Ancient World Review

Ancient Supernovae Led To Human Bipedalism? Quasi-Lemarckian Processes In Evolution

"Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy starting as many as 8 million years ago, with a peak some 2.6 million years ago, initiating an avalanche of electrons in the lower atmosphere and setting off a chain of events that feasibly ended with bipedal hominins." Source: Science Daily.

"...The authors believe atmospheric ionization probably triggered an enormous upsurge in cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that ignited forest fires around the globe. These infernos could be one reason ancestors of Homo sapiens developed bipedalism -- to adapt in savannas that replaced torched forests in northeast Africa."

Comment: The idea here is that hominins switched from walking around on all fours to walking around on two feet because of a change in their environment. In this case, they found themselves having to survive on an open savanna instead of in the confines of an enclosed forest. Presumably, standing upright gave them an advantage by allowing them to see farther and spot food and predators from a longer distance away (or whatever), thus increasing their chances of survival. But why would a behavioral change like this lead to an evolutionary change in the species?

Consider a more or less similar situation. Let's say that everyone living in a town somewhere decides for whatever reason that they should start crawling around on all fours or hopping on one foot all the time instead of walking normally. Would a behavioral change like this lead to a new species of humans that only crawls around or hops on one foot? That sounds like Lamarckism, "the [presumably discredited] hypothesis that an organism can pass on characteristics that it has acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime to its offspring ... also known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance."

According to the traditional explanation, evolution is driven by things like random genetic mutations, DNA-copying errors, genetic reshuffling, etc. In other words, evolution occurs more or less through a process of chance plus natural selection. Lamarckism, on the other hand, suggests that changes in behavior can lead to changes in DNA. One example of this is the ridiculous theory that giraffes got their long necks because they had to stretch to reach food on the higher branches of trees.

That particular example is absurd, naturally, and Lamarckism itself is supposedly obsolete, but the literature of evolution is full of language which suggests that changes in behavior can lead to organisms evolving new biological characteristics, often as a response to new threats and changes in the environment. A classic example is the so-called "evolutionary arms race" that went on between carnivorous dinosaurs and their plant-eating prey. As the carnivores grew larger, faster and more deadly, their prey also grew larger and evolved new kinds of formidable plate armor and other defense mechanisms. Something like that doesn't just happen by chance.

As it turns out, Larmarckism isn't a dead theory. "Interest in Lamarckism has continued," according to Wikipedia, and several "mechanisms resembling Lamarckism" have been discovered:

"Studies in the field of epigenetics, genetics and somatic hypermutation have highlighted the possible inheritance of traits acquired by the previous generation. The characterization of these findings as Lamarckism has been disputed. The inheritance of the hologenome, consisting of the genomes of all an organism's symbiotic microbes as well as its own genome, is also somewhat Lamarckian in effect, though entirely Darwinian in its mechanisms."

Epigenetics is particularly interesting:

"Epigenetics is based on hereditary elements other than genes that pass into the germ cells. These include methylation patterns in DNA and chromatin marks on histone proteins, both involved in gene regulation. These marks are responsive to environmental stimuli, differentially affect gene expression, and are adaptive, with phenotypic effects that persist for some generations. The mechanism may also enable the inheritance of behavioral traits..."

Some process like this (or perhaps one of the other quasi-Lamarckian mechanisms) must be involved in the evolution of organisms. The history of the development of life on this planet simply isn't random enough to be explained by random mutations and the like. There is some underlying natural law driving evolution which hasn't been discovered yet. If it turns out that a form of Larmarckism or something similar is at work, then the idea that an environmental change caused by supernovae could lead to the evolution of bipedalism wouldn't seem so outlandish.

Lucy: 3.2 Million-Year-Old "Mother Of Man?"

Video from 2014.

"The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of non-hominin apes, plus evidence of a walking-gait that was bipedal and upright, akin to that of humans (and other hominins); this combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size. A 2016 study proposes that Australopithecus afarensis was also to a large extent tree-dwelling, though the extent of this is debated." Source: Wikipedia.

Lucy is commonly considered to be a distant human ancestor and some sources, like the video above, call her the "Mother of Man." But a 2016 study shows that there were a lot of other human ancestors living around her at the same time:

"If 'Lucy' wasn't alone, who else was in her neighborhood? Key fossil discoveries over the last few decades in Africa indicate that multiple early human ancestor species lived at the same time more than 3 million years ago. A new review of fossil evidence from the last few decades examines four identified hominin species that co-existed between 3.8 and 3.3 million years ago during the middle Pliocene." (Science Daily, 2016).

