will vanish, and many less-obvious activities will also fade to oblivion. In the USA, most people work at useless jobs that they hate, and they go home, eat fattening "comfort food," imbibe alcohol and other drugs, and watch TV and engage in other mind-numbing behaviors so that they can wake up in the morning and do it again, usually getting jolted out of their stupor by caffeine. They take stimulants in the morning and after lunch, and depressants in the evening. All of that will probably disappear in a world based on FE and abundance, in which nobody performs worthless tasks that they hate, etc. Sources that I respect have described life in other star systems by more evolved beings, where time spent "working" is called "joy time," as beings are fulfilled as they contribute to their civilizations in a meaningful way. They do it by using their particular talents, and there is no such thing as drudgery. They are soul-centric in their pursuits, not egocentric, which is again like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Humans will leap an octave with the Fifth Epochal Event, just as they did for all previous Epochal Events, and in ways that are presently difficult to comprehend. Also, the idea of competition will probably vanish, as will the "entertainments" that enthrall so many today, such as competitive sports and games, beauty competitions, and the like. "Entertainment" with winners and losers will no longer be attractive, rooted as it is in ideas of scarcity; celebrity culture and gossip will also be discarded. All such primitive behaviors and ideals will fade away, and they will not be missed.
    
12. Violent male gangs, from the GCs to American presidents, war industry executives, organized crime, and inner city gangs, will no longer dominate humanity. Women will have to step up to help make that happen. If bonobos could do it, I have confidence that humans can.
    
13. Numbers and measurement will still exist, but egocentric economics that focuses on money and self-interest to the exclusion of all else will disappear, as will anthropocentric economics, in which ecosystem health is only seen in terms of how it can support human welfare. The economic view that will supersede those frameworks is what I call life-centric or soul-centric, and it measures and values the wellbeing of all life on Earth, not just human welfare. If humanity can see its in-group as being all of life on Earth, then humanity will have truly become a sentient species.
    
14. Humanity seems to be an intelligent, sentient species. Ending the Zero-Sum Game can also end the lives of quiet desperation that most people lead and help open their hearts, which will also unleash the potential of their minds. Today, there is a system designed to purposely dumb people down, but if they begin waking up, those games will end. Human intelligence in the service of an awakened heart is a force that most people today cannot imagine; with the awakening that FE can catalyze, intelligence and imagination can be used as never before.
    
15. With the end of the Zero-Sum Game, people can also began thinking about how they can reduce the harm their existence causes others, which leads to the longer-term possibilities.
    

Longer-Term Changes
The rise of the human species was dependent on exploiting new energy sources by using intelligence and manipulative ability. The new paradigm can be catalyzed by FE (there is nothing else more likely to do it, or so close to becoming a daily reality), and then intelligence and manipulative ability in the service of a healed heart can create a future that is presently difficult to imagine. Pondering the possibilities of FE since 1986 has led me to many realizations, and this section is devoted to exploring some of the possibilities that could come to pass in my lifetime, if FE became publicly available.

1. Humans have been able to artificially reproduce manipulative ability and intelligence. Reproducing manipulative ability began with the era of machines, and the reproduction of intelligence began with the computer age. Both ages are still in their infancies. Most mainstream environmentalists have austere solutions to humanity's energy issues, such as riding bicycles. FE can blast those austere blinders to shreds, and should. With love, intelligence and manipulative ability can rise to currently undreamed-of levels, and can begin approaching that heavenly future that can await most of us, if we want it. The potential of computers, especially when wedded with machines, is nearly limitless. Popping the Zero-Sum-Game paradigm also will unleash amazing levels of genius that exist today, but are suppressed in the name of greed. Robotics is in its infancy, but developed to a much higher level in the above-top-secret world. FE, machines, and intelligence can create marvels that today's science-fiction authors can barely imagine. Modern scientists are able to manipulate material at the atomic level as they make computer chips ever smaller and faster, while our energy production methods are not far removed from the cave days. That contrast is one of many mind-bogglers in today's world and could spur people to begin thinking about what is wrong with that picture; with the increase in robotics sophistication, no humans need toil on behalf of others, unless that is what they want to do.
   