Note: According to Science Daily, "Scientists have long argued that there was only one pre-human species at any given time before 3 million years ago that gave rise to another new species through time in a linear manner." This is no longer true. The discovery of these other very ancient human ancestors complicates the picture considerably, something to keep in mind the next time you see an oversimplified presentation of the human evolutionary tree.

The Evolution Of Bipedalism

Video from 2014.

A lot of different animals can walk on two feet but they usually don't qualify as true bipeds unless they habitually get around that way. Bipedalism itself evolved millions of years ago:

"Within mammals, habitual bipedalism has evolved multiple times, with the macropods, kangaroo rats and mice, springhare, hopping mice, pangolins and hominin apes (australopithecines and humans) as well as various other extinct groups evolving the trait independently. In the Triassic period some groups of archosaurs (a group that includes crocodiles and dinosaurs) developed bipedalism; among the dinosaurs, all the early forms and many later groups were habitual or exclusive bipeds; the birds are members of a clade of exclusively bipedal dinosaurs, the Theropods." (Wikipedia)

The evolution of true bipedalism in human ancestors required a convergence of changes in skeletal and muscle structure that is truly mind-boggling, especially when you consider the transformations in the brain and nervous system that had to take place to make walking on two feet possible.

The idea that bipedalism evolved through a more or less random process of " mutation, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation" (Wikipedia) seems kind of unlikely, to say the least. And don't forget that bipedalism has evolved independently several times in several different species. The odds against bipedalism emerging by chance in just one species must be astronomical, but in multiple species? I think it's safe to say that that just couldn't happen. Something else is going on here that nobody understands yet. 

Is Evolution Truly Random?

Evolution is a fact, but one of the problems I have with Darwinism (and its neo-Darwinian variants) is the idea that the driving force behind evolution is purely random genetic mutation. I'm no biologist or geneticist, but there doesn't seem to be anything random about evolution at all.

Biologists don't talk about evolution as if it were truly random. The language they use to explain the evolutionary history of various organisms makes it sound like evolution is purposeful -- not in the "Intelligent Design" sense, but in the sense that organisms adapt to changes in their environment by changing their basic morphology, developing new features in response to new threats and so on. Biologists may say that these adaptations are the result of underlying random processes driven by natural selection, but that isn't the way they usually talk about them.

For example, I was watching the great series "Planet Dinosaur" the other day and the experts were describing what they called the "arms race" between predators and herbivores. As the predators grew larger and developed better teeth, claws, vision, pack-hunting tactics and so on, their prey also grew larger and evolved more elaborate defense mechanisms as a direct response to the new threat.

The protective armor of various plant-eating dinosaurs is a good example of this. Some of them, like the ankylosaurs, were basically walking tanks. The evolution of their spikes and armor was presented by the experts as a survival tactic, an adaptation to the new predators they faced. According to this explanation, the ankylosaurs' armor didn't just evolve by accident and turn out to be useful, guaranteeing that the ankylosaurs with armor would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Their new armor was described as a direct response to changes in the anklyosaur's environment.

Now, I understand how natural selection is supposed to work, but it seems to me that random genetic mutations wouldn't produce this kind of result. If these mutations were truly random, then they would occur as the result of exposure to radiation or internal chemical changes or random errors in the DNA copying process and so on. And they would only effect one animal at a time. They would have to by definition if they're actually random.

In a random process, the mutations occurring in one organism would have no connection at all to the changes taking place in other organisms in the same environment. Even if a whole herd of dinosaurs was exposed to, say, a burst of gamma-ray radiation, they wouldn't all get the same genetic mutations as a result. In general, a specific random mutation would only effect one animal at a time and it would have unpredictable effects.

If the process is truly random, how likely is it that a whole group of plant-eating dinosaurs would change in response to a new threat from predators, all at the same time? Wouldn't a genetic mutation in one ankylosaurus get lost in the wider genetic pool of the entire species? Or was there a "mother" of all armored ankylosaurs? It seems like that's what must have happened if random mutations are behind the whole evolutionary process.

Take a look at the ankylosaurus. There's nothing random about its armor at all. The spikes, the plating, the clubbed tail -- this was functional protection and it was effective because it was complete, covering the dinosaur's entire body. In a random process, it seems more likely that if an armor-producing mutation did occur that it would lead to an anklyosaurus with just a beak, for instance, or an armored leg or eye socket, i.e., a partial characteristic that would have limited utility and probably wouldn't confer enough of an advantage to be useful.