2. Another of humanity's tasks would be cleaning up our mess beyond Earth's atmosphere. A junkyard orbits Earth today, and we have even sent material beyond our solar system. In the equivalent of a month or year of effort by one well-equipped crew (I would eagerly volunteer for that duty), all junk in Earth's orbit and scattered across our solar system would be cleaned up. The Apollo moon landing sites and other notable exploration sites might be preserved as museums, but nearly everything else would be cleaned up, and we would never make the mess again.
   
3. Cleaning up human space junk would only be the beginning, however. All asteroids in Earth-crossing orbits would be cleaned up (moved or mined), and if the technology does not already exist, it could readily be developed so that nothing larger than a pebble would be in Earth's vicinity. Also, any comets arriving from the Kuiper belt would be immediately noticed and tracked, and anything on an Earth-crossing trajectory (and probably crossing any planet or moon), would be either redirected or mined. The idea of randomly appearing comets, or potentially threatening asteroids, could quickly become as obsolete as stone tools, as the solar system became "domesticated." The asteroid belt and Kuiper belt have enough raw material to build space colonies that could easily host all of today's humanity, and that is before we even think of settling or mining any other planets. It may be decided that the entire asteroid belt should be consolidated into one "planet" that can be mined for raw materials when needed. It would be less than a twentieth of our Moon's mass.
   
4. With FE and antigravity technologies, those salubrious space colony ideas that Brian O'Leary and others advocated can be taken much further. For starters, there would be little practical limit on the size and speed of spaceships. The entire solar system would quickly become human civilization's hinterland, and even the primary abode of space-living peoples.
   
5. For those who fear skies filled with colliding craft: that will not happen. The days of human-piloted craft are quickly coming to an end. By 2012, automobiles without drivers had logged a half million kilometers of driving the USA's highways without incident, and self-driving cars marketed by the early 2020s are predicted. By the time that antigravity craft are made for public use, I would expect that they are all computer-piloted.
   
6. Just as humanity can clean up its space junk, all of the insults that humans, particularly industrialized humans, have inflicted on Earth can also be remediated as among FE's first applications. There are floating garbage patches in the world's oceans, primarily comprised of plastic. That could be easily cleaned up, mostly with automated equipment, and is another temporary assignment that I would happily volunteer for. The entire concept of disposable plastics that enter the environment would be rethought and redesigned. All landfills, waste dumps, mine tailings, and the like would be recycled into their constituent elements or made harmless, and all of Earth's environments would be restored. With FE and related technologies, those goals would be easily accomplished.
   
7. With FE, a new paradigm of chemistry can appear. Most substances used to clean things, such as chlorine in the water supply, laundry detergent and other soaps, bleach and other household cleaners, can be replaced with hydrogen peroxide, oxygen, and ozone. Those three chemicals "deteriorate" into water and oxygen. They are infinitely recyclable and of zero environmental impact, and they are creatable in virtually infinite amounts with FE; a primary reason that today's toxic agents are used is because they are chemically persistent. Chlorine in the water will stay there, killing microorganisms; with FE, ozone could be continually created and put into water. The USA's government demanded that ozone purification replace chlorine purification, creating the same effect without the persistent poison in it. Even that is an intermediary vision (desalination distillation can leapfrog the whole issue). The basics of using hydrogen peroxide, oxygen and ozone is simply using FE to increase the electrons' energy, and using it for cleaning purposes. Such a practice would introduce zero pollution and keep human environments spotlessly clean and non-toxic. There are new horizons of chemistry that await the awakening that FE can help catalyze, and go far beyond cleaning agents.
   
8. Industrialized peoples need to reconnect with nature, and a great beginning is to start having a hand in raising the food they eat, and raising it in their homes is one way. My ultimate eating experience has always been eating fruit off the tree and berries off the bush. Not only is it how our distant ancestors lived in the tropical forests, no food has ever tasted better or been better for us. The American food supply is degenerate on several levels, and locally grown fruit, harvested by those who eat it (or getting it the same day or week it was picked) can go a long way toward not only improving humanity's health, but also reconnecting minds and spirits with nature, to begin seeing the world with healthy eyes and hearts. If land-farming becomes viewed as primitive, and we can get all of our raw materials from around the solar system and easily manipulate them for our use, why would we ever again harm the fragile ecosystem that was our original home? Those kinds of practices would quickly be seen as born of desperation and will be universally abandoned. Under an FE-based economy, eating animal flesh will probably be seen as unnecessary and barbaric, and would soon end. Similarly, mind-altering substances are all brief escapes from misery (some arguments can be made for so-called "mind-expanding" drugs, but I have seen the toll they inflict and I never saw truly happy people regularly take them, and in my experience were virtually always taken by people who liberally imbibed alcohol, marijuana, etc.), and when everybody's standard of living leaps upward by a few orders of magnitude, the desire for those substance-induced states will decline and may vanish.
   
9. Forests are largely responsible for the existence of today's land-based life. With FE and the materials revolution, using wood for fuel and materials would disappear. Already, the USA is on the brink of eliminating paper for printing information. I rarely use my computer's printer anymore, and read everything on my computer. Words can be on computer screens, LCD tablets that look like books; projected onto sunglasses, walls, and even the retina. They can even be spoken aloud by voice generation; with just a little ingenuity, we could eliminate paper for information transmission. All plant fiber is simply water and air that photosynthesis turned into cellulose and lignin; all animal fibers such as wool are other transformations of sunlight. Already, synthetic fibers have eliminated much of the need for using cellulose and animal fiber. With the exotic materials that I am aware of in the GCs' Golden Hoard, I doubt that materials made from living organisms will ever be needed again, and would soon be considered as barbaric as slavery. Even toilet paper can be replaced by laser-guided warm water, perhaps with a little hydrogen peroxide or other sterilizing agent present (and a blow dryer!). That would not be much of a technical feat, in light of these other dynamics. In short, every use of wood, paper, and organic fibers could become largely obsolete, and humans would not even need the land that forests stood on for their energy needs. Then forests could become what they used to be; homes for forest denizens. Humans would only see forests as places to visit and marvel at. The Sixth Mass Extinction would be halted in it tracks, and all of Earth's ecosystems could be regenerated. We could even see the return of the megafauna as humanity reverses the damage that it has inflicted ever since humans learned to control fire.
   

In summary, a world without pollution, environmental destruction, hunger, poverty, and warfare would quickly come to pass with the most basic of technologies that I know exist. But what may challenge most of today's minds are the many features of today's civilization that will quickly become archaic and viewed as slavery and gladiator "games" are today.
A key aspect of civilization that will disappear with the release of those technologies is the same aspect that is suppressing them; with economic abundance, elites will become obsolete. Elites have always been economic elites above all else, and all elites for all time have engaged in conspicuous economic consumption as the mark of their status. Slavery appeared with civilization and disappeared with industrialization. Elites appeared with civilization and will disappear with the Fifth Epochal Event, which is why ultra-elites have worked so hard to prevent it. They see that their very existence is threatened. For most "normal" people, that can seem a bizarre view, but ultra-elites are addicted to political power and their ability to rule an entire planet, and imposing fear and scarcity are their primary methods of maintaining their position. Each industrialized human rides hundreds of energy slaves, but ultra-elites see themselves as riding billions of human slaves. Many of them will not willingly relinquish their position, even if Earth is made uninhabitable as a consequence. Fortunately, even most ultra-elites realize the insanity of that position, and cooler heads may prevail. Instead of ruling in hell, elites will become regular inhabitants of something that resembles heaven on Earth.
Today, capitalist interests have turned industrial waste into "medicine" and concocted other Big Lies that the public has swallowed whole. Greed and other deadly sins have been turned into virtues in our scarcity-addicted world. If abundance comes to pass, if a practice is discovered to be harmful, then it will be abandoned and a harmless method will be developed and implemented. What will not happen is that those "invested" in the harmful practice will brainwash the public, with compliant "scientists" who have sold their souls, to turn poison into "medicine," call addictive junk food (that capitalizes on the evolutionary energetic adaptation to prefer sweet and fatty foods) nutritious, and the many other evil practices that parade today as beneficial or benign. Without huge capitalistic interest involved (the GCs are capitalism on steroids), which are only concerned with profit, those kinds of practices will end.
The human nuclear family was a change from ape social organization, which gave more males an opportunity to procreate, but it is also an economic institution, as have been extended families and the like. Family and clan organization began to disappear with the first cities in Sumer. What will happen to family structures with FE and abundance? Bearing children is hard on a woman, and it is difficult to imagine a population explosion with FE and abundance, as women will have better things to do than become baby factories. Maybe the human population will significantly decline in a continuance of today's demographic transition, but even if it rose, since humanity will not place a burden on Earth's ecosystems, it would not matter as it does today.
Humans can radically alter the course of life on Earth, even more so than we already have. Artificial selection has proven to be far more powerful than natural selection, and with the human ability to alter its environment, natural selection itself could become largely irrelevant where humanity is concerned. I will return to this subject soon, but while those ideas can seem to encourage megalomania, it could also point the way to horizons that we can scarcely imagine, that do not have to become Blade Runner-ish nightmares.
As my fellow travelers and I have pursued FE, the nearly universal reactions to our efforts were denial and fear, which often led to our being attacked. Denial is a fear reaction, so we always found the barrier to be fear. If people got past denial and fear of "unexpected outcomes," then greed and megalomania usually destroyed the efforts. Greed is the fear of never having enough, and megalomania is due to fear of inadequacy, so once again, fear defeated the effort. Those reactions usually happened long before organized suppression was applied. When the agents of organized suppression arrived, they almost effortlessly defeated the efforts by using people's fear and greed against them. When I saw it happen the first few times, I initially refused to believe it. We made the GCs' task easy. They easily turned my own mother against me. The opposite of fear is love, which has always been the crux of this conundrum and will be addressed later. This chapter is about what life looks like after we get over the hump; I honor some fears and concerns, but they can be addressed.
Darwin began his Origin of the Species with a description of the evolutionary effects of domestication. Humans have already created unprecedented evolutionary trends, and a prominent speculation among scientists is that humans have domesticated themselves. Genes for the bellicosity of warfare, for instance, may be getting culled from the human gene pool. With industrialization, violence has been proportionally diminished and may be on its way to dying out. The entire dominance model of human relations will probably become a discarded relic of our primitive heritage.
During the history of life on Earth and the human journey, there were many golden ages, when energy was relatively abundant, whether it was new ecological niches with few competitors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), "virgin" continents awaiting the "settlers," (1, 2, 3), or the early days of exploiting a new energy source (1, 2, 3, 4), but the good times ended as others arrived to take their share of the energy or the energy source was depleted. If there is more potential energy in one cubic centimeter of "empty" space than scientists think exists in the entire visible universe, when do you think that energy will run out? For all practical human purposes, the energy would be inexhaustible. Michio Kaku has popularized the idea of galactic civilizations ranked on levels of energy's usage, and under that scale, humanity has not yet reached the first level. An FE-based civilization would probably rank as a Type 1. I am not too interested in humanity becoming a Type 2 or Type 3 civilization, and maybe none exists in our universe. Those can seem like rather grandiose ideas to today's humans. Taking care of each other, our own planet, our fellow creatures, and domesticating out solar system is enough challenge for our species for the foreseeable future. I would happily settle for humans' just learning those lessons for the next million years or so, before embarking on anything more ambitious. Humanity is not yet toilet-trained as a species, and reaching that galactically modest level is what the work of FE activists that I respect has aimed for. Anything beyond that will be a bonus and far into the future, when humanity will be far better equipped to deal with those possibilities.
There is a great deal of evidence, nearly all of it suppressed, that we are not alone in the universe. It is being suppressed for the same reason that FE, antigravity, and myriad other technologies are being suppressed: so that the ultra-elites can continue sitting on their perch atop the global economic and political systems. The issues are deeply related, and either situation's overcoming the organized suppression will probably resolve the other almost instantaneously, and they might happen at the same moment. Although the Brookings Institute advised NASA for caution regarding any ET disclosures, the days of a War of the Worlds reaction are long gone. Knowing that we are not alone in the universe, and that our journey may have been significantly influenced by ET visitors (such as the velocity of today's technological revolution, and perhaps genetically), will change humanity's self-image and probably the way that we end up interacting with galactic civilizations, but that will all pale beside the economic and social changes that FE, antigravity, and related technologies will initiate. That is all unexplored territory that I, for one, look forward to venturing into.
With FE, all of the changes listed in this chapter become feasible; without FE, virtually none of them will be, in any meaningful way. All of today's dominant ideologies will become obsolete in a world where abundance reigns, and all abundance notions have to be based on energy abundance above all else. If energy is not abundant, none of the abundance ideas put forth by various visionaries has much hope, if any, of coming to fruition.
The ideas presented in this chapter can be seen as vague ideas, if the Fifth Epochal Event happens. I can no more predict the specific outcomes of the Fifth Epochal Event than that English peasant of 1500 could predict the end of slavery, the invention of the Internet, the demographic transition, the liberation of women, Hollywood, nuclear weapons, or rockets to the moon.
However, for this Epochal Event, unlike the others, we actually have hints of what might lie ahead, and Star Trek provides one such vision of a potential future. One set of noteworthy visions comes from Michael Roads's Into a Timeless Realm, which is particularly inspiring and enlightening. Roads visited two future human realities, about 300 years into our future. They were on opposite ends of the fear/love spectrum. Both were technologically advanced compared to today and both had genetic engineering, but the fear-dominated reality made Blade Runner's Los Angeles seem like Disneyland, while a Disney movie could not begin to depict the love-based one. Visions like that make it clear to me that our future will be what we make it. What we choose to do, today, determines what our tomorrow looks like. The fear-based world was filled with victims, from top to bottom. Those in that heavenly world all acted like true creators, and creators create with love. Love has always been the answer, and learning that lesson may be the reason why we are here, playing this life-on-Earth game.

The Sixth Mass Extinction or the Fifth Epochal Event?
Chapter summary:

• What is nature?
  
• What is human nature, can we change it, and does it matter?
  
• Sixth mass extinction is underway
  
• Environmental devastation of humanity's energy production methods
  
• Will we have World War III?
  
• Without free energy, few, if any, of previous chapter's visions are feasible
  
• The Global Controllers' greatest triumph
  
• Our choice according to Bucky Fuller
  
• Will we choose the Sixth Mass Extinction of the Fifth Epochal Event?
  

Vast issues can arise when pondering this essay's subject matter. What is nature? What is called "nature" on Earth is the result of celestial, geophysical, geochemical, and life processes that have interacted and created the delicate ecosphere that lies on Earth's thin skin. Gaian dynamics have been evident in Earth's history, but so have Medean ones, and humans are creating dramatic changes never wrought by any other species. Human have greatly altered Earth's ecosystems, and are impacting numerous geophysical and geochemical dynamics. Much of that impact has been for immediate human benefit, but is also causing long-term changes that could be as catastrophic for the ecosphere as the formation of Pangaea ultimately was, and humanity might make Earth uninhabitable by complex life forms, although what may be likelier would be "only" wiping out nearly all birds, mammals, and large marine life, perhaps taking humanity with it, and arthropods will rule again.
A related question is, "What is human nature?" A biologist or anthropologist might say that humanity is the result of geophysical, geochemical, and celestial processes that have interacted with evolutionary processes. With the appearance of humanity, new cognitive and manipulative traits emerged on Earth, which have been reflected in human DNA and developmental processes. They might call those biological features human "nature," which includes brain and related mental development. Humanity's heritage is reflected in many of our traits, going back to the emergence of complex life and arguably earlier, although the development of animal organs, particularly the brain, may be a good place to begin understanding human nature. As humanity's evolutionary journey drew closer to the appearance of the genus Homo, more traits of today's human "nature" could be discerned.
Humans are the large-brained, allegedly sentient species that dominates Earth, and humans have greatly altered evolutionary processes, down to "engineering" the DNA of organisms. We have a "nature" and multi-billion year heritage, as any organism does. How much have we changed ours, and how much do our natures really matter? Can we consciously change our natures or overcome them? The nature/nurture debate is quite old, and as the domestication of plants and animals has demonstrated, or the high IQs of Ashkenazy Jews may indicate, nurture can become nature by selective breeding at the least. The silver fox was domesticated in my lifetime, as an experiment, and the changes were dramatic. There is plenty about humanity that is nature at work, such as a child's acquisition of language or the urge to procreate (and probably the related incest taboo).[849] There is also a great deal that is socially learned. At least half of the variance in human traits such as intelligence and personality has been attributed to genetics, and nearly all the rest is socialization by the peer group (I believe that the soul plays a major role, and the guiding role, but that is not scientifically demonstrable, at least today).[850] But few of those scientific findings regarding human nature, if any of them, are relevant to why imperial "entertainment" is no longer watching people being forced to murder each other. The improvement in standard of living due to increased energy consumption has precipitated many changes in what was once considered human "nature," such as slavery. In a world based on abundance, would the dominant ideologies exalt greed and violence?
A mystic might say that the ultimate human nature, as well as the nature of everything in the known universe, is divine, and humans, as well as all life, are here to discover that divinity, which is deep within all of us. Human "nature" and our "sentience" are probably keys for determining our immediate and long-term future. Dynamics of our past can draw inferences that we are heading toward the Sixth Mass Extinction that may take us with it. Other trends provide reason to believe that humanity will finally become a truly sentient species that experiences its Fifth Epochal Event and will not only heal as much of its damage inflicted on Earth and itself as it can, but a future that a Disney movie could not begin to portray may await humanity. But unflinchingly facing our past and present, and laying aside the myths and self-serving lies, will greatly increase the probability that such a future can be attained.
A mass extinction began when humans left Africa and may have even begun with ancestors of Homo sapiens, but it accelerated when that founder group of behaviorally modern humans left Africa 60-50 kya. They quickly drove the largest megafauna on three continents to extinction, as well as the arctic mammoths of Eurasia and all other human species. Once the inhabitable continents were filled with that founder group's descendants, in at least two places and as many as nine, humans independently domesticated plants and animals. The mass extinction continued with the Domestication Revolution, but in less spectacular fashion, usually via habitat destruction. The increasing density of human populations became the primary factor in driving other species to extinction, which were often local extinctions. Ancient Egypt and particularly Rome drove north-African megafauna to extinction, but there were few other notable mass extinctions until Europeans learned to sail the world's oceans. When they did, the greatest proportional demographic catastrophes since the extinction of all other human species began. Those same three continents earlier robbed of their megafauna were quickly shorn of their human populations, who were replaced with Europeans in Australia and with Europeans and enslaved Africans in the Americas. In the midst of that unprecedented disaster for Homo sapiens, England began to industrialize. Although industrialization raised the human standard of living as never before, as the energy of fossil fuels was exploited on a large scale for the first time, it also enabled greater environmental devastation. Humanity has been turning forests into deserts since the first civilizations (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), and the only reason it has not gotten worse during the industrial era, at least in industrialized, nations, is because hydrocarbons instead of wood were burned. The extinction of the passenger pigeon and the near-extinction of the bison, in the midst of history's most spectacular deforestation, were indicative of the vast damage that industrialized peoples could inflict on Earth's ecosystems. Industrialization also accelerated Europe's conquest of the world. It conquered and subjugated African and Asian peoples, reducing them to effective slavery and further devastating the ecosystems.
Today, environmental devastation is primarily inflicted by industrial nations as their mines scar the lands and they pour industrial pollutants into land, sea, and air. This includes the result of energy disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, following the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986, all of which were subjected to cover-up activities by those responsible and abetted by international interests trying to protect their public images. Like the "fluoride is good for you" canard concocted by industrial interests, there has been a great deal of "radiation is benign or even good for you" propaganda flowing, particularly in the Fukus