Something other than purely random forces must be involved here. I'm not saying that Darwinism is wrong -- random genetic mutations happen all the time and natural selection is a fact of life -- but there must be some deeper genetic principle at work that causes organisms to evolve in certain directions as the result of certain kinds of evolutionary pressures. For example, the ankylosaur's clubbed tail was a weapon; it wasn't just a ball of hard bone. Its existence implies that the ankylosaurs also evolved the muscles, nerve pathways and instinctual responses necessary to use that weapon.

It's impossible to believe that all of that was just an accident, the result of a series of random genetic mutations caused by radiation, chemical changes and random DNA copying errors. I'm an atheist myself. I'm not a Creationist and I don't believe in "Intelligent Design," but something else is going on here, some driving force that we don't understand yet. Whatever it is that causes the evolution of all these various organic forms, it's genetic, purely natural and it has a random component, but there have to be more than just random processes at work. Fractals and mathematical games like the Game of Life prove that order can emerge from underlying randomness, but fractals and the Game of Life have rules. When it comes to evolution, I think we're still a long way from figuring out what the rules really are.

Neanderthals Would Have Looked Like They Had "Been In The Wars"

The Old Man of La Chapelle. Video from 2014.

"Our image of prehistoric man as healthy and fit is wrong [see comment] as they were often old, crippled, or children, a leading scientist said." Source: Daily Mail.

"Displays in museums showing strapping cavemen are misleading when actually they would have looked like they had ‘been in the wars’, archaeological evidence shows.

"Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York told the British Science Festival that of 50 skeletons of Neanderthals unearthed worldwide, around a third had some kind of disability."

Comment: This Daily Mail article claims that "our image of prehistoric man as healthy and fit is wrong." This is itself wrong or at least misleading. Neanderthals probably looked kind of weathered and grubby and scarred, but they must have been pretty robust in order to survive. I don't think that it's a big stretch to say that they would have been a lot tougher in general than your average western suburbanite.

The fact that a third of Neanderthal skeletons look like they'd "been in the wars" isn't very surprising. After all, we're talking about prehistoric hunter-gatherers here. Dead hunter-gatherers. The fact that so many old Neanderthals have been discovered seems to prove that they were healthy and fit enough to survive into old age once they made it through infancy.

Statistically, you'd expect to find a large number of old, crippled and very young Neanderthals among their dead. It doesn't make sense to conclude from their remains that Neanderthals as a group were diseased and unfit. According to Wikipedia, these archaic humans "lived within Eurasia from circa 400,000 until 40,000 years ago." The fact that they survived for over 300,000 years speaks for itself.

Neanderthal Ribcage Reconstructed

This reconstruction is based on the 60,000-year-old remains of the Kebara 2 Neanderthal.

"Scientists have completed the first 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the most complete Neanderthal skeleton unearthed to date. Using CT scans of fossils from an approximately 60,000-year-old male skeleton, researchers were able to create a 3D model of the chest -- one that is different from the longstanding image of the barrel-chested, hunched-over 'caveman.'" Source: Science Daily (2018).

Comment: I'm not sure what effect a straight spine would have on your carriage and gait, but I'm guessing that Neanderthals wouldn't have been able to run as efficiently as modern humans.

Related: Why Is Your Spine S-Shaped? The Importance Of Spinal Curves.

Neanderthals May Have Used Penicillin And Painkillers

"Neanderthals living in prehistoric Belgium enjoyed their meat – but the Neanderthals who lived in what is now northern Spain seem to have survived on an almost exclusively vegetarian diet." Source: New Scientist (2017).

"This is according to new DNA analysis that also suggests sick Neanderthals could self-medicate with naturally occurring painkillers and antibiotics, and that they shared mouth microbiomes with humans – perhaps exchanged by kissing."

The kissing business here seems to be purely conjectural. One thing that the DNA study does seem to demonstrate is that Neanderthals had a varied diet:

"The team focused on three Neanderthals – two 48,000-year-old specimens from a site called El Sidrón in Spain and a 39,000-year-old specimen from a site called Spy [Spy Cave] in Belgium. The results suggested that the Spy Neanderthal often dined on woolly rhinoceros, sheep and mushrooms – but no plants. The El Sidrón Neanderthals ate more meagre fare: moss, bark and mushrooms – and, apparently, no meat."

Neanderthals And Modern Humans In The Levant

Note: According to Wikipedia, "The Tabun Cave contains a Neanderthal-type female, dated to about 120,000 years ago. It is one of the most ancient human skeletal remains found in Israel. A 2014 study of objects at Tabun suggests that ancestral humans used fire at the site on a regular basis since about 350,000 years ago."

I think that Tabun Cave marks the southernmost spread of the Neanderthals. The remains discovered at Skhul Cave seem to be Neanderthal-human hybrids of some kind:

"Skhūl yielded three fairly complete skulls and some well-preserved long bones. These resemble the remains of Neanderthals ... in having some rugged features (e.g., browridges), but they do not have the entire suite of unique traits that characterize Neanderthals. Some features of modern humans ... are also present." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The Book Of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is thought to have been written during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 AD). Many Christians believe the author was the apostle John, but the consensus among scholars is that the book was written by an unknown author they call John of Patmos, who either lived on the Greek island of Patmos or was exiled there during one of Domitian's alleged persecutions of the early Christians.

Note: According to Christian sources, Domitian carried out several harsh persecutions, especially towards the end of his reign, but "some historians ... have maintained that there was little or no anti-Christian activity during Domitian's time." (Wikipedia) "The lack of consensus by historians about the extent of persecution during the reign of Domitian derives from the fact that while accounts of persecution exist, these accounts are very cursory or their reliability is debated." (That's a polite way of saying that a lot of the Christian stories about how they were persecuted in the ancient world are myths.)

It's commonly believed that the Book of Revelation describes Armageddon, the end of the world, but it seems more likely that its author was prophesying the fall of the hated Roman empire:

"Many people look to the Book of Revelations for signs of the apocalypse," according to a now-defunct source I found a while ago. "This event represents the cumulative battle between good and evil, ends the world, ushers in the Age of God. The Book of Revelations was written during a trying time in Christian and Jewish history. The book’s target was not necessarily Satan, but Rome. As a result, the final battle and victory of God over Satan was actually predicting the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity."

A classic example of the apocalyptic literature of the period, the Book of Revelation was probably written in response to the spread of the Roman imperial cult under the Flavian emperors:

According to biblical scholar L. Michael White, "most scholars now think that the issue revolved around the inauguration of the Flavian imperial cult in Ephesus ... Our clearest indication of how this is reflected in Revelation is seen in the description of the two 'beasts' from Rev. 13. The first is called 'the beast from the sea' who is given his power by Satan himself. He is described as having 'seven heads and ten horns,' and people worshiped him (Rev. 13.1-4). Then there is a second, 'the beast from the land' who makes everyone worship the first beast and its 'image' (Rev. 13.11-18). The 'image' (13.14-15) and the mysterious number '666' (13.18) refer to statues and coins or inscriptions with the emperor's image and titles. The 'beast from the land' probably referred to either the provincial governor of Asia or to the high priest of the imperial cult, who jointly would have overseen the temple and its festivals in Ephesus at just this time."

In other words, the apocalypse predicted by the Book of Revelation actually refers to the hoped-for collapse of Rome. If this view is correct, then all the millennial cults and end-times Christians who are waiting for Armageddon based on their reading of Revelation are actually waiting for an event which happened almost 1500 years ago. But the strange truth of all of this is that the Roman empire was already Christian when it collapsed in the west. Gibbon was at least partially right when he blamed the fall of Rome (partly) on "barbarians and Christianity."

The Cave of the Apocalypse, Patmos Island.

Comment: It's strange and revealing that the New Testament, a collection of books about peace, love and redemption, should end with the apocalyptic bloodbath of Revelation. One minute, you have Jesus blessing the little children and talking about forgiving your enemies, then, the next minute, a beast with seven heads is slaughtering millions of sinners in a river of blood. That's quite a story arc, to say the least.

Revelation has always been my favorite book in the Bible because of its hallucinatory weirdness. Considering its surrealistic content, I've always wondered if John--assuming that was his real name--happened to stumble across some funny plants or mushrooms during his exile on Patmos, which, incidentally, was listed by Forbes (in 2014) as "modern Europe's most idyllic place to live." This has probably changed dramatically with the "refugee" invasion of the Greek islands, which has been an absolute disaster. The island probably wasn't that idyllic back in John's day, either, but the views must have been spectacular.

Note: The Monastery of St. John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos are now World Heritage Sites.

Ancient Beekeeping & Bee Divination

People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."

"Skeps, baskets placed open-end-down, have been used to house bees for some 2000 years." (Wikipedia)

Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."

Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.

Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:

"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.

Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)

Report from 2012.

Related: How to Construct a Claypot Hive.  "Clay tiles were the customary homes of kept bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean," according to Wikipedia. "Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East and to some extent in Greece, Italy and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey.