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

By Wade Frazier
Version 1.2, published May 2015. Version 1.0 published September 2014.

Note to Readers: This essay has internal links to this essay and to other essays on my website, with external links largely
to Wikipedia and scientific papers. This version is the closest one that people can read like a book. I have also published
this essay in another format: a .pdf format with visible links, to honor different methods of digesting this essay, but my 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:
o Journey of life on Earth
o Epochal energy events in human journey
o 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. 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. 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. My gesture
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
from 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, as the world’s greatest effort of organized suppression prevents 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 immediately after refusing an "offer" to perform classified UFO research for the American military. It became
evident that the UFO and free energy issues were conjoined. A faction of the global elite 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, and 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 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 then mass extinction
events cleared biomes and set the stage for another golden age by organisms adapted to the new environments. Those
newly dominant organisms were often marginal or unremarkable members of their ecosystems before the mass
extinction. 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.

The oldest stone tools yet discovered are about 3.3-3.4 million years old, likely made by australopiths, which may have
led to the appearance of the Homo genus. About 2.6 million years ago, when our current ice age began, our ancestors
began making Oldowan culture 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 agrarian
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 its 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,
riding on the power of coal. 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, and almost all people are only
concerned about their immediate self-interest and are 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, and several
manmade trends threaten 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 may now be 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 those aspirations 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 20. 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 12-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 3.4-to-3.3 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 20th 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 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 in situations in which 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 in which the distortions of political-economic racketeering have been muted and the theories and tools
have been relatively unrestricted.

Mass spectrometers measure the mass of atoms and molecules, and have become increasingly refined since they were
first invented in the 19th 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 and the data has become 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 resulted from 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, and the equator’s air receives the
most direct radiation and becomes 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
o
that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30 latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does
not bring precipitation, but it absorbs moisture from the land it hits and forms the world’s great deserts. That high
o
pressure at the ground at 30 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 evaporate 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 of Venezuela's coast, 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 by 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 our 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, and the unsustainable Mississippian culture was in decline long
before Europeans invaded North America. The Anasazi used logs to build their dwellings that today are famous ruins.
Scientists have used strontium ratios in the wood to determine where the logs came from, as well as dating the wood with
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 millennium later.10

Another major advance happened in the late 20th 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 20 from death row, due to DNA evidence's proving their innocence. Human DNA testing has provided
startling insights into humanity's 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 helped them conquer humanity. There were some
migrations of Fertile Crescent agriculturalists into Europe, but other than hunter-gatherers being displaced or absorbed by
the more numerous agriculturalists, there do not appear to be many population replacements. In 2010, a study suggested
that male farmers from the Fertile Crescent founded the paternal line for most European men as they mated with the local
women. DNA testing has demonstrated that all of today’s humans are descended from a founder population of about five-
to-ten 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 discovered 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 made 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
 Irrelevancy of mainstream science regarding critical issues
 Quasi-religious status of science in the 19th century
 Tensions between specialists and generalists
 Tensions between theorists, empiricists, and inventors
  Process and vagaries of mainstream science
 Dating sciences
 Fate of scientific pioneers and political-economic distortion of mainstream science
 The "laws of physics" and free energy
 Organized suppression of free energy technology
 Materialism, the nature of consciousness, and the scientific establishment
 Consciousness and the quantum enigma
 Black science and the nature of consciousness
 Battles between science and religion
 Mainstream science does not know what energy is
 Greatest scientists had a mystical orientation
 Mainstream theories of physics and the acknowledged forces
 Standard Model and Unified Field

In the West, the conception of the physical universe and humanity’s ability to manipulate it has remarkably changed in the
past few thousand years, which has been a tiny fraction of humanity‘s journey on Earth. Thousands of years ago, the
Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus argued that the universe was comprised of atoms and the void, and
Pythagoras taught that Earth orbited the Sun.12 Greeks also invented the watermill during the same era. Hundreds of
years later, a Greek mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, described the first steam engine and windmill and
is typically credited as the inventor, but the actual inventors are lost to history. Western science and technology did not
significantly advance for the next millennium, however, until ancient Greek writings were reintroduced to the West via
captured Islamic libraries. The reintroduction of Greek teachings, and the pursuit of their energy technologies, ultimately
led to the Industrial and Scientific revolutions.
Scientific practice is ideally a process of theory and experimentation that can lead to new theories. There are three
general aspects of today's scientific process, and it developed from a method proposed by John Hershel, which Charles
Darwin used to formulate his theory of evolution.13 First, facts are adduced. Facts are phenomena that everybody can
agree on, ideally produced under controlled experimental conditions that can be reproduced by other experimenters.
Hypotheses are then proposed to account for the facts by using inductive (also called abductive) logic. The hypotheses
are usually concerned with how the universe works, whether it is star formation or evolution. If a hypothesis survives the
fact-gathering process – often by predicting facts that later experiments verify – then the hypothesis may graduate to the
status of a theory.14 Scientific theories ideally can be falsified, which means that they can be proven erroneous. The
principle of hypothesis and falsification is primarily what distinguishes science from other modes of inquiry.

The relegation of hypotheses and theories to oblivion, without getting a fair hearing, as the pioneer dies in obscurity or is
martyred, only to be vindicated many years later, has been a typical dynamic. The man who first explained the dynamics
behind the aurora borealis, Kristian Birkeland, died in obscurity in 1917, with his work attacked and dismissed. It was not
until Hannes Alfvén won the 1970 Nobel Prize that Birkeland’s work was finally vindicated. Endosymbiotic theory, the
widely accepted theory of how mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other organelles came to be, was first proposed in 1905,
quickly dismissed, and not revived until the late 1960s.

When a new hypothesis appears, particularly a radical one, even if it is not a lone pioneer suffering martyrdom, the old
guard usually attacks the new hypothesis and the situation turns into bitter feuds and armed camps all too often, such as
the rise of the asteroid impact hypothesis regarding the dinosaurs’ demise.15 To a degree, those withering attacks are
supposed to be how science works. Doubt instead of faith is the guiding principle of science.16 Until a scientist’s bright
idea is tested against the real world, it is just a bright idea. Only hypotheses that have survived numerous attempts to
falsify them graduate to becoming theories. It can be argued that the “attack mode” that science has adopted toward new
hypotheses has formed a structural bias so that all scientific pioneers will be attacked by their peers; it is simply the nature
of the profession. Only scientists who can weather the attacks from their peers will survive long enough to see their
hypotheses receive a fair hearing. That “shark tank” environment, particularly with lucrative prizes and tenured academic
berths awaiting the winners, has arguably set back science’s progress considerably.

With what I know has been suppressed by private interests, often with governmental assistance, mainstream science is
largely irrelevant regarding many important issues that could theoretically be within its purview. Paradoxically, scientists
can also fall for fashionable theories and get on bandwagons.17 Scientific practice is subject to human foibles, just as all
human endeavors are. There can be self-reinforcing bias in that the prevailing hypotheses can determine what facts are
adduced, and potential facts thus escape inquiry, particularly when entire lines of inquiry are forbidden by organized
suppression and the excesses of the national security state, as well as the indoctrination that scientists are subject to, as
all people are.

Early in the 20th century, radical theories were proposed that remade scientists’ view of the universe. Along with relativity
and quantum theory, a primary pillar of today’s physics is the notion that everything in the universe is a form of energy, as
summarized by Einstein’s equation: E = MC2. Although the notion is still challenged in unorthodox corners, today’s
prevailing hypothesis is that the universe came into existence in an instant called the Big Bang, stars are the energy
centers in the observable universe, and nuclear fusion powers them. When the Big Bang supposedly happened, there
was no matter, but only energy. Only when the universe had sufficiently expanded and cooled, less than a second after
the Big Bang, did matter begin to appear, which is considered to be comprised of relatively low energy states. 18 This
essay hews fairly closely to today’s orthodox perspective for much of it. However, there will be limitations, and some of
them follow.

In the early days of science, it had a quasi-religious stature among its practitioners, and 19th-century scientists were prone
to calling their hypotheses and theories “laws,” often appending their names to the “laws” as soon as possible, like
imperialist “explorers” of the era appending European names to landmarks that they encountered during their conquests.
Brian O’Leary, one of two whom this essay is dedicated to the memory of, was a former astronaut, Ivy League professor,
and political activist who explored the frontiers of science and stated that there are no “laws” of physics, only theories, but
the term “law” is lodged deeply in the scientific lexicon, although by the 20th century scientists stopped calling new
hypotheses and theories laws. Modest scientists readily admit that the so-called “laws” of science are not the “laws” of
the universe, but rather human ideas about what those laws might be, if there are any laws at all. As Einstein and his
colleagues readily admitted, the corpus of scientific fact and theory barely says anything at all about how the universe
works. Sometimes, paradigms shift and scientists see the universe with fresh eyes. The ideals and realities of scientific
practice are often at odds. Ironically, when scientists reach virtual unanimity on a theory, it can be a sign that the theory is
about to radically change, and many if not most scientists will go to their graves believing the theory that they were
originally taught, no matter how much evidence weighs against it.

A key tension in mainstream science has long been the conflict between specialists and the generalists and
multidisciplinarians. The specialist’s motto might be, “The devil is in the details.” Deductive reasoning is their specialty
and reductionist principles often guide their investigations, in which breaking down phenomena into their most basic
components is the goal. The generalist’s motto might be, “I seem to see a pattern here.” Generalists often use inductive
reasoning and tend to think holistically, usually in terms of systems, and they recognize emergent properties arising from
higher levels of systems complexity, which can be something new and not necessarily inherent in lower levels of
complexity or predictable by analyzing those lower levels. New hypotheses often come from generalists and their
inductive reasoning, and the best of them usually have some flash of insight that leads them to their breakthroughs, which
is called intuition or the Creative Moment. I found that it is a close cousin to psychic ability, if not the same thing.

Specialists are often those on the ground, getting their hands dirty and doing the detailed work that forms the bedrock of
scientific practice. Without their efforts, science as we know it would not exist. However, mainstream science has long
suffered from the tunnel vision that overspecialization encourages, and R. Buckminster Fuller thought that the epidemic
overspecialization and naïveté of mainstream scientists in his time was a ruling class tactic to keep scientists controlled
and unable to see the forest for the trees.19 That has been slowly changing in my lifetime, so that collaborative efforts are
drawing from multiple disciplines and achieving synthetic views that were not feasible in earlier times, and patterns are
newly recognized that were invisible in a scientific world filled with isolated specialists. Many paradigmatic breakthroughs
in science and technology were made by non-professionals, specialists working outside of their field of professional
expertise, and generalists traversing disciplinary boundaries.20 Scientific training today attempts to prevent that
overspecialized tunnel vision, and today’s practicing scientists ideally get deep into the details and then pull back and try
to see context, connections, and patterns. A comprehensivist tries to understand the details well enough to refrain from
making unwarranted generalizations while also striving for that big-picture awareness. There are also top-down and
bottom-up ways to approach analyses; each can provide critical insight, and scientists and other analysts often try to use
both.21

Another key set of tensions are those between theorists, empiricists, and inventors. Theorists attempt to account for
scientific data and ideally predict data yet to be adduced, which tests the validity of their hypotheses and theories.
Empiricists often produce that scientific data. Inventors create new technologies and techniques. Albert Einstein is the
quintessential example of a theorist, who never performed experiments relating to his theories but accounted for
experimental results and predicted them. Michelson and Morley, who performed the experiment that produced results
that various scientists wrestled with for a generation before Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, never
suspected that their experiment would lead to the theories that it did. The most important experiments in science’s history
were often those producing unexpected results and were usually called failures. Einstein’s general theory of relativity had
no experimental evidence when he proposed it (it explained Mercury’s orbit, but that was the only evidence for it when the
theory was proposed), but it has been confirmed numerous times since then. Einstein expected that his theories would
eventually be falsified by experimental evidence, but that the best parts of his theories would survive in the new theories.

The Wright brothers were typical inventors. Before they flew, theorists said that man-powered flight was “impossible,”
mainstream science ignored or ridiculed them for five years after they first flew, and the Smithsonian Institution tried to
deny the Wright brothers their rightful precedence for generations. The theorists were spectacularly wrong, the
empiricists had abandoned their primary principle of observation, and it was up to inventors to finally open their eyes and
minds, years after the public witnessed the new technologies working. Brian O’Leary told me that the scientific
establishment’s collective blindness and denial is worse in the early 21st century than in the Wright brothers’ time.

I have encountered numerous technologies that theorists denounce as “impossible,” empiricists ignore as if they did not
exist, while the inventors are not exactly sure why their inventions work, but only know that they do. Such inventions often
threaten to upend the very foundations of scientific disciplines, which is primarily why they have been ignored as they
have, if they are not actively suppressed.22 When their breakthroughs threatened the dominance of the
industrial/professional rackets, then the risks could become deadly.

The findings of mainstream science can be particularly persuasive when lines of evidence from numerous disciplines
independently converge, which has become increasingly common as scientific investigations have become more
interdisciplinary. DNA testing is clearly showing descent relationships and ghost ancestors are being reconstructed via
genetic testing. Numerous dating methods are used today, and more are regularly invented. Typically, a new technique
will emerge from obscurity, often pioneered by a lonely scientist. For instance, dendrochronology, the reading of tree
rings, was developed as a dating science by the dogged efforts of an astronomer who labored in obscurity for many years.
He was a fortunate pioneer; when he died after nearly 70 years of effort, he had lived to see dendrochronology become a
widely accepted dating method. Eventually, the new method can break past the inertia and active suppression, and
sometimes even if the breakthrough threatens powerful interests. Then the newly accepted method can be seen as a
panacea for all manner of seemingly insoluble problems, in the euphoric, bandwagon phase. Yesterday’s heresy can
become tomorrow's dogma. Then early victories may not seem as triumphant as previously hailed, and a “morning after”
period of sobering up arrives. The history of science is filled with fads that faded to oblivion, sometimes quickly, while
advances that survived the withering attacks are eventually seen in a more mature light, in which its utility is
acknowledged as well as its limitations. DNA and molecular clock analyses have largely passed through those phases in
recent years. In the 1980s, the idea of room-temperature superconductors had its brief, frenzied day in the sun when
high-temperature superconductors were discovered. Cold fusion had a similar trajectory, although the effect seems real
and MIT manipulated their data to try to make the effect vanish. A scientist who spoke out against MIT’s apparent fraud
was murdered years later at the same time as a series of events that I was close to that may have been related. After the
bolide impact hypothesis broke through a taboo that lasted for more than a century, some scientists tried explaining all
mass extinctions with bolide impacts. Today, the bolide event that ended the dinosaurs’ reign is the only impact event
widely accepted as responsible for a mass extinction, and even that event is still under siege by scientists who propose
other dynamics for the dinosaurs’ extinction.

In the dating sciences, the tests have all had their issues and refinements. The equipment has become more
sophisticated, problems have been resolved, and precision has been enhanced. While there are continuing
controversies, dating techniques have advanced just like many other processes over the history of science and
technology. In 2014, dates determined for fossils and artifacts are generally only accepted with confidence when several
different samples are independently tested and by different kinds of tests, if possible. If thermoluminescence, carbon-14,
and other tests produce similar dates, as well as stratigraphic evidence, paleomagnetic evidence, current measurements
of hotspot migration rates across tectonic plates, along with genetic and other evidence introduced in the past generation,
those converging lines of evidence have produced an increasingly robust picture of not only what happened, but when.

In the 1990s, I found the dating issue enthralling and saw it assailed by fringe theorists and by catastrophists in particular.
A couple of decades later, I reached the understanding that, like all sciences, dating has its limitations and the enthusiasm
for a new technique can become a little too exuberant, but dating techniques and technologies have greatly improved in
my lifetime. Dating the Cambrian Period’s beginning to 541 million years ago, and using 100,000-year increments to
place the dates, may seem a conceit, thinking that scientists can place that event with that precision, but over the years
my doubts have diminished. When moon rocks and meteorites can be tested, and the findings support not only Earth’s
age previously determined by myriad methods, but also support the prevailing theories for the solar system’s and Moon’s
formation, call me impressed. Controversies will persist over various finds and methods used, and scientific fraud
certainly occurs, but taken as a whole, those converging lines of independently tested evidence make it increasingly
unlikely that the entire enterprise is a mass farce, delusion, or even a conspiracy, as many from the fringes continue to
argue. There is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody. I have looked into fringe claims for many years and few of
them have proven valid; even if many were, their potential importance to the human journey was often minor to trifling. As
the story that this essay tells comes closer to today’s humanity, orthodox controversies become more heated and fringe
claims proliferate.

Quite often, the pioneers of science and technology receive no credit at all, not even posthumous vindication, as others
steal their work and become rich and famous. But if private and governmental interests do not suppress the data and
theory, as is regularly achieved regarding alternative energy and other disruptive technologies, usually the data will
eventually win. But the data does not always win. The expedient but misleading tale of Louis Pasteur’s triumph in
explaining the origins of life, which microbiology students are still taught in college, is an example of the phenomenon of
false credit attributed to a figure who may have also marched the discipline off in the wrong direction, from which it has yet
to recover. Another problem has been fabricated “discoveries” that become uncritically accepted by the mainstream, and
that ideal “skepticism” of science completely disappeared, as powerful interests promote industrial waste as “medicine,”
for instance, as was done with fluoridation. It was also done with tobacco smoking, and medical authorities even
promoted asbestos cigarette filters, in one of many “believe it or not” episodes in the history of science and medicine.
Mercury was sold as “medicine” until my lifetime, and is still found in vaccines, for which the very theoretical and empirical
foundation seems pretty shaky. Lead received a similar clean bill of health by industrially funded laboratories as the
conflicts of interest were surreal, and the public was completely unaware of who was really managing such public health
issues and why. Similar situations exist today.

Perhaps the most significant challenge to mainstream science is the fact that numerous advanced technologies already
exist on Earth, including free energy and antigravity technologies, but they are actively kept from public awareness and
use. They and other exotic technologies developed in the above-top-secret world operate on principles that make the
physics textbooks resemble cave drawings.

Although some scientists have challenged Carnot’s Second Law of Thermodynamics and even the First, tapping the zero-
point field, as some fellow travelers did, does not violate the “laws of physics” at all; it is merely harnessing an energy
source that mainstream science does not recognize, even though its greatest minds have posited its existence. For that
reason, my astronaut colleague called such energy “New Energy,” and we co-founded an organization in 2003 with that
name. However, when my partner and I began to mount a business in 1987 around “New Energy,” he called it “free
electricity” in ads, and we used the term “free energy” before we knew anything about the field or our professional
ancestors. I used the term “free energy” for many years before I heard the term “new energy,” and I will probably always
use “free energy” (“FE”), largely because I grew up with it and it is still commonly used in the field. My partner's shared
savings programs were also the closest thing to truly “free” energy that has ever been on the world market.

Thousands of scientists and inventors have independently pursued FE technologies, but all such efforts, if they had
promise or garnered any success, have been suppressed by a clandestine and well-funded effort of global magnitude.
However, this essay will lay most of that aside until near the essay’s end, other than to note that one of Einstein’s
protégés, David Bohm, theorized that space is anything but empty.23 Einstein also stated that his general theory of
relativity resurrected the idea of an ether that his special theory of relativity supposedly rendered obsolete. 24 According to
Bohm’s computation, the energy existing in “empty space” is unimaginably vast, as one cubic centimeter of it contains
more energy than is contained in all the mass of the known universe. One of Fuller’s pupils not only subscribed to the
notion that “empty” space is not empty, but he helped build technologies that harnessed that energy source, and his life’s
story, like my former partner’s, is hard to believe, but has impressive evidence for its validity. According to him, the
recently discovered Higgs boson is part of an effort to “rebrand” what has been called the zero-point field and other names
over the years, which is the field that FE technology often harnesses.25 I have encountered dozens of instances of
scientists with theories that challenge the Standard Model of particle physics, and their primary upshot is a “new” energy
source, which is often called zero-point energy.26 But, black projects27 and “leading edge” theory aside (theory that is far
older than I am), technologies have been publicly available for many years whose operation upends some of science’s
oldest theories.28 “White science” (AKA "Establishment" or "mainstream" science) has great defects, especially when its
pursuit conflicts with deeply entrenched economic and political interests.

Although the greatest physicists were arguably mystical in their orientation, they rarely explored the nature of
consciousness in the way that modern human potential efforts have. When I was 16 years old, it was demonstrated to
me, very dramatically, that everybody inherently possesses psychic abilities, which falsifies today's materialistic theories
of consciousness. Millions of people had similar experiences during the last decades of the 20th century when performing
such exercises. They are usually life-changing events and available to nearly anybody who devotes the time to
experiencing them, but a politically active arm of mainstream science, known as organized “skepticism,” has waged a holy
war against such evidence for longer than I have been alive. The scientific establishment’s warriors often denigrate such
phenomena as “pseudoscience,” which is a term that they greatly abuse when attacking ideas and phenomena outside of
their ability to investigate or that conflict with their materialistic assumptions. Far too often, when scientists discuss
materialism, they compare it to organized religion, particularly its fundamentalist strains, as if those are the only two
alternatives, when they are on opposite ends of a spectrum in one way and two sides of the same coin in others.
Ironically, organized skepticism is largely comprised of anti-scientists who try to deny that such abilities of consciousness
are even worthy of scientific investigation. That they defend materialism with flawed logic, dishonesty, and dirty tricks is
one thing, but all too often, as I performed the studies that led to this essay, I saw mainstream scientists trust the
“skeptics” for their pronouncements on the validity of “paranormal” phenomena. That would be like asking a Wall Street
executive in the 1950s what his opinion of communism was.

I was also regularly dismayed by orthodox scientific and academic works that dealt with the human brain, consciousness,
human nature, UFOs, FE technology, and the like, in which the authors accepted declassified government documents at
face value (as in not wondering what else remained classified, for starters) or looked no further than 19th-century
investigations.29 Direct personal experience is far more valuable than all of the experimental evidence that can be
amassed; there is no substitute for it, as that is where knowledge comes from. Armchair scientists who accept the
skeptics' word for it have taken the easy way out and rely on highly unreliable "investigators" to tell them about the nature
of reality. They consequently do not have informed opinions, or perhaps more accurately, they have disinformed
opinions. The holy warriors’ efforts aside, the scientific data is impressive regarding what has been called “psi” and other
terms, which clearly demonstrated abilities of consciousness that are still denied and neglected by mainstream science.30
Brian O'Leary advocated scientific testing of paranormal phenomena, but he was a voice in the wilderness.

Not all mainstream scientists relegate consciousness to a mere byproduct of chemistry. John von Neumann’s
interpretation of quantum mechanics is that consciousness is required for the wavefunctions that describe fields at the
subatomic level to collapse into observable particles.31 He was not the only scientist whose theories required
consciousness to exist in order for the physical universe to become observable. The greatest physicists knew that
materialism was a doctrine built on unprovable assumptions, which amounts to a faith.32 It can be quite revealing when
mainstream scientists deal with phenomena that challenge the tenets of their faith. Forthcoming quantum physicists
regard the controversy over the implications of quantum theory as “our skeleton in the closet.” 33 To the end of his life,
Einstein was very uncomfortable with the implications of quantum theory, and his disquiet was ahead of its time.34 French
physicist Alain Aspect performed a state-of-the-art test of Bell’s inequality, which helped establish the reality of quantum
entanglement, which Einstein derided to his grave as “spooky action at a distance.” When they met and Aspect proposed
the experiment, John Bell’s first question was, “Do you have tenure?”35 That paradox at the heart of quantum physics was
avoided by the Copenhagen interpretation, which focuses on getting the right answers for quantum predictions and avoids
the implications for reality that the quantum enigma presents.36 Einstein and Schrödinger were not satisfied with a
framework that made accurate predictions but avoided grappling with what was really happening.
White science still has almost nothing to say about the nature of consciousness. However, Black Science (covert, largely
privatized, and the same province where that advanced technology is sequestered) is somewhat familiar with the nature
of consciousness and considers it to be far more than a byproduct of chemistry. The assumption that the entire universe
is a manifestation of consciousness is not only unassailable by White Science, but is probably a foundational assumption
of Black Science and mystics.

The battle between materialists and religious orders over the years, in which materialist evolutionists grapple with
creationists and intelligent design proponents, seems to be a feud between two fundamentalist camps. Nowhere in such
battles are the abilities or wisdom of accomplished mystics found. The nature and role of consciousness, both in this
dimension and beyond it, are likely far too subtle to be profitably engaged by the level of debate that predominates today.
Scientists such as Einstein were awestruck by the evident intelligence behind the universe’s design, but that did not mean
that they believed in a God with a flowing beard. As this essay will explore later, those issues are not merely fodder for
idle philosophical pursuit, but at their root lies the crux of the current conundrum that humanity finds itself in, as we race
toward our self-destruction.

White Science does not really know what energy is; it can only describe its measurable effects.37 At its root, there are two
primary components of our universe: energy and consciousness. Our universe may have begun as pure energy (and
even if it did not, all matter appears to be comprised of energy), and consciousness may be required for our universe to
exist at all, which may be part of the quantum paradox. Energy and matter may be manifestations of consciousness, and
large brains could be simply more refined “transducers” for more complex consciousness to manifest in physical reality.
In summary, everything physical is made of energy and our consciousness is all that we know, but the greatest physicists
admitted that the nature of consciousness is not something that today’s science is equipped to study. There is evidence
that evolution is not purely the province of chance mutations, but that organisms can affect their evolution at the genetic
level.38

The greatest scientists readily admitted that the theories and data of physics, that hardest of the hard sciences, drew
highly limited descriptions of reality, and those scientists were usually, to one extent or another, mystics. If textbook
science falls far short of explaining reality, what can be said within its framework that is useful? Plenty. Our industrialized
world is based on textbook science and feats such as putting men on the Moon were performed within the parameters of
textbook science. With the waning of overspecialization and overreliance on reductionism in the last decades of the 20 th
century, multidisciplinary works have proliferated and will tend to dominate the references for this essay. I have found
them not only very helpful for my own understanding, but they are appropriate references for a generalist essay. I have
also avoided scientific terminology when feasible. For example, I use “seafloor” instead of “benthic,” and if a non-
specialized term will suffice for a scientific concept, I will often use it.

The mainstream theory is that matter consists of elementary particles (which are all forms of energy), and their interaction
with the Higgs field is responsible for all mass. Almost all mass in the known universe consists of protons in hydrogen
atoms, and those protons are in turn comprised of quarks, and electrons and neutrinos are the other first generation
fundamental particles. Protons have a positive electric charge, electrons a negative charge, and neutrinos no net charge.
The simplest atom consists of one proton in the nucleus and one electron in “orbit” around it, which is the most common
hydrogen atom. Today, mainstream science recognizes four forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the
strong and weak forces in an atom’s nucleus. Gravity attracts matter to matter, and is thought to be responsible for the
formation of stars, planets, and galaxies. But the universe seems to be built from processes, not objects.

The Standard Model of particle physics is complex, but the preceding presentation is largely adequate for this essay’s
purpose, while it can be helpful to be aware that the physics behind FE and antigravity technologies will probably render
the Standard Model obsolete. If FE, antigravity, and related technologies finally come in from the shadows, the elusive
Unified Field may come with them, and the Unified Field might well be consciousness, which will help unite the scientist
and the mystic, and that field may be divine in nature. But that understanding is not necessary to relate the story that
White Science tells today of how Earth developed from its initial state to today’s, when complex life is under siege by an
ape that quickly spread across the planet like a cancer once it achieved the requisite intelligence, social organization, and
technological prowess.

With the above limitations acknowledged, this essay will explore the earthly journeys of life and humanity, and energy’s
role in them.

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, and each electron spins 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, in which 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 and
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 H2. The most common
hydrogen combination with another element on Earth is with oxygen (“O” in chemistry notation), which forms water and is
presented as H2O. 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. The “hungriest” atoms 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 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 element, 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 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, as 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 so that 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.
o
The activation energy for hydrogen and oxygen to react and form water is about 560 degrees Celsius (560 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, as they bond to form H2.
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, which “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 atom‘s 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

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

Energy Event Timeframe Significance

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

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.

Abbreviated Geologic Time Scale

Global Map
Eon Period Epoch Timeframe Reconstruction Geophysical events Life events
Hadean c. 4.56 to 4.0 bya No land masses yet. Earth, Moon, and None yet.
 oceans form. Earth is
bombarded with
planetesimals.
Everything is hot.
Atmosphere is
primarily comprised of
carbon dioxide.
Archaean 4.0 to 2.5 bya Too much uncertainty By the Archaean's First life
and too little evidence end, the Sun is 80% appears.
to confidently draw as bright as today. Photosynthesis
maps, but Earth cools to begins. All life is
landmasses existed. habitable bacterial.
temperature. Oxygenic
Continents begin photosynthesis
forming and growing. first appears.
Atmosphere is mostly
nitrogen, but oxygen
begins to increase.
First known
glaciation.
Proterozoic c. 2.5 bya to 541 Maps begin to be Earth’s two Snowball Complex cell
mya made with confidence Earth events (1, 2) (eukaryote) first
at about 750 mya. bookend the “boring appears.
billion years.” Aerobic
Banded iron respiration first
formations coincide appears. First
with ice ages. chloroplast
appears. Sexual
reproduction first
appears.
Grazing of
 photosynthetic
organisms first
appears.
Cryogenian c. 850 to 635 mya Late Cryogenian Map Supercontinent First animals
Rodinia breaks up. appear. First
Second Snowball land plants may
Earth event. have appeared.
Atmosphere
oxygenated to near
modern levels. Final
banded iron
formations appear.
Ediacaran c. 635 to 541 mya Mid-Ediacaran Map Deep ocean is Mass extinction
oxygenated. Proto- of microscopic
Tethys Ocean eukaryotes.
appears. First large
animals appear.
Phanerozoic Cambrian c. 541 to 485 mya Late Cambrian Map Continents primarily First mass
in Southern diversification of
Hemisphere. Oceans complex life.
are hot. Most modern
phyla appear.
First eyes
develop.
Arthropods
dominate
biomes.
Ordovician c. 485 to 443 mya Late Ordovician Map Paleo-Tethys Ocean Complex life
begins forming. Ice continues
age begins and diversifying.
causes mass First large reefs
 extinction which ends appear. Mollusks
period. 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.
Silurian c. 443 to 419 mya Mid-Silurian Map Hot, shallow seas Reefs recover
dominate biomes. and expand.
Climate and sea level Fish begin to
changes cause minor develop jaws.
extinctions. First invasions of
land by animals.
First vascular
plants appear.
Devonian c. 419 to 359 mya Late Devonian Map Continents closing to Fishes thrive.
form Pangaea, ice First forests
age begins at end of appear. First
Devonian and cause vertebrates
mass extinction, invade land.
possibly initiated by
first forests
sequestering carbon.
Carboniferous c. 359 to 299 mya Early Carboniferous Atmospheric oxygen Sharks thrive.
 Map levels highest ever, Gigantic land
likely due to carbon arthropods. First
End-Carboniferous sequestration by coal permanent land
Map swamps. Ice age colonization by
increases in extent, vertebrates.
causing collapse of Amphibians
rainforest. thrive. Reptiles
appear.
Rainforests and
swamps
proliferate,
forming most of
Earth’s coal
deposits.
Fungus appears
that digests
lignin.
Permian c. 299 to 252 mya Late Permian Map Tethys Ocean forms. Synapsid reptiles
Oxygen levels drop. dominate land.
Great mountain- Conifer forests
building and first appear.
volcanism as
Pangaea forms, and
its formation initiates
the greatest mass
extinction in eon of
complex life. Ice age
ends.
Triassic c. 252 to 201 mya Mid-Triassic Map Pangaea begins to Dinosaurs and
break up. mammals
Greenhouse Earth appear, and by
 begins and lasts the the Triassic’s
entire Mesozoic Era. end, diapsid
reptiles dominate
land, sea, and
air. Stony corals
appear as reefs
slowly recover.
Jurassic c. 201 to 145 mya Early Jurassic Map Northern continents Dinosaurs
split from southern become gigantic.
Mid-Jurassic Map continents. Atlantic First birds
Ocean begins to appear.
Late Jurassic Map form.
Cretaceous c. 145 to 66 mya Mid-Cretaceous Map Sea levels Flowers first
dramatically rise. appear.
End-Cretaceous Map Continents continue Chewing
to separate. Asteroid dinosaurs
impact drives non- become
bird dinosaurs extinct prominent.
and ends the Forests near the
Mesozoic Era. poles. Rudist
bivalves displace
coral reefs, but
go extinct before
the end-
Cretaceous
extinction.
Paleocene c. 66 to 56 mya Paleocene Climate Greenhouse Earth Mammals grow
Map conditions still prevail, and diversify to
Paleogene and an anomalous fill empty niches
warming occurred to left behind by
end the epoch. reptiles.
 Eocene c. 56 to 34 mya Mid-Eocene Map Warmest epoch in A Golden Age of
hundreds of millions Life on Earth,
Late Eocene Map of years, but began when life thrived
cooling midway into all the way to the
epoch, beginning poles. Whales
Icehouse Earth appear. Cooling
conditions. Europe in Late Eocene
collides with Asia, drives warm-
and Asian mammals climate species
displace European to extinction.
mammals.
Oligocene c. 34 to 23 mya Oligocene Climate Cool epoch, as Early whales die
Map Antarctic ice sheets out, replaced by
form, with warming at whales adapted
epoch’s end. to new ocean
biomes.
Miocene c. 23 to 5.3 mya Mid-Miocene Map First half of epoch is First half of
warm, then cools epoch is warm,
down. and called The
Golden Age of
Mammals. Apes
appear and
spread
Neogene throughout Africa
and Eurasia.
Apes migrate
back to Africa in
cooling, while
some remain in
Southeast Asia.
Pliocene c. 5.3 to 2.6 mya Would appear nearly Earth continues to Bipedal apes
 identical to today’s cool, and land bridge appear. First
global map. of North and South stone tools made
America initiates at end of epoch.
mass extinction of
South American
mammals and
initiates current ice
age.
Quaternary Pleistocene c. 2.6 mya to 12 Early Pleistocene Current ice age Mammals
kya Map begins. already cold-
adapted, and
Late-Pleistocene Map relatively few
extinctions, until
the rise of
humans.
Holocene 12 kya to present Today’s Map Interglacial period in Mass extinctions
current ice age, and of large animals
recent and probably happen
human-caused wherever
warming may extend humans begin to
the interglacial period. appear. By the
21st century, the
Sixth Mass
Extinction in the
eon of complex
life appears to
be underway,
entirely caused
by humans.
 Key Events before the Eon of Complex Life
Event Date
Sun forms c. 4.6 bya
Earth forms c. 4.56 bya
Moon forms c. 4.53 bya
Continents begin to form c. 4.0 bya
Life first appears (prokaryotic), common ancestor c. 3.8 – 3.5 bya
of all life on Earth lived*
Photosynthetic organisms first appear* c. 3.4 bya
Oxygenic photosynthesis first appears* c. 3.5 – 2.8 bya
Continents begin to markedly grow c. 3.0 bya
First known glaciation c. 3.0 – 2.9 bya
Great Oxygenation Event begins c. 3.0 – 2.3 bya
Creation of banded iron formations removes iron c. 2.4 bya to 1.8 bya
from the oceans
First major ice age begins (snowball Earth event) c. 2.4 to 2.1 bya
Aerobic respiration first appears c. 2.4 – 1.8 bya
Complex cells first appear (eukaryotic)* c. 2.1 – 1.6 bya
The “boring” billion years c. 1.8 to 0.8 bya
First chloroplast created* c. 1.6 – 0.6 bya
Sexual reproduction first appears* c. 1.2 – 1.0 bya
Grazing of photosynthetic life forms begins c. 1.0 bya
Dramatic climb in atmospheric oxygen, to c. 850-420 mya
eventually achieve modern levels, begins
Banded iron formations reappear c. 850 to 550 mya
First animal appears* c. 760 to 665 mya
Second ice age (snowball Earth event) c. 750 to 635 mya
Eon of complex life begins c. 635 mya
First bilaterally symmetric animals appear* c. 585-555 mya
 Deep oceans oxygenated c. 580 - 560 mya
Ediacaran fauna – Earth’s first large organisms – c. 575 mya
appear
Extinction of Ediacaran fauna c. 542 mya
Cambrian Explosion begins c. 541 mya
First eyes develop* c. 540 mya
* This event is currently considered to have been unique, confined to one organism/instance.

The Formation and Early Development of the Sun and Earth

Chapter summary:
 Orthodox hypotheses for the beginning of the universe, and formation and composition of the Sun and its planets
 Sun's influence on Earth, which is primarily an energy influence
 Earth's composition and early development
 Earth's geophysical and geochemical processes, and their interactions with life processes

In the tables above, some dates have ranges as such old dates often have relatively thin evidence supporting them, which
can be interpreted in different ways. Those dates will be adjusted as the scientific evidence and theories develop. As I
was writing this essay, a study was published that may have pushed back the beginning of the Great Oxygenation Event
by several hundred million years.41 Moving dates can change some theories of causation, but few scientists will dispute
the idea that Earth’s atmosphere was primarily oxygenated by oxygenic photosynthesis. It is the only plausible
mechanism for that oxygenation event and Earth’s continuing high atmospheric oxygen content.42

After the Big Bang, when matter began to coalesce, virtually all mass in the universe was contained in hydrogen atoms,
with traces of the next two lightest elements: helium and lithium. According to the Standard Model, atoms have no mass
by themselves, but the field that gives rise to the Higgs Boson provides the mass. Gravity attracted hydrogen atoms to
each other and, where “clumps” of hydrogen became large enough, the pressure in the clump’s center (a star’s core)
became great enough so that the mutual repulsion of the protons in hydrogen nuclei was overcome (like charges repel
each other, while opposite charges attract), and the protons fused together. That fusion released a great deal of
primordial Big Bang energy, and fusion powers stars.

Depending on the star’s size and the resulting temperatures and pressures, various larger elemental nuclei can be
produced. Iron is the heaviest element created during a large star’s primary fusion process. Nuclei larger than the
simplest hydrogen nucleus contain neutrons as well as protons. As the name implies, neutrons have no net electric
charge, but have about the same mass as a proton (an electron has less than a thousandth the mass of a proton, so
virtually all the mass in atoms is provided by its protons and neutrons). Radioactive decay into daughter isotopes is
mediated by the weak nuclear force.

In the smaller stars that eventually become white dwarfs, the primary fusion process creates oxygen as its heaviest
element. Even though the Sun is larger than about 95% of the Milky Way Galaxy’s stars, it is destined to become a white
dwarf in about six or seven billion years.

Several different fusion processes have been identified, and stars from about half the size of the Sun to about nine times
larger can undergo a process known as s-process fusion late in their lives, and that process has created about half of the
elements heavier than iron; bismuth is the heaviest element created by the process. Those heavier elements are
eventually blown from the star by its stellar wind as it becomes a white dwarf. Stars with more than nine times the mass
of the Sun undergo a different process at the end of their lives. When the hydrogen and helium fuel is used up and the
fusion processes in those stars’ cores are reduced low enough, gravity will cause those stars to collapse in on
themselves. That collapse creates the pressures needed to fuse those other atoms heavier than iron, including the
heaviest elements. Uranium is the heaviest naturally produced element. In an instant, r-process fusion occurs.
Depending on a collapsing star’s composition, it can collapse into a black hole or neutron star or explode into a
supernova.

When a star becomes a supernova, those heavy elements are sprayed into the galactic neighborhood by a stupendous
release of fusion energy. Over the subsequent eons, gravity will cause the remnants of stars, and hydrogen that had not
yet become a star or did not fuse within a star, to coalesce into an accretion disk, and a new star with its attendant planets
will form. The Sun will take more than ten billion years to live its life cycle before becoming a white dwarf. Large stars
burn much more quickly and can become supernovas after as little as ten million years of main-sequence burning. The
rule is: the larger the star, the shorter its life.

The accretion disk from which the Sun and its planets were formed appeared in a relatively short time, and the disk was
originally a molecular cloud that may have been disturbed by an exploding star. A "local" exploding star likely provided
the bulk of our solar system's matter, and the entire mess gravitationally collapsed into the disk. Earth’s age is estimated
to be about 4.6 billion years, and formed fewer than 100 million years after the Sun did. In a mere 50 million years after
formation, the Sun became compressed enough to initiate the sustained fusion that still powers it and will for several
billion more years.

Our solar system’s planets initially formed from clumps of heavier atoms, and the rocky planets formed in a region too hot
for lighter elements and compounds to condense. Oxygen and iron, those two largest products of main-sequence
burning, comprise nearly two-thirds of Earth’s mass.

Just past our solar system’s “frost line,” the largest planet and first gas giant, Jupiter, formed. In our solar system’s early
days, smaller agglomerations of mass, called planetesimals, swarmed. Those that began their lives inside the frost line
were rocky, and those outside the frost line were generally comprised of lighter elements. Those planetesimals
bombarded the forming planets and increased their mass. Other planetesimals were ejected from the solar system as the
gravity of the Sun and planets whipped them around. Today’s solar system provides mute evidence of that bombardment,
as all rocky planets and moons are heavily cratered. Earth’s geological processes have removed most evidence of that
bombardment, but other rocky bodies have preserved the evidence. It is thought that the bombardment of Earth by the
planetesimals comprised of lighter elements provided the materials for Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Venus and Mars
were also bombarded with the lighter elements and may have plentiful water long ago, but only Earth retained its water.
The biggest collision between Earth and its neighbors may well have created the Moon, and although the currently
prevailing hypothesis has plenty of problems, the other hypotheses have more. Moon rocks obtained by NASA’s Apollo
missions show that the oldest parts of the Moon’s surface are about the same age as Earth.

Today’s prevailing scientific theories consider stars to be the observable universe‘s energy centers. According to today’s
theories, 95% of the universe is not observable, as about 70% is dark energy and 25% is dark matter. At this time, dark
energy and dark matter have never been observed. Any theory that relies on unobserved phenomena is going to be
highly provisional, and I consider it unlikely that the prevailing cosmological theories a century from now will much
resemble those of today. The scale of the universe, from its largest to smallest objects, is truly difficult to imagine, and
this animation can help provide some perspective.

The chemistry of Earth’s land, oceans, and atmosphere provides the raw material for life, but if the Sun disappeared
tomorrow, Earth’s surface would quickly become a block of ice with an insignificant atmosphere. Partly because humanity
has not explored beyond our home star system, our planet is the universe’s only place officially acknowledged to host life
as we know it.

What is called geologic time is the calendar of Earth’s life cycle so far. The scale of geologic time strains human brains
with its immensity. Writing about a geological period that “only” lasted 24 million years is part of the sometimes surreal
experience of writing in terms of geologic time. European geologists developed most of the calendar’s names in the 19th
century, generally naming the timeframes after the locations where the first fossils of that time were discovered in their
particular sedimentary layers. Earth’s calendar has been divided into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, and those
categories are defined by the layers’ geological particulars, usually the discovered fossils.

The journey of life on Earth has been greatly affected by geophysical and geochemical processes as well as influences
from beyond Earth, such as:

 Continental formation and moving tectonic plates, and volcanism;

 Land-based dynamics, including erosion, weathering, uplift, and subsidence;
 The chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere;
 The currents in the oceans and atmosphere, including oceanic tides;
 The physics of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field;
 The climate, including precipitation and changing temperatures;
 Comet and asteroid impacts;
 Earth’s relationship with the Moon;
  Variations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun;
 Slowly increasing solar output as the Sun grows older, and minor variations in solar output.

Those processes and events can interact with each other, and a few examples can provide an idea of the dynamics’
complexity. What follows are today’s orthodox views, to the best of my knowledge, and they can certainly change in the
future, perhaps even radically, just as cosmological and subatomic theories may change radically. It seems to me,
however, that geophysical and geochemical processes are understood better and have more robust data than many other
areas of science, so geophysics and geochemistry are areas where I expect fewer radical changes than others. Maybe
that is because it is neither too big nor too small and closer to our daily reality than distant stars or what is happening
inside atoms.

Volcanism can not only temporarily alter the atmosphere’s chemistry, but the ash from volcanism can also block sunlight
from reaching Earth’s surface and lead to atmospheric cooling.43 Carbon dioxide vented by volcanism in the Mesozoic
era is what made it so warm. Tectonic plate movements can alter the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. When
continental plates come together into a supercontinent, oceanic currents can fail and the oceans can become anoxic, as
atmospheric oxygen is no longer drawn into the global ocean’s depths, which may have triggered numerous mass
extinction events.44 When continents are near the poles, ice ages can appear, but in our current ice age the tipping point
is variations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun, which is affected by, among other influences, the Moon.

Tectonic plates can collide, such as the collision of India into Asia, which formed the Himalayan Mountains and raised the
Tibetan Plateau. That continuing event not only changed Earth’s weather patterns and influenced the monsoons’
formation, it also exposed a great deal of raw rock to the atmosphere and consequently removed atmospheric carbon
dioxide through weathering, which in turn made the atmosphere cooler. That may have contributed to the ice age that we
currently experience, although other studies indicate that the carbon removal may have been more due to the burial of
organic matter. The debate is continuing as the complex dynamics are subjected to scientific investigation.45 For all of
the controversy over the dynamics, few scientists argue against the idea that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been falling,
fairly consistently, since about 150-to-100 mya, from more than a thousand parts per million to the roughly 200-300 parts
per million (“PPM”) of the past million years. Nearly 35 million years ago (also written as “35 mya”), carbon dioxide levels
fell below 600 PPM, when the Antarctic ice sheet began to form.46 During the current fossil fuel era, Earth’s atmosphere
may reach 600 PPM again, or higher, in this century. It is already nearly 400 PPM and rising fast. Carbon dioxide levels
are considered to be a primary variable affecting the temperature of Earth’s surface over the eons.

Earth’s development has also been greatly impacted by life processes. For instance, if hydrogen floats free in the
atmosphere, Earth’s gravity is not strong enough to prevent it from escaping to space. Ultraviolet light breaks water vapor
into hydrogen and oxygen.47 If not for the high oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere, Earth would have lost its oceans as
all the hydrogen from split water molecules eventually drifted into space. Scientists believe that that happened to Venus
and Mars, although Venus may have never cooled enough to form liquid water; it split in the atmosphere and hydrogen
then escaped to space.48 Without the ocean, there would not be life on Earth as we know it. On Earth, that hydrogen
liberated by ultraviolet light reacts with atmospheric oxygen and turns back into water before it can escape into space.49
The reason for free oxygen in the atmosphere is photosynthesis. When comparing Earth’s tectonics to Venus’s, the
formation of granite, continents, and setting the tectonic plates in motion appears to be due to Earth’s ocean.50 Plate
tectonics are responsible for recycling elements through Earth’s crust and mantle, and the carbon cycle in particular has
great import. Photosynthesis led to atmospheric oxygen, which led to the ozone layer that helped prevent the splitting of
water, and atmospheric oxygen recaptured hydrogen that would have otherwise escaped to space, which prevented the
oceans from disappearing, which probably led to plate tectonics, which led to the formation of granitic continents, which
led to land-based life. In short, life made Earth more conducive to life. That is the most important impact of life on
geophysical and geochemical processes, but far from the only one; others will be explored in this essay.

Geology in the West is considered to have begun during the Classic Greek period, and Persian and Chinese scholars
furthered the discipline during the medieval period. While volcanoes and geysers have always provided humanity with
abundant evidence that Earth’s interior is hot, when humans began mining hydrocarbons and metals in abundance during
the early days of industrialization, the collection of data about Earth’s subterranean temperature began. It was not until
my lifetime that some of Earth’s geological processes were understood well enough to begin mapping its energy flows.
Today’s most widely accepted hypothesis is that the energy provided by radioactive decay of elements such as
potassium, uranium, and thorium is the primary heat source for Earth’s geological processes, and propels mass flows
within Earth. There is a constant upwelling of mass from the mantle, riding those energy currents. When those flows
reach Earth’s crust, the lighter portions float to Earth’s surface.51 Those portions eventually cool, become denser, and
sink back into the mantle. That process is thought to have begun about three billion years ago (also written as “three
bya”), about the time that the continents began forming in earnest. Three bya, the continents may have only had about a
quarter of the mass that they do today.52 There are even recent ideas that life processes led to forming the continents.53
The lightest portions of Earth’s crust, a relative wisp of Earth’s mass, make up the continents today, which are primarily
made of lighter rocks such as granite, and the remainder of the crust is composed of denser rock such as basalt. The
granites formed when basalt was exposed to water, and the process partly replaced heavier iron with lighter sodium and
potassium. Earth is our solar system’s only known home of granite. Water also became incorporated into the rocks,
generally where the heavier oceanic crust was subducted below the lighter continental crust.54 It is thought today that the
original global ocean had about twice the volume of today’s ocean.55 The “missing” ocean was incorporated into the crust
and mantle, and helps make the granitic continents lighter so that they float on the heavier basaltic crust. Granite is solely
comprised of metallic oxides, and hydrated minerals abound in Earth’s continents. Those continental masses have been
floating across Earth’s surface for billions of years as they have collided with each other, rebounded, lifted, subducted
below the crust, and recycled into the mantle. Those tectonic plates have been likened to the surface of a pot of boiling
oatmeal. Plates can collide and form mountains, and they can pull apart and expose the hot interior, which spews out in
volcanism (at the edges of tectonic plates, including ridges in the oceans). Currently, it seems that there is a 500-million-
year cycle whereby the continents crash together to form a supercontinent, then break apart and scatter across Earth’s
surface before coming back together.56 Today, the continents are about 100 million years from their furthest projected
spread across Earth's surface, when they will begin to come back together to form a supercontinent about 250 million
years from now.

Earth’s volume is about one trillion cubic kilometers, its core is believed to be about 90% iron, and the rest is largely
nickel. The mantle is thought to be mostly oxygen and silicon, and the remainder is largely composed of the lighter alkali
and alkaline earth metals, such as sodium, potassium, and calcium. Those mantle metals are primarily bound in oxides.
The mantle makes up more than 80% of Earth’s volume. The crust also is almost solely comprised of oxides. Silicon
dioxide (sand and glass are made from it) is the most prevalent compound and the crust is, by mass, nearly 75% oxygen
and silicon (granite's primary constituent elements), and nearly all of the remainder is aluminum, iron, and those lighter
alkali and alkaline earth metals. All other elements combined amount to less than 2% of Earth’s crust. An accompanying
table presents the current estimates of the relative concentrations of Earth’s mass and atoms that are relevant to this
essay.57

The oceans and atmosphere amount to a tiny portion of Earth’s mass and are made of light elements and compounds
with low boiling points as compared to crustal compounds. The oceans are primarily comprised of water, and that water
contains most of Earth’s hydrogen. On Earth, about 1-in-5,000 atoms are hydrogen, but 63% of the human body’s atoms
are hydrogen. Carbon and nitrogen are also scarce Earth elements, but they total more than 10% of the human body’s
atoms; life is made of rare Earth elements. What geochemists call the biosphere (comprised of all living organisms;
biologists call it biomass) amounts to less than one billionth of Earth’s mass. Land-based biomass is about 500 times
greater than ocean-based biomass. Life as we know it seems to be rare and delicate, found nowhere else in our solar
system so far, and few places seem promising for it to exist. Below is a graphical representation of the relationship of
Earth’s mass to the masses of the ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere.
Earth receives less than one-billionth of the energy that the Sun produces. The above image of the biosphere’s
proportion of Earth’s mass is close to the proportion of the Sun’s energy that Earth receives (the largest sphere indicates
the Sun’s output, and that small green dot indicates the proportion of the Sun’s output that Earth receives). About 0.02%
of the Sun’s energy that reaches Earth is captured by photosynthesis (that tiny dot would be invisible in that diagram).
That infinitesimal proportion captured by photosynthesis is the basis for nearly all life on Earth.

Earth’s iron core gives rise to its pronounced magnetic field, which helps protect Earth’s surface from the solar wind.
Planets with weak magnetic fields, such as Mars, are believed to be vulnerable to the solar wind stripping away their
atmospheres. If Earth did not have a magnetic field, its ozone layer may have been stripped away, which may have led to
the extinction of complex life on Earth, if it would have ever appeared at all.

The fact that complex life exists on Earth seems to be a miracle of circumstance. From the life of the Sun, to the part of
our galaxy where our solar system resides, to the dynamics that led to Earth retaining her global ocean and having an
ozone layer, to the molten core and magnetic field that protects Earth’s surface, life on Earth may be far rarer in the
universe than it seems from the perspective of a species that has yet to visit other stars.58

For the first 500 million years of Earth’s life, called the Hadean Eon, it was hot and bombarded by planetesimals. A naked
human would not have survived for a minute on the Hadean Earth. The atmosphere held no oxygen, the ocean’s
temperature was higher than today’s boiling point of water, and there was little if any land to stand on. Earth’s surface
was regularly bombarded by comets and asteroids, and the larger collisions vaporized the ocean, which would then
condense and settle back in the greatest rains in Earth’s history. The Moon was probably created during the Hadean Eon
when a planet-sized mass collided with Earth. The oldest known “native” rocks on Earth date from the Hadean Eon’s end,
four bya. The Hadean atmosphere may have been like Venus’s today – almost all carbon dioxide and at an immensely
higher pressure than today’s atmosphere, although this is controversial today and recent evidence favors far lower carbon
dioxide levels, at least in the Archaean, which was the next eon.59 The continents probably began forming during the
Archaean Eon (although as with many ancient events like that, there are competing hypotheses with various levels of
acceptance, and one of them is that the continents were fully formed by 4 bya), and is likely when life as we know it first
appeared on Earth. At the Archaean Eon’s beginning, the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere would have been
unfamiliar to us, and would not have supported today's animal life because there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere or
oceans. The global ocean may have been full of dissolved iron and other minerals not prevalent in today’s ocean. The
environment that life first appeared in would have been highly hostile to today’s multicellular life forms, and those early life
forms were tough.

Early Life on Earth

Chapter summary:
 Appearance of life on Earth, and its energetic basis
 Role of DNA, enzymes, ATP, and membranes
 Basic aspects of life
 Biochemistry, geochemical cycles, and entropy
 Respiration and photosynthesis
 Split of bacteria and archaea
 Oxygenic photosynthesis
 Formation of the continents, and plate tectonics
 Great Oxygenation Event, formation of the iron deposits, the first ice age, and formation of the ozone layer
 Development of the complex cell and its energy centers - the mitochondria - and mitochondrial DNA
 Development of aerobic respiration
 Free radicals and cell death
 Formation of supercontinents
 Evolutionary struggles, the appearance of plants, sexual reproduction, grazing, and predation
 One-way path of evolution
Above all else, life is an energy acquisition process. All life exploits the potential energy in various atomic and molecular
arrangements, or captures energy directly, as in photosynthesis. Early life exploited the potential energy of chemicals.
The chemosynthetic ideal is capturing chemicals fresh to new environments that have yet to react with other chemicals.
The currently most-accepted hypothesis has life first appearing on Earth about 3.5-3.8 bya, probably in volcanic vents on
the ocean floor.60 The earliest life forms took advantage of fresh chemicals introduced to the oceans. Life had to be
opportunistic and quick in order to capture that energy before other molecules did.

Today’s mainstream science has nothing to say about any intent behind the appearance of life on Earth. Today’s science
pursues the physical mechanism. When life first appeared on Earth, the evolutionary process that led to humanity began.
The USA's population has more doubt about evolution than any other Western nation, and that is primarily because
Biblical literalism is still strong here. In all other Western nations, there is virtually no controversy over evolution being a
fact of existence, and those nations view the controversy over evolution in the USA with befuddlement. Enlightened
scientists will state that science’s story of evolution is one of process and history, not intent, and really has nothing to say
about a creator.61

There is no scientific consensus regarding how life first appeared, but it is currently thought that all life on Earth today
descended from one organism, a creature known today as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (“LUCA”).62 The
reasoning is partly that all life has a preference for using certain types of molecules. Many molecules with the same
atomic structure can form mirror images of themselves. That mirror-image phenomenon is called chirality. In nature,
such mirror images occur randomly, but life prefers one mirror image over the other. In all life on Earth, proteins are
virtually without exception left-handed, while sugars are right-handed. If there was more than one line of descent, life with
different “handedness” would be expected, but it has never been found, which has led scientists to think that LUCA is the
only survivor that spawned all life on Earth today. All other lineages died out (the likely answer, and there was probably
hundreds of millions of years of evolution on Earth before LUCA lived), or they may have all descended from the same
original organism. As we will see, this is far from the only instance when such seminal events are considered to have
probably happened only once. Also, the unique structure of DNA and many enzymes are common to all life, and they did
not have to form the way that they did. That they came through different ancestral lines is extremely unlikely.

The critical feature of earliest life had to be a way to reproduce itself, and DNA is common to all cellular life today. The
DNA that exists today was almost certainly not a feature of the first life. The most accepted hypothesis is that RNA is
DNA’s ancestor. The mechanism today is that DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars,
and fats are the most important molecules in life forms, and very early on, protein “learned” the most important trick of all,
which was an energy innovation: facilitate biological reactions. If we think about activation energy at the molecular level, it
is the energy that crashes molecules into each other, and if they are crashed into each other fast enough and hard
enough, the reaction becomes more likely. But that is an incredibly inefficient way to do it. It is like putting a key in a
room with a lock in a door and shaking up the room in the hope that the key will insert itself into the lock during one of its
collisions with the room’s walls. Proteins make the process far easier, and those proteins are called enzymes.

Enzymes speed up chemical reactions and they do it as in the above analogy but as if a person entered that room, picked
up the key, and inserted it into the lock. That took far less effort than shaking up the room a million times. Enzymes are
like hands that grab two molecules and bring them into alignment so that the key inserts into the lock. The lock-and-key
analogy is the standard way to explain enzymes to non-scientists. Enzymes make chemical reactions happen millions
and even billions of times faster than they would occur in the enzymes’ absence. Life would never have grown beyond
some microscopic curiosities without the assistance that enzymes provide. Almost all enzymes are proteins, which are
generally huge molecules with intricate folds. The animation of human glyoxalase below depicts a standard enzyme
(author is WillowW at Wikipedia, and the zinc ions that make it work are the purple balls).
Enzymes look like Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions when their function is considered: huge molecules are used to make
small ones interact. Proteins have a four-level structure, and the second level is held in place by hydrogen bonds. The
enzyme’s pair of “hands” is like that of a robot on an assembly line, putting two parts together and passing the assembly
to the next stage. An enzyme can catalyze millions of reactions per second. All of today’s life on Earth would cease to
exist in the absence of enzymes. Other than the ability to reproduce itself and produce proteins, speeding up reactions by
millions of times is life’s most important “trick” and its greatest energy innovation. Adenosine triphosphate ("ATP") is a
coenzyme used to fuel all known biological processes. The human body produces its own weight in ATP each day.
Poisons and drugs generally disable enzymes by plugging or wrecking the “lock” so that the intended “key” will not fit.
Cyanide kills by disabling a key enzyme that produces ATP, which induces an energy shortage at the cellular level.

Another vital invention of life is creating the “room” in which those reactions can take place. The “rooms” of the first life
forms were created by membranes, which are comprised of proteins and fats. As with the first RNA, DNA, and proteins,
the first membranes probably did not resemble today’s very much. Membranes define life, keeping it separate from other
molecules in Earth’s brew.

There are two primary aspects of life, and what can be observed in human civilization are often only more complex
iterations of those aspects, which are:

1. Life harnessed energy so that it could manipulate matter to create itself;

2. Life created information so that it could reproduce itself.

One aspect manipulated matter and energy, and the other was the “program” for manipulating it. Matter and energy could
be manipulated to either build a living structure or operate it (or disassemble it), and the organism always made the
“decision.”

Entropy is another important concept for this essay. Entropy is, in its essence, the tendency of hot things to cool off. The
concept is now introduced to students as energy dispersal. Even though science really does not know what energy is, it
can measure its effect. At the molecular level, entropy is the tendency of mass to become disordered over time, as the
random motion of molecules spreads in collisions with other molecules, until the interacting molecules have the same
temperature. Life had to overcome entropy in order to exist, as it brought order out of disorder and maintained it while
alive, and it takes energy to do that. The prevailing theory is that net entropy can only increase, and life has to create
more entropy in its surroundings so that it can reduce entropy internally and produce and maintain the order that sustains
itself. Life is called a negentropic phenomenon, in which it uses energy to reverse entropy to make the order of its
organism’s structures, and it is continually using energy to reverse the natural entropy that is called decay. 63

Of those key elements necessary for life as we know it, the most diverse is carbon, with that half-filled outer electron shell.
Carbon provides the “backbone” for life’s chemistry, and is the foundational element of DNA, RNA, sugars, proteins, fats,
and virtually all other components of life. Carbon can form one, two, three, and four bonds with itself and so forms the
most diverse bonds with itself of all elements, and an entire branch of chemistry is devoted to carbon, called organic
chemistry. Organic molecules are by far the largest known to science. During my first day of organic chemistry class, the
professor observed that because the primary use of hydrocarbons was burning them to fuel the industrial age, we were
living in “the age of waste,” as hydrocarbons are a treasure trove of raw materials. In the eyes of an organic chemist,
burning fossil hydrocarbons to fuel our industrial world is like making Einstein dig ditches or making Pavarotti wash dishes
for a living.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are the most vital elements for life after carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. In its pure state in
nature, nitrogen, like hydrogen and oxygen, is a diatomic molecule. Hydrogen in nature is single-bonded to itself, oxygen
is double-bonded, and nitrogen is triple-bonded. Because of that triple bond, nitrogen is quite unreactive and prefers to
stay bonded to itself. In nature, nitrogen will not significantly react with other substances unless the temperature
(activation energy) is very high. Most nitrogen compounds in nature are created when the nitrogen and oxygen that
comprise more than 99% of Earth’s atmosphere react under lightning’s influence to create nitric oxide, which then reacts
with oxygen to form nitrogen dioxide, and atmospheric water combines with that to make nitrous and nitric acids, which
then fall to Earth’s surface in precipitation. Certain kinds of bacteria “fix” the nitrogen from the acidic rain into biological
systems. Also, some bacteria can fix nitrogen directly from atmospheric nitrogen, but it is an energy-intensive operation
that uses the energy in eight ATP molecules to fix each atom of nitrogen. For the earliest life on Earth, nitrogen would
have been essential, and some nitrogen is fixed at volcanic vents, where life may have first appeared.

The nitrogen cycle is one of life’s most important, in which some bacteria fix nitrogen for biological use and others release
nitrogen back to the atmosphere. Nitrogen’s relatively inert nature and preference for being bonded to itself is why it is the
dominant atmospheric gas, at 78% of the atmosphere’s volume. It has held that dominant status for billions of years.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, has been generally decreasing as an atmospheric gas for billions of years, and has
consistently declined for the past 100-150 million years. The geochemical process is like nitrogen's in that atmospheric
water combines with carbon dioxide to form a weak acid, which then falls to Earth in precipitation. But carbon is in the
same elemental family as an abundant crustal element: silicon. Carbon replaces the silicon in crustal compounds and
turns silicates into carbonates in a process called silicate weathering.64 Most of Earth’s primordial carbon dioxide was
probably removed by this process, although the exact mechanisms are in dispute. In all paleoclimate studies, carbon
dioxide is a prominent variable, if not the prominent variable, for determining Earth’s surface temperature. But perhaps as
early as three bya, life became a significant source of carbon removal from the atmosphere, as life forms died and sank to
the ocean floor, were subsequently buried by sedimentation, and tectonic plate movements further buried them into
Earth’s crust and mantle.

More carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere by those processes than was reintroduced to the atmosphere by
volcanism and other processes. That removal and reintroduction of carbon to Earth’s surface is called the carbon cycle.
As carbon dioxide continues to be removed from the atmosphere, life will have a harder time surviving, to eventually go
extinct, as first plants, then animals decline and go extinct, and it will be back to microbes ruling the Earth until the Sun’s
expansion into a red giant destroys Earth.65 The earthly end of complex life’s reign may be a billion years away, but might
come much sooner.

When life first appeared, it was single-celled and simple, and such organisms are called prokaryotes today. Below is a
diagram of a typical prokaryotic cell. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The diagrams used in this chapter are only intended to provide a glimpse of the incredible complexity of structure and
chemistry that takes place at the microscopic level in organisms, and people can be forgiven for doubting that it is all a
miraculous accident. I doubt it, too, as did Einstein. Prokaryotes do not have organelles such as mitochondria,
chloroplasts, and nuclei, but even the simplest cell is a marvel of complexity. If we could shrink ourselves so that we
could stand inside an average bacterium, we would be astounded at its complexity, as molecules move here and there,
are brought inside the bacterium’s membrane, used to generate energy and build structures, and waste products are
ejected from the organism. Cellular division would be an amazing sight.

The most significant branch of evolution’s tree of life may have been the first, when bacteria split into two branches; one
branch is called Bacteria and the other is Archaea. Darwin’s notion of slowly accumulating differences through
descending organisms gradually leading to new species is confounded at the single-celled level in particular, as microbes
swap DNA with abandon. The so-called tree of life at the microbe level better resembles a web. 66 The classifications in
the evolutionary tree of life are by no means settled, with constant disputes and changes, but every scientist still thinks
that it is a tree, with perhaps some webby roots.

In the earliest days of life on Earth, it had to solve the problems of how to reproduce, how to separate itself from its
environment, how to acquire raw materials, and how to make the chemical reactions that it needed. But it was confined to
those areas where it could take advantage of briefly available potential energy as Earth’s interior was disgorged into the
oceans. The earliest process of skimming energy from energy gradients to power life is called respiration. That earliest
respiration is today called anaerobic respiration because there was virtually no free oxygen in the atmosphere or ocean in
those early days. Respiration was life’s first energy cycle.67 A biological energy cycle begins by harvesting an energy
gradient (usually by a proton crossing a membrane or, in photosynthesis, directly capturing photon energy), and the
acquired energy powered chemical reactions. The cycle then proceeds in steps, and the reaction products of each step
sequentially use a little more energy from the initial capture until the initial energy has been depleted and the cycle’s
molecules are returned to their starting point and ready for a fresh influx of energy to repeat the cycle.

Back in life’s early days, some creatures discovered another source of energy and nutrients besides the chemical brew of
volcanic vents: other life forms. Predation was then born.68 Evolution has plenty to answer for, and opportunistically
robbing creatures of their lives to eat them is perhaps evolution’s primary “negative” outcome.

The evidence is that after “only” 100 million years or so after LUCA lived, life learned its next most important trick after
learning how to exist and speed up reactions: it tapped a new energy source. Photosynthesis may have begun 3.4 bya.
Bacteria are true photosynthesizers that fix carbon from captured sunlight. Archaeans cannot fix carbon via sunlight
capture, so are not photosynthesizers, even those that capture photons.
As with other early life processes, the first photosynthetic process was different from today’s, but the important result –
capturing sunlight to power biological processes – was the same. The scientific consensus today is that a respiration
cycle was modified, and a cytochrome in a respiration system was used for capturing sunlight. Intermediate stages have
been hypothesized, including the cytochrome using a pigment to create a shield to absorb ultraviolet light, or that the
pigment was part of an infrared sensor (for locating volcanic vents). But whatever the case was, the conversion of a
respiration system into a photosynthetic system is considered to have only happened once, and all photosynthesizers
descended from that original innovation.69

Metals used by biological processes can donate electrons, unlike those other elements that primarily seek them to
complete their shells. Those metals used by life are isolated in molecular cages called porphyrins.

As with enzymes, the molecules used in biological processes are often huge and complex, but ATP energy drives all
processes and that energy came from either potential chemical energy in Earth’s interior or sunlight, but even
chemosynthetic organisms rely on sunlight to provide their energy.70 The Sun thus powers all life on Earth. The cycles
that capture energy (photosynthesis or chemosynthesis) or produce it (fermentation or respiration) generally have many
steps in them, and some cycles can run backwards, such as the Krebs cycle.71 Below is a diagram of the citric acid
(Krebs) cycle. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The respiration and photosynthesis cycles in complex organisms have been the focus of a great deal of scientific effort,
and cyclic diagrams (1, 2) can provide helpful portrayals of how cycles work. Photosynthesis has several cycles in it, and
Nobel Prizes were awarded to the scientists who helped describe the cycles.72 Chlorophyll molecules look like antennae,
with magnesium in their porphyrin cages, and long tails. Below is a diagram of a chlorophyll molecule. (Source:
Wikimedia Commons)
Those molecules initiate photosynthesis by trapping photons. Chlorophyll is called a pigment and, as it sits in its
“antennae complex,” it only absorbs wavelengths of light that boost its electrons into higher orbits. The wavelengths that
plant chlorophyll does not absorb well are in the green range, which is why plants are green. Some photosynthetic
bacteria absorb green light, so the bacteria appear purple, and there are many similar variations among bacteria. Those
initial higher electron orbits from photon capture are not stable and would soon collapse back to their lower levels and
emit light again, defeating the process, but in less than a trillionth of a second the electron is stripped from the capturing
molecule and put into another molecule with a more stable orbit. That pathway of carrying the electron that got “excited”
by the captured photon is called an electron transport chain. Separating protons from electrons via chemical reactions,
and then using their resultant electrical potential to drive mechanical processes, is how life works.

Early photosynthetic organisms used the energy of captured photons to strip electrons from various chemicals. Hydrogen
sulfide was an early electron donor. In the early days of photosynthetic life, there was no atmospheric oxygen. Oxygen,
as reactive as it is, was deadly to those early bacteria and archaea, damaging their molecules through oxidization.
Oxidative stress, or the stripping of electrons from life’s molecules, has been a problem since the early days of life on
Earth.73 Oxidative stress is partly responsible for how organisms age, but it can also be beneficial, as organisms use
oxidative stress in various ways.

The dates are controversial, but it appears that after hundreds of millions of years of using various molecules as electron
donors for photosynthesis, cyanobacteria began to split water to get the donor electron, and oxygen was the waste
byproduct. Cyanobacterial colonies are dated to as early as 2.8 bya, and it is speculated that oxygenic photosynthesis
may have appeared as early as 3.5 bya and then spread throughout the oceans. Those cyanobacterial colonies formed
the first fossils in the geologic record, called stromatolites. At Shark Bay in Australia and some other places the water is
too saline to support animals that can eat cyanobacteria, so stromatolites still exist and give us a glimpse into early life on
Earth.

Oxygenic photosynthesis uses two systems for capturing photons. The first one (called Photosystem II) uses captured
photon energy to make ATP. The second one (called Photosystem I because it was discovered before Photosystem II)
uses captured photon energy to add an electron to captured carbon dioxide to help transform it into a sugar. That “carbon
fixation” is accomplished by the Calvin Cycle, and an enzyme called Rubisco, Earth’s most abundant protein, catalyzes
that fixation. Below is a diagram of the Calvin cycle. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Some bacteria use Photosystem I and some use Photosystem II. More than two bya, and maybe more than three bya,
cyanobacteria used both, and a miraculous instance of innovation tied them together. Some manganese atoms were then
used to strip electrons from water. Although the issue is still controversial regarding when it happened and how, that
instance of cyanobacteria's using manganese to strip electrons from water is responsible for oxygenic photosynthesis. It
seems that some enzymes that use manganese may have been "drafted" into forming the manganese cluster responsible
for splitting water in oxygenic photosynthesis.74 Water is not an easy molecule to strip an electron from, a single
cyanobacterium seems to have “stumbled” into it, and it probably happened only once.75 Once an electron was stripped
away from water in Photosystem I, then stripping away a proton (a hydrogen nucleus) essentially removed one hydrogen
atom from the water molecule. That proton was then used to drive a “turbine” that manufactures ATP, and wonderful
animations on the Internet show how those protons drive that enzyme turbine (ATP synthase). Oxygen is a waste product
of that innovative ATP factory.

Below is a diagram of the photosynthetic process in grass. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 Click on
image to enlarge

About the time that the continents began to grow and plate tectonics began, Earth produced its first known glaciers,
between 3.0 and 2.9 bya, although the full extent is unknown. It might have been an ice age or merely some mountain
glaciation.76 The dynamics of ice ages are complex and controversial, and numerous competing hypotheses try to explain
what produced them. Because the evidence is relatively thin, there is also controversy about the extent of Earth's ice
ages. About 2.5 bya, the Sun was probably a little smaller and only about 80% as bright as it is today, and Earth would
have been a block of ice if not for the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide and methane that absorbed electromagnetic radiation,
particularly in the infrared portion of the spectrum. But life may well have been involved, particularly oxygenic
photosynthesis, and it was almost certainly involved in Earth's first great ice age, which may have been a Snowball Earth
episode, and some pertinent dynamics follow.

As oxygenic photosynthesis spread through the oceans, everything that could be oxidized by oxygen was, during what is
called the Great Oxygenation Event (“GOE”), although there may have been multiple dramatic events. The event began
as long as three bya and is responsible for most of Earth’s minerals. The ancient carbon cycle included volcanoes
spewing a number of gases into the atmosphere, including hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen, but carbon
dioxide was particularly important. When the continents began forming, carbon dioxide was removed from the
atmosphere via water capturing it, falling onto the land masses as carbonic acid, the carbon became combined into
calcium carbonate, and plate tectonics subducted the calcium carbonate in the ocean sediments into the crust, which was
again released as carbon dioxide in volcanoes.77

When cyanobacteria began using water in photosynthesis, carbon was captured and oxygen released, which began the
oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. But the process may have not always been a story of continually increasing
atmospheric oxygen. There may have been wild swings. Although the process is indirect, oxygen levels are influenced
by the balance of carbon and other elements being buried in ocean sediments. If carbon is buried in sediments faster
than it is introduced to the atmosphere, oxygen levels will increase. Pyrite is comprised of iron and sulfur, but in the
presence of oxygen, pyrite's iron combines with oxygen (and becomes iron oxide, also known as rust) and the sulfur forms
sulfuric acid. Pyrite burial may have acted as the dominant oxygen source before carbon burial did.78 There is sulfur
isotope evidence that Earth had almost no atmospheric oxygen before 2.5 bya.79

About 2.7 bya, dissolved iron in anoxic oceans seems to have begun reacting with oxygen at the surface, generated by
cyanobacteria. The dissolved iron was oxidized from a soluble form to an insoluble one, which then precipitated out of the
oceans in those vivid red (the color of rust) layers that we see today and are called banded iron formations ("BIFs"), which
became an oxygen sink and kept atmospheric oxygen low.80 The GOE is widely accepted to have created almost all of
the BIFs, but it is not the only BIF-formation hypothesis and there is a great deal of controversy, but life processes are
generally considered to be primarily responsible for forming the BIFs.81 Most iron in the crust is bound in silicates and
carbonates, and it takes a great deal of energy to extract the iron from those minerals; the oxides that comprise BIFs are
much less energy-intensive to refine, as the iron is so concentrated. Far less ore needs to be melted to get an equivalent
amount of iron. BIFs are the source of virtually all iron ore that humans have mined. Life processes almost certainly
performed the initial work of refining iron, and humans easily finished the job billions of years later. Copper was not
refined by life processes, and copper ore takes twice as much energy to refine as iron ore does.

When BIF deposition ended about 2.4 bya (maybe because all of the available iron had been removed), oxygen levels
then skyrocketed and may have even reached modern levels, although it may have only been a few percent of Earth's
atmosphere, but was substantially higher than it had ever been.82 Not coincidentally, Earth experienced its first definite
ice age, beginning 2.4 bya.

Earth's Venus-level carbon dioxide likely began declining during the Hadean Eon, and the GOE also removed methane
from the atmosphere (a methane molecule is more than 20 times as effective as a carbon dioxide molecule in absorbing
radiation in Earth’s atmosphere), which may have been created by methanogens (methane-producing archaea), and
Earth’s first ice age lasted for 300 million years.83 There is no scientific consensus regarding the exact dynamics that
caused that first ice age (although I consider the above dynamics persuasive and likely relevant), but there is general
agreement that it was ultimately due to reduced greenhouse gases. That first ice age might have been a “Snowball Earth”
event, in which Earth’s surface was almost completely covered in ice.

The high oxygen levels may have turned pyrite on the continents into acid, which increased erosion, flooded essential
nutrients, particularly phosphorus, into the oceans, and would have facilitated a huge bloom in the oceans.84 But this also
happened in the midst of Earth's first ice age, so increased glacial erosion may have been primarily responsible, as we will
see with a Snowball Earth that happened more than a billion years later. The two largest carbon-isotope excursions
(carbon 13/12) in Earth's history are related to ice ages. The first was a positive excursion (more carbon-13 than
expected), and the second was negative. Scientists are still trying to determine what caused them. Beginning a little less
than 2.3 bya and lasting for more than 200 million years is the Lomagundi excursion, in which there was great carbon
burial.85 When the Lomagundi excursion finished, oxygen levels seem to have crashed back down to almost nothing and
may have stayed that way for 200 million years, before rebounding to a few percent, at most, of Earth's atmosphere, and it
stayed around that low level for more than a billion years.86

Atmospheric oxygen prevented Earth from losing its water as Venus and Mars did, which saved all life on Earth. An
atmosphere of as little as two percent oxygen may have been adequate to form the ozone layer, and that level was likely
first attained during the first GOE.87 The ozone layer absorbs most of the Sun’s ultraviolet light that reaches Earth.
Ultraviolet light carries more energy than visible light and breaks covalent and other bonds and wreaks biological havoc,
particularly to DNA and RNA. Before the ozone layer formed, life would have had a challenging time surviving near the
ocean’s surface. Ultraviolet light damage presented a formidable evolutionary hurdle, and proteins and enzymes that
assist cellular division are like those that arose to repair damaged DNA. Life has adapted to many hostile conditions in
Earth’s past, but if conditions change too rapidly, life cannot adapt in time to survive. Many mass extinctions that dot
Earth’s past were probably the result of conditions changing too rapidly for most organisms to adapt, if they could have
adapted at all. During the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which was the greatest extinction event yet known, there is
evidence that the ozone layer was depleted and ultraviolet light damaged photosynthesizing organisms that formed the
base of the food chains. From the formation of stromatolites to mass extinction events, ultraviolet light has played a
role.88

Around the end of that first ice age, another unique event transpired with enormous portent for life’s journey on Earth: one
microbe enveloped another, and both lived. Today's prevailing hypothesis is that an archaean enveloped a bacterium,
either by predation or colonization, and they entered into a symbiotic relationship. Today’s leading hypothesis, called the
hydrogen hypothesis, is that the archaean consumed hydrogen and the bacterium produced hydrogen, which formed the
basis for their symbiosis.89 That unique event transpired around two bya and led to complex life on Earth.90 That
enveloped bacterium was the parent of all mitochondria on Earth today, which are the primary energy-generation centers
in all animals. About 10% of the human body’s weight is mitochondria.91 If not for the red of hemoglobin and the melanin
in skin, humans would look purple, which is the mitochondria’s color. That purple color is probably because the original
enveloped bacterium that led to the first mitochondrion was purple.92

The mitochondrion’s creation had impact far beyond “only” creating “power plants” in cells; it allowed cells to grow to
immense size. That first mitochondrion became, according to the most restricted definition, the first organelle. Cells with
organelles are called eukaryotes, and today they are generally thought to have descended from that instance when a
hydrogen-eating archaean enveloped a hydrogen-producing bacterium. That animation of ATP Synthase in action depicts
a typical event in life forms - the generation of energy as protons cross a membrane - which in that instance makes the
turbine rotate that manufactures ATP. For prokaryotes, the cellular membrane is their only one and the site of the process
that fuels their lives. Cells are three-dimensional entities, and if spherical, the cell’s volume will increase at the cube of its
diameter, while its cellular membrane only grows at the square of its diameter. If the diameter of a spherical bacterium is
doubled, its surface area increases four times, but its volume increases eight times, and the disparity between surface
area and volume increases as the diameter does.93 For a prokaryote, it means that the cytoplasm-to-membrane ratio
quickly shrinks as the cell grows, so that less ATP is serving more cytoplasm. That means that with increasing size
comes slower metabolism, so the cell becomes sluggish. Imagine a grown man trying to live on the calories that he
ingested when he was an infant. He would quickly starve to death or have to hibernate each day.

Prokaryotic cells are limited in size because their energy production only takes place at their cellular membranes. In
ecosystems, the race usually goes to the quick, and it is very true with bacteria, as the smallest bacteria are faster and
“win” the race of survival.94 Mitochondria increase the membrane surface area for ATP reactions to take place, which
allowed cells to grow in size. The average eukaryotic cell has more than 10 thousand times the mass of the average
prokaryotic cell, and the largest eukaryotic cells have hundreds of thousands of times the mass (or around a trillion times
for ostrich eggs, for instance, which exist as single-cells when formed). Where an organism has the greatest energy
needs, such as in muscle and nerve cells, the greatest numbers of mitochondria are found. In a typical animal cell, dotted
with hundreds of mitochondria, a single mitochondrion is the size of the prokaryote that became the mitochondrion, and is
representative of prokaryote size in general. That increased surface area to generate ATP allowed eukaryotic cells to
grow large and complex. There are quintillions (a million trillion) of those ATP Synthase motors in a human body,
spinning at up to hundreds of revolutions per second, generating ATP molecules.95

It can help to think of mitochondria as “distributed” energy generation centers in eukaryotes, versus the “perimeter” energy
generation in prokaryotes. The new mode of energy production presented various challenges, but it allowed life to
become large and complex. Size is important, at the cellular level as well as the organism level. Below is a diagram of a
typical plant cell. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The primary advantage that mitochondria provided was not only increased surface area for reactions, but unlike other
organelles that began as bacteria (such as hydrogenosomes), mitochondria retained some of their DNA.96 That DNA was
probably retained by mitochondria that could make key proteins vital to their functioning on the spot, instead of waiting for
the nucleus to send DNA “instructions.” Essentially, mitochondria provided flexible power generation, like a field
commander empowered to make decisions far from headquarters and quickly responding to conditions on the ground.
Mitochondria move around inside the cells and provide energy where it is needed. That flexibility of decentralized power
generation may be the mitochondrion’s chief contribution to making complex life possible, and that in turn led to many
changes that are characteristic of complex life, some of which follow.

Perhaps a few hundred million years after the first mitochondrion appeared, as the oceanic oxygen content, at least on the
surface, increased as a result of oxygenic photosynthesis, those complex cells learned to use oxygen instead of
hydrogen. It is difficult to overstate the importance of learning to use oxygen in respiration, called aerobic respiration.
Before the appearance of aerobic respiration, life generated energy via anaerobic respiration and fermentation. Because
oxygen is in second place for creating the most energetic reactions, aerobic respiration generates, on average, about 15
times as many ATP molecules per cycle as fermentation and anaerobic respiration do (although some types of anaerobic
respiration can get four times the typical ATP yield).97 The suite of complex life on Earth today would not have been
possible without the energy provided by oxygenic respiration. At minimum, nothing could have flown, and any animal life
that might have evolved would have never left the oceans because the atmosphere would not have been breathable.
With the advent of aerobic respiration, food chains became possible, as it is several times as efficient as anaerobic
respiration and fermentation (about 40% as compared to less than 10%). Today’s food chains of several levels would be
constrained to about two in the absence of oxygen.98 Some scientists have questioned oxygen's role in the rise of
complex life and oxygen and respiration in eukaryote evolution. Whether the first animals needed oxygen at all is
controversial.99

Complex life means, by definition, that it has many parts and they move. Complex life needs energy to run its many
moving parts. Complexity’s dependence on greater levels of energy use not only applies to all organisms and
ecosystems, but it has also applied to all human civilizations, as will be explored later in this essay. When cells became
“complex” with organelles, a tiny observer inside that cell would have witnessed a bewildering display of activity, as
mitochondria sailed through the cells via cytoskeleton “scaffolding” on their energy generating missions, the ingestion of
molecules for fuel and to create structures, the miracle of cellular division, the constant building, repair, and dismantling of
cellular structures, and the ejection of waste through the cellular membrane.100 The movement of molecules and
organelles in eukaryotic cells is accomplished by using the same protein that became muscle: actin.101 Prokaryotes used
an ancestor of actin to move, and their flagella provide their main mode of travel, to usually move toward food and safety
or away from danger, including predators.

For various reasons that are far from settled among scientists, eukaryotes did not immediately rise to dominance on Earth
but were on a fairly even footing with prokaryotes for more than a billion years. That situation was at least partially related
to continental configurations and oceanic currents.

The Moon has stabilized Earth’s axial tilt in relation to the Sun and made Earth's seasons vary within a relatively narrow
o o o
range. Without the Moon, Earth could have up to 90 changes in its axis of rotation instead of the 22 -to-24.5 variation of
the past several million years.102 If that had happened, although life may have survived, Earth’s climate would have been
extremely chaotic, with part of the planet going into perpetual day while another went into perpetual night, and other wild
variations. Earth would have had mass-extinction effects on those portions, and the rest of the biosphere would have
been extremely challenged to survive. Complex life on Earth would little resemble today’s (if it had appeared and survived
at all), if Earth’s axis tilted chaotically and severely. The primary effect of Earth’s stable tilt is the planet’s entire surface
receiving relatively uniform and predictable energy levels.

The primary heat dynamic on Earth’s surface is that the oceans near the equator are heated by sunlight and entropy
spreads the heat toward the poles via oceanic currents. Today’s continental configuration, with three major oceans
besides the polar ones, has seen a global current develop that takes water 1,600 years to travel. Where the Atlantic
Ocean meets the polar oceans, the warm surface currents cool and sink to the ocean’s bottom, which is how the oceans
are oxygenated. Without that oxygenation, there would be little life on the ocean floor or much below the surface; almost
the entire global ocean would be lifeless. Before the GOE, this was certainly the case, but relatively recent hypotheses
make the case that the oceans were anoxic for more than a billion years after the GOE began, largely because of the
continental configurations and geophysical and geochemical processes.

Many people are familiar with the term Pangaea, which was all of today’s continents merged into a supercontinent.
Pangaea formed about 300 mya, but it was not the only supercontinent; it was just the only one existing during the eon of
complex life. One called Rodinia may have existed one bya and did not break up until 750 mya (and reformed into
another supercontinent, Pannotia, 600 mya, which did not break up until 550 mya), and there is a hypothesized earlier
one called Columbia that existed two bya. There is also a hypothesis that all continental mass was contained in one
supercontinent that lasted from 2.7 bya to 600 mya. The continental land masses of two bya may have been only about
60% the size of today’s.103 Supercontinents are generally associated with ice ages.

When the total continental land mass was small or combined into a supercontinent, there was no land to divert that
diffusion of warm water toward the poles, which results in currents. During those times, the global ocean became one big,
calm lake, with no currents of significance. Those oceans are called Canfield Oceans today, and they would have been
anoxic; the oxygenated surface waters would not have been drawn by currents to the ocean floor, and the oceans were
certainly anoxic before the GOE. The interplay of those many interacting dynamics can be incredibly complex and lead to
the multitude of hypotheses posited to explain those ancient events, but a leading hypothesis today is that a combination
of factors, including supercontinents, variations in volcanic output, Canfield Oceans, and ice ages prevented eukaryotic
life from gaining ecosystem dominance until the waning of the second Snowball Earth event, which was the greatest
series of glaciations that Earth has yet experienced. It is known today as the Cryogenian Period, which ended about 635
mya. The study of the Cryogenian Period, which is the subject of this essay’s next chapter, resulted in the term “Snowball
Earth.”

All animals, except for some tiny ones in anoxic environments, use aerobic respiration today, and early animals
(multicellular heterotrophs, which are called metazoans today) may have also used aerobic respiration. Before the rise of
eukaryotes, the dominant life forms, bacteria and archaea, had many chemical pathways to generate energy as they
farmed that potential electron energy from a myriad of substances, such as hydrogen sulfide, sulfur, iron, hydrogen,
ammonia, and manganese, and photosynthesizers got their donor electrons from hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen, arsenate,
nitrite, and other chemicals. If there is potential energy in electron bonds, bacteria and archaea will often find ways to
harvest it. Many archaean and bacterial species thrive in harsh environments that would quickly kill any complex life, and
those hardy organisms are called extremophiles. In harsh environments, those organisms can go dormant for millennia
and perhaps longer, waiting for appropriate conditions (usually related to available energy). In some environments, it can
take a hundred years for a cell to divide.

But once the GOE reached the level where eukaryotes could reliably power their respiration aerobically, then virtually all
complex life went “all in” with aerobic respiration, and all plants engage in oxygenic photosynthesis. The conventional
view has long been that the GOE was a microbe holocaust, as most anaerobic microbes died from oxygen damage.
However, there is little evidence for a holocaust. Today, it looks more like the anaerobes were driven to the margins
where oxygen is scarce (underground, and in some anoxic waters such as today’s Black Sea) while aerobes quickly came
to dominate the planet.104 Once the oxygenic photosynthesis and aerobic respiration regime was achieved around two
bya, the cycle of photosynthesizers creating oxygen and aerobes eating it began. Atmospheric carbon dioxide and
oxygen levels have seesawed ever since the beginning of the eon of complex life and probably earlier. For instance, the
coal beds that humanity is mining and burning with such abandon today were created because trees produced lignin that
allowed them to grow tall, and it took about 100 million years for a fungus to learn how to break lignin down, and like the
other big events, that trick was probably only learned once. Consequently, carbon got buried with those trees in immense
amounts and eventually formed most of Earth’s coal beds. That time is known as the Carboniferous Period, and all of that
carbon sequestered in Earth led to skyrocketing oxygen levels, the highest that Earth has yet seen. Over the billions of
years since oxygenic respiration began, aerobes have consumed 99.99% of all the oxygen created by oxygenic
photosynthesis. That remaining 0.01% was buried into Earth’s crust and is responsible for the generally declining
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. It has been estimated that there is 26,000 times more organic carbon buried in Earth’s
crust than exists in today’s biosphere.105

The times between 1.8 bya and 800 mya are called “the boring billion years” in scientific circles, because there were no
dramatic evolutionary events that left a fossil record, and it was likely because the oceans were largely anoxic and rich in
hydrogen sulfide, which prevented eukaryotes from attaining dominance.106 It is also speculated that a shortage of
molybdenum, which bacteria use to fix nitrogen, may have contributed.

During that “boring” time before complex life appeared, key biological events happened that were critical for the later
appearance of complex life, and some of them follow. About 1.5 bya, eukaryotic organisms are clearly seen in the fossil
strata, but are simple spheroids and tubes.107

About 1 bya, stromatolites began to decline and microbial photosynthesizers began to evolve spines, probably due to
predation pressure from protists, which are eukaryotes. Eating stromatolites may reflect the first instance of grazing,
although grazing is really just a form of predation. The difference between grazing and predation is the prey. If the prey is
an autotroph (it fixes its own carbon, by using energy from either sunlight capture or harvesting the energy potential of
inorganic chemicals), it is called grazing, and if the prey got its carbon from eating autotrophs (such creatures are called
heterotrophs), then it is called predation. There are other categories of life-form consumption, such as parasitism and
detritivory (eating dead organisms), and there are many instances of symbiosis. For complex life, the symbiosis between
the mitochondrion and its cellular host was the most important one ever.
Just as mitochondria were “invented,” somewhere between 1.6 bya and 600 mya a eukaryote ate a cyanobacterium and
both survived, and that cyanobacterium became the ancestor of all chloroplasts, which is the photosynthetic organelle in
all plants.108 As with similar previous events, it appears that it happened only once, and all plants are descended from
that unique event.109 The invention of the chloroplast quickly led to the first multicellular eukaryotes, algae, which were
the first plants. The first algae fossils are from about 1.2 bya.110 Most algae species are not called plants, as they are not
descended from that instance when a eukaryote ate a cyanobacterium. The non-plant algae, such as kelp, also have
chloroplasts, from various “envelopment” events when algae chloroplasts were eaten and the grazers and chloroplasts
survived. Below is the general outline of the tree of life today, in which bacteria and archaea combined to make
eukaryotic cells, and in which the bacterium enveloped into a protist to make plants, and all complex life developed from
protists. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Since mitochondria are the energy generation centers in eukaryotic cells (some eukaryotes lost their mitochondria, usually
because the mitochondria evolved into other organelles such as mitosomes and hydrogenosomes), they present similar
issues related to how industrialized humanity generates energy today. Power plants have pollution issues and can
explode and create environmental catastrophes such as what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
A free radical is an atom, molecule, or ion with an unpaired valence electron or an unfilled shell, and thus seeks to capture
an electron. The electron transport chain used to create ATP in a mitochondrion leaks electrons, which creates free
radicals, which will take that electron from wherever they can get it. Aerobic respiration creates some of the most
dangerous free radicals, particularly the hydroxyl radical. The more hydroxyl radicals created, the more damage inflicted
on neighboring molecules. Another free radical created by that electron leakage is superoxide, which can be neutralized
by antioxidants, but there is no avoiding the damage produced by the hydroxyl radical.111 Those kinds of free radicals are
called reactive oxygen species (“ROS”). ROS are not universally deleterious to life processes, but if their production spins
out of control, the oxidative stress inflicted by the ROS can cripple biological structures. ROS damage can cause
programmed cell death, called apoptosis, which is a maintenance process for complex life. Antioxidants are one way that
organisms defend against oxidative stress, and vitamin C is a standard antioxidant. Antioxidants usually serve multiple
purposes in cellular chemistry, and antioxidant supplements generally do not work as advertised. They not only do not
target the reactions that might be beneficial to prevent, but they can interfere with reactions that are necessary for life
processes. Antioxidant supplements are blunt instruments that can cause more harm than good.112

There is plenty of uncertainty and controversy regarding just how connected the issue may be, but it appears that keeping
some DNA at the mitochondria, in order to have more efficient and flexible energy generation, helped lead to the genetic
phenomenon known as sexual reproduction. Bacteria swap DNA in reproduction and have done so since life’s early days,
but the process of meiosis, which is when two parent life forms split and recombine their DNA to produce an offspring, is
unique to eukaryotes, and that form of reproduction appeared between 1.2 and 1.0 bya. As with other seminal events, it
seems that sexual reproduction using meiosis happened once, and all eukaryotes that reproduce sexually are descended
from that one instance. Protists were the first organisms to reproduce sexually.

Again, the dates for these events are rather rough, but if the creation of a chloroplast happened once and the creation of
sexual reproduction happened once, then sexual reproduction would have needed to come before the chloroplast, as
many plants produce sexually. If it turns out that the chloroplast really is 1.6 billion years old, then the current date for
sexual reproduction would need to be pushed back, or the “sex was invented once” idea would have to be discarded, and
biologists would probably decide that the date of sex appearing would need to be pushed back, even without fossil
evidence of it.

Many principles of evolutionary theory have not changed much since Darwin, and one of them is that when one species
gains the “upper hand” in the struggle of life on Earth, as there is only so much sunlight and nutrients to go around, the
losers become marginalized or go extinct. Ultimately, the species with the highest carrying capacity, or ability to extract
energy from its environment, wins.113 There are many ways, however, to attain that winning carrying capacity. Another
Darwinian concept is that species adapt to their environments (which include other species) to benefit that species, not
any other (and Darwin used the concept at the organism level, not the species level). Darwin’s idea that all life on Earth
descended from a common ancestor is a central feature of evolutionary theory. But Darwin’s idea of gradual changes
leading to speciation is confounded by the appearance of mitochondria, which led to complex life. There was nothing
gradual about an archaean swallowing a bacterium and both surviving, and the bacterium eventually became the power
plant for all animals. It was a radical change and a chasm between simple and complex life.114

Another evolutionary concept is that all changes had mechanical reasons for happening (again, today’s science has
nothing to say about any intent), and each mechanical change required some purpose in improving an organism’s
chances of surviving to reproduce, or at least not have unduly impaired it. As evolution progressed, for each species, it
was like taking a road, and the farther down the road a species went in its development, the “lifestyle” opportunities that its
biological operation created precluded other kinds of styles. For instance, trees will never become Ents. Trees went
down the path of roots, lignin, growing taller than their neighbors, and the like. A plant cannot choose locomotion as a
way of life. It does not generate enough energy for it, for one thing. Animals went down a very different evolutionary path
than plants did, and muscles, brains, livers, and the like have no analogy in plants and, by themselves, plants will not
grow muscles or brains anytime soon, although humans have been making radical changes in animals over brief periods
of time, such as the many breeds of dog.115

The nutrient cycling that life contributes to, and the oxygen that is generated that maintains the ozone layer, was all
initially performed by prokaryotes, and will continue to be performed by them long after complex life goes extinct.
Complex life is largely unnecessary for making Earth inhabitable. Microbes do not need them.116 Earth’s biomass today
is about half prokaryote and half eukaryote.

During that “boring billion years,” sexual reproduction was invented, plants became possible, and the rise of grazing and
predation had eonic significance. While many critical events in life’s history were unique, one that is not is multicellularity,
which independently evolved dozens of times, and some prokaryotes have multicellular structures, some even with
specialized organisms forming colonies.117 There are various hypotheses to explain why life went multicellular, but the
primary advantage was size, which would become important in the coming eon of complex life. The rise of complex life
might have happened faster than the billion years or so after the basic foundation was set (the complex cell, oxygenic
photosynthesis), but geophysical and geochemical processes had their impacts. Perhaps most importantly, the oceans
probably did not get oxygenated until just before complex life appeared, as they were sulfidic Canfield Oceans from 1.8
bya to 700 mya. Atmospheric oxygen is currently thought to have remained at only a few percent at most until about 850
mya, although there are recent arguments that it remained low until only about 420 mya, when large animals began to
appear and animals began to colonize land.118 Just as the atmospheric oxygen content began to rise, then came the
biggest ice age in Earth’s history, which probably played a major role in the rise of complex life.

The Cryogenian Ice Age and the Rise of Complex Life

Earth’s Major Ice Ages

Major Ice Age Duration Impact on Ecosphere Suspected Primary Cause(s)

Huronian c. 2.4 to 2.1 bya Perhaps little – only Early stage of Great
prokaryotes existed. Oxygenation Event.
Cryogenian c. 850 to 635 mya Perhaps great – life Supercontinent breakup and
may have been nearly resultant runaway effects.
extinguished, and rise
of complex life followed
Cryogenian.
Andean-Saharan c. 460 to 420 mya Caused the first great Gondwana drifted over the
mass extinction. South Pole.
Karoo c. 360 to 260 mya Destroyed Earth’s first Carbon sequestering by
rainforests and rainforests and Gondwana at
resulted in a mass South Pole.
extinction that led to
the rise of reptiles.
Pleistocene c. 2.5 mya to Growing and retreating The ultimate cause is
present ice sheets led to declining carbon dioxide
cooling and drying, levels. The first proximate
 warming and cause was probably Antarctica
moistening phases. 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.

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 chapter 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.119 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.120 Hypotheses began to
proliferate, and in the 1870s, James Croll proposed the idea that variations in Earth’s orientation to the Sun caused the
continental ice sheets. Because of problems in matching his hypothesis with dates adduced for ice age events, it fell out
of favor and was considered dead by 1900.121 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 advancing and retreating ice sheets during the current ice age.122

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.123 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 a global ice age immediately preceded the
Cambrian Period, when 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 realm of scientific investigation. Humanity’s colossal burning of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits
may well be delaying the ice sheets' return; they have been advancing and retreating in rhythmic fashion for the previous
million years.124 Today, the current pattern's accepted tipping point has been Earth’s orientation toward the Sun,
particularly the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, which has a roughly 100,000-year cycle. Although Earth’s orientation is
universally considered to be the tipping point variable, 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 was likely 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.
When 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 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 organisms 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 and the one in the Carboniferous and Permian periods. A hypothesis is that
Canfield Oceans can accompany supercontinents, so warm water is not pushed to the poles as vigorously.125 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.126 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 in which 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 in which 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 were two key ways
that carbon was removed from the atmosphere in the day's carbon cycle, especially before the rise of land plants.
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 two key dynamics for removing it suppressed
by the ice, carbon dioxide would have increased in the atmosphere. The resultant greenhouse effect would have
eventually melted the ice and runaway effects would have quickly turned 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.127 Canadian
geologist Paul Hoffman had been an ardent Arctic researcher, but a dispute with a bureaucrat saw him exiled from the
Arctic.128 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.129 Oceanic dropstones were deposited by melting icebergs and 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.130 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.131 Those papers
resulted in a flurry of scientific investigations and controversy. Hoffman engaged in feuds as 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
the formation of late-Proterozoic BIFs.132 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.133 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.134 Explaining the Shuram excursion is one of the most
controversial areas of geology today, with numerous proposed hypotheses. When the controversies are finally resolved, if
they are resolved, the Shuram and Lomagundi excursions, even though they go in opposite directions, I suspect will likely
be both related to the dynamics of ice ages and the rise of oxygen levels. Ediacaran fauna, the first large, complex
organisms to ever appear on Earth, also first appeared about 575 mya, when the Shuram excursion began.135 I strongly
doubt that Earth’s first appearance of large complex life at the exact geological timescale moment of the wildest carbon-
isotope swing in Earth’s history will prove to be a coincidence. The numerous competing hypotheses regarding the
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;136
 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;137
 The excursion is the result of an asteroid impact that changed Earth’s tilt;138
 The vaporization of methane hydrates on the ocean floor;139
 It was related to a global glaciation, like previous Snowball Earth glaciations;140
 The excursion was real, but there were others, and none of them significantly impacted Precambrian evolution.141

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 likely 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 pre-Cryogenian oceanic 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. A persuasive
explanation is recycling sulfur in the oceanic ecosystem, which can only happen in the presence of oxygen.142
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 ocean sediments will be enriched in
strontium-87, which analysis of Ediacaran sediments confirmed. That evidence, combined with carbon isotope ratios,
provides a strong indication of high erosion and high carbon burial, which would have increased atmospheric oxygen
levels.143 There is other evidence of increasing atmospheric oxygen content during the late Proterozoic, such as an
increase in rare earth elements in Ediacaran sediments. Although there is still plenty of controversy, today's consensus is
that the Cryogenian is when atmospheric oxygen levels began 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 only a
few percent 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
o o o o o
40 C to around 20 C, and it has been below 30 C ever since, generally fluctuating between 25 C and 10 C. Today’s
o
global surface temperature of around 15 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 the rise of DNA sequencing and genomics, molecular biologists have provided invaluable assistance. In 1996, a
paper was published that created a huge splash in paleontological circles.144 Molecular biologists 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.145 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, 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 used for
calibrating 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 and the basics are 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 prokaryotes and eukaryotes was ultimately shattered, and oxygen levels began rising 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 organism remains that become saturated with various chemicals, which gradually
replace the organic material with rock by several different processes of mineralization.146 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. 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 nvironments far too harsh 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.147 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.148 Fossils 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, 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 probably only happened once.149 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?).150

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.151 In Namibia in 1933, those Precambrian fossils were again noted but given a
Cambrian chronology because the day’s prevailing hypothesis 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 19th 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
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.152 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 remains153).

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 Dickensonias 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. It has reasonably been speculated that Dickinsonia got its oxygen through diffusion across its surface,
and that oxygen levels had to be at least 10% of today's to achieve that. 154 Charnia looked like a plant but almost
certainly was not, and is classified into another extinct phylum. Phyla are body plans, and 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 Cloudinids.155 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.156 One 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. Cambrian fauna filled the vacant niches and then some when the ocean 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 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;157
 There was not really a Snowball Earth, and a naturally wandering axis of rotation has created the illusion of tropical
glaciation;158 another version is that the magnetic poles wandered more than currently believed and made the
paleomagnetic evidence invalid, which 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;159
 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;160
 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;161
  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); perhaps the rise of complex life happened in an anaerobic environment
and animals only switched to aerobic respiration when oxygen became available;162
 Canfield’s sulfur evidence may not be evidence of an oxygen increase but of an increase in burrowing animals in
the ocean sediments; Canfield himself has broken with the results of his mentor's model (GEOCARBSULF), which
had near-modern levels of oxygenation reached by the Cambrian Period, and believes as of 2014 that oxygen
levels were no more than 5% by the Cambrian Explosion and did not reach modern levels until around 420 mya,
after complex life began to colonize land;163
 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;164
 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;165
 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.166

Some hypotheses are stronger, others weaker, and some have already come and gone (and might be resurrected one
day, as 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, the rise and fall of species and ecosystems is always primarily an energy
issue. The Ediacaran extinction is a good example: Ediacaran fauna either became an energy source for early Cambrian
predators, ran out of food energy, ran out of the oxygen necessary to power their metabolisms, or lacked some other
energy-delivered nutrient. After the extinction events, biomes were often cleared for new species to dominate, which were
often descended from species that were marginal ecosystem members before the extinction event. They then enjoyed a
golden age of relative energy abundance as their competitors were removed via the extinction event.

For this essay’s purposes, the most important ecological 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, as 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 activity),
and life is damaged or destroyed. The journey of life on Earth has primarily been 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 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

Earth’s Largest Mass Extinction Events

Percent of
Species or
Major Extinction Minor Extinction Genera that Suspected Primary Aftermath
Event Event Date Went Extinct Cause(s) Dynamics
Microscopic May have Changing sea The last microscopic
organisms happened temperatures and mass extinction
numerous chemistry. directly preceded the
times rise of the first
before animals that could
eon of be seen with the
complex naked eye.
life.
Ediacaran c. 542 Unknown, but Anoxia Cambrian Explosion
mya almost all
Ediacaran
forms
disappeared.
Mid-Cambrian c. 517 Unknown, but Anoxia and changing Trilobite radiation
mya small shelly sea levels.
fauna largely
disappear.
Dresbachian c. 502 40% of marine Anoxia End of Golden Age
mya genera of Trilobites, and
brachiopods
diminished.
End-Cambrian c. 485 Unknown, but Rising sea levels and Ordovician radiation
mya half of trilobite anoxia.
 species go
extinct. Might
be regional, but
could be a
major mass
extinction.
Ordovician–Silurian c. 443 c. 85% of all Temperature and sea Ecosystem
mya species level changes and functioning not
anoxia. fundamentally
altered.
Ireviken c. 433 50% of trilobite Climate and sea level Disaster taxa appear
and 80% of changes. It was a late afterward, followed
conodont ice age event. by recovery.
species in Chemistry and/or
seafloor event. currents changes or
anoxia.
Mulde c. 427 Seafloor Climate change, sea
mya communities level changes, and
devastated anoxia.
Lau c. 424 Seafloor Climate change, sea
mya communities level changes, and
devastated anoxia.
Late Devonian c. 375 to c. 70% of all Series of extinctions. Arthropod and
360 mya species Sea level changes and vertebrate
anoxia. Mountain- colonization of land
building and volcanism halted for 14 million
could have triggered years.
ice age that caused it.
Mid- c. 325 Marine Sea level changes End of Mississippian
Carboniferous mya extinction related to ice age and and beginning of
continental uplift Pennsylvanian
 related to continents epochs of
colliding to form Carboniferous
Pangaea. Period.
Carboniferous c. 307 Rainforest Ice age The rise of reptiles.
mya collapse
Permian–Triassic c. 270 to c. 90-96% of all Series of extinctions. Beginning of a new
250 mya species Volcanism, warming, era.
sea level changes,
and anoxia.
Formation of Pangaea
probably the ultimate
cause.
Carnian-Pluvial c. 230 Ammonoid and Volcanism, mountain- Dinosaurs begin to
mya conodont mass building. dominate, and
extinction. mammals first
Near-extinction appear several
of therapsids, million years later.
and extinction Stony corals first
of synapsid that appear. Some argue
would have that this extinction is
been a more significant than
dinosaurian the end-Triassic
competitor. extinction.
Triassic–Jurassic c. 200 c. 70-75% of all Volcanism, warming, The dominance of
mya species sea level changes, dinosaurs.
and anoxia.
Toarcian c. 183 Reefs and Volcanism, anoxia. Carbonate
mya ammonites hardgrounds
devastated. become common in
calcite seas.
End-Jurassic c. 145 Reef collapse, Falling sea levels Cretaceous period
 mya bivalves had rise of ornithischians.
about a 20%
extinction.
Aptian c. 116 Marine event. Volcanism Rudists
mya Rudist bivalve subsequently
domination dominated,
temporarily displacing coral
halted. reefs.
Cenomanian c. 93 mya Marine event Undersea volcanism, Biomes recovered
which may anoxia. largely unchanged,
have marked although world
the final continued cooling for
extinction of nearly the next 40
ichthyosaurs. million years.
About 25% of
marine
invertebrate
species went
extinct. Rudist
reefs decline.
Cretaceous–Paleogene c. 66 mya c. 75% of all Bolide impact, and The end of dinosaurs
species perhaps also and the rise of
volcanism and sea mammals.
level changes.
Paleocene- c. 56 mya Seafloor Volcanism, release of Warmest epoch in
Eocene communities methane hydrates hundreds of millions
devastated, up from ocean floor, of years, and great
to 50% of possibly related to radiations of
seafloor change in ocean mammals. A Golden
foraminifera current. Age of Life on Earth.
species go
 extinct.
Mid-Eocene c. 50-49 Warm-climate Cooling related to Cold-adapted
to 38-37 species migrate transition from species dominate
mya or go extinct. Greenhouse Earth to biomes.
Greatest mass Icehouse Earth.
extinction of
Cenozoic Era
so far.
End-Eocene c. 34 mya Half of Migration of Asian Relatively cold
European mammals to Europe, Oligocene Epoch
mammal Icehouse Earth begins.
genera, all conditions in oceans.
early whales.
Mid-Miocene c. 14.8- Warm-climate Mountain-building and Earth has not been
14.5 mya species migrate carbon sequestration as warm since then.
or go extinct. due to silicate Miocene apes
weathering. migrate back to
Africa, which might
include humanity’s
ancestor.
Late Pliocene - c. 3.5 to 65% of North Closure of gap Current ice age in
Atlantic 2.5 mya American between Atlantic and Northern
bivalve species, Pacific Oceans Hemisphere.
Florida’s reefs. between the
Americas, and
resultant Gulf Stream
dynamics which may
have initiated current
ice age.
Late Pliocene c. 3.0 to The majority of Land bridge to North Mammals that
2.7 mya mammalian America forms. migrated from North
 species. America dominate
South American
biomes.
Quaternary/Holocene c. 50 kya May reach 50% Humanity, warming. Future extinctions
to present or higher by still preventable by
2100 and humans, and
maybe far humans can create a
sooner, and far radically different
higher later. aftermath.
Eventual
Permian-level
extinction is
possible.

Chapter summary:
 Beginning of evolutionary theory
 Formation of two geological schools of thought: uniformitarianism and catastrophism
 Speciation, including the ideas of punctuated equilibrium and gene duplication
 Genetic bottlenecks and adaptive radiations
 Nutrient limitations
 Extinction
 Mass extinction, including the contribution of organisms to extinction events
 Mass extinctions and cascading energy collapses

In his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin sketched processes by which species appear and disappear, today called
speciation and extinction. Origin of Species is a landmark in scientific history and is still immensely influential. But it was
also afflicted by false notions that are still with us. Europe’s emergence from dogma and superstition has been a long,
fitful, only partially successful process. In the 1500s, Spanish mercenaries read a legal document to the unfortunate
Indians that they conquered and annihilated that stated that Creation was about five thousand years old, as scholars of
the time simply added up the Book of Genesis’s “begats.” The Old Testament is filled with tales of genocide, miracles,
and disasters, with a global flood that the faithful Noah survived. As geology gradually became a science and processes
such as erosion and sedimentation were studied, the Judeo-Christian belief of Earth's being five thousand years old was
discarded and the concept of geologic time arose in Europe.

In the early 19th century, a dispute was personified by Charles Lyell, a British lawyer and geologist, and Charles Cuvier, a
French paleontologist. Their respective positions came to be known as uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Just as the
British prevailed in their global imperial competition with the French, so did uniformitarianism prevail in scientific circles.
Under the comforting uniformitarian worldview, there was no such thing as a global catastrophe. Changes had only been
gradual, and only the present geophysical, geochemical, and biological process had ever existed. The British Charles
Darwin explicitly made Lyell’s uniformitarianism part of his evolutionary theory and he proposed that extinction was only a
gradual process. Cuvier was the first scientist to suggest that organisms had gone extinct, which contradicted the still-
dominant Biblical teachings, even in the Age of Enlightenment.167 Although Cuvier did not subscribe to the evolutionary
hypotheses that predated Darwin, his catastrophic extinction hypothesis was informed by his fossil studies. But Lyell and
Darwin prevailed. Suggesting that there might have been catastrophic mass extinctions in Earth’s past was an invitation
to be branded a pseudoscientific crackpot. That state of affairs largely prevailed in orthodoxy until the 1980s, after the
asteroid impact hypothesis was posited for the dinosaurs’ demise.168 An effort led by a scientist publishing outside of his
field of expertise (a Nobel laureate in this instance) removed gradualism from its primacy. Only since the 1980s have
English-speaking scientists studied mass extinctions without facing ridicule from their peers, which has never been an
auspicious career situation. Since then, many minor and major mass extinction events have been studied, but the
investigations are still in their early stages, partly due to a dogma that prevailed for more than a century and a half, and
Lyell’s uniformitarianism is still influential. The ranking of major mass extinctions is even in dispute, or even how they
should be ranked, and a mid-Carboniferous Period extinction was recently argued as being greater than the Ordovician–
Silurian extinction.169

Speciation has probably been more controversial than extinction. To be fair to Darwin, genetics was not yet a science
when Origin of Species was published in 1859. It was not until the 1866 publication of an obscure paper by Silesian friar
Gregor Mendel that the science of genetics began, but Mendel’s work was dismissed and ignored by mainstream science
until the 20th century. Darwin went to his grave unaware of Mendel’s work. Today, speciation is primarily considered to
be a genetic event.170 But similar to how proteins have several dimensions of structure that dictate their function, and
emergent properties that appear at higher levels of complexity, the DNA code by itself does not explain life, although the
popular Selfish Gene Hypothesis frames life and evolution as a competition between genes.171

Before humans began to alter “natural” evolution with selective breeding, genetic engineering, and the like, speciation has
been largely thought to be the result of populations becoming genetically isolated, primarily through geographic isolation,
and isolated populations continue to evolve and adapt to their environments. Eventually, the separated populations
become separate species. Even defining what a species is is still controversial, but the general concept is that if two
sexually reproducing organisms can breed and produce fertile offspring, they are of the same species. In light of
evolutionary theory, human races are simply genetically isolated populations that have evolved as they adapted to their
environments, but all races can interbreed, so humanity is a single species. Recent DNA studies suggest that white skin
is an evolutionary adaptation to northern climates, and white skin may be only six thousand years old, and blue eyes and
light hair are similarly new and developed in the same vicinity.172 As Europe’s conquest of the world and subsequent
Industrial Revolution have ended a great deal of genetic isolation, the adaptive differences seen in the races have been
gradually disappearing as multiracial offspring have increased. If humanity attains the FE epoch, “race” will disappear
along with geographic isolation.

Liebig’s Law states that life can only grow as fast as its scarcest nutrient, and nutrient availability is clearly the limiting
factor in many ecological situations. In the oceans today, most marine life lives near land (99% of the global fish catch is
caught near land), as nutrient runoffs from land feed oceanic ecosystems. The runoff is seasonal and so is the fish catch,
the deposition of marine sediments, and the like. Nitrogen and phosphorus are two particularly critical nutrients; blooms
and die-offs are based on those elements’ availability. In the industrial age, with phosphorus and nitrogen artificially
added in agriculture, the runoff has created great algal blooms (which create hypoxic “dead zones”) and other events, and
even artificially introduced carbon is a suspected variable.

Since the most dramatic instances of speciation seem to have happened in the aftermath of mass extinctions, this essay
will survey extinction first. A corollary to Liebig’s Law is that if any critical nutrient falls low enough, the nutrient deficiency
will not only limit growth, but the organism will be stressed. If the nutrient level falls far enough, the organism will die. A
human can generally survive between one and two months without food, ten days without water, and about three minutes
without oxygen. For nearly all animals, all the food and water in the world are meaningless without oxygen. Some
microbes can switch between aerobic respiration and fermentation, depending on the environment (which might be a very
old talent173), but complex life generally does not have that ability; nearly all aerobic complex life is oxygen dependent.
The only exceptions are marine life which has adapted to varying levels of oxygen. Birds can go where mammals cannot,
flying over the Himalayas, for instance, or being sucked into a jet engine at several kilometers above sea level, due to
their superior respiration system. If oxygen levels rise or fall very fast, many organisms will not be able to adapt, and will
die.

Biologists consider extinctions to be due to failure to adapt to environmental changes, and the “environment” includes
other organisms.174 Exactly how species go extinct is still poorly understood, but the idea that organisms that capture the
most energy win the battle for survival is a common understanding among biologists, and they see ecosystems organized
along the position in the food chain that each organism occupies. A popular model used for analyzing predator-prey
relationships makes the relationship explicit. There are many interacting variables, including those environmental
nutrients, both inorganic and those provided by life forms. The ability of an organism or species to adapt is partly
dependent on how specialized it is and how unique its habitat is. Absolute numbers, geographic distribution, position in
the food chain (higher in the food chain is riskier), mobility, and reproductive rates all impact extinction risk. During the
Cambrian Period, about 80% of all animals were immobile. Today, 80% of all animals are mobile.175 The immobile
animals were at higher extinction risk, for obvious reasons.

The evolutionary game for a species is for enough of its members to survive long enough to produce viable offspring.
Organisms have adopted myriad survival and reproduction strategies, with astonishing diversity. There are many ways to
win or lose that game, but every species eventually loses. More than 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on Earth
became extinct. A mammalian species has a life expectancy of around a million years, while a marine invertebrate
species has one of about five-to-ten million years. Today’s global extinction rate is more than 100 times the “normal” rate
(“background rate”), and perhaps far greater, such as 10,000 times, due to human domination of the ecosphere. The
current rates could rival and equal the rates during the greatest mass extinction of all: the Permian extinction.176

There are “normal” extinction scenarios, and the “happy ending” extinction is when a species lives, evolves, and there
comes a time when it would no longer be able to produce viable offspring by breeding with its ancestors. There obviously
would not be a “bright-line” demarcation for such an event, or any way to currently test such an event, but it has happened
countless times. Another normal extinction begins when a species splits into isolated populations, such as by tectonic
plates moving away from each other. Old World and New World monkeys became separated when monkeys from Africa
migrated to South America, before the Atlantic Ocean grew to its present size. Isolated populations of a species would
continue to evolve and eventually could no longer interbreed, which made them different species by definition, and
perhaps neither population could breed with its ancestors at the time the populations became separated. Both
populations might continue to thrive, but one might find itself in unfavorable conditions and go extinct while the other
continued living. If those isolated populations were still the same species, the population that went extinct would be called
locally extinct, but if they were separate species, then the disappearing population would be a species extinction.

Often, a species will not become extinct but its population will be reduced to small number, called a “bottleneck,” usually in
refugia where they can ride out the storm, to have their population expand again when conditions improve. That isolation
can cause speciation but can also cause extinction. When a bottleneck happens, the genetic diversity of the population
will largely vanish, which can make it more vulnerable. A bottlenecked population can go extinct, can speciate, can
undergo an adaptive radiation when conditions improve, or can remain in its refugia and can become a living fossil. The
coelacanth is a living fossil that found and remained in such refugia, as it outlived all of its cousins by hundreds of millions
of years. Coelacanths have a similar strategy to the nautilus, which spends most of its time in its deep-water refugia, to
rise at night to feed on the reefs, and all of its cousins long ago went extinct. Humans seem to have gone through a
bottleneck, as have many other animals alive today, most of which are in threatened status today. In the Devonian
extinctions, armored fish species were reduced by half during the first extinction event and the remaining population
became bottlenecked. From that bottlenecked situation, the second Devonian extinction event annihilated the remaining
armored fish.

Scientists often measure extinction rates at the family and genus levels of the taxonomy; families and genera are far
harder to kill off than species. Some genera/families beat the odds and survived for hundreds of millions of years. They
are called living fossils, and usually all of their close relatives went extinct long ago. The ubiquitous and lowly horsetail is
a living fossil that first appeared nearly 400 mya. There have been recent calls to retire the "living fossil" designation, as
the survivors of their lines have evolved somewhat over the years. However, it was not all that much, as they were very
recognizable decedents of nearly identical-looking ancestors, and if those "living fossils" were graphically represented on
the tree of life, they might instead be called the last leaves on their branch. Perhaps "sole survivor" conveys the meaning
better. However scientists want to term it, the fact is that those "living fossils" have an ancient lineage, have not
appreciably changed in millions of years, and the large "family" that they descended from all went extinct; their branch is
bare except for them. The survivors evolved since their close relatives died out, but there is nothing close to them on their
branch of the tree of life.
Some kinds of organisms found great success with their strategies and they marginalized other kinds and even drove
them to extinction, to only die off themselves in a mass extinction event, and the previously marginalized life forms
flourished in the post-catastrophic biome. The rise of mammals might have never happened without the dinosaurs’
demise. Mass extinction events account for less than five percent of all species extinctions during the eon of complex life,
but they had a profound impact on complex life’s history; the rise of mammals is only one of many radical changes. Not
only would a class of animals such as mammals thrive when their dinosaur overlords were gone, but the direction of
mammal evolution was also influenced. It took millions of years, even tens of millions of years, for ecosystems to
approach their former level of abundance and diversity after a mass extinction event, and the new biomes could appear
radically different from the pre-extinction biome. The geologic periods in the eon of complex life usually have mass
extinctions marking their boundaries.

Many assemblages of organisms had their “golden ages” in fresh biomes, then to cycle through a plateau, decline, and
then finally suffer marginalization or extinction. Sometimes the decline was relatively slow, with its ups and downs, and at
other times it could be over in a flash, such as the dinosaurs’ exit.

The extinction of Ediacaran fauna was the first mass extinction of organisms that could be seen with the naked human
eye. There was an extinction of microscopic eukaryotes soon before the eon of complex life began, and there may have
been mass extinctions of microbes before then, but the evidence is so thin for anything before then that scientists may
never know just how many mass extinctions there were. However, bacteria and archaea, those biochemical wizards, can
exist in environments far too harsh for complex life and those communities do not have the apparent instability of complex
life’s food chains, so there may have been few mass extinctions in Precambrian times. Cyanobacteria have not
fundamentally changed in billions of years, which means that its mode of living has always worked well enough to ensure
its survival. No animals have anything close to such a lengthy pedigree.

Mass extinctions always have critical geophysical aspects to them, and often geochemical. Continental shelves under
shallow seas, which are home to most marine life, are vulnerable to sea level and oceanic current changes. Stagnant
waters, or waters that have too many nutrients dumped into them, can lose their oxygen, which triggers anoxic events that
kill complex life. A continental shelf exposed to the atmosphere by a falling sea level would obviously lose its marine life,
and that marine life might have had nowhere else to go. Sea levels can rise or fall for different reasons. The most
obvious reason has been advancing and retreating ice sheets, as water is removed from or added to the oceans, but the
aggregate continental landmass has always grown (possibly sporadically), continents can rise and can fall during the
journeys of their tectonic plates, and the ocean’s collective basin has fluctuated in size, usually falling as water was
hydrated into rocks, and also falling when tectonic plates collide to form supercontinents and rising again as they
fragmented. Generally, when sea levels fell, the continental shelves lost their marine life, and when they rose, anoxic
conditions often accompanied them. There is evidence that the ozone layer has been periodically damaged, which
stressed all plants and animals that the Sun directly shined on.177 The positions of the continents, both in relation to each
other and their proximity to the equator or poles, can have dramatic effects, including impacts on global climate. Global
climate changes and moving continents can turn rainforests into deserts and vice versa.

There is also evidence that life itself can contribute to mass extinctions. When the GOE eventually oxygenated the
oceans, organisms that could not survive or thrive around oxygen (called obligate anaerobes) retreated to the anoxic
margins of the global ocean and land. When anoxic conditions appeared, particularly when Canfield Ocean existed, the
anaerobes could abound once again, and when sulfate-reducing bacteria thrived, usually arising from ocean sediments,
they produced hydrogen sulfide as a waste product. Since the ocean floor had already become anoxic, the seafloor was
already a dead zone, so little harm was done there. The hydrogen sulfide became lethal when it rose in the water column
and killed off surface life and then wafted into the air and asphyxiated life near shore. But the greatest harm to life may
have been inflicted when hydrogen sulfide eventually rose to the ozone layer and damaged it, which could have been the
final blow to an already stressed ecosphere. That may seem a fanciful scenario, but there is evidence for it. There is
fossil evidence of ultraviolet-light-damaged photosynthesizers during the Permian extinction, as well as photosynthesizing
anaerobic bacteria (green and purple), which could have only thrived in sulfide-rich anoxic surface waters. Peter Ward
made this key evidence for his Medea hypothesis, and he has implicated hydrogen sulfide events in most major mass
extinctions.178 An important aspect of Ward’s Medea hypothesis work is that about 1,000 PPM of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, which might be reached in this century if we keep burning fossil fuels, may artificially induce Canfield Oceans
and result in hydrogen sulfide events.179 Those are not wild-eyed doomsday speculations, but logical outcomes of current
trends and growing understanding of previous catastrophes, proposed by leading scientists. Hundreds of hypoxic dead
zones already exist on Earth, which are primarily manmade. Even if those events are “only” 10% likely to happen in the
next century, that we are flirting with them at all should make us shudder, for a few reasons, one of which is the awesome
damage that it would inflict on the biosphere, including humanity, and another is that it is entirely preventable with the use
of technologies that already exist on the planet.

Mass extinction events can seem quite capricious as to what species live or die. Ammonoids generally outcompeted their
ancestral nautiloids for hundreds of millions of years. Ammonoids were lightweight versions of nautiloids, and they often
thrived in shallow waters while nautiloids were banished to deep waters. Both dwindled over time, as they were
outcompeted by new kinds of marine denizens. In the Permian and Triassic mass extinctions, deep-water animals
generally suffered more than surface dwellers did, but the nautiloids’ superior respiration system still saw them survive.
Also, nautiloids laid relatively few eggs that took about a year to hatch, while ammonoids laid more eggs that hatched
faster. However, the asteroid-induced Cretaceous mass extinction annihilated nearly all surface life while the deep-water
animals fared better, and nautiloid embryos that rode out the storm in their eggs were survivors. The Cretaceous
extinction wiped out the remaining ammonoids while nautiloids are still with us and comprise another group of living
fossils, although that status is disputed in 2014.180 Lystrosaurus was about the only land animal of significance that
survived the Permian extinction and it dominated the early Triassic landmass as no animal ever has. It comprised about
95% of all land animals. Why Lystrosaurus, which was like a reptilian sheep? Nobody knows for sure, but it may have
been the luck of the draw.181 Perhaps relatively few bedraggled individuals existed in some survival enclave until the
catastrophe was finished, and then they quickly bred unimpeded until the supercontinent was full, for the most spectacular
species radiation of all time, at least until humans arrived on the evolutionary scene.

Many causes for mass extinctions have been suggested. Cuvier speculated that extinctions might have regular
periodicity, and other scientists have proposed that hypothesis. Around 30 million years is the average time between
mass extinctions, which set scientists speculating whether galactic dynamics could be responsible. Gamma ray bursts
from supernovas have been proposed as one possible agent, as have bolide events, but the periodicity hypothesis has
fallen out of favor.182 The periodic nature of mass extinctions could be because it takes millions of years for complex
ecosystems to recover from the previous extinction events and build themselves into unstable states again, when new
events cause the ecosystems to collapse.183

Before the era of mass extinction investigation that began in the 1980s, a hundred hypotheses were presented in the
scientific literature for the dinosaur extinction, but it was a kind of scientific parlor game. Scientists from all manner of
specialties concocted their hypotheses.184 But even during the current era of scientific study of mass extinctions, much is
unknown or controversial and even the data is in dispute, let alone its interpretation. Dynamics may have conflated to
produce catastrophic effects, such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration warming the land and oceans
to the extent that otherwise stable methane in hydrates on the ocean floor and in permafrost would be liberated and
escape into the atmosphere. That situation is currently suspected to have contributed to the Permian, Triassic, and
Paleocene-Eocene extinctions, as well as helping end the Cryogenian Ice Age. Today, there is genuine fear among
climate scientists that those dynamics might return in the near future, as global warming continues and hydrocarbons are
burned with abandon, which could contribute to catastrophic runaway conditions. Wise scientists admit that humanity is
currently conducting a huge chemistry experiment with Earth, and while the outcomes are far from certain, the risk of
catastrophic outcomes is very real and growing.

Recent environmental studies show that disturbed ecosystems can have cascading failures, as the removal of one part of
a food chain can collapse the entire chain in cascading failures, and entire ecosystems can go extinct. Cascades in
today's world usually begin when the apex predator is removed (by humans, and called a trophic cascade185), but not
always. Those cascading events can happen in aquatic and terrestrial environments. Food chains are essentially energy
chains made possible by aerobic respiration, and the more complex they are, the more energy is required to sustain them.
The leading hypothesis for why complex civilizations collapse is also an energy-scarcity dynamic. Also, the most
compelling findings that I have encountered regarding degenerative disease in humans shows that if individual cells no
longer have their nutritional needs met by the organism, they stop acting out their role as specialized cells and “go rogue.”
It may be difficult-to-impossible for scientists to reconstruct and test cascading failure hypotheses in ancient mass
extinction events, but they may have played a major role in them, if not the dominant role.

Mass extinction events may be the result of multiple ecosystem stresses that reach the level where the ecosystem
unravels. Other than the meteor impact that destroyed the dinosaurs, the rest of the mass extinctions seem to have
multiple contributing causes, and each one ultimately had an energy impact on life processes. The processes can be
complex and scientists are only beginning to understand them. This essay will survey mass extinction events and their
aftermaths in some detail, as they were critical junctures in the journey of life on Earth.

In 1972, Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould published their theory of punctuated equilibrium, which has generated
plenty of controversy. The basic idea is that species usually evolve slowly and even remain in a kind of stasis, except in
exceptional times, when they can evolve relatively quickly. Those exceptional times are often when new ecological niches
become available, such as a new biological feature that allows exploitation of previously unavailable niches, or after an
ecosystem is wiped clean by a mass extinction. If a creature finds a way of life that works and it can keep
exploiting/defending its unique niche, and the niche does not disappear, it can keep doing it for hundreds of millions of
years without any significant changes, such as the horsetail, nautilus, and coelacanth have done.186

Gene duplication is an important kind of genetic innovation that leads to speciation, which begins when a gene is
duplicated, seemingly in error, and gets a “free ride,” like a spare part that never gets used. The spare can then
“experiment,” which can lead to a new and useful gene that perhaps codes for a new biological feature that enhances an
organism’s ability to survive or reproduce. About 15% of humanity‘s genes arose through gene duplication events, and in
eukaryotes, gene duplication is around 1% per gene per million years.187 In the wake of mass extinctions, new species
appear at high rates in what is called an adaptive radiation. A leading hypothesis is that those post-extinction times allow
for a golden age when life is easy, without the resource competition typical in more crowded biomes. In such
environments, organisms with duplicate genes and other genetic “defects” survive, and after long enough, those
mutations become useful and lead to new species. The most famous such adaptive radiation was the Cambrian
Explosion, although its character was different from other radiations, when new body plans were invented as never
before.188

Oxygen levels have fluctuated far more than temperature, ocean salinity, and pH have during the eon of complex life.
Peter Ward proposed that fluctuating atmospheric oxygen levels have not only contributed to mass extinction scenarios,
but adapting to low oxygen levels has been a key stimulus for biological innovation.189 In summary, speciation is a
reaction of organisms to challenge and opportunity which is eventually reflected in their DNA.

The Cambrian Explosion

Timeline of Key Biological Innovations in the Eon of Complex Life

Event Date
First bilaterally symmetric animals appear c. 585-555 mya
The Cambrian Explosion c. 541 mya
Eyes develop c. 540 mya
First animals with specialized organs are c. 540 mya
probably worms
Arthropods appear c. 540 mya
Mollusks appear c. 540 mya
Teeth appear c. 540-530 mya
Vertebrates appear c. 530-525 mya
Fish appear c. 530-525 mya
Reef ecosystems appear c. 513 mya
Land plants appear c. 470 mya
Land animals appear c. 430-420 mya
Jaws appear c. 420 mya
Bony fish appear c. 420 mya
Vascular plants appear c. 410 mya
Trees appear c. 385 mya
Fish migrate to land c. 375 mya
Seed-reproducing plants appear c. 375 mya
Amphibians appear c. 365 mya
Amniotes appear c. 320-310 mya
Lignin-digesting organism appears c. 290 mya
Dinosaurs appear c. 243 mya
Mammals appear c. 225 mya
Birds appear c. 160 mya
Flowering plants appear c. 160 mya
Placental mammals appear c. 160 mya
Primates appear c. 85-65 mya
Marsupials appear c. 65 mya
Rodents appear c. 65 mya
Elephants appear c. 60 mya
Rhinoceroses appear c. 55 mya
Horses appear c. 52 mya
Camels appear c. 50 mya
Monkeys appear c. 45-40 mya
Whales appear c. 41 mya
Bears appear c. 38 mya
Apes appear c. 35-29 mya
Deer appear c. 35-30 mya
Canines appear c. 34 mya
 C4 plants appear c. 32-25 mya
Felines appear c. 25 mya
Kelp appears c. 20 mya
Great apes appear c. 14 mya
Stone tool created c. 3.4-3.3 mya

Global temperatures during the eon of complex life (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Global carbon dioxide concentrations during the eon of complex life (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
World map when Cambrian Period began (c. 540 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)
Chapter summary:
 Development of the first complex ecosystem
 Causes of the Cambrian Explosion
 First recognizable animals were probably worms
 Beginning and the end of the development of body plans (phyla), and why
 Development of organs and body systems
  Key genes in body development (HOX, PAX6)
 Advantages of size
 Key fossil beds (Burgess Shale, China)
 Rise of arthropods
 Mid-Cambrian mass extinction
 Role of oxygen
 Dual use of body features in evolution
 Late-Cambrian mass extinction
 Balance between efficiency and resilience
 Energy issues in ecological niches
 End-Cambrian mass extinction

Until Ediacaran fossils were recognized for what they were, the Cambrian Period (c. 541 to 485 mya) was considered to
have produced the earliest known fossils, and that situation vexed scientists from Darwin onward.190 If animals just came
into existence from nothing, the Creationist arguments of Darwin’s time may have had some validity. Darwin attributed
the lack of Precambrian fossils to the geological record’s imperfection. As this essay’s previous sections have shown,
scientists have filled many gaps and Darwin’s theory has held up well.

The Cambrian Period, however, is of eonic significance and still a source of great controversy. The Cambrian Explosion
was unique and the development of the first complex, modern-looking ecosystem.191 Although the Cambrian Explosion is
the most spectacular event in the fossil record, it is questioned whether it was really an explosion at all, and many
contenders for the “cause” of the explosion have been offered. Various hypotheses fell by the wayside over the years, but
the hunt for one “cause” may be futile. One factor may have triggered its more dramatic manifestations, but several
dynamics played their roles. There are going to be proximate and ultimate causes for events such as that. First and
foremost, the Cambrian Explosion was about size, which was aided by oxygenating the seafloor, which interacted with
developmental changes (from egg to adult) and new ecological relationships.192 The currently predominant hypotheses
feature geophysical and geochemical processes interacting with biological ones.193 The increase in organism size that
marked the rise of complex life is today thought to be a response to predation, which led to life’s “arms race.”194 The
competition between organisms, locked in predator/prey, parasite/host, grazer/grazed dynamics, is thought to be behind a
great deal of evolutionary innovation called coevolution, as organisms adapted to each other. The Red Queen hypothesis
posits that the constant battle between those competing life forms led to sexual reproduction and other innovations.195

During the Cambrian Explosion, an ecosystem developed in which life on the sea floor, surface, and water column all
interacted for the first time. All but one of the environmental factors currently and prominently considered were energy
dynamics, as the environment provided either too much or too little energy, and the nutrient hypothesis (calcium in this
case) will be revisited numerous times in this essay. A lack of nutrients, mineral and otherwise, always meant that the
energy-driven dynamics that delivered the nutrients were curtailed. If enough energy is properly applied, all nutrients can
be abundant.

Before the rise of humanity and industrial agriculture, the interplay of life, climate, and land masses created the seasonal
runoffs that fed oceanic ecosystems. However, during the Cambrian Explosion the land was largely barren, as life had yet
to significantly invade land. Also, continental shelves have always been key hosts for oceanic ecosystems, as sunlight
could reach the seafloor and nutrients were closer to the surface. When supercontinents broke apart or formed as the
tectonic plates danced across Earth’s crust, shallow seas were often created, which were usually quite life-friendly. Those
ancient shallow seas and swampy continental margins have great importance to today’s humanity, as our fossil fuels were
usually created there. Earth’s coal beds were created in swampy floodplain conditions, usually near coasts, and the oil
deposits were created by black shale and marlstone that formed in shallow anoxic waters. The Tethys Ocean and its
predecessors (1, 2) had a half-billion-year history that began in the Ediacaran, and the Tethys finally disappeared less
than 20 mya. The shallow margins of those tropical oceans, and the anoxic events that dotted the eon of complex life,
formed most of today’s oil deposits, and particularly Middle East oil. Numerous shallow tropical seas characterized the
Cambrian Period.

The first skeletons appeared in the Ediacaran, and Cambrian Period skeletons became a key aspect of the coming arms
race between predator and prey. Food chains appeared in which about ten percent of an organism’s energy was
transferred to the animal that ate it. Unlike the internal skeletons that characterized fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals, the first skeletons were external. Hard shells protected from predation, and the bigger the animal, the more
likely it would survive (but a bigger animal also meant a bigger energy windfall if it could be eaten). But size presented
immense challenges. Similar to how complex cells needed to solve the energy generation and distribution problem before
they could grow, increasing size presented numerous problems to early complex life. How could a large organism supply
energy and other nutrients to its cells? Remove waste? Move? Life solved the problems by making structures and
organs from specialized cells. By the Cambrian Period’s end, animals had developed skeletons, gills, muscles, brains,
circulatory systems, digestive and eliminative systems, nervous systems, respiratory systems, and internal organs which
included eyes, livers, kidneys, etc.

Just as the aftermath of the appearance of complex life was uninteresting from a biochemical perspective, as the
amazingly diverse energy-generation strategies of archaea and bacteria were almost totally abandoned in favor of aerobic
respiration, biological solutions to the problems that complex life presented were greatest during the Cambrian Explosion,
and everything transpiring since then has been relatively insignificant. Animals would never see that level of innovation
again. While investigating those eonic changes, many scientists have realized that the dynamics of those times might
have been quite different from today’s, as once again Lyell’s uniformitarianism may be of limited use for explaining what
happened.196 Also, scientists generally use a rule-of-thumb called Occam’s Razor, or parsimony, which states that with all
else being equal, simpler theories are preferred. Karl Popper, a seminal theorist regarding the scientific method, preferred
simpler theories as they were easier to falsify. However, this issue presents many problems, and in recent times, theories
of mass extinction or speciation have invoked numerous interacting dynamics. Einstein noted that the more elegant and
impressive the math used to support a theory, the less likely the theory depicted reality. Occam’s Razor has also become
an unfortunate dogma in various circles, particularly organized skepticism, in which the assumptions of materialism and
establishment science are defended, and often quite irrationally. Simplicity and complexity have been seesawing over the
course of scientific history as fundamental principles. The recent trend toward multidisciplinary syntheses has been
generally making hypotheses more complex and difficult to test, although scientists’ improving toolset and ever-increasing
and more precise data makes the task more feasible than ever, at least situations in which vested interests are not
interfering.

Phyla consist of body plans, which scientists have used to classify all life forms, and all significant animal phyla had
appeared by the Cambrian Period’s end.197 The Cambrian Explosion has been difficult to explain and there is still great
controversy and many unanswered questions, and it has also been difficult to explain why significant change stopped
after the explosion. Once the basic body plans appeared and biomes were filled, new plans never appeared again. Why
did all fundamental change stop? The emerging view is the same for why complex life went all in with aerobic respiration
and never changed since then. Not only could innovation confer great benefits, but once that path was embarked on,
further travel along the developmental path made it continually less feasible to backtrack, start over, and take another
path, or choose a fundamentally different path. The history of life’s choices was reflected in organisms in several ways,
and the source of that inertia began to be understood when biology and chemistry at the cellular and subcellular levels
were investigated, particularly after DNA was sequenced and studied. The fact that Hox genes have not significantly
changed in several hundred million years points to the issue. Hox genes have not changed because they control key
developmental steps in embryonic development. Not only do Hox genes work, there are no practical ways to significantly
change them, as they lay the animal’s structural foundation. Hox genes are called regulatory genes, and the nature of
gene regulatory networks seems to be why animals have not fundamentally changed since the Cambrian Explosion. 198

Imagine a family having a custom home built and, after it was built, they decided that they wanted a basement, four extra
stories, central gas heating rather than baseboard electric heating, and a swimming pool on the third floor. It would not be
feasible to renovate the home to give it those new features, especially if the family was already living in it. They would
need to build a new house from scratch, with a new foundation, and they would have to find a temporary home during the
construction period. But an animal has to live in its body all the time. There is no way to redesign and rebuild an animal’s
foundation while it lives in its body, and the biological superstructure built on the foundation was designed for that
foundation. A new superstructure would also have to be designed and built on the new foundation. A six-chambered
heart, for instance, could not just be invented and put into a human chest and work, or a second brain, or a third arm. The
kinds of changes that are feasible have to adhere to the basic structural and biochemical foundations that the phyla
represent.

Once animals arrived on the evolutionary scene and filled most possible niches, new biological foundations could not be
built, with superstructures built atop them, and hope to compete for resources that were already being consumed in the
food chains. Developing the original animal body plans took millions of years. There were many other possible body
plans that could have been developed in the early days of animals, which might have worked wonderfully, but those
chosen ones worked well enough for survival and reproduction, and once chosen, there was no going back. There really
could not be, unless all animal life was wiped out and protists could start over, as they are the last common ancestors of
animals (and eliminating all animal life would lead to great plant extinctions for starters, such as flowering plants). The
biological commitments to those basic modes of existence had their own inertia, and it starts at the root, with the DNA.

The primary unit of taxonomic organization is a clade, which consists of a single ancestor and all of its descendants. The
study of body features has been augmented by recent findings in molecular biology. Many organisms have had their
cladistic classification changed, and many more will in the future.199 Many common features among diverse organisms
are due to convergent evolution and not ancestry, as organisms independently developed similar solutions to life’s
challenges.

Ediacaran traces show that some animals were mobile before the Cambrian Explosion. Sponges were probably the first
animals, but they were immobile except for their flagella drawing water through them, which carried food and oxygen in
and waste out. The first creatures that we would recognize as animals were probably worms crawling atop ocean
sediments. As lowly as the worm might seem, it would have needed muscles, bilateral symmetry, a circulatory and
digestive/excretory system, and a nervous system run by a brain; that distant ancestor probably possessed Earth’s first
brain.200 Some early worms may have even had rudimentary eyes. And of possibly eonic importance, worms probably
made the first poop. The evolution of feces-producing animals may have been a seminal event in the organic carbon
burial process. Sponges may have also been largely responsible for initially removing oceanic carbon, which helped
increase atmospheric oxygen and helped ventilate the oceans.201 Until then, organic carbon from dead life forms would
not have settled to the ocean floor, but would have floated in the water column and been recycled by other life forms.
Although the hypothesis is considered marginally valid today, feces sinking to the ocean floor may have been how life’s
burial of carbon began, as well as robbing sulfate-reducing bacteria in the water column of their nutrients and thus
enabling oceanic waters to remain oxygenated.202 Ediacaran fauna did not burrow into ocean sediments, but deep
burrowing was characteristic of Cambrian sediments. There is debate today whether Cambrian burrowing was a
consequence or cause of oxygenating the ocean floor.

As with those small worms that crawled along and burrowed into the newly oxygenated seafloor (or helped oxygenate it),
many small animals with shells and mineralized parts appeared in the late Ediacaran, and a misnomer was coined to
account for them termed small shelly fauna. Those small animals also thrived in the Cambrian, and many of them were
ancestors to their larger descendants, which showed more intermediate steps in the “explosion.”203

The Cambrian Explosion’s iconic animal was the trilobite. As a child, I read every paleontology text in my elementary
school’s library, and I have fond memories of imagining trilobite lives. Was there love among the trilobites? Among the
protists? The bacteria? To a scientist, those questions might be unanswerable and even meaningless, but a mystic might
pursue them. I will not wax too mystically in this essay (I do it elsewhere), but that may well be the big question of life on
Earth and an enduring mystery to humanity. The nature of consciousness and love in the Cambrian, or the lack thereof,
as much as it may always be a mystery, does not invalidate life’s arc through the evolutionary process; it only challenges
materialism.

Creationist critiques of the evolutionary corpus, which all-too-often attempt to portray the Book of Genesis as literally true,
often use the eye as evidence of their Creationist notions. The eye is too complex and function-specific to be some kind
of evolutionary development, so goes Creationist reasoning. Even Darwin confessed to the problems that eyes posed for
his theory of natural selection, stating that the notion of eyes' being the product of natural selection seems “absurd.”204
However, the evolutionary path to the fully developed eye appears pretty clear to today’s scientists.205 Below is the
current conception of the evolutionary path of eyes. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Eyes began with pigments such as chlorophyll that captured photons that initiated electrical impulses through chemical
cycles in a new kind of specialized cell: the nerve cell. Neurons are energy hogs and “high-tension electric lines” in
animals. Human brain tissue uses ten times the energy that non-organ tissues elsewhere in the body do. The first eyes
probably only detected light, and perhaps even infrared light, so that organisms could remain the proper distance from life-
giving/destroying volcanic vents, for instance. Hydrothermal vent shrimp today have such infrared sensors, which can be
likened to naked retinas.206 The development of an eye with a lens was not a great evolutionary leap from rudimentary
eyes, and a recent calculation shows how eyes with lenses could have developed from scratch in about a half-million
years of evolution.207 Protozoa may have had the first precursors to eyes. Once the eye evolved, its benefit was
overwhelmingly obvious, and virtually all animals that live where vision would help them have eyes. Animals that adopted
subterranean existences have lost their vision and even their eyes. It is thought today that the development of eyes was a
key innovation in the arms race that would soon characterize the eon of animals, and might have even triggered it. The
Pax6 gene is common to all animals with eyes. As with those other early life events, that gene supports the widely
accepted idea that vision evolved only once.208 The purpose of all senses is to detect environmental information, which is
in turn processed by the brain. Even brainless plants can detect light and modify their behavior, such as plants turning
and growing toward sunlight.

The first brains are considered to have appeared with early mobile animals, which were probably worms, but precursors to
nervous systems exist in unicellular eukaryotes. Experiments were performed long ago that showed that flatworms can
learn. Animal behavior began with protists, and protozoans have numerous behaviors, from predation and parasitism to
defensive activities. Even materialist philosophers have argued that atoms possess consciousness.209 If a worm can
learn, it would seem to have consciousness of a sort. Perhaps it is not as complex as mine or yours, but it surely seems
to be consciousness. Worms have brains and can learn.

The Cambrian Explosion marked the rise of arthropods, which may be the most successful animal body plan ever, which
accounts for more than 80% of all animal species today. Arthropods such as the trilobite left spectacular fossils, and were
once thought to dominate the Cambrian Period, but in 1909 the Burgess Shale was discovered; it is one of the world’s
most famous fossil beds. The Burgess Shale preserved the soft parts of Cambrian organisms, which is very rare, and
interest was renewed in the Burgess Shale in the 1960s, as the unique fossils coming from them began to be appreciated.
Mining the Burgess Shale for fossils will continue for the foreseeable future, and new and important findings are expected.
Recent finds in China and elsewhere have greatly improved scientific understanding of the Cambrian Explosion.
Grazing and predation far predated the Cambrian Explosion, and it took on new forms as animals became large.
Trilobites, for instance, rolled up like pill bugs to protect themselves from predators, and trilobites could be predators
themselves. The Burgess Shale produced the first complete fossil of Anomalocaris, which is a cousin of the bizarre-
looking Opabinia, and Anomalocaris probably was the Cambrian Period’s apex predator, and Chinese specimens reached
up to two meters in length; it was the leviathan of its time. It is controversial whether Anomalocaris could have preyed
upon armored arthropods or shellfish, as its mouth may have been unsuited for it. But it might have grabbed trilobites and
torn them apart, which may have led to their pill-bug defensive strategy.

An important evolutionary principle is organisms' developing a new feature for one purpose and then using that feature for
other purposes as the opportunity arose. As complex life evolved in the newly oxygenated seafloors, several immediate
survival needs had to be addressed. To revisit the hierarchy of nutrients that a human needs, if an oxygen-dependent
animal did not have access to oxygen, it meant immediate death. Obtaining oxygen would have been the salient
requirement for early complex life that adopted aerobic respiration as its primary respiration process, which is how nearly
all animals today respire. While animals in low-oxygen environments have adapted to other ways of respiring (or perhaps
never relinquished them in the first place), they are all sluggish creatures and would have quickly lost in the coming arms
race. Collagen, which is a critical connective tissue in animals, requires oxygen for its synthesis, and was one of
numerous oxygen-dependencies that animals quickly adopted during the Cambrian Explosion.210

Diffusion works for animals that are no more than a couple of millimeters thick, but for larger animals a respiration system
was necessary. The rise of the arthropods has been an enduring problem for paleobiologists. Why was the arthropod so
successful, particularly in the beginning? Segmented animals dominated Cambrian seas, and segmentation provides for
repeated features. Segments obviously became important for locomotion but, for arthropods, segmentation appears to
have conferred the more important advantage of distributed oxygen absorption. Each trilobite leg had an attached gill,
and leg motion constantly drew fresh oxygenated water over each gill. Arthropods never developed the kinds of lungs
that vertebrates have, or the pump gills of fish and other aquatic animals. Early arthropods breathed by moving their legs.
Peter Ward’s recent hypothesis is that segments were first used for respiration, to provide a large gill surface area, and
using the segments for locomotion came later. For trilobites, the same functionality that pushed water over gills was also
coopted for food intake.211 Also, the leg-mounted gill was necessary because of an arthropod’s body armor; oxygen could
not be absorbed through tough exoskeletons.
Every aerobic aquatic animal had to solve the problem of extracting oxygen from the water, and there was diversity in that
accomplishment. Key Cambrian animals such as sponges and corals had very high-surface-area-to-body-volume ratios,
which allowed diffusion to provide their oxygen. Immobile animals such as sponges and coral had to position themselves
where oxygenated water flowed past or through them. Sponges work like chimneys, designed to passively draw water
through them. The position and structure of reefs facilitated those oxygen-providing dynamics, so corals helped create
the conditions that sustained them; the calcified exoskeletons of corals dissuaded predation and built the reefs.

The Cambrian’s global ocean contained far less oxygen than today’s. Being newly and probably inconsistently
oxygenated by oceanic currents was only part of the problem. The Cambrian oceans were warmer than today’s oceans,
o
perhaps far warmer, such as 40 C and higher for the tropical ones. Water’s ability to absorb oxygen declines as it gets
o o
warmer. Water heated from 10 C to 40 C will lose 40% of its ability to absorb oxygen. The phenomenon of warmer
water absorbing less oxygen contributed to many instances of anoxic waters during the eon of complex life, and
particularly in the warmer, earlier periods.

Members of another phylum, Brachiopoda, which superficially resemble clams, were successful in the Cambrian, but if
their shells are opened, they look very different inside. Inside the shell is mostly empty space, with ciliated tentacles that
perform a dual function of filtering food and absorbing oxygen.212 The cilia pump water through the shell and over the
tentacles, which allows such animals to be immobile.

Another winner in the Cambrian Period was the mollusk phylum, which today comprises nearly a quarter of all marine
animals. As with arthropods and corals, mollusks developed predation-defending armor, and their variation was shells.
Mollusks include the cephalopod, bivalve, and gastropod classes. Like brachiopods, mollusks developed “power gills,”
whereby they actively pumped water across their gills using cilia, and bivalves usually also use their gills to catch food.
One early class of mollusks, which may be the first mollusks, had the repeated gill structure of the trilobites, but their gills
lined the inside of their shells, which supports the idea that shells may have been developed for improving respiration first
and predation-protection second.213 There is even evidence that a gastropod-like animal might have lived on the
seashore about 510 mya and might have been the first animal to visit land.

But the most impressive dual-use innovation in mollusks is what cephalopods invented. Their gill pumps are quite
muscular and jets water over their gills. That jet also propels the animal. Jet propulsion is not an energy-efficient means
of transportation, but the cephalopod’s ability to pass oxygen-bearing water over its gills is unmatched. Cephalopods can
live in waters too hypoxic for fish to survive.214 In the coming Ordovician Period, cephalopods would be apex predators of
marine biomes and would hold that distinction for a long time. Cephalopods are today’s most intelligent invertebrates; the
octopus performs surprising feats of intelligence and it has the largest brain-to-body-size ratio of all invertebrates. It is
thought that the skills needed for predation stimulated cephalopodan intelligence. Today, the nautilus is the only survivor
of that lineage of Ordovician apex predators.

But the branch of the tree of life that readers might find most interesting led to humans. Humans are in the chordate
phylum, and the last common ancestor that founded the Chordata phylum is still a mystery and understandably a source
of controversy. Was our ancestor a fish? A sea squirt?215 Peter Ward made the case, as have others for a long time,
that it was the sea squirt, also called a tunicate, which in its larval stage resembles a fish. The nerve cord in most
bilaterally symmetric animals runs below the belly, not above it, and a sea squirt that never grew up may have been our
direct ancestor. Adult tunicates are also highly adapted to extracting oxygen from water, even too much so, with only
about 10% of today’s available oxygen extracted in tunicate respiration. It may mean that tunicates adapted to low
oxygen conditions early on. Ward’s respiration hypothesis, which makes the case that adapting to low oxygen conditions
was an evolutionary spur for animals, will repeatedly reappear in this essay, as will challenges to that hypothesis. Ward’s
hypothesis may be proven wrong or will not have the key influence that he attributes to it, but it also has plenty going for it.
The idea that fluctuating oxygen levels impacted animal evolution has been gaining support in recent years, particularly in
light of recent reconstructions of oxygen levels in the eon of complex life, called GEOCARBSULF and COPSE, which
have yielded broadly similar results, but their variances mean that much more work needs to be performed before
confidently placing oxygen levels on the geologic timescale can be done, if it ever can be.216 Ward’s basic hypotheses is
that when oxygen levels are high, ecosystems are diverse and life is an easy proposition; when oxygen levels are low,
animals adapted to high oxygen levels go extinct and the survivors are adapted to low oxygen with body plan changes,
and their adaptations helped them dominate after the extinctions.217 The chart used to support his hypothesis has a pretty
wide range of potential error, particularly in the early years, and it also tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The
challenges to the validity of a model based on data with such a wide range of error are understandable. But some broad
trends are unmistakable, as it is with other models, some of which are generally declining carbon dioxide levels, some
huge oxygen spikes, and the generally seesawing relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, which a
geochemist would expect. The high carbon dioxide level during the Cambrian, of at least 4,000 PPM (the "RCO2" in the
below graphic is a ratio of the calculated CO2 levels to today's levels), is what scientists think made the times so hot.218
(Permission: Peter Ward, June 2014)
As will be explored in this essay, all of the first four major mass extinctions of complex marine life have anoxia as a
suspected contributing cause, so oxygen is a major area of interest among extinction specialists. Whether oxygen levels
were also significant contributing causes of evolutionary innovation is another area of interest today. Again, the energy-
generating superiority of aerobic respiration led to food chains. Even if the first animals did not respire anaerobically, they
adapted to aerobic respiration early on and then became dependent on it. There would be no going back for animals; all
except those few adapted to hypoxic and anoxic environments went “all in” with aerobic respiration.

An irony of fossilization is that conditions hostile to life usually left the best-preserved fossils, because nothing disturbed
the sediments, which were anoxic and often sulfidic. In the sea sediments that mark the geologic periods, white limestone
and black shale are typical layers. Limestone means oxygenated oceans, and black shales and mudstones mean anoxic
conditions. The black color means reduced carbon, as the ecosystems could not recycle the carbon and it was instead
preserved into the sediments which have been the primary source of the oil and gas burned in today’s industrialized
world.

Supercontinents tend to result in Canfield Oceans and land near the poles could help initiate an ice age. For the coming
geologic periods, the configurations of the continents were critical variables for determining the ecosystems that existed,
whether there were anoxic oceans, greenhouse conditions, ice ages, extinction events, or adaptive radiations. Helpful
animations exist to make the configurations easier to visualize.

The Cambrian Explosion had several phases to it, with explosions of life and mass extinctions, and a general atmospheric
oxygen rise accompanied it. Anoxic conditions coincided with extinctions. Prokaryotes would not be that affected by what
complex life was doing (although anaerobes were generally driven underground and into the seafloor), but the rise of
complex life led to new ecosystems. Before the rise of animals, the seafloor was smooth and “stiff,” but burrowing
animals had profound impact on seafloor ecosystems and may have played a prominent role in creating the ecosystems
themselves. Corals created new ecosystems, as life terraformed Earth.

A recent study shows a more dramatic rise and fall during the Cambrian than the GEOCARBSULF model does, with
oxygen levels seesawing and doubling to around 30% in the Late Cambrian.219 Those varying levels coincide with
evolutionary radiations and extinctions, and questions are raised whether they were triggering causes or not. They may
have been related, and many of today’s specialists suspect that they played key causative roles.
Around 530 mya, the first brachiopods, reef-building animals, and fish appear in the fossil record, and trilobites first
appear in the fossil record about 521 mya, only a few million years before a mass extinction about 517 mya, which wiped
out those early reef-building organisms and nearly all of the small shelly fauna. As happened with Ediacaran fauna, those
early extinctions extinguished major portions of the ecosystems. With the rise of DNA studies, scientists are trying to
recover the tree of life’s lost portions, looking for “ghost ancestors,” which did not leave fossils that have been
discovered.220 This is a new area of study, with current findings quite speculative, but we can be confident that many
clades were born and went extinct, all the way up to the phylum level and maybe even higher, particularly in the
Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, without leaving a trace in today’s known fossil record. Specialists in these areas are
always calling for more fossil-hunting, analysis with new tools, and the like. At about 502 mya, another extinction event
wiped out about 40% of marine genera, probably triggered by anoxia.

The Middle Cambrian years were the Golden Age of Trilobites, when they reached peak dominance. It is thought that
they filled vacant niches in the wake of those early mass extinctions.221 The early corals went extinct and the rise of
demosponges followed it (those early corals are currently classified as sponges, although the issue is controversial222).
Sponge reefs dominated in later times, and sponges have perhaps been the most successful early animals and still thrive
today. Below is an artist's conception of the Cambrian seafloor. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
There is evidence that rising and falling sea levels, probably the result of a periodically growing and shrinking ice cap at
the South Pole (as the continent Gondwana was there), contributed to the radiations and extinctions that marked the
Cambrian. Trilobites went through several boom-and-bust phases in the Cambrian. Many extinctions were more local
than global, but at the end of the Cambrian, most trilobites went extinct and would never dominate again. They survived
until the greatest mass extinction of all, the Permian extinction, and then disappeared from Earth, at least until the rise of
paleontology and reconstructions to fascinate children and adults. The leading hypothesis is that rising seas caused
anoxia and led to the end-Cambrian extinctions at about 485 mya.223 That this may have coincided with a rise in
atmospheric oxygen is not necessarily contradictory; all the oxygen in the world will be useless to deep-ocean and
seafloor life if there are not mechanisms, primarily currents, to introduce atmospheric gases into the oceans. Surface life
can thrive in high-oxygen conditions while the seafloor dies from lack of oxygen, especially when the surface rises farther
above the seafloor. Oxygenation and anoxia during the Cambrian may well have been sporadic and regional, and
research to unravel the dynamics is ongoing.224 If the evidence was better, the Cambrian extinction could rank among the
Big Five, but we may never know.225 The older the fossils, the less likely they will survive subsequent geological
processes. Cambrian fossil beds discovered so far are uncharacteristically rich, and the next period, the Ordovician, is
relatively impoverished. It is suspected that unique geological and fossil-preservation processes led to the Cambrian’s
gold mine of fossils.

In summary, the deadly waltz of predator and prey characterized the Cambrian, and complex ecosystems were born.
Again, from a biochemical and morphological perspective, all events since the Cambrian have been relatively insignificant,
but are still fascinating and led to the bipedal ape writing these words.

It can be helpful at this juncture to grasp the cumulative impact of life's forming by harnessing energy gradients, inventing
enzymes, inventing photosynthesis, inventing distributed energy generation centers that made complex cells possible,
and inventing aerobic respiration. Pound-for-pound, the complex organisms that began to dominate Earth’s ecosphere
during the Cambrian Period consumed energy about 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produced it.226 Life on Earth is an
incredibly energy-intensive phenomenon, powered by sunlight. In the end, only so much sunlight reaches Earth, and it
has always been life’s primary limiting variable. Photosynthesis became more efficient, aerobic respiration was an order-
of-magnitude leap in energy efficiency, the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans allowed animals to colonize land
and ocean sediments and even fly, and life’s colonization of land allowed for a great leap in biomass. Life could exploit
new niches and even help create them, but the key innovations and pioneering were achieved long ago. If humanity
attains the FE epoch, new niches will arise, even of the artificial off-planet variety, but all other creatures living on Earth
have constraints, primarily energy constraints, which produce very real limits. Life on Earth has largely been a zero-sum
game for several hundred million years, but the Cambrian Explosion was one of those halcyonic times when animal life
had its greatest expansion, not built on the bones of a mass extinction so much as blazing new trails.

The twin ideas of efficiency and resilience are important. Efficiency is about getting more for less, particularly energy.
Although aerobic respiration’s energy efficiency allowed for food chains to develop, they end up creating interactions and
dependencies, and the entire structure can lose its resilience when compared to simpler systems. Remove one part of
the food chain and the entire ecosystem can collapse, and it can be any part of the chain, from top to bottom. Making
systems more efficient, as the last bits of energy are wrung from the system, reduces their resilience to the real world’s
surprises. That dynamic is probably a key contributing factor of mass extinctions during the eon of complex life. Modern
ecosystems studies are making the connections clear and are being applied to the dynamics of human civilizations; C. S.
Holling’s work has been seminal in this regard.227 Complex ecosystems pass through adaptive cycles of exploitation,
conservation, release, and reorganization, and three dimensions of interaction are involved: potential, connectedness, and
resilience.228 In general, simple systems are more stable than complex ones, which is another reason why any mass
extinctions of prokaryotes, if there were any, would have been far less cataclysmic than those of complex life.

All species live within their niches, which are always primarily energy niches, in which an organism can obtain enough
energy and preserve it for long enough to produce viable offspring. There are usually energy tradeoffs; efficiency could
be sacrificed for rate of ingestion, so that efficiency was reduced but input was increased enough so that the increased
cost of obtaining it was worthwhile, such as with hindgut fermenters. The primary measure of an organism’s success is its
energy surplus, which is related to resilience. As an example, today a trout can live in a fast-moving current where food
quickly arrives, which is efficient from an input perspective, but the energy spent swimming to maintain a presence in the
current reduces the net energy surplus. A slower stream will provide less food per unit of time, but it also takes less
energy to live there. In trout studies, the dominant trout will live where the optimal energy tradeoff exists, which leads to
the greatest energy surplus. Less dominant trout will be pushed into the faster water, and the least competitive trout will
be pushed into calm water and slowly starve. No species will last for long if it does not have a high enough energy
surplus so that it can survive the vagaries of existence. The energy surplus issue has not been emphasized in biology
during the past century, as the “fitness” of a species has been emphasized, but it is the key variable for understanding
species fitness.229
Also, just as no fundamentally new body plans appeared after the Cambrian Explosion, modern ecosystems seem
constrained by body size. Body sizes have similar “slots,” and body sizes outside of those slots are relatively rare.
However, successful innovation usually happens at the fringes.230 The fringes are where survival is marginal and
innovations carry a high risk/reward ratio. Most innovations fail, but a successful one can become universally dominant,
such as those biological innovations that are considered to have happened only once. There have been countless failed
biological innovations during life’s history on Earth, many of which might have seemed brilliant but did not survive the
rigors of living.

The rise of life was based on energy, information, and the ability to manipulate them. Just as the foundation of complex
life remained basically unchanged since the Cambrian Explosion, energy systems form the foundations for all ecosystems
and civilizations. While the superstructure can change and can seem radical at times, the foundation dictates what kind of
superstructure can exist. A huge superstructure built on a small foundation, if it can be built at all, will not be very resilient
(the first earthquake or storm levels it), and will not last long. Today, industrialized civilization is burning through its
foundational energy sources a million times as fast as they were created and will largely deplete all of them in this century
at the current trajectory. On the geologic timescale, the rise and fall of humanity may happen in the blink of an eye and
create more ecosystem devastation than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs; it would happen faster than all
previous mass extinctions other than that asteroid’s effect. Arthropods may then come to rule the world once again.

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.231

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, which results 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.232 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.233 In its final cost/benefit analysis, complex life decided that bigger was better, and
much larger animals lived in the Ordovician than in the Cambrian. 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.234 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.235 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. They replaced arthropods atop the food chain.
During the Ordovician, nautiloids developed a sturdy build and 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.236

The Ordovician was characterized by diversification into new niches, even creating them, but those halcyonic times came
to a harsh end in the first 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.237
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 about 40 million years, but some events were 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.238 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 21st 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.239 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. When currents 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.240 In the mid-20th century, Soviet scientists revived an old
hypothesis that oil was not formed from organic marine sediments, a variation of which was also championed by Thomas
Gold, but improving tools and investigation invalidated those hypotheses. No petroleum geologists today seriously
consider the abiogenic origin of hydrocarbons. Oil sediment formation events seem related to mantle and crust processes
that created high sea levels and anoxic events, and the last great one was in the Oligocene, which formed more than 10%
of the world's oil deposits.241

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 relatively hot period with shallow tropical seas, but Gondwana still covered the
South Pole. But the ice caps eventually shrank, which 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. The first insects appeared about that time and all of the
first insects flew.242 As of 2014, Donald Canfield believed that the gigantism among arthropods and other oxygen effects
were due to Earth's atmosphere beginning to reach modern levels for the first time in the eon of complex life, not that it
reached higher than modern levels.243 I expect the oxygen controversy to outlive me.

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.244 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.245 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.246

Bony fish (both ray-finned and lobe-finned) first appeared in the late Silurian and abounded in the Devonian. All bony fish
could breathe air in the Devonian, which provided more oxygenated blood to their hearts.247 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.248 A lightweight descendent of nautiloids appeared in the Devonian, and ammonoids subsequently
enjoyed more than 300 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.249 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.250 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.251 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).252
The five digits common to limbed vertebrates were set around this time; early tetrapodomorphs had six, seven, and eight
digits, and the digital losses were probably related to using feet on land.253

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.254 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.255 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.256

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 organisms 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.257 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 a Devonian forest. (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.258 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).259

Plants and trees created a “boundary layer” of relatively calm air near the ground that became the primary abode of most
land animals. Also, forests created a positive feedback in which 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.260 Transpiration also cools the plants via the latent heat
of vaporization, as well as the resultant cloud cover.261 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.262 Arid climates prevent trees from growing tall or even growing at all. Energy
availability limits leaf size, too.263 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.

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.264 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. 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.265 A bolide impact has been invoked in some
scientific circles, but the evidence is weak.266 Mountain-building and volcanic events also happened as continents began
colliding to eventually form Pangaea (and the resultant silicate and basaltic weathering removed carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere), and those dynamics may have been like what precipitated the previous major mass extinction.267 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.268

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.269 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).270 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.271 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 since the GOE,
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%.272 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.273

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.274 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 during 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.275 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.276

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 early tetrapods, but they were beaten back twice during the late-
and end-Devonian extinction events, and what emerged the third time was different from what preceded it.277 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).278 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.279
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.280 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 ice ages that have prominently shaped Earth’s eon of complex life probably always began
with ice sheets at the South Pole, and the current ice age arguably is the only partial exception, but today’s cold period
really began about 35 mya, when Antarctic ice sheets began developing.

The first tree forests formed in the late Devonian, and bark is the great innovation that led to forming the Carboniferous’s
vast coal deposits. Compared to modern trees, Carboniferous trees seemed to go overboard on bark, at least partly to
discourage arthropods. Today’s trees generally contain at least four times as much wood as bark. Those early trees had
about ten times as much bark as wood, and the bark was about half lignin. Lepidodendron trees dominated the
Carboniferous rainforest and could grow 30 meters tall. Because it took more than a hundred million years for life to learn
to break down lignin, that early lignin did not degrade via biological processes. The early Carboniferous was warm, even
with a small ice cap at the South Pole, and Earth’s first rainforests appeared in the late Devonian and again proliferated in
the Carboniferous. The Carboniferous lasted from about 360 mya to 300 mya and was the Golden Age of Amphibians, as
the rainforest was largely global in extent and swamps abounded. Amphibians were the Carboniferous’s apex predators
on land, and some reached crocodile size and acted like them.

Artists have been depicting Carboniferous swamps for more than a century, and the cliché image includes a giant
dragonfly. That giant dragonfly represents a key Carboniferous issue and perhaps why the period ended. That giant, and
others like it, appeared in the fossil record about 300 mya, when oxygen levels were Earth’s highest ever, at somewhere
between 25% and 35%. The almost universally accepted reason for that high oxygen level is that burying all of that lignin
for the entire Carboniferous Period removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in vast amounts. Today, the estimate is
that carbon dioxide fell from about 1,500 PPM at the beginning of the Carboniferous to 350 PPM by the end, which is
lower than today’s value. That tandem effect of sequestering carbon and freeing oxygen not only may have led to huge
arthropods and amphibians, but also intensified the ice age that ended the Carboniferous. The idea that high oxygen
levels led to those giants was first proposed more than a century ago and dismissed, but has recently come back into
favor. Flying insects have the highest metabolisms of all animals, but they do not have diaphragmatic lungs as mammals
have, or air sac lungs as birds have, and although they may have some way of actively breathing by contracting their
tracheas, it is not the bellows action of vertebrate lungs. The two primary hypotheses for early insect gigantism is that
high oxygen, as well as a denser atmosphere (the nitrogen mass would not have fallen, so increased oxygen would have
added to the atmosphere’s mass), would have enabled such leviathans to fly, and the other is that flying insects got a
head start in the arms race and could grow large until predators that could catch them evolved. The late Permian had an
even larger dragonfly, when oxygen levels had crashed back down. The evolution of flight is another area of great
controversy, and insects accomplished it long before vertebrates did. The general idea is that flight structures evolved
from those used for other purposes. For insects, wings appear to have evolved from aquatic “oars,” and gills became
lungs.281 Reptiles did not develop flight until the Triassic, and only glided in the Permian.282

But it was not only flying insects that became huge: giant millipedes, scorpions, and other arthropods also lived in the
Carboniferous, such as mayflies with half-meter wingspans. The giant millipede (more than two meters long) has been
featured in popular culture as a nightmare creature, although it was vegetarian. The largest freshwater fish ever lived in
the Carboniferous and reached seven meters long.283 The high-oxygen hypothesis is challenged for giant insects and
giant animals in general, and the controversy will probably continue for many more years.284

The Carboniferous also marked the rise of reptiles, which first appeared between 320 and 310 mya. The very term reptile
has become rather informal with the rise of cladistics, as birds and mammals descended from “reptiles” but are not called
that. The term paraphyletic refers to groupings such as reptiles, in which part of the clade is not classified in the named
group; monophyletic clades (beginning with the last common ancestor and including all descendants) are tidier and
scientists often prefer them.285 Although the issue, as usual, is controversial today, it seems that amphibian and reptilian
ancestors may have descended from different groups of tetrapods, and some seemingly transitional animals added to the
controversy.286 But the idea that reptiles are descended from amphibians is still prominent. Most importantly, reptiles
were the first amniotes, a clade that includes birds and mammals, which do not need to lay their eggs in water and
allowed reptiles to become independent of rainforests and swamps. Reptiles then colonized niches previously
unavailable to amphibians. The first reptiles were small and ate insects, and laying eggs in trees may have been a
solution to arboreal life.287 Seed plants and amniotes could reproduce on dry land, and their success greatly expanded
terrestrial ecosystems.

Amniotes are primarily classified by the number of holes in their skulls. The earliest reptiles may have had skulls like
amphibians, with only holes for eyes and nostrils. In some early reptiles, a hole developed behind the eye, probably for
attaching jaw muscles, and animals with such skulls are called synapsids; mammals evolved from that line, and are
essentially the only survivors of it. Near the Carboniferous’s end at about 300 mya, skulls with two holes behind the eye
developed, probably for anchoring more powerful jaw muscles. Animals with those skulls are called diapsids, and one line
of diapsid descendants eventually ruled Earth as dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had the greatest terrestrial jaws of all time, which
is the primary energy acquisition equipment of vertebrates. Complex life’s arms race reached its ultimate expression in
dinosaurs, with the fearsome teeth and jaws of the late-Cretaceous’s Tyrannosaurus rex matched against the spear-and-
shield arrangement of Triceratops. Jurassic dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, with its thagomizer, would not have been
easy meals for predators such as Allosaurus. Turtles are today generally considered to be diapsids that lost their skull
holes, and would otherwise seem to be anapsids.

In the oceans, the Carboniferous is called the Golden Age of Sharks, and ray-finned fish arose to a ubiquity that they have
yet to fully relinquish. Ray-finned fish probably prevailed because of their high energy efficiency. Their skeletons and
scales were lighter than those of armored and lobe-finned fish, and their increasingly sophisticated and lightweight fins,
their efficient tailfin method of propulsion, changes in their skulls, jaws, and new ways to use their lightweight and versatile
equipment accompanied and probably led to the rise and subsequent success of ray-finned fish in the Carboniferous and
afterward.288 Foraminifera, which are amoebic protists, rose to prominence for the first time in the Carboniferous. Reefs
began to recover, although they did not recover to pre-Devonian conditions; those vast Devonian reefs have not been
seen again. Today’s stony corals did not appear until the Mesozoic Era. Trilobites steadily declined and nautiloids
developed the curled shells familiar today, and straight shells became rare. The first soft-bodied cephalopods, which
were ancestral to squids and octopi, first appeared in the early Carboniferous, but some Devonian specimens might
qualify. Ammonoids flourished once again, after barely surviving the Devonian Extinction. This essay is only focusing on
certain prominent clades, and there are many animal phyla and plant divisions. The early Carboniferous, for example, is
called the Golden Age of Crinoids, which are a kind of echinoderm, which is a phylum that includes starfish.289 The
crinoids had their golden age when the fish that fed on them disappeared in the end-Devonian extinction. Earth’s
ecosystems are vastly richer entities than this essay, or any essay, can depict.

In the early Carboniferous, the continents were still somewhat dispersed but began merging into the supercontinent called
Pangaea. The period from the Late Devonian extinction event to the late Permian about 260 mya is also called the Karoo
Ice Age, which had various stages of ice sheet development. It was the last ice age before the current ice age. About
325 mya, there was a marine extinction that some have argued should be a Big Five mass extinction, but others are
doubtful, and the authors of the argument re-ranked that extinction to sixth in significance.290 It was caused by fluctuating
sea levels due to the ice sheet advances and retreats and the continental uplift that resulted from the continents colliding
to form Pangaea. The Mississippian Epoch ended with that extinction and the Pennsylvanian Epoch began. That
growing ice cap eventually destroyed the Carboniferous rainforest. Cooler oceans have less evaporation and therefore
produce drier climates; that dynamic began reducing the Carboniferous rainforest, breaking them up into “patches” that
kept shrinking, to eventually result in the rainforests' collapse. Only a few rainforest pockets survived into the Permian
Period. As usual, scientists have proposed several contributory causes of rainforest collapse, but climate change is
probably the ultimate cause. The collapse of the rainforest ended the dominance of amphibians and flora and fauna
adapted to warm, wet environments. The cooler, dryer conditions that ended the Carboniferous led to the dominance of
seed plants and amniotes.

When the Carboniferous rainforest collapsed beginning about 307 mya, Earth’s oxygen levels were at their highest ever.
About 75% of Earth’s coal deposits were formed in the Carboniferous, with most of it laid down in the 25-million-year
Pennsylvanian Epoch. There will never be a coal-forming period like that again on Earth, as organisms developed the
ability to decay lignin about 290 mya. Even if humans burned all fossil fuel deposits, carbon dioxide levels will never
again reach the levels that preceded the Carboniferous, at many times today’s concentrations.

The Permian Period (c. 299 to 252 mya) ended with the greatest mass extinction in the eon of complex life. The
Carboniferous rainforests not only collapsed, but great deserts formed in the interior of the newly formed supercontinent of
Pangaea. Pangaea was a little scattered when it formed, with huge ice sheets at the South Pole, but by the end of the
Permian, the ice age was finished and another ice age would not appear for more than 200 million years. The continent
that became North America and Europe collided with Gondwana, and a gigantic mountain range formed as a result, called
the Central Pangaean Mountains. Those mountains created climatic effects, and great deserts formed on each side of
that range. Remnants of that range include the Appalachians and part of the Atlas Mountains. The Ural mountain range
began forming during the creation of Pangaea, and the Tethys Ocean formed during the late Permian.

Conifer forests, which I have spent my life happily hiking through, first appeared in the Permian. Devonian forests were
10 meters tall, Carboniferous rainforests were 30 meters tall, and Mesozoic conifers reached 60 meters tall and even
sequoias appeared. Conifers were one of the early seed plants and used pollen to fertilize their seeds; that method that
did not need the water that spores did. As conifers appeared during an ice age, they are well-adapted to cold climates,
which is why conifer forests are so prevalent today. As discussed later in this essay, conifers were later displaced by
flowering plants, which engaged in an unprecedented symbiosis with animals, and conifers were pushed to Earth’s cold
margins.291 Tree ferns declined after the Carboniferous, but still exist today.

In water environments, there are not diurnal temperature changes as there are on land, so regulating body temperature
was not a significant issue for aquatic animals. The rise of reptiles created a new kind of animal, and regulating body
temperature became a major challenge, and particularly in an ice age climate. The early Permian was the Golden Age of
Synapsids, as they dominated the land masses (and became the largest non-amphibious land animals to that time).
Thermoregulation was a prominent trait, with huge “sails” on the backs of large synapsids. Dimetrodon was popular with
children’s models of ancient animals (I had one in my childhood collection, along with mammoths and stegosaurs).
Animals made many adaptions to land’s temperature swings. Today’s mammals and birds are warm-blooded, and
controversy has raged whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded. Keeping a body’s temperature within certain ranges can
allow for optimal enzyme functioning. Humans, for instance, can only survive within a narrow range of body temperature.
High temperatures kill humans because key enzymes begin falling apart and vital reactions cease. If temperatures are
too low, activation energies for vital reactions are not reached. But maintaining an ideal body-temperature is costly;
mammals and birds consume about 10-to-15 times the energy of today’s reptiles.292 A snake can live for a month on a
good meal, while a mammal must constantly eat or hibernate. As with other life features, those synapsid sails may have
had a dual function, and the most popular hypothesis today is that it was used for “display” to attract a mate. Sexual
selection has been a major source of evolutionary change (it is almost certainly why men are larger and stronger than
women), and those tremendous sails may have been an early example of enhancing a feature to attract a mate.
Dimetrodon also had different-sized teeth, which were probably distant ancestors to mammalian teeth.

During the Permian, synapsids had great radiations, typical of golden ages. Synapsids developed many evolutionary
novelties, and one of them led to therapsids first appearing about 275 mya in the mid-Permian, just as oxygen levels
began crashing, according to GEOCARBSULF. Synapsids began to overcome Carrier’s Constraint by developing stiffer
backbones, so they no longer had the serpentine gait of lizards.293 Therapsids were the direct ancestors of mammals and
further overcame Carrier’s Constraint by evolving a more erect posture; their legs were more under them rather than
splayed to their sides. This improved their breathing ability, and that it happened during Earth’s most spectacular oxygen
crash is probably no coincidence. However, they inherited a posture that put most body weight on their front legs, so they
had a “wheelbarrow” gait that still hampered their ability to breathe and run, although it was better than their synapsid
ancestors.294 From a high of 25%-35% at the end of the Carboniferous, oxygen crashed down to around 15% by the
Permian’s end. Animals that could adapt to lower oxygen levels could dominate, and therapsids did just that and
completely displaced pelycosaur synapsids, which included Dimetrodon, and huge dinocephalians dominated the mid-
Permian. The largest amphibian ever also lived in the high oxygen times of the mid-Permian. As oxygen levels crashed
in the late Permian, land animals became smaller.295 In the mid-Permian, synapsids began to develop a secondary palate
that allowed them to breathe and chew at the same time. Therapsid jaws became more powerful and their teeth became
more diverse than synapsid teeth. Such innovations typically improved an animal’s energy efficiency, and thus were
favored innovations. Dimetrodon disappeared about 272 mya, and at 270 mya there was a mass extinction today called
Olson’s Extinction which hit land and sea animals hard as well as land plants. The cause is still a mystery, although
climate change has been recently presented as a candidate. Therapsids then dominated land animals until the Permian
extinction, and Olson’s Extinction was arguably that calamity’s first event.

One of Peter Ward’s recent hypotheses is that animals that adapted to the changing conditions, particularly when oxygen
levels crashed, survived the catastrophes to dominate the post-catastrophic environment. In the late Permian, several
therapsid lines developed turbinal bones, which may have been used for respiratory water retention in a world where
oxygen levels were crashing.296 This is a controversial issue, and related to the controversy over when reptiles developed
endothermy. The therapsid ancestors of mammals, cynodonts, first appeared about 260 mya, and had many mammalian
features.

The earliest diapsid appeared in the late Carboniferous and looked like a modern lizard. It also had some canine-type
teeth. Diapsids, however, were marginal animals in the Permian, as that was the time of synapsid and therapsid
dominance. Diapsids would not rise to prominence until the Triassic.

In the oceans, reefs finally began to make a comeback in the late Permian, and the remnants of those reefs can be seen
in Texas today. Tabulate and rugose corals were abundant, as were ammonoids and echinoderms. Articulate
brachiopods (with two shells that can open and close, like a clam’s) were also doing fine. Fish (ray-finned fish and
sharks), however, were the dominant sea animals. Trilobites were a mere shadow of their former selves, eking out an
existence on the seafloor, like the way that nautiloids eked out their existence in deep waters while ammonoids dominated
the surface. And then came the Great Dying.

The Permian extinction, like the prior major extinctions, was more than one event and had more than one cause. The
Cretaceous extinction is what most people think about when mass extinctions are mentioned (as it was Hollywood-
spectacular and ended one fascinating line of animals and paved the way for mammals to dominate), and it led to the
existence of humans, but the Permian extinction was the Big One. Before the taboo against investigating mass
extinctions began lifting in the 1970s and 1980s, specialists generally thought that the Permian extinction only impacted
the oceans and left terrestrial ecosystems unaffected. The picture has radically changed since the 1980s, and the
terrestrial extinctions are now acknowledged as similarly catastrophic.297 The Permian extinction is Earth’s only mass
extinction of insects, and although plants are not normally vulnerable to mass extinctions, land plants also barely survived
the Permian extinction. But the extinction came in phases, and each may have had different causes. There is great
ongoing controversy and research regarding the issues.

The ultimate cause of the Permian extinction was probably the formation of a supercontinent. When Pangaea finally
formed, new dynamics appeared. One was that there became only one major ocean, the Panthalassic, and the Paleo-
Tethys and nascent Tethys oceans were largely landlocked. Those landlocked smaller oceans would have become like
lakes, with little current in them (the Black Sea is the favored analogy today), and the Panthalassic Ocean (from which the
Pacific Ocean eventually formed) did not have continents to divert them during their journey from the equator to the poles,
so today’s circuitous thermohaline circulation would not have existed, which is shown below. (Source: Wikimedia
Commons)
The Panthalassic’s currents were slow and lazy, and the deep-water oxygenation of today’s oceans would have been
quite different, and perhaps largely ceased to exist. Also, when supercontinents form, the sea level falls as the oceanic
basin expands, and the late Permian's sea levels are thought to be among the lowest in the eon of complex life. The
many shallow seas of complex life’s earlier periods also disappeared with the formation of Pangaea (nearly 90% of the
continental shelves became exposed), which were the abode of most marine life.298 That new land exposed the swamps
and deltas formed in the Carboniferous, and the oxidation of those carbonaceous deposits drew down atmospheric
oxygen and increased carbon dioxide. The merging of continents also results in mountain-building and volcanism.

Also, the formation of Pangaea (which is controversial regarding what processes led to its formation) may have led to the
dynamics that broke it apart. The Hawaiian Islands are part of a volcanic island chain that began forming more than 80
mya, and is due to a hotspot bubbling up from Earth’s mantle. Although the issue is far from settled, a prominent
hypothesis is that the formation of Pangaea plugged hotspots and prevented heat from venting from Earth’s core, which
led to a swelling and fracturing Pangaea.299 Part of the evidence for that hypothesis was relatively sudden and
widespread volcanism sprouting up around Pangaea, which followed a known fracture pattern around such crustal
upwellings. The volcanism and resultant fracture lines formed today’s continents.300 As can be seen in the map of Earth’s
landmasses during the late Permian, what became China and Siberia were on the northeast margins of Pangaea,
bordering the Paleo-Tethys Ocean, and two volcanic events arising from China and Siberia are currently favored as key
proximate causes of the Permian extinctions.

The ecosystems may not have recovered from Olson’s Extinction of 270 mya, and at 260 mya came another mass
extinction that is called the mid-Permian or Capitanian extinction, or the end-Guadeloupian event, although a recent study
found only one extinction event, in the mid-Capitanian.301 In the 1990s, the extinction was thought to result from falling
sea levels.302 But the first of the two huge volcanic events coincided with the event, in China. There can be several
deadly outcomes of major volcanic events. As with an eruption in the early 1800s, massive volcanic events can block
sunlight with the ash and create wintry conditions in the middle of summer. That alone can cause catastrophic conditions
for life, but that is only one potential outcome of volcanism. What probably had far greater impact were the gases belched
into the air. As oxygen levels crashed in the late Permian, there was also a huge carbon dioxide spike, as shown by
GEOCARBSULF, and the late-Permian volcanism is the near-unanimous choice as the primary reason. That would have
helped create super-greenhouse conditions that perhaps came right on the heels of the volcanic winter. Not only would
carbon dioxide vent from the mantle, as with all volcanism, but the late-Permian volcanism occurred beneath Ediacaran
and Cambrian hydrocarbon deposits, which burned them and spewed even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Not only that, great salt deposits from the Cambrian Period were also burned via the volcanism, which created
hydrochloric acid clouds. Volcanoes also spew sulfur, which reacts with oxygen and water to form sulfurous acid. The
oceans around the volcanoes would have become acidic, and that fire-and-brimstone brew would have also showered the
land. Not only that, but the warming initiated by the initial carbon dioxide spike could have then warmed up the oceans
enough so that methane hydrates were liberated and create even more global warming. Such global warming apparently
warmed the poles, which not only melted away the last ice caps and ended an ice age that had waxed and waned for 100
million years, but deciduous forests are in evidence at high latitudes. A 100-million-year Icehouse Earth period ended and
a 200-million-year Greenhouse Earth period began, but the transition appears to have been chaotic, with wild swings in
greenhouse gas levels and global temperatures. Warming the poles would have lessened the heat differential between
the equator and poles and further diminished the lazy Panthalassic currents. The landlocked Paleo-Tethys and Tethys
oceans, and perhaps even the Panthalassic Ocean, may have all become superheated and anoxic Canfield Oceans as
the currents died. Huge hydrogen sulfide events also happened, which may have damaged the ozone layer and led to
ultraviolet light damage to land plants and animals. That was all on top of the oxygen crash. With the current state of
research, all of the above events may have happened, in the greatest confluence of life-hostile conditions during the eon
of complex life. A recent study suggests that the extinction event that ended the Permian may have lasted only 60,000
years or so.303 In 2001, a bolide event was proposed for the Permian extinction with great fanfare, but it does not appear
to be related to the Permian extinction; the other dynamics would have been quite sufficient.304 The Permian extinction
was the greatest catastrophe that Earth’s life experienced since the previous supercontinent existed in the Cryogenian.305

Siberian volcanism (which formed the Siberian Traps) is considered to have been the main event. The Chinese
volcanism of ten million years earlier was a prelude, with other minor events between them, in a series of blows that left
virtually all complex life devastated when it finally finished. To give some perspective on the volcanism's magnitude, when
Mount Tambora erupted in 1815 and caused the Year Without a Summer, it is estimated that the eruption totaled 160
cubic kilometers of ejecta. The Siberian Traps episode lasted a million years and, although it was more of a lava event
than an explosion (although there were also plenty of explosions), the total ejected lava is estimated at one-to-four million
cubic kilometers.

The Chinese eruption was the preview and it devastated marine environments, and a brief review of the casualties will
make it clear. Tabulate and rugose corals were brought to the brink of extinction, and ammonoids, echinoderms,
articulated brachiopods, gastropods, and complex foraminiferans suffered similarly, while fish, bivalves, and small
foraminiferans did relatively well.306

After the mid-Permian extinction, marine life recovered and there were many radiations to fill empty niches, but coral reefs
did not recover. Between the two big extinction events, extinction levels were highly elevated, which suggests that some
of those aforementioned dynamics were still wreaking havoc, with possible cascade effects. Critics of extinction
hypotheses often say: “Correlation is not necessarily causation.” While there can be great merit to that position, it seems
to be overused by various critics. When the guns are as smoking as volcanic events were, and they often “correlate” with
mass extinctions, they are increasingly hard to deny as being at least immediately causative.307

The end-Permian extinction correlated rather precisely with the eruption of the Siberian Traps, which continued for a
million years and spewed millions of cubic kilometers of basalt. The end-Permian extinction was the final blow for many
ancient organisms. My beloved trilobites made their final exit from Earth during the end-Permian extinction, as did
tabulate and rugose corals, spiny sharks, and the last freshwater eurypterids. Articulate brachiopods completely vanished
from the fossil record, but reappeared in the Triassic via ghost ancestors, but brachiopods never recovered their former
abundance and have lived a marginal existence ever since. Glass sponges and bryozoans disappeared along with the
reefs, while complex foraminiferans and radiolarians also vanished, and all of them staged comebacks in the Triassic via
ghost ancestors. Bivalves suffered relatively modestly (“only” about 60% of bivalve genera went extinct) and quickly
recovered, fish were barely affected, and gastropods were devastated but quickly recovered. Ammonoids went through
their typical boom-and-bust pattern during the Permian extinctions, while nautiloids kept dwindling but scraped by in their
deep-water exile. In the final tally, more than 95% of all marine species went extinct. Not only was the death toll
tremendous, but the post-Permian oceans were so different from before that the Permian extinction marks the end of an
era, which began with the Cambrian Explosion. The Paleozoic Era ended with the Permian extinction and the Mesozoic
Era began.

On land, the devastation was similar. Again, insects suffered their only mass extinction, and several orders of insects
vanished from the fossil record after the Permian; those gigantic flying insects of Paleozoic times also vanished forever.
Permian conifer forests gave way to deciduous forests in the wake of global warming, and early gymnosperms and seed
ferns were largely replaced as lycophytes made a comeback in the early Triassic. The lycophyte radiation in the wake of
the Permian extinction is typical of what are called disaster taxa, which are the first organisms to colonize disturbed
environments. Reptiles and amphibians lost nearly two-thirds of their families, which translates to more than 90% of all
species. All large herbivores and predators went extinct, along with gliding reptiles. In total, the Permian extinctions
wiped out about 90-96% of all species, more than 80% of all genera, and nearly 60% of all families. Nothing else in the
history of complex life comes close and puts the Permian extinction in a category all its own.

Although the overwhelming devastation of the Permian extinction seemed to play no favorites and whatever survived was
the luck of the draw, recent research has demonstrated that even with such a catastrophe, certain life forms were more
resilient than others, related to biological “buffers” in their life processes. In marine environments, the warming, anoxia,
and acidification would have wiped out species vulnerable to them, and corals were and still are particularly susceptible to
those changes. Those conditions wiped out the corals in the Permian extinction, and they are the first ecosystems being
devastated today, with similar conditions of warming, anoxia, and acidification.308 Whether it was the ability to move to
safer environs or the ability to buffer chemical changes, the more resilient organisms had a better survival rate than
others.

The Reign of Dinosaurs

World map in mid-Jurassic (c. 170 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)
World map in mid-Cretaceous (c. 105 mya) (Source: Wikimedia Commons) (map with names is here)
Chapter summary:
 Ecosystems begin slow recovery from Permian extinction
 Lystrosaurus dominates Pangaea
 Archosaurs begin rise to dominance
 Stony corals dominate post-Permian reefs
 Tethys Ocean grows, and eventually form most of the today's oil deposits
 Early Mesozoic was a low oxygen time
 Volcanism prevalent in Mesozoic, and its carbon dioxide emissions maintain Greenhouse Earth conditions
 Reptiles migrate to oceans and dominate them
 Dinosaurs appear
 Scientists' recently changing views on dinosaurs
 Mass extinction marks dinosaurs' appearance
 Controversies over thermoregulation
 Controversies over dinosaurian air sac breathing system
 Ornithischian dinosaurs appear
 Dinosaur intelligence
 Archosaurs learn to fly
 Mammals appear
 Triassic extinction
 Archosaurs invade freshwater environments and become crocodiles
 Jurassic period begins Golden Age of Dinosaurs
 Sauropod diet
 Flowering plants appear and form symbiosis with animals
 Birds appear
 Why birds live so long
 Territoriality
 Armored dinosaurs appear
  As Pangaea breaks up, Atlantic Ocean forms
 Mesozoic anoxic events form most of world's oil deposits
 Mid-Jurassic extinction
 End-Jurassic extinction
 Dramatic ocean rise in Cretaceous
 Dinosaurs near the poles
 Indian Ocean forms
 World-circling equatorial current
 Calcite and aragonite seas
 Rudist bivalves displace stony coral reefs
 Mid-Cretaceous extinction
 Late-Cretaceous extinction
 End-Cretaceous extinction: what survived and why

The period following the greatest extinction event ever is called the Triassic (c. 252 to 201 mya). The Triassic was also
the Mesozoic Era’s first period (the other two were the Jurassic and Cretaceous). The Mesozoic is also known as the
Golden Age of Reptiles, but most people think of it as the reign of dinosaurs. However, dinosaurs did not yet exist when
the Triassic began.

There was a “coal gap” in the early Triassic, and depending on the framework and which scientist is asked, it took Earth’s
ecosystems 10 million years (when the environment recovered enough to sustain normal ecosystems), 30 million years
(when terrestrial ecosystem diversity recovered), or 100 million years (when marine ecosystem diversity recovered) to
recover from the Permian extinction. On land, the forests slowly recovered, and disaster-taxa lycophytes dominated the
early Triassic. Seed ferns dominated the Southern Hemisphere, and palm-tree-resembling cycads and ginkgo trees
(which first appeared in the late Permian, of which the living fossil Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving member) also
prospered. In the Triassic’s Northern Hemisphere, on what became North America, Europe, and Siberia, conifer forests
recovered and blanketed the land.

From the Permian extinction’s devastation arose a reptilian sheep called Lystrosaurus. Fossil hunters of early Triassic
sediments have been frustrated for many years, as nearly 95% of preserved early Triassic land animal remains are
Lystrosaurus, because it was about the Permian extinction’s only land animal survivor. There has been debate for many
years about why it survived when almost nothing else did. No single animal ever dominated Earth’s land masses as
thoroughly as Lystrosaurus did during the early Triassic. Lystrosaurus was probably a burrower (many have likened
Lystrosaurus to a pig because of that burrowing), which may have provided the shelter needed to survive the Permian
holocaust. It may also have been a generalist herbivore and could eat most surviving plants.309 But some think that its
survival, when almost every other species died, was due to luck. Luck is a surprisingly common proposed explanation for
evolutionary events and outcomes, and some creatures seemed to be in the right place at the right time while others were
in the wrong place at the wrong time. The spread of Lystrosaurus was also aided by two other facts: the land masses
formed one continent, so Lystrosaurus could simply walk to dominance of Earth; and few predators capable of eating a
Lystrosaurus survived. One swamp denizen ate Lystrosaurus (being semi-aquatic may have also helped species survive
the Permian extinction), as did another carnivore, but not much else did. Lystrosaurus was a therapsid, as were the
dominant land animals before the Permian extinction.

The Golden Age of Lystrosaurus lasted only about a million years before it was displaced by much larger herbivorous
reptiles, and diapsids, particularly archosaurs, began displacing therapsids early in the Triassic. A cynodont descendant,
Thrinaxodon, burrowed and was possibly a direct ancestor of mammals.310 If it was not our direct ancestor, it was a close
cousin to it. Proto-mammals were displaced and largely driven underground during the Triassic, and many of them
resembled rats and other rodents. About 225 mya, which was about halfway through the Triassic, early mammals first
appeared, although there is plenty of fierce controversy over exactly which animal could be called a mammal.311 But
reptiles starred in the Mesozoic’s tale, dinosaurs in particular. Mammals were small, marginal creatures, and until the late
Mesozoic, they only emerged from their burrows at night to feed.

In Triassic seas, ammonoids recovered from the brink of extinction at the Permian’s end to live in their golden age while
still periodically booming and busting. It took ten million years after the Permian’s end for reefs to begin to recover, and
when they did, they were formed by stony corals, which evolved from their tabulate and rugose ghost ancestors. Stony
corals also built today’s reefs. Bivalves dominated biomes in which brachiopods once flourished, and have yet to
relinquish their dominance. Before the Permian extinction, about two-thirds of marine animals were immobile. That
number dropped to half during the Triassic, ecosystems became far more diverse, and a marine “arms race” began in the
late Triassic. Predators invented new shell cracking and piercing strategies, and prey had to adapt or go extinct. The few
surviving brachiopods and crinoids were driven to ecosystem margins, and the Jurassic and Cretaceous would see the
appearance of shell-cracking crabs and lobsters.

The Tethys Ocean grew during the Triassic, and in the Jurassic there were no more island barriers on the Tethys’s east
end. The Paleo-Tethys was finally squeezed out of existence by islands that became part of Eurasia. The shallow
margins of the Tethys became the greatest oil source in Earth’s history. The Proto-Tethys and Paleo-Tethys oceans also
formed oil deposits, but about 70% of the world’s oil deposits initially formed during the Mesozoic’s anoxic events,
primarily along the Tethys’s margins. In the Middle East, Caspian Sea, Western Russia, North Africa, Gulf of Mexico, and
Venezuela virtually all of the oil deposits were laid down by dying and preserved organisms along Tethyan shores. In the
early Triassic, along the west end of what became North America, oceanic plate subduction under continental plates
initiated a series of volcanic and mountain-building events that continue to this day. The foundations of the Sierra Nevada
mountain range were formed then. I have spent my fair share of time hiking through them.

Low-oxygen Mesozoic oceans saw the rise of unusual biomes. In methane seeps in the Mesozoic’s global ocean floor,
bivalves and brachiopods formed symbiotic relationships with chemosynthetic organisms that digested methane.312 All
over the world, scientists have been amazed to find rock layers almost entirely comprised of shells of those innovative,
low-oxygen surviving shelled animals.313

As with cliché images of Carboniferous rainforests that depict giant dragonflies, the cliché dinosaur image has volcanoes
in the background (1, 2, 3). The Mesozoic began and ended with tremendous volcanic eruptions, and major eruptions
dotted the Mesozoic. Those eruptions vented vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and were responsible
for the high carbon dioxide levels that dominated the Mesozoic, according to GEOCARBSULF and its subsequent
corrections, which made it such a hot era. Hot seas also do not hold as much oxygen as cold seas, which contributed to
the anoxic events that continually visited Mesozoic oceans, particularly the Tethys. Hot, low-oxygen air is hostile to
animal life, and during the Triassic, many reptiles beat the heat by migrating back to the oceans where their ancestors
hailed from.314 Those seagoing reptiles soon dominated Earth’s oceans in complex life's greatest migration from land to
sea. Ichthyosaurs, which looked like reptilian dolphins, first appeared about 245 mya and survived for about 150 million
years. The ancestors of plesiosaurs also appeared when ichthyosaurs did. By 215 mya, some ichthyosaurs became
gigantic; one species reached more than 20 meters in length and had Earth’s largest eyes ever, at about the size of
dinner plates.315 Ichthyosaurs hunted the squid’s ancestors (which could become fairly large), Earth’s other big-eyed
animals, but feasted on a wide variety of prey as the late Triassic oceans’ apex predators. Also, a shellfish-eating cousin
of plesiosaurs lived in the Triassic. Aquatic reptiles overcame Carrier’s Constraint, and many aquatic reptiles of the
Mesozoic seem to have become warm-blooded and also gave live birth.

So far, this essay has dealt lightly with regional differences and largely confined the discussion to polar, temperate, and
tropical conditions in the seas, and rainforest versus dryer conditions on land. While Pangaea existed, barriers to species
diffusion on land were relatively modest, hence Lystrosaurus's dominance. But Pangaea began to break up at the
Triassic’s end, and continental differences in plants and animals often became significant in later times. Although the
formation of Pangaea had profound impacts, because land life was relatively young, the differences and resultant
changes due to the removal of oceanic barriers were less spectacular than would happen in the distant future, such as
when South America connected to North America.

For an example of how geography impacted early animal evolution, therapsids are thought to have evolved in non-tropical
Permian climates. That non-tropical beginning influenced therapsid evolution and particularly strategies for regulating
body temperature. Therapsids were rather stocky and had short limbs and tails, which is a cold-weather adaptation seen
in mammals today. There is plenty of speculation and research on the issue of therapsid thermoregulation because
mammals are the therapsid line’s last survivors. Diapsids, on the other hand, evolved in warmer climates, were relatively
gracile, and had particularly long tails.316 That long tail was critical for the appearance of bipedal reptiles, as it shifted their
center of gravity over their hips.

Until my lifetime, scientists thought of dinosaurs as slow and stupid, but that view has changed. In the 1970s, scientists
realized that prior depictions of bipedal dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex erroneously depicted them with upright
postures. Their actual posture had the tail, spine, and head all on a line largely parallel with the ground.317 Not until the
release of Jurassic Park did the public begin to see more realistic portrayals of bipedal dinosaur posture. That posture
may have been critical for the success of dinosaurs, as becoming bipedal, with their legs in an upright position under their
bodies, allowed them to overcome Carrier’s Constraint. Also, the notion of overcoming Carrier’s Constraint transformed
the view of dinosaurs from lumbering, slow creatures to nimble runners. The dinosaur line is considered monophyletic,
and the first dinosaurs were bipeds. All quadrupedal dinosaurs re-evolved their four-legged stances from the original
bipedal posture, which is obvious in that nearly all quadrupedal dinosaurs had rear legs longer than their front ones.318
The view of dinosaurian intelligence has also changed radically in the past generation, as evidence has been discovered
that some dinosaurs were significantly encephalized (particularly the line that led to birds), as well as evidence for
parenting and herd behaviors, and pack hunting.319 Dinosaurs had the first hands, even with opposable thumbs.320
Recent work on encephalization suggests that animals were well on their way toward human-level encephalization
hundreds of millions of years ago, and were prevented from attaining it far earlier, such as 70 mya, due to the Permian
extinction. The world might be populated with sentient, civilized, and even space-faring reptiles today if events had played
out slightly differently, such as that asteroid missing Earth 66 mya (or technologically advanced dinosaurs preventing its
impact).

The direct ancestors of dinosaurs, archosauromorphs, first appeared in the late Permian, and some beleaguered
specimens survived into the Triassic as ghost ancestors. Until recently, the first true dinosaur was widely considered to
be Eoraptor, which appeared about 231 mya. Eoraptor looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex and in fact is in the
terrestrial dinosaur line that culminated with the Lizard King, called theropods. A study published in 2013, however, made
the case that Nyasasaurus, dated to 243 mya, is either the first dinosaur yet discovered or a close cousin to it.321 Birds
are also probably part of the theropod clade, as the only survivor of that line and the only surviving dinosaurs. Eoraptor
was about a meter long and weighed ten kilograms. The time from the first diapsids to the first dinosaurs spanned nearly
100 million years, but there was nothing spectacular about them then, as their early years were dominated by amphibians,
then #synapsid, and then therapsids. Why dinosaurs rose to prominence has been a source of controversy and debate,
but the contending answers are energy-based.

Carrier’s Constraint and the first dinosaurs’ bipedal posture is currently an issue of great interest, as it may explain why
dinosaurs prevailed over therapsids. According to GEOCARBSULF and COPSE, the early Triassic was a period of low
oxygen following the Permian crash, down to 15% or so from the early Permian’s 25-35%. Peter Ward’s hypothesis is
that dinosaur ancestors evolved their bipedal posture and overcame Carrier’s Constraint in the Triassic’s low-oxygen
environment.322 With running no longer interfering with breathing, quick dinosaurs displaced lethargic therapsids in the
Triassic. Even quadrupedal dinosaurs had postures with their legs directly under them, which overcame Carrier’s
Constraint. The standard hypothesis is that speed and stamina allowed dinosaurs to prevail (and their ability to breed in
large numbers and quickly grow was a great advantage over mammals323), but they also first appeared and increased
their spread after another mass extinction event about 230 mya, which may have resulted from volcanism and/or
mountain-building in Alaska and along the west coast of Canada, with their attendant climatic effects.324 Today, a few
competing hypotheses explain the rise of dinosaurs: their superior respiration and speed, their ability to rapidly breed and
grow, or their opportunism when a mass extinction at 230 mya eliminated therapsid herbivores and left the biomes open
for herbivorous dinosaurs called sauropodomorphs to appear and dominate by the Triassic’s end.325 Their probable
descendants, the sauropods, are Earth’s largest land animals ever. The question of why dinosaurs became so large is a
central issue today and may well be related to another hot topic: the development of endothermy in dinosaurs.

Birds are warm-blooded and today’s reptiles are cold-blooded. Thermoregulation is a vast, complex issue, and warm-
bloodedness or cold-bloodedness appears to be a result of evolutionary cost-benefit outcomes. The first vertebrates that
left Earth’s waters often basked, the first dominant reptiles had energy-regulating sails, and therapsids may have at least
dabbled in chemical means of internal temperature regulation, although the evidence is thin.326 But the evidence for
dinosaurian internal temperature regulation is strong, and the surviving therapsid line, the mammals, also developed
internal temperature regulation.

The Triassic began hot and ended hot, and the Jurassic and Cretaceous were also hot, so staying warm was not a
significant issue for dinosaurs. Marine reptiles stayed cool by becoming aquatic, and for land-based dinosaurs, features
such as Stegosaurus plates apparently replaced the sails of synapsids for both heating and cooling, and like the synapsid
sail, those Stegosaurus plates may have also been used for display.327 Also, like the cliché, many large herbivorous
dinosaurs lived near cooling swamps, although the issue has been controversial. Cooling swamps and protective water
holes that we see in the tropics today were a major aspect of Mesozoic landscapes. But the thermoregulatory aspect that
most work is directed toward today is how dinosaurs kept warm. There is compelling evidence that dinosaurs regulated
their body temperature in myriad ways, including internal chemistry. All bipedal animals today are endotherms and they
all have four-chambered hearts, as dinosaurs did. Feathers, dinosaurs living near the poles (1, 2), and oxygen-isotope
studies of dinosaur bones all support the idea that dinosaurs engaged in internal temperature regulation, but one of the
more intriguing areas is that of dinosaur growth. Like tree rings, bones have seasonal growth rings and they have been
read for many dinosaur fossils. They have been used to determine dinosaurian life expectancies. Tyrannosaurus rex
could live to be about 30, giant sauropods could live to be 50, and smaller dinosaurs, as with smaller mammals, lived
shorter lives. The tiny ones only lived three-to-four years and the mid-sized ones lived seven-to-fifteen years.328 Growth
rates also provide thermoregulation evidence. Tyrannosaurs had juvenile growth spurts and largely stopped growing as
adults, and sauropods had growth rates equivalent to today’s whales, which are Earth’s fastest growing animals.329 But
there is also evidence of ectothermic dynamics. The great size of dinosaurs would have led to relatively easy ways to
stay warm, as large animals have a greater mass-to-surface area ratio, like the way in which complex cells overcame the
energy generation issue. Also, in the generally hot Mesozoic times, staying warm would have been fairly easy,
particularly for huge dinosaurs.

As scientists know with mammals, although optimal performance can be attained with endothermy, it comes with a great
energetic cost. As with plants, an animal can spend its energy budget on consumption (metabolism) or investment
(growth). An intriguing hypothesis is that growing large was part of an energy strategy, as the benefits of size (reduced
risk of predation, ease of conserving body heat and consequently less need for a high metabolism, ability to access new
food sources, such as foliage high above the ground) outweighed their costs (energy devoted to growth instead of
metabolism, the need to constantly feed). Their size and the warm climate meant that large dinosaurs did not need as
intense internal energy generation as mammals do, for instance, and dinosaurs may have been mesotherms, with internal
energy regulation greater than ectotherms, but not as great as endotherms (mammals and birds).330

In light of GEOCARBSULF's depiction of low Mesozoic oxygen levels, Peter Ward addressed a controversial issue
regarding how dinosaurs breathed.331 Birds have an air sac breathing system with an inflexible septate lung, which is
highly superior to the mammalian alveolar bellows lung. At 1600 meters elevation, today’s birds are about twice as
efficient at extracting atmospheric oxygen as mammals are. Flying is the most aerobically demanding activity on Earth
and a bird’s air-sac breathing system is a primary reason why they can fly, and flying over the Himalayas is an energetic
feat far beyond what any mammal can accomplish. The high-performance respiration that birds possess is also why they
live far longer than similarly sized mammals, but is related to their efficient mitochondria. When a mammal breathes, it
inhales oxygenated air and exhales carbon dioxide, but it is not a very efficient system, as fresh and depleted air mix in
the lungs. The air sac system, on the other hand, passes fresh oxygenated air along the lungs with each breath. One
might say that birds constantly inhale. Animations of the air sac system can help us understand it. Since birds evolved
from dinosaurs, and indeed are dinosaurs, just when this innovation developed is of great interest to paleobiologists. If
the early Mesozoic were the low-oxygen times that GEOCARBSULF depicts, then the air sac system would have been a
logical adaptation to oxygen-poor air.

The issue of avian and dinosaurian air sacs and when they evolved has been the focus of a rancorous dispute that was
only recently resolved and hinged on the hollow parts of bones, which is a phenomenon called skeletal pneumaticity. The
controversy involved dinosaur bone pneumaticity and how it may have been related to birds. In a landmark paper in
2005, it was shown that birds have their most important air sacs where nobody thought they were, near a bird’s tail, not its
head. Not only that, pneumatic bones are all related to the air sac system, and birds have the same pneumatic bones as
saurischian dinosaurs did.332 The obvious implication is that the air sac system evolved in theropods and sauropods,
when dinosaurs first appeared. If the air sac system appeared with the first dinosaurs, it is one more big reason why
dinosaurs prevailed over the less respiratorily gifted therapsids. Such a highly effective respiration system evolving in a
low-oxygen environment is a tantalizing hypothesis.

Ornithischians, a great clade of herbivorous dinosaurs, appeared soon after theropods did, but were initially marginal
dinosaurs and did not begin becoming abundant until the late Jurassic. If dinosaurs all have the same common ancestor,
ornithischian dinosaurs quickly diverged, with their different hips, and so far, there is no good evidence that ornithischians
breathed with the air sac system, and they became the dominant herbivores in the relatively high-oxygen Cretaceous.333
The ornithischian advantage was a superior eating system. Ornithischians were the only dinosaurs that chewed their
food.334 Chewing squeezes more calories from plant matter and may be why ornithischians surpassed sauropods in the
Cretaceous. Sauropods did not chew their food but had rock-filled gizzards, as birds and reptiles do today. Sauropods
began becoming gigantic in the late Triassic. Only rare ornithischians without chewing teeth had gizzards. Sauropods
also had the smallest proportional brains of any dinosaur.335 The most encephalized dinosaurs were dromaeosaurs,
some of which were featured as clever killers in Jurassic Park. Theropods were the most encephalized dinosaurs, which
is an early example of predators having larger brains in order to outsmart their prey. Ornithopods were in second place
only to theropods in encephalization and were among the most successful Cretaceous herbivores. A fascinating aspect of
some ornithopods was their seeming ability to communicate by bugling with a horn in their head’s crest.336 This kind of
evidence strongly supports the idea of herd behavior in herbivorous dinosaurs. There is also evidence of a dinosaur
stampede, which has been keenly contested (1, 2) in recent years.337

Below are examples of the only three kinds of dinosaurs known. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Long before birds learned to fly, non-dinosaurian reptiles did, and the first pterosaurs flew about 220 mya. They also had
an air sac respiration system. Although they obviously flew, just how they flew has been controversial. They were
probably warm-blooded, and by the late Cretaceous, pterosaurs became Earth’s largest flying animals ever, with ten-
meter wingspans. Pterosaurs may have been the dinosaurs’ closest relatives.338

The mass extinction at 230 mya coincided with a volcanic event and the initial building of mountains in what became
Central Asia. Ammonoids, bivalves, and other marine denizens were hit hard, and on land it was nearly the final exit for
therapsids (cynodonts and dicynodonts), and what would have been the chief diapsid competitor to early sauropods,
rhynchosaurs, suddenly went extinct, possibly by losing their food source. Extinction specialist Michael Benton has
argued that the mass extinction at 230 mya was greater in ways than the end-Triassic extinction, which is considered one
of the Big Five extinctions.339 The rise of dinosaurs to dominance coincided with the mid-Triassic mass extinction, and
mammals first appeared a few million years later. Although the “slate's being cleared” by a mass extinction may well have
given dinosaurs their opportunity, they also left many contemporaries far behind. Mammals would be rat-like, largely
nocturnal fringe dwellers for 160 million years after they first appeared, while dinosaurs ruled Earth. Stony corals also first
appeared after the mid-Triassic extinction, and turtles first appeared about 220 mya.

Although the Triassic was a period of great evolutionary novelty (such as a reptile that was mostly neck), and even called
an “explosion” in some corners, when air sac lungs, dinosaurs, mammals, modern corals, and flying and marine reptiles
appeared, it was not nearly the boom as when mammals rose after the Cretaceous extinction. GEOCARBSULF shows
that oxygen levels were low during the Triassic, rebounding a little from the Permian extinction, and then collapsing to
perhaps their lowest level of the entire eon of complex life. Peter Ward proposed that the low oxygen levels during the
Triassic and Jurassic kept dinosaurs from “exploding” as mammals did after the Cretaceous extinction.340
GEOCARBSULF’s crash of oxygen levels coincides with the end-Triassic extinction at about 201 mya. The cause of the
end-Triassic mass extinction, as with all other extinction events, is debated today, and climate change and volcanic
eruptions are among the primary suspects (the volcanic eruptions spewed “only” hundreds of thousands of cubic
kilometers of lava as compared to the Permian’s millions), along with rising and falling sea levels. GEOCARBSULF’s
carbon dioxide values show a carbon dioxide spike, which would have caused global warming, as happened during the
Permian extinction, and could have triggered methane hydrate vaporization and hydrogen sulfide events. A recent study
makes the similarity explicit between the end-Permian and end-Triassic extinction events, with ominous parallels to
current events.341 Vented carbon dioxide from volcanic events also made the oceans near shore acidic. Extensive anoxic
events visited the oceans in the late Triassic, particularly along the Tethys’s periphery, and Triassic anoxia formed
Southern Iraq’s oldest oil deposits.

The breakup of Pangaea at the Triassic’s end not only initiated volcanic events right in the heart of Pangaea, but the
weather systems would have been altered. In general, the Triassic was a dry period on Pangaea (with some mid-Triassic
extinctions possibly related to its becoming wetter on land), and the Jurassic was wetter and had the ubiquitous Mesozoic
jungles depicted by Hollywood.

The end-Triassic extinction once again nearly drove ammonoids to extinction and perhaps only one genus survived. The
reefs that began to recover in the late Triassic were again eradicated and did not reappear until more than 10 million
years later. Bivalves, brachiopods, and gastropods lost about half of their genera. The marine reptile placodonts, which
specialized in eating mollusks, went extinct, and plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were the marine apex predators to begin
the Jurassic. On land, it was nearly the end for therapsids; afterward, until their final extinction in the early Cretaceous,
they were marginal fringe dwellers. All large terrestrial non-dinosaur archosaurs went extinct and left dinosaurs
unchallenged for terrestrial dominance during the Jurassic.

Similar to how reptiles found refuge in the oceans, the crocodile’s ancestors were originally terrestrial archosaurs and
found their cooling niche in swampy margins and still do today, even though their cousins (1, 2) went extinct in the end-
Triassic event. Crocodiles have four-chambered hearts like dinosaurs, which suggests that they may have been
endotherms/mesotherms that re-evolved ectothermy to better adapt to swamp life.342 Only one superfamily of primitive
amphibians survived the end-Triassic event for long, and its last surviving member lasted into the Cretaceous in survival
enclaves. It was a giant, at five meters long and 500 kilograms. Primitive amphibians could not abide the reign of
crocodiles, and since the end-Triassic event, amphibians have been almost exclusively modern varieties. The first
salamanders appeared in the late Jurassic and frogs may have first appeared 100 million years earlier, in the late
Permian. Probably spurred by their size in an arms race with dinosaurs, crocodiles became huge, and a Cretaceous
species reached twelve meters and eight metric tons; ambushing drinking sauropods and holding their heads under until
they drowned was a likely specialty.

Although great mass death resulted from the end-Triassic extinction, dinosaurs emerged virtually unscathed. Why? It
may have been due to their superior air sac breathing system, which could survive the hot times and record-low oxygen
levels of the end-Triassic.343 The mammalian lung is pretty good, too, but not nearly as efficient as the saurischian
dinosaurs’ air sac system. Crocodiles have a piston-lung like mammals have, so they also have a superior respiration
system. Mammals rode out the storm in their burrows while crocodile ancestors cooled in the swamps and marine reptiles
cooled in the oceans. Living in burrows, swamps, and other refugia is probably how mammals, crocodiles, and birds
survived the end-Cretaceous extinction when non-avian dinosaurs did not.

The end-Triassic event’s final tally was more than 20% of all families, nearly half of all genera, and between 70% and 75%
of all species. Afterward, marine reptiles dominated the oceans, flying reptiles filled the air, crocodile ancestors were the
freshwater environment’s apex predators, and dinosaurs reigned in terrestrial environments.

The Jurassic (c. 201 to 145 mya) and Cretaceous (c. 145 to 66 mya) periods spanned the Golden Age of Dinosaurs. The
human fascination with dinosaurs is primarily due to their great size. They were Earth’s largest land animals ever, by far.
Huge predators hunted even larger herbivores. Prosauropods, or plateosaurs, were largely bipedal and were the early
Jurassic’s dominant herbivorous dinosaurs, but their four-legged descendants, sauropods, supplanted them by the mid-
Jurassic and sauropods became Earth’s largest land animals ever. Some species may have weighed more than 100
metric tons, which would have rivaled the blue whale, which is generally considered to be the largest animal that ever
lived. The blue whale achieved weight primacy, but the sauropods’ vast dimensions are still awe-inspiring. Some were
up to 60 meters in length and could reach 17 meters tall. Some of the largest sauropods ever lived in the late Jurassic,
when they were most numerous, but huge sauropods were plentiful until the Cretaceous extinction.344 A prominent
hypothesis is that their tremendous size was a strategy for digesting lower-quality food sources; they could digest food for
a longer period as it wound its way through their digestive systems. Their size also discouraged predation and conserved
heat. But their highly efficient air sac breathing system may have been the main reason why they could get so large,
particularly in the record-low oxygen Jurassic Period, at least according to GEOCARBSULF.

Jurassic sauropods probably subsisted on ferns and the foliage of cycads and conifers, which almost no vertebrates do
today, and few animals. Sauropods had huge guts to ferment those plants.345 It would not have been an energy-rich diet.
There has been controversy whether sauropods could rear up on their hind legs, and how they held their heads on their
long necks, but the idea that they were primarily swamp-dwellers underwent significant revision. Today, scientists think
that they seem to have sought moist environments, but probably did not spend their lives immersed in water. They were
walking grazers and browsers, and their long necks were probably used for browsing trees.346

Sauropods seem to have lived in herds and tended their young. Until relatively recently, animals as agents of ecosystem
change and maintenance was a marginal idea. But today, sediment burrowing is thought to be a seminal geophysical
event in the Cambrian, and those huge sauropods probably had an ecosystem impact like what elephants have today in
Africa.347 Elephants today break up woods as they feed, as they knock over trees and uproot them. That damage
transforms the biome and provides opportunities for other kinds of herbivores and their predators. Elephants also create
and enlarge water holes and are considered keystone species, which have an outsized impact on their environment.
Today, there is a “loyal opposition” to the overkill hypothesis regarding megafauna extinctions soon after humans
appeared; such people minimize the impact of humans (their position has an inherent conflict of interest, as those
scholars and scientists are all humans) and attribute the extinction of all elephants of the Western Hemisphere (north,
south) to climate change and resulting changes in vegetation. If the current situation with African elephants is relevant, it
is likelier that those vegetation changes were a result of elephant extinction, not a cause.348 Elephant extinctions would
have affected many other kinds of plants and animals, and could have precipitated cascade effects. Similarly, those huge
sauropods would not just have nibbled at vegetation and been relatively harmless browsers, but their vast bulk would
have been ideal for pushing over trees to get at their foliage and other devastations of trees in particular, which would
have dramatically impacted biomes. Giant dinosaurs probably had keystone species impacts on their environments,
particularly the vegetation. Dinosaurs were not the only huge organisms in those days. The first sequoias appeared in
the Jurassic, and would have been immune to dinosaur browsing when they grew large enough. Below is an artist's
conception of a typical Jurassic landscape (just as an allosaur and stegosaur are about to cordially interact). (Source:
Wikimedia Commons)

Ornithischians started slowly and began to become common in the late Jurassic, just when the greatest biological
innovation in the past 300 million years began: the appearance of flowering plants, which first bloomed about 160 mya.
Until that time, plant survival strategies included how to avoid being eaten by animals, whether it was bark, height,
poisonous foliage, etc. Flowering plants adopted a different strategy by laying out a banquet for animals. The primary
benefit for plants was spending less energy to reproduce, as well as attracting animals that did not seek to eat the plants
and even ended up protecting them. The advantage for animals was an easily acquired and tasty meal. It was the
greatest direct symbiosis between plants and animals ever, other than plants providing the oxygen that animals breathe,
which is inadvertent. The two primary aspirations that seed plants achieve for successful reproduction are becoming
fertilized via pollination and placing seeds where they can become viable offspring (and feces fertilizer could only help).
Flowering plants, also called angiosperms, did not invent animal assistance from whole cloth. Some Jurassic insects
have been found in association with gymnosperm (conifer) cones, and were probably doing the work that the wind
previously performed.349 Like the enzyme example of a key rattling around in a room, attracting animals to plants, to eat
the pollen and nectar, was like a reproductive enzyme: animals carried the key to the lock to initiate reproduction. Other
animals ate the fruit and thereby spread the seeds. That relationship did not become significant until the mid-
Cretaceous.350 Angiosperms mature faster and produce more seeds than gymnosperms do. By the Cretaceous’s end,
angiosperms dominated tropical biomes where ferns and cycads used to thrive, and they pushed conifers to the high
latitudes, just as they have today. That tropical dominance is probably related to the insect population, which prefers
warm climates. Angiosperms became Earth’s dominant plants after the end-Cretaceous extinction and comprise more
than 90% of plant species today.

There is speculation that dinosaurs invented flowering plants in a coevolutionary dance, as low-browsing ornithischians
put pressure on plants to grow and reproduce quickly, and angiosperms are far more effective at those activities than all
plants preceding them.351 The spread of angiosperms in the mid-Cretaceous coincided with the ornithischians’ rising
dominance, and by the end-Cretaceous extinction, they were the most numerous herbivores by far. Stegosaurs appeared
in the late Jurassic and went extinct by the late Cretaceous.

In the late Jurassic, as ornithischians began to become plentiful, a theropod innovation would lead to the only dinosaurs to
survive the end-Cretaceous extinction: birds. As with synapsid sails, stegosaur plates, and a Triceratops’s horns and frill,
feathers had a display function as well as thermoregulation, long before they were used to fly. Ever since scientists
realized that dinosaurs were closely related to birds, they have watched for feathers, and have found more than 20 genera
of dinosaurs that sported feathers.352 That famous Archaeopteryx fossil discovered in 1860-1861 began the speculation
that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and was considered one of the first confirmations of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Today, scientists strongly doubt that Archaeopteryx flew, and it is not considered a direct ancestor of today’s birds.353
Feathered dinosaurs existed before Archaeopteryx’s 155 mya appearance, and they are in the clade that led to today’s
birds, which first appeared about 160 mya. Birds probably did not fly much, if at all, until the Cretaceous, and the first
beaked birds appeared in the early Cretaceous.

When birds began to fly, their energy requirements skyrocketed. Today’s bats, for instance, burn several times as many
calories as similarly sized non-flying mammals and live several times longer, just as birds live far longer than similarly
sized mammals. Mammalian life-expectancy follows a curve in which size, metabolism, and longevity are all closely
related. The general rule is that all mammals have about the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. A mouse’s heart
beats about 20 times as fast as an elephant’s, and an elephant lives about 20 times as long as a mouse.354 Larger bodies
mean slower metabolisms, or less energy burned per unit of time per cell. Birds have the same kind of
size/metabolism/life-expectancy curve, but it sits on a higher level than mammals'. A pigeon lives for about 35 years, or
10 times as long as a similarly sized rat.355 On average, birds live three-to-four times as long as similarly sized mammals.

Because of the stupendous energy demands of flight, birds not only have the superior air sac system for breathing, but
their mitochondria, the cell’s energy-generation centers, are far more efficient than mammalian mitochondria. Parrots in
captivity can live to be 80, scientists have noted an albatross in the wild reproducing at more than 60, and scientists may
discover that wild albatrosses live to be 100 or more, when their tagging programs get that old. The mitochondrial theory
of aging may explain bird longevity, as the efficient mitochondria of birds produced fewer free radicals.356 The theory is
controversial and will be for many years, but I think that an engine analogy can help. A bird is a piece of high-
performance biological technology, and when operating at peak output it puts all land-bound animals to shame. But a
bird’s metabolism is usually in its slack state, only maximized during flight. Simply put, a bird has a great energy capacity
that is rarely used to its fullest. It is like a high-performance engine that rarely runs near its redline. Such engines will last
far longer than those regularly running near redline. High-performance technology that usually “loafs” in its slack state
and is rarely taxed is expensive and long-lasting. The increased investment in superior technology allows for high
performance and long life. High-quality technology is more economical in the long run, if the initial investment can be
afforded.

Recognizably modern birds existed by the end-Cretaceous, and modern birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the end-
Cretaceous extinction. Small pterosaurs called pterodactyls first flew about 150 mya, about the time that birds appeared.
The skies were getting crowded by the late-Cretaceous, although birds and pterosaurs seem to have inhabited different
niches. Modern birds survived the end-Cretaceous extinction partly because they found refugia in swampy margins,
burrows, and holes in trees, such as those that woodpeckers can create.

Another energy-related activity probably appeared on a large scale during the reign of dinosaurs: territoriality. Although
territoriality can be observed in insects, fish, crustaceans, amphibians, and reptiles today, it is most common among birds
and mammals. Territoriality is primarily about preserving an animal’s energy base from competition, and it is usually a
behavior oriented toward others of the same species, which would eat the same food resources and mate with the same
potential partners. Just as what scientists call consciousness seems to have appeared with the earliest animals, territorial
behavior may go all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion. But the social behaviors apparent in dinosaurs probably
also meant territorial behavior, and probably on a scale never experienced before on Earth. Even the suspected display
function of synapsid sails implies territorial behavior. All great apes are territorial, and human political units such as
nations are little more than ape territoriality writ large, as peoples protect their energy and mating bases. In light of the
display common in today’s birds (with its apotheosis in the peacock, although, as usual, there are competing hypotheses),
and the phenomenon perhaps goes all the way back to synapsids, along with the discovery of dinosaurian mass nesting
sites, herd behaviors, and the like, many scientists believe that dinosaurs were territorial.

In the late Jurassic, armored stegosaurs and ankylosaurs first appeared and used an ornithischian defensive strategy that
ceratopsians also developed in the early Cretaceous, which reached its peak with Triceratops in the late Cretaceous.
Today’s rhinoceros is the mammalian equivalent of Triceratops, but today’s rhinos do not have to face anything as
fearsome as Tyrannosaurus Rex, although the most successful predators in Earth’s history, humans, are driving rhinos to
extinction.

The Tethys Ocean was fully formed in the Jurassic and the continents began to break up in earnest, which led to rising
sea levels. The shallow seas that began to reappear in the Triassic became widespread in the Jurassic as continental
shelves were submerged. The Atlantic Ocean began forming in the Jurassic, as North America, Africa, and South
America split, and the world-circling Panthalassic Ocean became the Pacific Ocean about the same time, although it is
more of a convention among geologists than any dramatic change. Australia began to split from Antarctica during the
Jurassic. Mountain-building events along the west coast of North America continued unabated, and the Andes
Mountains, which began forming in the Triassic, continued their development in the Jurassic.
In the middle Jurassic, the largest bony fish ever, Leedsichthys, a filter feeder, lived. It reached nearly 20 meters in
length. Scientists have long argued over how other leviathans of Jurassic oceans, such as plesiosaurs, lived. Scientists
have proposed several hypotheses to explain the function of their anatomy.

The mid-Jurassic marked the beginning of a 160-million-year period of anoxic events that produced most of Earth’s oil
deposits, and they finally ended in the Oligocene. The anoxia of post-Triassic Mesozoic oceans seems to be at least
partly the result of increased runoff from land spurred by volcanic events, combined with warm, stagnant, stratified surface
waters.357 Low atmospheric oxygen, combined with high nutrient runoff and warm waters that absorb less oxygen than
cold water, provided the conditions for those anoxic events, and atmospheric oxygen levels only increased toward modern
levels in the Cretaceous. Also, changing currents (including upwelling, which usually brings nutrients to the surface) and
rising sea levels (which can make the seafloor anoxic) may have contributed to the unprecedented and never reproduced
anoxia of those times. Until the current low-oxygen events that humans are inducing, anoxic events, and hence oil
formation, have not occurred much during the past 30 million years.358

About 183 mya, an extinction event linked to anoxic and volcanic events hit ammonoids hard, as usual. The extinction
seems to have been confined to the oceans.359 Along with the appearance of carbonate hardgrounds, reefs slowly
recovered in the Jurassic, and by the Jurassic’s end, coral reefs lined Tethyan shores. Low-oxygen tolerating marine
animals proliferated in the Jurassic. Ammonoids, with their superior respirational equipment, developed large, thin-shelled
varieties that housed the large gills probably required to navigate the Jurassic’s low-oxygen waters.360 Also, a different
kind of cephalopod, the ancestor of squids, became plentiful in the Jurassic. The first crabs appeared in the Jurassic, and
they also developed a superior respiration system; they put their gills within their armor and developed a pump gill.361 As
most seashore visitors know, crabs are quite tolerant of exposure to air, much as nautiloids suffer no ill effects when
exposed to air for a short time. Crabs proliferated with the late Jurassic’s reefs, to only collapse with the end-Jurassic reef
collapse (called the Tithonian event, or end-Jurassic extinction), which was caused by a sudden drop in sea levels, and
the extinction again appeared to be largely restricted to marine biomes.362 On land, there were extinctions of sauropods,
stegosaurs, and advanced ornithopods.363

The sea level drop quickly reversed in the early Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous (c. 145 to 66 mya) saw the most
dramatic rise in global ocean levels during the eon of complex life. At the sea level’s peak, the land’s surface area during
the Cretaceous was about two-thirds of today’s (18% versus today’s 29% of surface coverage). By the early Cretaceous,
today’s continents were recognizable, and for the first time ever, marked regional differences appeared among the
terrestrial animals that inhabited continental biomes. Sauropods generally stayed in the southern continents and
ornithischians came to dominate the northern continents, and theropods also became quite diverse in the late Cretaceous.
The iconic theropod and most famous dinosaur, T-rex, appears to have solely been a North American resident. Earth’s
fossil record for dinosaurs is richest in North America (with China and Mongolia coming in second), so the fossil record
may be biased toward northern dinosaurs.364 Today, there are only about 100 professional dinosaur paleontologists on
Earth; that is not a very large community. To most six-year-old boys, those scientists won the lottery, as they are paid to
study dinosaurs and dig their fossils from the ground. In T-rex’s northern range, Triceratops was the dominant herbivore,
and its confrontations with T-rex may have been Earth’s greatest land battles ever, at least until humans appeared. In T-
rex’s southern range, North America’s largest dinosaur, a gigantic sauropod, lived.365

As land’s surface area shrank, the continents became wetter, as all land became relatively close to the oceans. In the
late Jurassic there was a cooling period, the coldest time of the entire Mesozoic, with even some mountainous and polar
glaciation, but end-Jurassic volcanism kept carbon dioxide levels high and the climate warmed. Warm-climate plants lived
within 15 degrees of the South Pole during the Cretaceous, and forest went all the way within five degrees of the poles,
which has fascinated scientists as they try envisioning a biome which was in the dark for nearly half the year.366 The
Cretaceous was generally a hot, wet time on Earth.

India broke away from Gondwana in the early Cretaceous, and Gondwana's breakup beginning about 150 mya is
generally considered the birth of the Indian Ocean. By the Cretaceous’s end, India was alone and swiftly moving toward
Southern Asia and a tremendous collision that formed the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau. The Andes were
uplifted during the Cretaceous, and mountain-building events (1, 2) continued in western North America. In the late
Cretaceous, the Rocky Mountains began their rise and the volcanic hotspot that created the volcanic mountain chain that
is currently represented by the Hawaiian Islands first appeared. In the late Cretaceous, the Tethys Ocean connected with
the Pacific and created a world-circling tropical current, which helped gentle and warm Earth’s weather systems, and
contributed to anoxic events. North America’s Great Plains were under a shallow sea in the Cretaceous.

Calcareous plankton appeared in the Mesozoic and required oxygen to form calcium carbonate. They became so
abundant in the high oxygen of the late Cretaceous that the rain of their bodies on ocean floors gave the Cretaceous its
name: chalk (the Latin name).367 Calcium carbonate, the primary constituent of limestone, comes in two forms: calcite
and aragonite. The magnesium content in the oceans, as well as the ocean temperature, determines which form of
calcium carbonate will dominate. The Permian extinction also marked the end of a 100-million-year ice age and gave way
to about 200 million years of hot times. During the eon of complex life, Earth has vacillated between icehouse and
greenhouse conditions. That pattern also seems related to supercontinent dynamics. Hot seas are generally calcite seas
and cold seas are usually aragonite seas. Calcite seas create carbonate hardgrounds, which influence the biome that
forms. The Ordovician and Silurian periods had vast carbonate hardgrounds, which disappeared during the Karoo Ice
Age and returned in the Greenhouse Earth age of dinosaurs, becoming common in the Jurassic. Today’s Icehouse Earth
has aragonite seas, so organisms that form calcium carbonate shells use aragonite, which is less stable than calcite and
its formation is sensitive to temperature and acidity. Coral reefs, key phytoplankton (which help produce Earth’s oxygen),
and shellfish use aragonite today to form their shells. There is already strong evidence that acidification of the oceans
due to humanity’s burning of fossil hydrocarbon deposits to power the industrial age is interfering with the ability of coral,
carbonate-forming phytoplankton, and shellfish to form their shells. That is only one of the industrial age’s many
deleterious ecosystem impacts. The current aragonite-formation situation is not a theoretical construct of fearful
environmentalists, but is a measurable impact today.

According to GEOCARBSULF, oxygen levels rose in the Cretaceous and reached nearly modern levels by the end. But
anoxic events also dotted the Cretaceous, probably related to rising sea levels. The largest bivalve ever lived in the
Cretaceous and reached three meters in length. It was a deep-water species that probably formed symbiotic relationships
with chemosynthetic organisms, along with those other low-oxygen Mesozoic bivalves, and it went extinct as oxygen
levels rose in the atmosphere and probably also in the seas.368

When sea levels rise as dramatically as they did in the Cretaceous, coral reefs will be buried under rising waters and the
ideal position, for both photosynthesis and oxygenation, is lost, and reefs can die, like burying a tree’s roots. About 125
mya, reefs made by rudist bivalves, which thrived on carbonate hardgrounds, began to displace reefs made by stony
corals. They may have prevailed because they could tolerate hot and saline waters better than stony corals could. About
116 mya, an extinction event happened, probably caused by volcanism, which temporarily halted rudist domination. But
rudists flourished until the late Cretaceous, when they went extinct, perhaps due to changing climate, although there is
also evidence that the rudists did not go extinct until the end-Cretaceous event. Carbon dioxide levels steadily fell from
the early Cretaceous until today, temperatures fell during the Cretaceous, and hot-climate organisms gradually became
extinct during the Cretaceous. Around 93 mya, another anoxic event happened, perhaps caused by underwater
volcanism, which again seems to have largely been confined to marine biomes. It was much more devastating than the
previous one, and rudists were hit hard, although it was a more regional event. That event seems to have nearly spelled
the end of ichthyosaurs, and a family of competing plesiosaurs also went extinct. On land, spinosaurs, some of which
seem to have specialized in eating fish, also went extinct. There had been a decline in sauropod and ornithischian
diversity before that 93 mya extinction, but it subsequently rebounded. In the oceans, biomes beyond 60 degrees latitude
were barely impacted, while those closer to the equator were devastated, which suggests that oceanic cooling was
related.369 #GEOCARBSULF shows rising oxygen and declining carbon dioxide in the late Cretaceous, which reflected a
general cooling trend that began in the mid-Cretaceous. Among the numerous hypotheses posited, late Cretaceous
climate changes have been invoked for slowly driving dinosaurs to extinction, in the “they went out with a whimper, not a
bang” scenario. However, it seems that dinosaurs did go out with a bang. A big one. Ammonoids seem to have been
brought to the brink with nearly all marine mass extinctions during their tenure on Earth, and it was no different with that
late-Cretaceous extinction. Ammonoids recovered once again, and their largest species ever lived in the late Cretaceous,
but the end-Cretaceous extinction marked their final appearance as they went the way of trilobites and other iconic
animals.

Sauropods were high grazers that ate tree ferns, cycads, and conifers as their staple. The dramatic radiation of
ornithischians in the late Cretaceous coincided with the spread of angiosperms, and their chewing ability continually
improved. Insects also dramatically diversified, as did birds and mammals, in an epochal instance of coevolution between
plants and animals.370 Hive insects (bees, wasps, termites, and ants) began their rise when flowering plants did.

Shell-cracking lobsters first appeared in the early Cretaceous. By the late Cretaceous, mosasaurs became the dominant
marine predators. Ichthyosaurs went extinct after 150 million years of existence, and plesiosaurs declined. Those apex
predators preyed on squids as large as today’s and sharks and ray-finned fish always seemed to do well. Some
substantial sharks appeared in the mid-Cretaceous that even preyed on mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. The largest sea
turtles yet recorded lived in the late Cretaceous, at four meters long and two metric tons.

In the 19th century, the Jurassic was called the Golden Age of Dinosaurs, but that moniker is arguably most applicable to
the late Cretaceous, and it was a golden age clear up until a bolide impact brought it all to an end.371 One of the uglier
disputes in paleontology’s history was a race in the late 19th century between two Americans bent on outcompeting each
other in finding and describing dinosaur fossils.372 However, the dinosaur extinction is probably the largest and most
contentious controversy in the history of paleontology. Again, the subject of mass extinctions was taboo, due to Lyell’s
and Darwin’s prevailing uniformitarianism, until my lifetime. The hypothesized bolide event, first proposed in 1980, was a
kind of a bolide event inflicted on paleontology. Acrimonious disputes ignited that still burn, but it made studying mass
extinctions respectable. Initially attacked and dismissed, the bolide impact hypothesis is by far today’s leading hypothesis
for explaining the end-Cretaceous extinction.373 However, at the same time, India was speeding toward its Asian destiny,
and its movement is associated with a huge volcanic event that created the Deccan Traps. Also, sea levels seesawed
during the Cretaceous’s end, so the bolide event has some theoretical competition as a causative agent.

It is probably safe to say that if the end-Cretaceous extinction had multiple causes, none of the pre-human mass
extinctions can be attributed to just one cause. However, the sudden disappearance of all non-avian dinosaurs, and what
survived, casts a heavy vote for the bolide hypothesis. Also, there may have been multiple impacts, similar to how the
Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragmented before it plowed into Jupiter. Dinosaurs were all terrestrial and were either
herbivores or ate herbivores. The largest bolide impact obviously hit North America the hardest, T-rex would have been
among the first casualties, and it would have created an artificial “winter” lasting at least a few months, which might have
followed the greatest fires in Earth’s history. All photosynthetic organisms would have been devastated, as well as the
food chains that relied on them. That alone can explain the end of non-avian dinosaurs, but it also helps explain what
survived. Ammonoids were lightweight versions of nautiloids that lived near the ocean’s surface. Nautiloids had retreated
to deep waters hundreds of millions of years earlier, they lay eggs that take a year to hatch, and they lay them in deep
water. All ammonoids went extinct in the end-Cretaceous event, which ended a 300-million-year-plus tenure on Earth,
and all marine reptiles disappeared, too. Rudist bivalves were in decline before the extinction, probably related to the sea
level changes, but it is looking like they lasted until the bolide event. They were all dependent on primary-production food
chains that would have been interrupted by the “bolide winter,” for those that survived the initial conflagration, and they all
went extinct. However, a year after the disaster, when the smoke and dust was clearing, out hatched nautiloids that had
been safe in their eggs the entire time, and nautiloids are still with us.374 Sharks would have feasted on dead beasts; both
aquatic animals and carcasses washed into the oceans by tsunamis.

Most plants produce seeds, which would have largely survived the catastrophe and began growing when conditions
improved. Ferns came back first, in what is called a fern spike, as ferns are a disaster-taxon. Crocodiles, modern birds
(which included ducks at the time), mammals, and amphibians also survived, and all could have found refuge in burrows,
swamps, and shoreline havens, lived in tree holes and other crevices that they were small enough to hide in, and all could
have eaten the catastrophe’s detritus. In general, freshwater species fared fairly well, especially those that could eat
detritus. Also, the low-energy requirements of ectothermic crocodiles would have seen them survive when the
mesothermic/endothermic dinosaurs starved. The primary determinants seem to have been what could survive on
detritus or energy reserves and what could not, and what could find refuge from the initial conflagration. While there may
have been some evidence of dinosaur decline before the end-Cretaceous extinction (it was gradually growing colder), and
the Deccan Traps may have caused at least some local devastation, the complete extinction of non-avian dinosaurs,
ammonites, marine reptiles, and others that would have been particularly vulnerable to the bolide event’s aftermath has
convinced most dinosaur specialists that the bolide impact alone was sufficient to explain the extinction and no other
hypothesis explains the pattern of extinction and survival that the bolide hypothesis does.375 In general, the key to
surviving the end-Cretaceous extinction was being a marginal species, and all of those on center-stage paid the ultimate
price. The end-Cretaceous extinction's toll was nearly 20% of all families, half of all genera, and about 75% of all species,
and marked the end of an era; the Mesozoic ended and made way for the Age of Mammals, also called the Cenozoic,
which used to have the Biblically inspired title of the Tertiary.

With the success of the end-Cretaceous bolide hypothesis, there was a movement in some circles to explain all mass
extinctions with bolide events, particularly the Permian extinction. If bolide events were responsible for all mass
extinctions, then the periodic, galactic explanation might still have relevance. Even though an end-Permian bolide event
was unveiled with great fanfare and media attention in 2001, it does not appear to be a valid extinction hypothesis today,
and invoking bolide impacts to explain every mass extinction seems to have been a passing fad that has seen its best
days.376 The oxygen hypothesis for explaining extinctions, evolutionary novelty, and radiations is similarly called a current
fashion in some circles, and time will tell how the hypothesis fares, although it seems to have impressive explanatory
value.

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 this 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 most 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 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.377 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.378 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 those of 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.379 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.380 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.381 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.382 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. 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.383

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 rates 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.384 Mammals solved Carrier’s Constraint when
they adopted erect postures in the early Jurassic.385

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.386 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 to South America. About the time of the end-Cretaceous holocaust, 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.387 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 Paleocene‘s 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.388 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 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.389

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. 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
in Oligocene 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.390 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.391 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 succeeded 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.392

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.393 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 increase in intelligence that characterizes primates. Lemurs diverged early in the primate line and
rafted over to the newly isolated Madagascar in the early Eocene. 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.394

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 thrived
in North America and Europe and survived to the mid-Eocene, although the evidence today strongly suggests that it was
herbivorous. 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 GEOCARBSULF, 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 C4 carbon fixation. It allowed plants to adapt to
reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. C4 plants became ecologically prevalent about 6-7 mya in the Miocene, and
grasses are today’s most common C4 plants and comprise more than 60% of all C4 species. The rest of Earth’s
photosynthesizers use C3 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, one of 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. 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. They 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.395

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.396 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. That ten
million year period ended as Earth began cooling off and headed toward the current ice age, and it has been called the
original Paradise Lost.397 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.398

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 about 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 is the closest living relative to whales.399 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 41 mya they became fully aquatic, for a transition
from land to sea that “only” took eight million years.400 Whales quickly became 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.401 Most of the world’s oil formed in the sediments
of those Tethyan oceans and very little has formed since the Oligocene.

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; 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 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 beguiling 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 ever
since the end-Permian extinction 250 mya. 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
o o
Eocene, the global ocean floor’s water temperature was about 13 C (55 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 12 million years, very consistently, although a brief small reversal transpired at
about 40 mya.402 By 37-38 mya, the 200-million-year-plus Greenhouse Earth phase ended and the transition to 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.403 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.404
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.405 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.406

Those oceanic changes profoundly impacted Earth’s ecosystems. Not only did most warm-climate species go extinct, at
least locally, but new species appeared that were 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, particularly in the Southern Ocean.407 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. More cosmopolitan Asian mammals replaced provincial European mammals, although from
competition, an extinction event, or other causes is still debated, and competition is favored. About half of European
mammalian genera went extinct, replaced by immigrants from Asia, and some from North America via Asia.408

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, 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 most 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.409 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.410

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 the Miocene was 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 positive and negative feedbacks can produce dramatic changes. For the several million year warm
period, carbon dioxide levels do not appear to have been elevated. That data has been seized on by Global Warming
skeptics as evidence that carbon dioxide levels have nothing to do with Earth’s temperature, but climate scientists not
funded by the Hydrocarbon Lobby rarely think that way. Carbon dioxide is only one greenhouse gas, and water is more
important. But as clouds demonstrate, water is notoriously ephemeral, constantly evaporating and precipitating, and
some land can get a lot (rainforests), and some can get very little (deserts). Icehouse Earth temperatures are more
variable than Greenhouse Earth temperatures, particularly during the transitions between states, and an Icehouse Earth
atmosphere contains less water vapor than a Greenhouse Earth atmosphere.

In recent years, Neogene temperatures have been the focus of intensive research.411 What appears to be the proximate
cause of elevated temperatures was a dramatic change in global ocean currents. The final closing of the Tethys Ocean,
the isolation of Antarctica, the creation of that vast arc of Eurasian mountains, and the opening and closing of land
bridges, such as in the Bering Sea and ultimately the land bridge between North and South America, created dramatic
changes in ocean currents and global climate. One result was fluctuating Antarctic Bottom Water. Its production declined
beginning about 24 mya, and its weakness lasted until about 14 mya. Consequently, Earth’s oceans were not stratified as
they are today, and warm water extended far lower into the oceans than it does today. Also, it reduced the temperature
gradient between the equator and poles, which drives global currents: the greater the differential, the more vigorous the
currents. It was still an Icehouse Earth, but the “mid-Miocene climatic optimum” was relatively warm.412 The past three
million years are the coldest that Earth has seen since the Karoo Ice Age that ended 260 mya, but this Icehouse Earth
phase began developing in the mid-Eocene. While the steadily declining carbon dioxide levels of the past 150-100 million
years is the ultimate cause of this Icehouse Earth phase, relatively short-term and regional fluctuations have had their
proximate causes rooted in other geophysical, geochemical, and celestial dynamics.

Whatever the causes were, the early Miocene was warm, and as with Eocene migrations around the North Pole, migrating
in the Arctic became easy again, and North America was invaded by Eurasian animals migrating across Beringia. The
prominent Menoceras descended from Asian migrants, and the strange-looking Moropus was also an Asian immigrant,
which had claws on its forefeet, like a sloth’s.413 Pronghorns also migrated from Asia, and the first true cat in North
America arrived. Those North American days saw the last of a pig-like omnivore that was rhino-sized. A giraffe-like
camel lived then, and the first true equines appeared in the early Miocene and migrated to Asia from North America. The
general Oligocene cooling gave rise to tough, gritty plants, and deer, antelope, elephants, rodents, horses, camels, rhinos,
and others developed hypsodont teeth, which had greatly expanded enamel surfaces for grinding those plants.414
Carnivores also migrated from Asia, such as an early bear, an early weasel, and bear dogs. North America’s rodents and
rabbits, which have a common ancestor from what became Eurasia, continued to diversify. Later in the Miocene’s warm
period, the trickle of Asian immigrants became a flood, including a giant bear dog that weighed up to 600 kilograms (1,300
pounds), and two large groups of immigrant rhinos, Teleoceras and several genera of aceratherine rhinos, displaced
endemic ones. In a late-Pliocene count of North American mammalian genera, a third were not native to North
America.415 But North American fauna was unscathed compared to other continents. Below is an artist's conception of
Miocene North America. (Source: public domain from Wikipedia)
The invasion of North America from Asia (with a little migration from North America to Asia), while important, was not as
dramatic as what happened in Africa a few million years later. About 24 mya, Africa and the attached Arabian Peninsula
began colliding with Eurasia. The once-vast Tethys Ocean had finally been reduced to a strait between the continents,
and one of Earth’s most dramatic mammalian migrations began. By about 18 mya, proboscidean gomphotheres had
migrated from Africa and they reached North America by 16.5 mya. An elephant ancestor left Africa but stayed in Asia.
As with the North American interchange with Asia, however, the greater change came the other way. Rodents, deer,
cattle, antelope, pigs, rhinos, giraffes, dogs (including the hyena), and cats came over, along with small insectivores and
shrews. Most of the iconic large fauna of today’s African plains originated from elsewhere, particularly Asia.416 Asian
animals invaded and dominated Europe and Africa, and became abundant in North America. In general, Asia had more
diverse biomes and was the largest continent, so it developed the most competitive animals. That principle, which Darwin
remarked on, became very evident when the British invaded Australia in the 18th century: imports such as rabbits and
foxes quickly prevailed, and endemic species were quickly driven to extinction. The most important Miocene development
for humans was African primate development, but that is a subject for a later chapter.

What seems to explain invader and endemic success with those migrations is what kind of continent the invaders came
from, what kind of continent they invaded, and the invasion route. Asia contains large arctic and tropical biomes, unlike
any other continent. North America barely reaches the tropics and only a finger of South America reaches high latitudes,
and well short of what would be called arctic latitudes in North America. Africa’s biomes were all tropical and near-
tropical. The route to Europe from Asia in the late Oligocene was straight across at the same latitude, so the biomes were
similar. About the same is true of the route to Africa from Asia. Asian immigrants were not migrating to climates much
different from what they left. But the route to North America was via Beringia, which was an Arctic route. Primates and
other tropical animals could not migrate from Asia to North America via Beringia, and even fauna from temperate climates
were not going to make that journey, not in Icehouse Earth conditions. Oligocene North America was geographically
protected in ways that Oligocene Europe and Africa were not, and it already had substantial exchanges with Asia before
and was a big continent with diverse biomes in its own right. It was not nearly as isolated as Africa, South America, and
Australia were.

In South America, its animals continued to evolve in isolation, and some huge ones appeared. In the Miocene, the largest
flying bird ever known flew in South American skies; it looked like a giant condor, had a seven-meter wingspan, and
weighed 70 kilograms. The largest turtle ever lived in South America in the late Miocene and early Pliocene. Glyptodonts
first appeared, as well as a rhino-sized sloth, and some large browsers and grazers inhabited the large herbivore guild
and looked like guild members on other continents, for another instance of convergent evolution. In Australia, the
Miocene fossil record is thin, but recent findings demonstrate that all Miocene mammals were marsupials, except for bats.
Kangaroos diversified into different niches; some were rat-sized and others became carnivorous. Giant wombats foraged
in the Miocene, and marsupial lions first appeared in the Oligocene, kept growing over the epochs, and when humans
arrived about 50 kya, they were lion-sized. Giant flightless birds also roamed Australia, as they still did in South America,
although just how carnivorous some may have been is debated.

In the oceans, the Miocene warm period meant expanding reefs, and tropical conditions again visited high latitudes, but
not to the early Eocene’s extent. Corals, mollusks, echinoids, and bryozoans all expanded and diversified in the warm
period.417 Also, the first appearance of the closest thing to marine forests was in the Miocene, when kelp developed about
20 mya. Kelp forest denizens such as seals and the ancestors of sea otters also appeared in the Miocene. Seals are
closely related to bears and otters, from the family that includes weasels. Whales radiated in the warm Miocene oceans,
and C. Megalodon was not far behind. The first rorquals appeared in the Miocene, and they specialized in eating polar
krill. They were the last whales hunted nearly to extinction by humans, after all other species had been decimated.
Rorquals were fast swimmers and hunting them was not feasible until whaling became industrialized.

For 10 million years, Earth’s ecosystems readily adapted to the warmer temperatures, but Greenland began to grow its ice
sheet about 18 mya, and by 14 mya the party was over and a steady cooling trend began that lasted all the way to the
beginning of the current ice age, as the Antarctic ice sheets grew like never before. Once again, tropical flora and fauna
in high latitudes either migrated toward the equator or went extinct. Reefs cannot migrate, so those outside the shrinking
tropics died out.

The cause of the cooling at 14 mya is the subject of a number of hypotheses, one of which is mountain-building in that
great arc created by colliding continents exposed rock that then absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in silicate
weathering. Around the time of the cooling, the Arabian Peninsula finally crashed into Asia and closed off the Tethys
Ocean, which by then was more like the Tethys Strait there. The last remnants of the Tethys consisted of an inland sea
that includes today’s Caspian, Black, and Aral seas, and the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf.

Eurasian mountain building was not the only such Miocene event. The Cascade Range, which I have spent my life
happily hiking in, began erupting in the Miocene and rose in the Pliocene, and so is one of Earth’s younger and more
rugged ranges. The Sierra Nevada of California also formed in the Miocene, and the Andes grew into a formidable
climatic barrier. The Rocky Mountains also had renewed uplifting in the Miocene, and the Southern Alps of New Zealand
were formed. In the mid-Miocene, the northward movement of Australia toward Asia initiated the plate collision that
created the Indonesian archipelago, which blocked tropical flow between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. 418 Grinding
tectonic plates have created the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is Earth’s most seismically active region, and contributed to
many Cenozoic mountain-building and volcanic events, but it is only a pale imitation of Mesozoic volcanism. The
radioactivity that drives plate tectonics has steadily declined over the eons, and in about one billion years the plates will
cease to move and Earth will become geologically dead, as Mars is today. Life on Earth will then quickly end, if it has not
already expired. Complex life will likely be long gone by then.419

As the cooling event began 14 mya, drying came again, the tropics shrank, rainforests gave way to woodlands,
woodlands gave way to grasslands, grasslands gave way to steppes, coniferous forests grew, angiosperm forests shrank,
and deserts and tundra grew. In the Miocene, another major new biome appeared: grasslands. Grasses originated in the
Cretaceous and dinosaurs ate them, but it was not until the mid-Miocene's cooling at 14 mya that grasslands first
appeared as a biome’s foundation. Those grasslands were the first savannas, and North America’s Miocene grasslands
would have resembled Africa’s today. As it is today, North America’s grasslands were on the Great Plains. Instead of
elephants there were mastodonts, instead of hippos there were hippo-like rhinos, in place of giraffes were long-necked
camels, some of which indeed reached giraffe size and even far more massive, pronghorns played the antelope role, and
horses played zebras. The predators would have looked a little different, and hyena-like dogs, bears, and bear dogs
brought down the big game.420

Those grasslands, with their attendant grazers and browsers, and their predators, appeared in the pampas of Argentina,
the plains of the Ukraine, China, and Pakistan, and, of course, Africa. Africa’s savanna fauna would have looked very
familiar, with elephants, antelope (including impalas, gazelles, etc.), hippos, cats, hyenas, short-necked giraffes, horses,
the first modern rhinos, and the like. In Eurasia and Africa, with the land barriers removed, all the savanna biomes
resembled each other. In the late Miocene, C4 plants began to proliferate, especially in those grasslands. Those
grasslands grew when the ice age began.

Many plant families incorporate silica into their structures. Diatoms also incorporate silica, and those are among the few
life forms that use silicon, although it is one of Earth’s most plentiful crustal elements. Diatoms seem to gain energy
advantages by using silica, and plants seem to have structural advantages, but it is thought that plants also used silica for
a defensive measure, as it helps make plants unpalatable. Eating plants full of silica structures, called phytoliths, is like
chewing sand. This is particularly true with grasses, as phytoliths make chewing them a tooth-wrecking process,
particularly for ruminants and their thorough chewing. Grazing herbivores have heavily enameled hypsodont teeth (also
called high-crowned teeth) to deal with the silica and generally tough grassland vegetation. In North America, hypsodont
herbivores proliferated while those without that heavy enamel (also called low-crowned teeth), which were browsers
instead of grazers, declined. By about nine mya, North American browsers had largely vanished and grazers dominated
the new grasslands.421 Earth kept cooling and drying, and fewer than seven mya, steppe vegetation began replacing
savanna-like grasslands, and forests were decimated. This led to the greatest mass extinction in pre-human North
America in the Cenozoic Era, as many species of horses, mastodonts, bears, dogs, and small predators went extinct, as
well as mice, beavers, and moles.422 Asia and Africa were hit similarly, although not quite as hard as North America
seemed to be, but South America and Australia hardly seemed affected at all.423 New Zealand’s surrounding seafloor
changed from warm-water communities to the Southern Ocean communities that it has today.424

The Tethys Ocean finally evaporated, literally, at the Miocene’s end, and it was a spectacular exit. As part of the collision
of Africa and Europe, Morocco and Spain smashed together and separated the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean
Sea. Then the entire Mediterranean dried out, as there was not enough regional precipitation to replenish the
evaporation. Then the crashing Atlantic waves eroded through the rock and the Atlantic again filled the Mediterranean
Sea in floods that may have been Earth history's most spectacular. The grinding continents then made another rock dam,
the Atlantic was cut off again, and the Mediterranean once again dried up. That pattern happened more than 40 times
between about 5.8 and 5.2 mya. Each drying episode, after the rock dam again separated the Atlantic from the
Mediterranean, took about a thousand years and left about 70 meters of salt on the floor of the then Mediterranean
Desert. The repeated episodes created 2,000-to-3,000-meter-thick sediments of gypsum, which is formed from
evaporating oceans, as trapped as the Mediterranean was.425 Creating so much gypsum partially desalinated Earth’s
oceans (a 6% lowering), raised their freezing point, and may have contributed to the growth of Antarctica’s ice sheets.426
Also, those drying episodes initiated great droughts in Africa and may well have spurred the evolutionary events that led
to humans.

The Pliocene Epoch (c. 5.3 to 2.6 mya) began warmer than today’s climate, but was the prelude to today’s ice age, as
temperatures steadily declined. An epoch of less than three million years reflects human interest in the recent past.
Geologically and climatically, there was little noteworthy about the Pliocene (although the Grand Canyon was created
then), although two related events made for one of the most interesting evolutionary events yet studied. South America
kept moving northward, and the currents that once circled Earth at the equator in the Tethyan heyday were finally closed.
The gap between North America and South America began to close about 3.5 mya, and by 2.7 mya the current land
bridge had developed. Around three mya, the Great American Biotic Interchange began, when fauna from each continent
could raft or swim to the other side. South America had been isolated for 60 million years and only received the stray
migrant, such as rodents and New World monkeys. North America, however, received repeated invasions from Asia and
had exchanges with Europe and Greenland. North America also had much more diverse biomes than South America's,
even though it had nothing like the Amazon rainforest. The ending of South America’s isolation provided the closest thing
to a controlled experiment that paleobiologists would ever have. South America's fauna was devastated, far worse than
European and African fauna were when Asia finally connected with them. More than 80% of all South American
mammalian families and genera existing before the Oligocene were extinct by the Pleistocene.427 Proboscideans
continued their spectacular success after leaving Africa, and Stegomastodon species inhabited the warm, moist
Amazonian biome, as well as the Andean mountainous terrain and pampas. The Cuvieronius also invaded and thrived as
a mixed feeder, grazing or browsing as conditions permitted. In came cats, dogs, camels (which became the llama),
horses, pigs, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, deer, bears, tapirs, and others. They displaced virtually all species inhabiting
the same niches on the South American side. All large South American predators were driven to extinction, as well as
almost all browsers and grazers of the grasslands. The South American animals that migrated northward and survived in
North America were almost always those that inhabited niches that no North American animal did, such as monkeys,
ground sloths (which survived because of their claws), glyptodonts and their small armadillo cousins (which survived
because of their armor), capybaras, and porcupines (which survived because of their quills). The opossum was nearly
eradicated by North American competition but survived and is the only marsupial that made it to North America and exists
today. One large-hoofed herbivore survived: the Toxodon. The largest rodent ever (it weighed one metric ton!) survived
for a million years after the interchange. Titanis, that large predatory bird from South America, also survived and migrated
to North America and lasted about a million years before dying out.428 In general, North American mammals were more
energy efficient and brainier, which resulted from evolutionary pressures that South America had less of, in its isolation.
They were able to outrun and outthink their South American competitors. South American animals made it past South
America, but none of them drove any northern indigenous species of note to extinction.

The scientific consensus today is that climate change or inhospitable biomes had nothing to do with North American
mammals prevailing over South American mammals, which were significantly marsupials. But the event that made the
exchange possible, closing the gap between those continents, seems to have triggered the current ice age (and may have
triggered interchange events, but would not have greatly influenced their outcome), and started about 3.5 mya, as the
ocean gap began disappearing between the Americas. The closure of the gap between North and South America led to
today’s thermohaline circulation and created the Gulf Stream. Although the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the North
Atlantic and makes western Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be, the pre-ice-age Caribbean had low-salinity
waters that drifted north into the Arctic, and because of that low salinity, the surface water did not sink but continued into
the Arctic Ocean, warming it. Once Pacific access was cut off, the Gulf Stream formed, which was saltier (hence denser)
and sank as it cooled in the North Atlantic, sinking to the ocean floor before it got to Greenland, as is the case today. This
cessation of warm tropical waters to the Arctic seems to have triggered the growth of Arctic ice, particularly Greenland,
which has the world’s second largest ice sheet after Antarctica.429 The change in currents killed off about 65% of mollusk
species along the Atlantic coast of North America, and Florida’s reefs largely died out. Caribbean reefs survived and
much of the east North Atlantic’s warm water sea life migrated south into the tropics and the Mediterranean. Japanese
mollusks also survived the new currents. The western North Atlantic cooled off, which led not only to Greenland’s ice
sheet but the largest ice sheets of the current ice age have been North American, and their volumes even exceeded
Antarctica’s.

At 2.6 mya, today's ice age began. It ended the Neogene Period and initiated the Quaternary Period, which we still live in.
The term “Quaternary” is one of the last vestiges of Biblical influences on early geology and refers to the time after Noah’s
flood. The Quaternary’s first epoch is the Pleistocene, which ended 12 kya, at the beginning of this ice age’s most recent
interglacial period. The past 12 thousand years are called the Holocene Epoch.

The current ice age has come in phases, and about a million years ago a steady rhythm of advancing and retreating ice
sheets began and has recurred about every 100 thousand years, which is certainly related to Milankovitch cycles. During
this ice age, the land fauna was already adapted to Icehouse Earth conditions, and during 17 or more ice sheet advances
and retreats over the past two million years, there were not any large-scale extinctions, except for the most recent one.
Below is an artist's conception of Pleistocene Spain. (Source: public domain from Wikipedia)
In general, the large-sized fauna guilds that have dominated the past 40 million years were well represented on all
continents. Proboscideans thrived in all inhabitable continents and biomes that they could migrate to. In North America,
mammals whose size would astound (and terrify) modern observers included the short-faced bear (about the largest
carnivore ever), a bison with horns two meters wide, the largest cat ever, giant mammoths, the largest wolf ever, and the
largest beaver ever. They only seem large because of today’s stunted remnant populations. With the exception of the
bison, they all lived for millions of years, through numerous ice age events, all to go extinct just after humans arrived,
along with many other species, such as the American cheetah. The other continents had similar giants. Australia had a
kangaroo about the size of a gorilla and the largest lizard ever. Southeast Asia had the largest primate ever, which
dwarfed today’s gorillas. With only Africa and parts of Eurasia as partial exceptions, virtually all large fauna went extinct,
worldwide, soon after human arrival, and how humans came to be is the subject of a coming chapter.

Mid-Essay Reflection
This chapter falls at about this essay's midpoint, and humanity's role in this story has yet to be told. As I conceived this
essay, studied for it, wrote it, edited it, and had numerous allies help out, an issue repeatedly arose regarding the half of
this essay just completed, and can be summarized with: "What was the point?" Not everybody asked it and some
understood, but others wondered openly and sometimes subtly what the purpose of this essay's first half was (and some
asked if the essay had any point at all and considered my effort a waste of time). This chapter is my reply, and I think it is
important to understand.

My teachers from the first grade onward remarked on my fascination with nature. Science always came easily to me. A
bizarre set of circumstances saw me trade my science studies for business studies in college, and that voice in my head
led me to attempting to fulfil my teenage dreams of changing the energy industry. I left the pure science path for applied
science in the real world, and that experience radicalized me. In 2002, when I finished my website largely as it stands
today, I longed to one day resume my math and science studies. Soon afterward, one of R. Buckminster Fuller's pupils
remarked that my work was like Fuller's, and reading his work helped crystallize the paradigm that I had been groping
toward. When that paradigmatic view became clearer, I began the studies that resulted in this essay, and my efforts since
2007 were specifically directed toward writing it.

Could this essay's first half be considered an indulgence of my childhood fascination with nature? That argument could
have merit, but I have always been a "big picture" kind of thinker, even as a teenager. I am writing this essay primarily to
help manifest FE technology in the public sphere and help remedy the deficiencies in all previous attempts that I was part
of, witnessed, heard of, or read about. The biggest problem, by far, was that those trying to bring FE technology to the
public had virtually no support from the very public that they sought to help. My journey's most important lesson was that
personal integrity is the world's scarcest commodity, and an egocentric humanity living in scarcity and fear is almost
effortlessly manipulated by the social managers. John Q. Public is only interested in FE technology to the extent that he
can immediately profit from it. Otherwise, he goes back to watching his favorite TV show. It took many years of
disillusionment for that to finally become clear to me. While this essay and all of my writings are provided for free to
humanity and anybody can read them, I intend to only reach a very tiny fraction of humanity with my writings, but that tiny
fraction will be sufficient for my plan to succeed. The readers that I seek have a formidable task ahead of them, but
nothing less is required for my approach to have any hope of bearing fruit. This essay and my other writings are intended
as a course in comprehensive (also called "big picture") thinking. Studying the details deeply enough to avoid misleading
superficial understandings is also a key goal. I am an accountant by profession, but one of the world's leading
paleobiologists surprisingly read an early draft of this essay and informed me that it was one of the best efforts that he
ever saw on the journey of life on Earth. There was nobody on Earth whose opinion I would have respected more than
his, so I do not think that I am asking readers of this essay's first half to humor me. Every sentient being on Earth should
know the rudiments of what this essay's first half covers.

Perhaps the most damaging deficiency in FE efforts, after self-serving orientation, was that the participants and their
supporters were scientifically illiterate and easily led astray by the latest spectacle. Scientific literacy can help prevent
most such distractions. While writing this essay, I was not only bombarded with news of the latest FE and alternative
energy aspirants' antics, but I had to continually field queries from my allies regarding whether Peak Oil and Global
Warming were conspiratorial elite hoaxes (or figments of the hyperactive imaginations of environmentalists and other
activists), for two examples that readily come to mind. Digesting this essay's material should have those questions
answered as mere side-effects. Far from being a hoax or imaginary, Peak Oil was reached in the USA in 1970 and
globally in 2005-2006, and it is all downhill from there, and conventional oil will be almost entirely depleted in my lifetime.
Shale oil and tar sands are not solutions at all, although both were heavily promoted in the USA in 2014. In every
paleoclimate study that I have seen, so-called greenhouse gases have always been considered the primary determinant
of Earth's surface temperature (after the Sun), and carbon dioxide is chief among them. The radiation-trapping properties
of carbon dioxide are not controversial in the slightest among scientists, and after the Sun's influence (which is
exceedingly stable), declining carbon dioxide levels are considered to be the ultimate cause of the Icehouse Earth
conditions that have dominated Earth for the past 35 million years. Humanity's increasing the atmosphere's carbon
dioxide content is influencing the ultimate cause of Icehouse Earth, and oceanic currents, continental configurations, and
Earth's orientation to the Sun are merely proximate causes. Increasing carbon dioxide can turn the global climate from an
Icehouse Earth to a Greenhouse Earth, and the last time that happened, Earth had its greatest mass extinction event. But
scientists with conflicts of interest have purposefully confused the issues, and a scientifically illiterate public and compliant
media have played along, partly because believing the disinformation seems to relieve us all of any responsibility for our
actions. Although scientific literacy can help people become immune to the disinformation and confusion arising from
many corners, and reading this essay's first half can help people develop their own defense from such distractions, my
goals for this essay's first half are far greater than that.

This essay presents a table of key energy events in the history of Earth and its ecosystems, and nearly half of the events
happened during the timeframe covered by this essay's first half, which includes almost the entirety of Earth's history.
Humanity's tenure amounts to a tiny sliver of Earth's history, and surveying pre-human events was partly intended to help
readers develop a sense of perspective. We are merely Earth's latest tenants. We have unprecedented dominance, but
we are quickly destroying Earth's ability to host complex life. As my astronaut colleague openly wondered, is that the act
of a sentient species? Is our path of destruction inevitable, as we plunder one energy resource after another to
exhaustion? Will depleting Earth's hydrocarbons be the latest, greatest, and perhaps final instance?

Few people on Earth today have much understanding of the relationship between energy and economic activity. Most
people think that money runs the world, when it is only an accounting fiction. Money by itself is meaningless, and financial
measures of economic activity can be highly misleading. I noted long ago that scientists had little respect for economists
and their theories. History's greatest energy baron and richest man funded the leading economic institution that obscured
the role of energy while exalting money. What a coincidence. Understanding this essay's first half will help with
comprehending the last half, and the connections between energy, ecosystems, and economics should become clear.

Paleobiologists are fascinated with the history of life on Earth, and I share their sense of wonder. If I can impart the
slightest sense of that to my readers, this essay's first half will be successful for that alone. However, just as a math
curriculum builds on itself, as each class forms the foundation of the next one, this essay's first half is intended to help
readers develop a foundational understanding. With that foundation built, the information in this essay's last half can
make a profound impact and help readers achieve personal paradigm shifts. That is essentially this essay's purpose.
Studying this essay's first half is far from a waste of time for those whom I seek, but is vitally important.

The Path to Humanity

Chapter summary:
 Old World and New World monkeys split
 Africa becomes primate refuge
 Monkeys evolve into apes
 Miocene apes migrate from Africa
 Apes ancestral to humans
 Apes migrate back to Africa
 Ape/human terminology
 Great ape diet
 Human/chimpanzee split
 Early human-line fossils
 Human line becoming bipedal
 Ardi
 Lucy
 Mammal/ape/human intelligence
 Ape dimorphism
 Mammalian investment in offspring
 Monkey/ape/human social bonding activities
 Life requirements
 How simians prevent inbreeding
 The benefits of bipedalism
 Human ancestor similarities with macaques
 First stone tools
From their Cretaceous origins through their radiations and extinctions in the Eocene, primates continued evolving. About
35 mya, Old World and New World monkeys, called higher primates (also called simians or anthropoids), split. Simians
seem to have split from a group also ancestral to prosimians. Today’s prosimians include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, and
bush babies. During the Oligocene, Africa and Southeast Asia became primate refugia. Tarsiers have lived in Southeast
Asia continually for about 45 million years, and the only survivors of their evolutionary line live on islands near Southeast
Asia. Primate history in the late Eocene and Oligocene is controversial today. The fate of an extinct group from primates’
wide geographical range in the early Eocene is debated, but they seem at least cousins to ancestors of non-tarsier
prosimians, if not ancestral to them.

This chapter and the next will survey the disputes of evolutionary lineages and geography that continue all the way to
Homo sapiens. The debates and drama have two primary sources: the first is that humans are descendants from those
lines and the second is that there has been a desire to demonstrate that humanity radically differs from its ancestors,
possessed of unique traits, not only in degree, but in kind. The debates seem to get fiercer the closer the primate line
gets to modern humans.430

Early primate migrations and extinctions led to a disjointed geographical distribution, as they could only live in tropical
canopies. When tropical forests shrank in the cooling conditions that led to the current ice age, primates such as tarsiers
found themselves in isolated refugia. In the late Eocene and late Miocene, when tropical canopies disappeared, the
primate lines inhabiting them went extinct unless they used an escape route to a surviving tropical forest.

Although simians may have first appeared in Eocene Asia, when the late-Eocene cooling began, Africa became the
primary primate refuge. Around the early Oligocene, a splinter group migrated to South America from Africa and evolved
in isolation for the next 30 million years. Just as dinosaurs marginalized early mammals, simians marginalized
prosimians, beginning in the Oligocene. Today’s prosimians either live where simians do not, or where they coexist with
simians, they are nocturnal. Prosimians have simple social organization; most nocturnal prosimians lead solitary
existences. Lemurs living in daylight have societies of up to 20. Monkeys have far more complex social organization than
prosimians, and baboon societies number up to 250 individuals, although societies of about 50 are typical. Capuchins are
considered the most intelligent New World monkeys, and their societies have between 10 and 40 members. Studies of
simian societies have shown them engaging in crude versions of human politics, which have even been called
Machiavellian, which has caused some to leap to Machiavelli’s defense.
From their origins around 40-45 mya, monkeys continued evolving in Africa’s Oligocene forests, and between 35 and 29
mya, according to molecular clock studies, some African monkeys began evolving into apes, and Proconsul, a
controversial transitional fruit-eating monkey, appeared about 25 mya.431 Mary Leakey’s most famous find was a
Proconsul skull in 1948.432 The primary differences between apes and monkeys are that apes are larger, lost their tails
(not having as much need for balancing on tree limbs), and they have a stiffer spine and larger brain.433 Apes began the
descent from canopy to ground. Simians will eat fruit if they can, but some early monkey/apes developed thicker tooth
enamel. That change meant that they no longer subsisted on soft fruit and leaves, but were eating coarser vegetation,
which was a consequence of living in a cooler, dryer world.434 No Miocene apes were as adapted to leaf eating as today’s
apes and leaf-eating monkeys. As with the first tetrapods to leave water, a prominent speculation today is that those
monkeys/apes changed their diets and left the trees as they lost the competitive game with other canopy-dwellers.435
Gibbons split from the line that became great apes about 22 mya and became masters of tree-living, with their swinging
mode of locomotion.436

By 20-17 mya, apes became common in East Africa, some became large, up to 90 kilograms, and some resembled
gorillas.437 Nearly all apes eventually abandoned tropical canopies, and although monkeys were scarce in the Miocene,
they stayed and dominate them today. The number of monkey species increased and ape species have decreased rather
steadily over the past 20 million years.438 With that late-Oligocene warming that continued into the Miocene, tropical
forests began expanding again. When Africa and Arabia finally crashed into Eurasia and began that great invasion from
Asia, apes escaped Africa beginning about 16.5 mya. They had thickly enameled teeth suited to the non-fruit foods
available outside rainforests.439 Their migrations resulted in new homes that spanned Eurasia, from Europe to Siberia to
China to Southeast Asia.440 It was a spectacular adaptive radiation that tallied more than 20 discovered ape species so
far, and has been called the Golden Age of Apes.441 That is how gibbons and orangutans arrived in Asia. About 14 mya
in Africa, the ancestors of today’s great apes may have appeared, and about 12.5 mya the likely ancestors of orangutans
appeared in India. By that time, tropical forests were shrinking once again and orangutans continued down their
evolutionary path, isolated from their African cousins. One possible ancestor lived in Southeast Asia about 9-7 mya. A
descendant from the orangutan line became the largest primate ever, at three meters tall and more than 500 kilograms.
Below is a comparison of that primate to humans. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It lived for nine million years, only to go extinct about when humans arrived, and might have something to do with Yeti
legends. Today’s orangutans are confined to two Indonesian islands, Borneo and Sumatra, and are particularly
endangered on Sumatra. All apes besides humans are endangered today due to human activities.
In the mid-Miocene cooling’s early stages, beginning about 14 mya, apes were richly spread across Eurasia and were
adapted to the hardier diets that less-tropical biomes could provide, and one from Spain 13 mya may well be ancestral to
modern humans and other great apes.442 It largely lived on the ground and had a relatively upright posture. Its discovery
threw previously accepted ideas of ape evolution into disarray. The idea of apes ancestral to humanity living beyond
Africa is a recent one, but is gaining acceptance.443 Important new fossils are found with regularity, as with all areas of
paleontology, but the most plentiful funding is for investigating human ancestry. A 1996 discovery of a Miocene ape in
Turkey, with features common to both orangutans and African apes, led to questioning whether some key ape features
are ancestral or convergent.444 One early fossil ape finding is still highly controversial as to where it fits into the
evolutionary tree, as it had ape and monkey features but lived 10 million years after the hypothesized ape/monkey split.445
The great ape lineages are the subject of considerable controversy today, and the human ancestral tree is regularly
shaken up with new findings.

Around 10.5 mya, after Eurasian forests began thinning out, African rainforests began losing their continuity, broke up into
isolated patches, and woodlands and grasslands appeared along rainforest edges.446 Whether the direct ancestor of
humans moved “home” to Africa from Eurasia around 9-10 mya as the Miocene cooling progressed, or indigenous African
lines led to humans, is currently controversial. However, by seven mya the evolutionary line to humans was firmly
established in Africa, as the forests that could support apes in near-African Eurasia disappeared, and the last of those
lines went extinct about eight mya. The gorilla line may have split from the human line about seven mya, but recent
findings may push that back to ten mya. Whatever the timing really was, there is little scientific debate whether humans
and gorillas descended from the same line and that that ancestor lived in Africa. The genome sequencing projects show
that great ape DNA and human DNA are very similar. Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest surviving cousins, share
more than 98% of their genes with humans. About 94% of human DNA is identical to chimps’. Gorillas have slightly less
DNA in common with humans, and orangutans understandably have the greatest divergence. Humans also lost a
chromosome that other great apes retained.

The terminology of the ape/human line can be confusing to a lay reader, as it gets sliced ever finer as humanity’s time is
approached, and I will avoid some of the many “homi” and “homo” terms used to describe families, genera, and species.
Homo in Greek meant “same,” while homo in Latin meant “human,” which is the meaning used in ape taxonomy. The ape
clade is the superfamily called Hominoidea, and all of its branches have “hom” prefixes. Members of the genus “Homo”
are of the solely human line. Homo habilis is perhaps the genus’s first member, although its status is still unsettled.
Orangutans are the most arboreal great ape, and in Africa the great apes had definitely left the trees as their daytime
residence, although they slept in trees to avoid predators. Gorillas can primarily subsist on leafy vegetation, although the
staple of the western lowland gorilla, which is the most prevalent gorilla species, is still fruit. Mountain gorillas primarily
subsist on leaves. Gorillas usually have a smaller daily range than chimpanzees have and live in the heart of rainforests;
what became chimpanzees were probably pushed to the margins by their larger cousins and live more along a rainforest’s
woodland fringes. They have to range relatively far to find their staple: fruit. Since their diet is more diverse and they can
survive in more varied environments, the chimpanzees’ range is far larger than that of gorillas. Like the largest
quadrupedal herbivores, gorillas ingest a great deal of low-calorie vegetation each day and are hindgut fermenters that
extract energy from cellulose, which humans cannot do. Chimpanzees are also hindgut fermenters. As with all
organisms, the ecological situation of great apes influenced their evolution, including social organization and behaviors.
This has been increasingly studied since the 19th century and has provided valuable insights into humanity, some of which
follow.

The chimpanzee and human lines seem to have split between five and seven mya, and some recent estimates are as low
as 4.6 mya. The species perhaps the closest to that split found so far dates to about seven mya, but the findings have
also been used to argue for pushing the human/chimpanzee split back to 13 mya. Whatever the timing that scientists
eventually agree on, the splits of orangutans first, gorillas second, and chimpanzees last (and the bonobo split arguably
about a million years ago) almost certainly will not change. The end of the Tethys Ocean between 5.8 and 5.2 mya may
have been the reason for the split, as the resulting droughts from those Mediterranean Sea drying episodes further shrank
the African rainforest. As with so many other evolutionary events, the line that led to humans began to leave the trees as
the losers of rainforest life and adapted to new environments probably out of necessity, not a sense of adventure and
opportunity. Those apes pushed to the margins learned to walk upright and learned to eat new foods such as roots.447

A recent find of a possible human-line ape may even displace australopithecines as humanity’s ancestors, relegating
them to a side-branch that went extinct. These are still the early days of investigating human ancestry, and rapidly and
dramatically changing ideas about the evolutionary path to humanity will continue. That is partly because the fossil
sparseness has only been recently expanded by numerous teams digging around Africa, with dreams of the ultimate find
haunting their sleep. Darwin speculated that humans evolved in Africa, but in the early 20th century, Asia was considered
the likeliest evolutionary home of humans. In 1921, an early protohuman skull was discovered in a Rhodesian mine, and
in 1924 an even more primitive protohuman skull was discovered in a South African mine. Africa became the focus of
investigating the human line and accelerated with the work of what became the Leakey dynasty, which began with Louis
Leakey’s checkered but ultimately triumphant career.

That human/chimp find of 6-7 mya had thick teeth that meant that it had abandoned the arboreal ape diet and brings up
perhaps the single biggest question of the early human line: “When did our ancestors became bipeds?”448 One piece of
evidence for bipedalism is where the spinal cord enters the skull; if it is underneath the skull, it suggests an upright
posture and, hence, bipedalism. There is disputed evidence that that seven mya ape had a skull hole that meant
bipedalism. Skull and vertebrae evidence, changes in the shoulders, arms, and hands of apes from Proconsul onward, as
well as the pelvis, legs, knees, ankles, and feet, are used whenever relevant ape fossils are found to determine what kind
of posture they had, all the way from swinging from branches to walking upright. The great range of motion of the human
arm has that arboreal heritage to thank.

Part of that late Miocene ground-foraging existence probably included digging roots, as chimpanzees do today.449 Around
4.4-3.9 mya came the earliest celebrity humanoid fossil, called Ardi today. Ardi has an older cousin, maybe an ancestor,
from 5.8-5.2 mya, but Ardi is the most complete early great ape fossil. Ardi had about the same-sized brain as a
chimpanzee, but she may have walked upright. Ardi had relatively delicate features, which suggest that she did not eat
roots and tough food, but soft fruits obtained by nimbly climbing trees. Her canine teeth are markedly less prominent than
chimpanzee teeth, which has led to speculation that her species was less aggressive than chimpanzees.

Although the human lineage through those early protohumans can be shuffled, perhaps radically, with the next new
finding, today’s anthropologists are fairly confident that the human line passes through australopithecines.450 The first
ones appeared about 4.2-4.1 mya, and about 3.9 mya, the most famous australopithecine species appeared, called
Australopithecus afarensis, of which the original humanoid fossil rock star, Lucy, was a member. She lived about 3.2
mya, and one of Mary Leakey’s greatest finds was biped footprints, probably of Lucy’s A. afarensis, dated to about 3.6
mya. But all early humans up to australopithecines also had shoulder and arm adaptations for climbing in trees, bipedal
or not, and all early humans climbed at least every night to sleep. Sleeping on the ground is not done by great apes today
except gorillas (and some chimps do), and adult male gorillas are the most regular ground sleepers, and smaller gorillas
sleep in trees.451 Gorillas are rarely preyed upon in their rainforest homes, other than by humans, rival gorillas, and the
stray leopard, which generally avoids large males. African predators made sleeping on the ground infeasible for primates,
and none does today in the kinds of woodland environments where early humans lived. The human line may have not
slept on the ground until it controlled fire.
The study of intelligence is a young science, and the relationship of brain size (both absolute and relative) and structure to
what is called intelligence is currently subject to a great deal of research and controversy, and even the definition of
intelligence is hotly debated. The cerebral cortex appeared with mammals, and is the key structural aspect of brain
evolution that led to human intelligence. The mirror test attempts to determine which animals have self-recognition, and
those suspected of being the most intelligent have passed the test, including all great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and
even a bird. Humans do not pass the mirror test until about 18 months of age.452 There is great debate between those
embracing "rich" versus "lean" interpretations of behavior and intelligence observations among animals, in which
seemingly complex thinking can be an illusion.453

Many human mental traits exist in more rudimentary form in other animals, but human thought seems far more complex
and sophisticated. Feats such as language with grammar may be a unique human achievement, which provides evidence
of the greater mental ability of humans, and our tools provide the best evidence of advanced human cognitive abilities.

Intelligence can confer great advantages, and the encephalization of theropods is an early indicator of its benefits. For
instance, spider monkeys have brains about twice the size of howler monkeys, which is thought to be due to their larger
societies (about twice as large), and the fact that their diet is more than 70% fruit, while the howler monkey’s diet is less
than half fruit, and leaves provide twice the proportion of the howler’s diet over the spider’s. Remembering where and
when fruit is ripe, and navigating more complex social environments, takes greater thinking power. Just as with howler
and spider monkeys, chimpanzees have to range far to find fruit, which is their staple, while gorillas can more readily eat
nearby leaves, and chimps have more complex social lives than gorillas do. Chimpanzees also have proportionally larger
brains than gorillas' and are considered more intelligent.

Did the larger brain lead to the behaviors, or did the behaviors lead to the larger brain? If other evolutionary trends have
relevance, they mutually reinforced each other and provided positive feedbacks; down one evolutionary line it reached
runaway conditions that led to the human brain. The initial behavior was probably the use of a body part (the brain) for a
new purpose, and its success led to selective advantages that led to mutual reinforcement. Although it is by no means an
unorthodox understanding, I think that the likely chain of events was walking upright freed hands for new behaviors, which
led to new ways of making and using tools, which enhanced food acquisition activities. This allowed the energy-
demanding brain to expand, as well as related biological changes, which led to more complex tools and behaviors that
acquired and required even more energy. That, in short, defines the human journey to this day, which the rest of this
essay will explore. There has never been and probably never will again be an energy-devouring animal like humanity on
Earth, unless it is a human-line descendant.

Many traits of apes, including humans, are evident in monkeys. Sexual dimorphism, which is when species have genders
of different shapes and sizes, is a minor phenomenon among prosimians.454 But it is pronounced in simians, especially
apes, and is why men are larger and stronger than women. Its ultimate cause is probably sexual selection: how females
choose their mates. A prominent hypothesis is that early monkey troupes had males as sentinels guarding the territorial
perimeter and protecting the female-dominated core where offspring were cared for and where food was. A defensible
food source was the key attribute of any simian territory. Most primates are territorial, and extreme territorial behaviors
can be seen in monkeys and apes, including murder, with its apotheosis in humans.

Nursing led to more involved mammalian parenting behaviors and increased female participation, in addition to the great
investment that females have in gestating offspring. Larger simian males are more likely to become dominant, and
dominant males often get the most and best food and have enhanced reproductive rights, as females are attracted to
them. Virtually all monkey and ape societies are male-dominated, and the modern ideal of human females freely
choosing their mates (or, perhaps more importantly, non-dominant males choosing their mates, if they get to mate at all) is
rarely in evidence in monkey and ape societies, and is a new phenomenon for humans. The phenomenon of attractive
women mating with rich and powerful men has deep roots in the simian evolutionary journey.

In addition to their Machiavellian social activities, monkeys are quite vocal and a key social behavior is grooming, which is
integral to forming social bonds. In crab-eating macaques, grooming seems to be a form of foreplay or even a payment
for sex, and male chimpanzees and capuchins have paid for sex, so the world’s oldest profession may be quite old
indeed. Vocalizations and grooming behaviors become more prominent in gorillas and chimpanzees (orangutan social
organization is markedly different from that of African apes). A recent hypothesis is that gossip largely replaced grooming
with humans as a cheap way to form social bonds, and “cheap” is almost always measured in terms of energy and relates
to how much metabolism is devoted to an activity. Chimpanzees spend about 20% of their day grooming, and humans
spend about 20% of their day in conversation.455 The more intelligent a primate is, the larger its society can be, to
navigate all of those social relationships. Chimp societies can reach to 120 members and humans can double that, to 250
or so, which probably not coincidentally is around the size of the group that geneticists think left Africa perhaps 60-50 kya
and conquered Earth.
There are three primary survival requirements for any species: obtain nutrients (always primarily energy), avoid becoming
nutrients, and perform those first two tasks long enough to produce offspring. If those requirements are not met, the
species will go extinct. The eating instinct outranks the sex drive, but avoiding becoming food is where the most energetic
behaviors can usually be found. Primal survival instincts take over during the fight-or-flight response. In humans, that
fear response shuts down the neocortex to enable the body to perform feats of physical survival. That is when adrenaline
pumps. All evolutionary adaptations studied by scientists always have those three primary requirements girding the
explanatory framework.

Female simians usually stay within their society of origin, while males leave. That is how simians prevented inbreeding,
but that pattern is reversed in chimpanzee and gorilla societies, in which females usually leave. Sexual coercion of
females is common behavior among simians. Bonobos and gibbons are among the few simians that overcame it, and it
seems to have been due to ecological dynamics. Humans have partially discarded that behavior during the industrial age.
Those are obviously highly charged areas of behavioral research, and sociobiology is a highly controversial scientific
discipline.456 A falsifiable hypothesis is arguably the sine qua non of science, and behavioral sciences have often been
plagued with a lack of them, going back to Freud, which has caused some to say that psychology is not really a science.
This essay will soon sail into some of those murky waters.

Becoming bipedal freed human-line hands for other uses. The non-human great apes all have long fingers and short
thumbs. Below is a comparison of chimpanzee and human hands. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Ardipithecus ramidus is an early example of the growing thumb in the ape milieu from which the human line descended.
Changes in australopithecine hands may have been at least partly adaptations to throwing and wielding clubs.457 Lucy’s
species existed for about a million years and went extinct about 2.9 mya, but it might have been one of those “happy
ending” extinctions when the descendants eventually changed to become new species. What seems clear today is that
australopithecine species were scattered around Africa, as they were a highly successful line. Lucy’s species lived in
eastern Africa, around Ethiopia, while other australopithecines lived in southern Africa and others lived in central Africa,
where Miocene ape fossils have also been found.458 Not long after Lucy’s species disappeared, an australopithecine line
appeared called “robust australopithecines,” and its members have been assigned their own genus, and Lucy and her
cousins are called “gracile.” The robusts had huge jaws and teeth, and a dramatic sagittal crest anchored their powerful
chewing muscles. A member of the robust line is nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” because of its gigantic teeth.
Several lines of evidence have converged and more evidence is regularly amassed, which is telling a story of dramatic
and rapid climate change spurring vegetation changes that initiated evolutionary adaptations in the cradle of humanity.
Sediment cores off of East Africa in the Arabian Sea, land sediment records in East Africa, combined with studies of
carbon-12/13 ratios of fossil teeth, are telling an interesting and familiar tale of human origins. Three mya, as Earth was
moving toward an ice age and the climate dried, the familiar grasslands of the Serengeti appeared for the first time. C4
grasses have higher proportions of carbon-13, and so will animals that eat them. The expanding C4 grasslands coincided
with the disappearance of Lucy's species and the appearance of the robusts that ate generous amounts of C4 plants (or
perhaps eating animals that ate those plants), probably from those expanding grasslands.459

Becoming bipedal allowed for far greater mobility than knuckle-walkers were capable of, and farther excursions from the
safety of trees became possible. But ranging farther from the safety of trees was also dangerous. Like Proconsul, key
australopithecine fossil finds were apparently where the remains of predator meals accumulated, usually in caves.460
Those early apes on the path to humanity were the hunted, not hunters. Cats such as leopards feasted on
australopithecines, and one robust skull showed leopard puncture marks.461 Most surviving bones were those from body
parts more difficult to eat, with less flesh on them, so predators left those parts largely intact. Fossil hunters discovered
body parts such as jaws, teeth, hands, and feet. Skull finds are rare.

The woodland fringes that australopithecines and their relatives lived in were markedly different from where gorillas and
even chimpanzees exist today. Today’s most successful primates in fringe environments such as those that
australopithecines operated in are macaques, which also suffer high rates of predation. The social organization of
humanity’s early ancestors may well have been more like macaques than chimpanzees.462

Earth’s evolutionary tree of life has many branches, so many that no one person can become intimate with all of them,
and innumerable lines of animals arose, radiated, and died out, almost always going out with a whimper instead of a
bang. All australopithecine branches came to their ends, except perhaps for the line that led to humans. About 2.6-2.5
mya, just as the current ice age began, a gracile australopithecine lived in eastern Africa, another in southern Africa, and
the robust australopithecine with that amazing skull lived in eastern Africa. The oldest manufactured stone tools yet
discovered of a recognized culture were associated with that east African gracile australopith. Earlier tools were likely
made at least 3.4-3.3 mya, probably by australopiths of Lucy's species, and making them may well have been part of
australopith culture for millions of years. Many non-human animals use tools, and some even make them. But all early
tools would have been made of twigs, bones, sticks, unshaped rocks, and the like, and they have not left behind much
evidence for scientists to study. Stone tools were an energy technology that mimicked the teeth and claws of more
specialized animals.

Chimpanzees are the most tool-using non-human great ape, and female chimps make and use tools more often than
males do. One problem with studying today’s animals and applying those findings to their ancestors is that their line has
evolved too. The ancestor of chimpanzees when the split was made with the human line did not look like today’s
chimpanzees, and probably did not act quite like them. However, chimpanzees and gorillas adapted to environments that
have not remarkably changed for the past 8-10 million years, and it is unlikely that they have dramatically changed over
that time. Orangutans are similar. Scientists have argued that since there is little evidence of morphological change in
those great apes in the intervening years since they split from the human line, particularly in their cranial capacity, that
they probably act similarly today and have similar capacities to their distant ancestors.463 Today’s chimps have nearly the
same-sized brains as australopithecines did. They make and use tools, and an orangutan was even trained in captivity to
make stone tools. All great apes have learned to use sign language and some even invent their own signs.

I think it very reasonable to believe that relatively sophisticated tool use among humanity’s ancestors predates, perhaps
by several million years, those stone tools dated to 3.4-3.3 mya. Tools may be hundreds of millions of years old, and
insects, fish, cephalopods, and reptiles use tools today. The protohuman equivalent of Nikola Tesla (although it may have
been a female) discovered how to bang two rocks together to create a hard edge used for cutting, perhaps with a little
inventor’s serendipity. It may not be possible to overstate the significance of that invention.464 More than a million years
of free hands, due to australopithecine bipedal posture, probably led to the most significant tool-making event in Earth’s
history to that time. The shortening fingers and lengthening thumbs of australopithecines led to more dexterity, and in
training today’s great apes to make stone tools, their relative lack of dexterity has been noted as an impediment. Also, the
increasing dexterity of the protohuman hand is linked with neurological changes, from the hands to the brain, as early
protohumans took tool-making to a new level, in another case of mutually reinforcing positive feedbacks.465

Although that australopithecine may have been the smartest member of its species, with an ape IQ that went off the scale,
his or her brain was the same size as the fellow members of his or her species, but that would not last long. The swift
climb to the appearance of Homo sapiens had begun.
 Tables of Key Events in the Human Journey
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

Humanity’s Evolutionary Heritage

Group Humans Likely Direct Human Ancestor, Time When Ancestor
Descended From or a Close Relative to It Description First Appeared
Earliest life forms Last common ancestor of A form of bacteria, with c. 3.8 – 3.5 bya
all life on Earth many traits unique to all life
on Earth.
Bacteria and archaea First complex cell An archaean enveloped a c. 2.1 – 1.6 bya
bacterium, and both lived.
Eukaryotes First sexually reproducing This innovation accelerates c. 1.2 – 1.0 bya
organism evolution.
Motile eukaryotes Choanoflagellate Motile eukaryote was an c. 900 mya
ancestor to animals.
Unicellular organisms First multicellular organism Was probably sponge-like. c. 760 – 660 bya
Immobile animals First mobile animal Was probably like a c. 580 mya
jellyfish.
Motile animals Flatworm First animal with a brain. c. 550 mya
Worms Acorn worm Early animals with c. 540 mya
breathing and circulatory
systems.
Fish-like ancestors to Pikaia First animal with a spinal c. 530 mya
vertebrates cord.
Eel-like fish Ostracoderm First true fish. Used gills c. 505 mya
 exclusively to breathe.
Jawless fish Placoderm First fish with jaws. c. 480 mya
Cartilaginous fish Guiyu oneiros First bony fish. c. 420 mya
Bony fish Coelacanth First fish with lobed fins, c. 410 mya
which later became legs.
Lobe-finned fish Panderichthys First fish that begins c. 380 mya
developing legs.
Leggy fish Tiktaalik First fish to crawl on land. c. 375 mya
Crawling fish Ichthyostega First fish to walk on land. c. 374 mya
Tetrapods Acanthostega First amphibian. c. 365 mya
Amphibians Hylonomus First reptile. First amniote. c. 312 mya
Reptiles Archaeothyris First synapsid. c. 306 mya
Synapsids Sphenacodonts (AKA Lost its scales, and teeth c. 295 mya
pelycosaurs) begin to become
specialized.
Pelycosaurs Raranimus First therapsid. Could c. 270 mya
breathe and eat at the
same time.
Therapsids Theriodonts May have been warm- c. 265 mya
blooded.
Theriodonts Cynodonts Jaws changed, freeing up c. 260 mya
bones to eventually form
middle ear.
Cynodonts Tritheledontids More mammalian traits c. 230 mya
than reptilian.
Tritheledontids Mammaliaformes Nursed young, had one c. 225 mya
replacement of teeth.
Mammaliaformes Mammals Cranial features suggest c. 225 mya
developing mammalian
brain. Mammalian brains
 have first and only cerebral
cortex.
Mammals Juramaia First placental mammal. c. 160 mya
Placental mammals Euarchontoglires Tree-dwelling ancestor of c. 95-90 mya
rodents and primates.
Euarchontoglires Euarchonta Direct ancestor of primates. c. 88-86 mya
Euarchonta Primates Primates have unique c. 80 mya
features, such as forward-
looking eyes and
opposable digits, which are
specializations for tree-
dwelling.
Primates Simple-nosed primates More encephalized, lost c. 63 mya
ability to produce vitamin
C.
Simple-nosed primates Old World monkeys Called “higher primates,” c. 35 mya
and split from New World
monkeys.
Old World monkeys Apes Apes lost tails, became c. 34.5-29 mya
more encephalized and
intelligent, have tricolor
vision.
Apes Great apes Male-dominated, most c. 14 mya
intelligent primates.
Great apes African great apes Evolved in African isolation. c. 12 mya
Ground-dwelling by day.
African great apes Chimpanzee and human Gorillas split from line. c. 10-7 mya
line
Chimpanzee and human Human line Chimpanzee and human c. 5-7 mya
line line split.
 Human line Ardipithecus Possible direct human c. 4.4 mya
ancestor. Smaller canines
probably meant reduced
male conflict.
Human line Australopithecines Possible direct human c. 4.1 mya
ancestor. Walked upright.
Gracile australopithecines Homo habilis First member of genus c. 2.3 mya
Homo.
Homo habilis Homo erectus First Homo species to c. 2.0-1.8 mya
widely migrate past Africa.
Used fire. Inventors of
Acheulean stone tool
technology. The first
hunter-gatherers.
Homo erectus Homo heidelbergensis May have been first c. 1.3 mya-600 kya
humans to bury their dead.
Homo heidelbergensis Homo sapiens First anatomically modern c. 200 kya
humans.
Homo sapiens Behaviorally modern Became founder population c. 60-50 kya
humans of today’s humanity.
Replaced/displaced all
other humans.

A table like the above one is here.

Human Event Timeline Until Europe Began Conquering Humanity

Event Date Likely or Known Location Global Human
Population
First stone tool made c. 3.4-3.3 mya East Africa
First control of fire c. 2.0-1.0 mya East Africa
Appearance of Homo erectus c. 2.0-1.8 mya East Africa
First migration from Africa c. 2.0-1.9 mya Across Asia, then Europe by 1.5
mya
First Mode 2 (Aurignacian) stone c. 1.7 mya East Africa
tools made
Appearance of Homo c. 1.3 mya-600 kya Africa, and soon migrated to
heidelbergensis Eurasian vicinity
Appearance of stone-tipped weapons c. 500 mya South Africa
Neanderthal descent from Homo c. 500 mya Europe and West Asia
heidelbergensis
Appearance of thrown weapons c. 400 kya Germany
Neanderthal invention of Mode 3 c. 300 kya Europe
(Mousterian) tools
Appearance of Homo sapiens c. 200 kya East Africa
First heat-treated stone tools c. 170 kya South Africa – first seashore human
community yet discovered
First bedding and complex tool- c. 75 kya South Africa
making processes
First needle, and perhaps the first c. 60 kya South Africa
arrowheads
Behaviorally modern humans appear c. 60-50 kya East Africa c. 5,000
and a group of about 300 leave Africa
and colonize the rest of Earth
Humans reach Australia, and c. 48-46 kya Australia, via boat
megafauna quickly go extinct
Humans begin invading Europe c. 45-40 kya Via southeast Europe
First cave paintings made c. 40 kya Europe
First fisherman appears c. 40 kya China
Dog domesticated c. 33-15 kya East-central Asia
Mode 4 (Châtelperronian) stone tools c. 30 kya Europe and West Asia
invented
Humans begin hunting mammoths c. 29 kya Eastern Europe
Neanderthals go extinct c. 30-27 kya Southern Europe is their last refuge
First known inter-human violent c. 25 kya Europe
conflict
Pottery invented c. 20 kya China
Mode 5 (microlith) tools invented c. 17 kya Europe
Humans reach the Americas, and c. 15-11 kya Via Siberia-Alaska (15 kya by boat,
megafauna quickly go extinct on both 11 kya by land)
continents
Pig domesticated c. 15 kya Tigris watershed
Nuts first made into human staple c. 13.5 kya The Levant
First sedentary village established c. 13.5 kya Euphrates watershed became first
agricultural settlement about 11 kya.
First known mass slaughter of c. 13 kya Egypt
humans
Slavery “invented” c. 11 kya Wherever sedentary populations
appeared
Humans reach Mediterranean islands c. 11-9 kya Mediterranean periphery
and megafauna quickly go extinct
Blond hair appears c. 11 kya Northern Europe
Blue eyes appear c. 10-6 kya Baltic states region
Cattle domesticated c. 10.5 kya Near Anatolia
Goat domesticated c. 10 kya Today’s Iran c. 5 million
Agriculture begins in Americas c. 10-8 kya Mesoamerica
First city-sized settlement c. 9.5 kya Anatolia
Agriculture begins in China c. 9-8 kya China
Hook-and-line fishing invented c. 8 kya Eurasia, Western Hemisphere
Plow invented c. 7 kya Fertile Crescent
First city established c. 5400 BCE Mesopotamia
First metal smelted: copper c. 5000 BCE Balkans
Sailboat invented c. 5000 BCE Mesopotamia
Writing invented c. 5000 BCE Eastern/Southern Europe
Humans begin populating Caribbean c. 4500 BCE Caribbean periphery
islands, and megafauna quickly go
extinct
Mass warfare begins c. 4000 BCE Mesopotamia c. 7 million
White skin appears c. 4000 BCE Northern Europe
Horse domesticated c. 4000 BCE Steppe region north of Black Sea
Humans arrive at Saint Paul Island, c. 3800 BCE Saint Paul Island
and isolated dwarf mammoths quickly
go extinct
Wheel invented c. 3500 BCE Mesopotamia or Europe
Bronze invented c. 3300 BCE Fertile Crescent
Harappan civilization appears c. 3300 BCE Indus River Valley
Egyptian civilization appears c. 3100 BCE Nile River Valley
Rice paddy system invented c. 3000 BCE China
Camel first domesticated c. 3000 BCE East Africa or Arabian Peninsula
First literate civilization c. 3000 BCE Sumer, in Mesopotamia c. 15 million
Polynesian expansion begins c. 3000-1000 BCE Taiwan
Construction of necropolis at Giza c. 2570-to-2470 BCE Nile River Valley
Humans arrive at Wrangel Island, c. 2500-2000 BCE Wrangel Island
and the last mammoths on Earth
quickly go extinct
Egypt’s Old Kingdom ends c. 2200 BCE Nile River Valley
First civilization becomes c. 2000 BCE Mesopotamia, and environmental c. 27 million
depopulated refugees disperse. Intense
deforestation of the region from
Morocco to Afghanistan
commences. Today, only about
 10% of that forest remains, and
much has turned to desert.
Bronze Age civilizations rise and c. 2700-to-1150 BCE Mediterranean and periphery,
collapse including Egypt
Harappan civilization collapses c. 1800-to-1700 BCE Indus River Valley
Olmec civilization appears c. 1600-1500 BCE Mesoamerica c. 38 million
Egyptian civilization at its height c. 1350 Nile River Valley
First iron age begins c. 1300 BCE Anatolia, Balkans, or Caucasus
Trojan War fought c. 1200 BCE Mediterranean shore of Anatolia
Peak influence of Phoenician c. 1200-to-800 BCE Eastern Mediterranean, Levant
civilization
Bantu Expansion Begins c. 1000 BCE Equatorial Africa c. 50 million
Madagascar discovered, and c. 1000 BCE Madagascar, via Africa
megafauna quickly go extinct
Rome founded c. 750 BCE Italian Peninsula
Assyria destroys Kingdom of Israel c. 722 BCE The Levant
Greece begins to recover from c. 700 BCE Greece
collapse of Mycenaean civilization
Gautama Buddha born c. 560-480 BCE Today’s Nepal
Athens enters its classic phase 508 BCE Greece
First Mesoamerican state appears c. 500 BCE Mesoamerica
Victory in 50-year-war with Persia 449 BCE Greece
marks height of classic Greek
civilization
War with Sparta, and devastating 431-to-404 BCE Greece
epidemic, marks decline of Athens
Alexander the Great conquers 336-to-323 BCE Eastern Mediterranean to India
numerous civilizations with a military
prowess unsurpassed until
industrialized warfare
Watermill invented, probably by c. 300-250 BCE Greece
Greek engineers
Rome begins first war with Carthage 264 BCE Mediterranean periphery
Paper invented c. 200 BCE China
Rome destroys Carthage and 146 BCE Northern Africa and Greece
Corinth, enslaving the survivors
Roman civil wars begin that end the c. 133 BCE Mediterranean periphery
republic
Defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra 31 BCE Mediterranean near Greece
mark end of Roman republic and
beginning of Roman empire
Jesus born c. 7-4 BCE Today’s Israel c. 170 million
Rome invades Great Britain 43 CE (all Island of Great Britain
subsequent dates in
this table are CE)
Windmill and steam engine invented c. 50 Roman Egypt
Rome defeats Second Jewish revolt 73 Today’ Israel
against Roman rule
Moche culture appears c. 100 Peru
Antonine plague ravages Roman 165-180 Mediterranean periphery
Empire, kills two emperors, and
marks end of Peace of Rome
Plague of Cyprian scourges Rome 250-270 Mediterranean periphery
Polynesians discover Hawaii c. 300-800 Hawaiian islands
Christianity becomes Rome’s state 325-to-380 Mediterranean periphery
religion
Roman imperial capital moved to 330 Anatolia
Constantinople
Horse collar invented 5th century China
Rome falls to Germanic tribes 476 Italian Peninsula
Teotihuacan declines from drought c. 535 Valley of Mexico
Plague of Justinian kills up to half of 541-542 Mediterranean periphery c. 200 million
Europe
Muhammad born c. 570 Levant or Arabian Peninsula
Cahokia settled c. 600 North America, on Mississippi River
Arabs begin enslaving Africans c. 650 African periphery, other than
equatorial West Africa
Islamic Moors invade Iberian 711 Iberian Peninsula
Peninsula
Mayan civilization collapses c. 750-to-950 Mesoamerica
Viking expansion c. 787-to-early-1000s Northern Europe, North Atlantic,
North America, Eastern Europe
Medieval Warm Period begins c. 800 Earth
European watermills begin great c. 1000 Western and northern Europe
proliferation
Chinese horse collar used in Europe c. 1000 Europe c. 400 million
Compass used for navigation c. 1040 China
England conquered from France, and 1066 England
peasantry begins dispossession
Christian conquest of Toledo results 1085 Iberian Peninsula
in Greek teachings being
reintroduced into Europe
First Crusade begins 1096 Europe to Levant
Angkor Wat completed c. 1150
Fourth Crusade sacks “ally” 1204 Anatolia
Constantinople
Albigensian Crusade begins 1209 Southern France
Rise and fall of Mongol empire 1206-to-1368 China to Europe
Mexica people arrive in Valley of c. 1248 Mesoamerica
Mexico, later known as Aztecs
Medieval Warm Period ends c. 1250 Globally
Maoris discover New Zealand and c. 1250-1300 New Zealand
drive megafauna to extinction in
about a century, maybe less
Queen Eleanor driven from 1257 England
Nottingham by cloud of coal smoke
Series of European famines mark 1304-1317 Europe
prelude to Little Ice Age
England and France begin more than 1337 England and France
100 years of warfare
Black Death sweeps Old World c. 1338-1350 Eurasia
Renaissance begins, rise of Late 1300s Northern Italian Peninsula
humanism in Europe
Cahokia abandoned, probably due to c. 1400 North America, on Mississippi River
environmental overtaxation,
Mississippian civilization begins its
decline
China mounts naval expeditions in 1405-to-1433 Periphery of Indian Ocean and
Indian Ocean and in Pacific Ocean Southeast Asia
near Southeast Asia
Portugal begins sailing the Atlantic 1420 Atlantic Ocean
Ocean
Aztecs form the Triple Alliance that 1428 Mesoamerica
dominates the Valley of Mexico
Portugal initiates new era of slavery 1434 Iberia and West Africa
with captured Africans
Incan expansion begins 1438 Peru
Printing press invented c. 1439 Germany
Ottoman conquest of Constantinople 1453 Anatolia
Portuguese naval expedition crosses 1488 South Africa
the southern tip of Africa.
Columbus stumbles into Western 1492 Bahaman and Caribbean islands c. 500 million
Hemisphere, and European conquest
of humanity begins.

Human Event Timeline Since Europe Began Conquering Humanity

Event Date Likely or Known Location Global Human
Population
Columbus returns to Caribbean with 1493 Island of Española
invasion force
First gold strike on Española, 1499 Island of Española
initiating century-long quest for gold
in Western Hemisphere.
Portuguese Vasco da Gama 1499 African and South Asian periphery
expedition returns after expedition
reaches India by sailing around Africa
Portugal launches military expedition 1500 African and South Asian periphery
to conquer spice trade
Martin Luther begins the Reformation 1517 Germany
Spanish conquest of Aztecs provides 1521 Mesoamerica
greatest proselytizing opportunity
ever for the Catholic Church, the
same year that it condemns Martin
Luther
Magellan expedition is first to 1522 Earth
circumnavigate Earth
Spain invades Incan Empire 1532 Peru
Henry VIII kicks Catholic Church out 1534 England
of England
English ironworks established for the 1543 Island of Great Britain
first time since the Roman invasion
First works of modern science 1543 Europe
published
Michael Servetus burned at the stake 1553 Geneva
for his “heresies” in Protestant
Geneva
The Spanish crown goes bankrupt, in 1557 Spain
the first of several bankruptcies that
mark its imperial decline
The Inquisition begins banning 1559 Europe
“heretical” books
French Wars of Religion begin 1562 France
Spanish establish permanent 1565 Philippines Islands
presence in Philippines
Dutch revolt against Spanish rule 1566 Netherlands
begins
Portuguese nobility, including its king, 1578 North Africa
annihilated by Moors when they
invade north Africa
Francis Drake returns from pirate 1580 England
expedition that circumnavigates
Earth, and becomes England’s
richest private citizen
Spanish armada destroyed engaging 1588 England’s periphery
the English and Dutch
Giordano Bruno burned at the stake 1600 Rome
for his heresies
English East India Company founded 1600 England
Dutch East India Company founded 1602 Netherlands
English make first visit to New 1602 New England
England, and note the prodigious
forests that could be used for sailing
ship masts
King James I campaigns against 1604 England
smoking tobacco
English establish Ulster Plantation 1606 Today's Northern Ireland
English establish Jamestown 1607 Today’s Virginia
French establish Montreal 1611 Today’s Quebec
Dutch establish Jakarta 1619 Today’s Indonesia
English establish Plymouth 1620 Today’s Massachusetts
Rembrandt van Rijn opens his first c. 1624 The Netherlands
studio
Dutch establish Fort Amsterdam 1625 Manhattan Island
Galileo Galilei forced to recant his 1633 Italy
scientific findings by the Inquisition
English civil wars begin 1642 England
The Maunder Minimum marks the c. 1645 to 1715 Earth
heart of the Little Ice Age
Thirty Years’ War ends 1648 Europe
Western Hemisphere’s population 1650 Western Hemisphere c. 500 million
about nine million, down from 30-100
million in 1491, for history’s greatest
demographic catastrophe
English and Dutch begin series of 1652 Europe
wars
Dutch establish Cape Town 1652 South Africa
Isaac Newton invents calculus 1666 England
Antonio Stradivari begins making 1666 Italy
violins
War between France and 1678 Europe
Netherlands ends, marking the
decline of Dutch power
Scotland formally unites with England 1707 Island of Great Britain c. 600 million
to become Great Britain
Abraham Darby founds first 1709 England
successful iron-smelting operation
based on coal
Thomas Newcomen builds first 1710 England
commercial steam engine
Voltaire imprisoned for his satirical 1717 Paris
writings
Isaac Newton loses life’s fortune 1720 England
speculating in the slave trade
Roller Spinning machine for cotton 1738 England
patented, soon followed by many
other models
Abolition movements begin in Europe c. 1750 Europe
Great Britain wins first global war, 1763 Europe, North America, Asia
defeating France
Great Britain begins conquering 1764 Bengal
India, beginning with Bengal
First British-induced famine hits 1770 Bengal
Bengal
James Cook “discovers” Australia 1770 Australia c. 800 million
James Cook nearly reaches 1773-1774 Antarctica
Antarctica, turned back by ice
James Watt installs first commercial 1776 England
application of his steam engine
Adam Smith publishes first work of 1776 Scotland
classical political economy
French-assisted American Revolution 1776 Eastern North America
begins
Antoine Lavoisier falsifies phlogiston 1777 France
theory of combustion
James Cook “discovers” Hawaii 1778 Hawaiian islands
George Washington crafts plan to 1782 Eastern North America
steal North America from its natives.
First steamboat built 1783 France
French Revolution begins 1789 Paris
Mozart dies, marking the beginning of 1791 Vienna
the end of Classical Period in music
Cotton gin patented 1793 USA
Great Britain unites with Northern 1800
Ireland to become the United
Kingdom ("UK")
First steam powered railroad built 1804 Wales c. 1 billion (estimated to
have happened between
1800 and 1810)
Napoleon defeated at Waterloo 1815 Today’s Belgium
First photograph made 1822 France
Sadi Carnot publishes first work on 1824 France
thermodynamics
The USA steals more than half of 1836-to-1848 Western North America
Mexico
The UK invades China under 1839 China
principles of “free trade”; first use of
steam-driven naval ships in warfare
Charles Dickens publishes A 1843 England
Christmas Carol
Ignaz Semmelweis pioneers sanitary 1847 Vienna
medical practices
American whaling peaks 1847 Global ocean
Karl Marx publishes his Communist 1848 England
Manifesto
California Gold Rush begins 1848 California
Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick 1851 USA
The USA invades Japan 1853 Japan
First industrial war begins 1853 Crimea
Darwin publishes Origin of Species 1859 England
First commercial oil well drilled in the 1859 Pennsylvania
West
The USA’s Civil War begins 1861 USA
John Rockefeller enters oil industry 1863 Ohio
The USA’s transcontinental railroad 1869 USA
is completed
John Rockefeller’s empire controls 1879 USA
95% of the USA’s oil refining, and
Rockefeller soon becomes history’s
richest human
Thomas Edison publicly 1879 Menlo Park, Edison, New Jersey
demonstrates incandescent lighting
Final large massacre of American 1890 South Dakota
Indians
Vincent van Gogh dies, marking the 1890 France
waning of the post-impressionism era
Nikola Tesla’s alternating current 1891 USA
technology wins “war” with Edison’s
direct current
Americans overthrow Hawaiian 1893 Hawaii
monarchy
The USA steals last remaining 1898 Caribbean, Philippines
shreds of Spain’s empire
Wright brothers first fly 1903 North Carolina
Ford Motor Company established 1903 Detroit
Panama gains “independence” via 1903 Panama
robber baron swindling of the USA’s
government
Tesla loses funding for his free 1903 USA
energy tower
Albert Einstein publishes first paper 1905 Switzerland/Germany
on relativity
Mark Twain publishes King Leopold’s 1905 USA
Soliloquy to protest the
“philanthropic” genocide in the Congo
Method developed to artificially fix 1909 Germany
nitrogen
Greatest international balance of 1910 UK and India
payment difference is between the
UK and India
Winston Churchill begins converting 1911 UK
the British Navy from coal to oil
Income tax amendment and Federal 1913 USA
Reserve Act passed
World War I begins 1914 Europe
Company controlled by notable 1914 Colorado
“philanthropist” John Rockefeller
uses machine guns on striking coal
miners
Einstein publishes general theory of 1915 Germany
relativity
Russian Revolution 1917 Russia
World War I ends, and oil-rich 1918 Eurasia
Ottoman Empire is dismembered by
imperial nations
First confirmation of general theory of 1919 South America and Africa
relativity
Modern quantum theory invented 1925 Europe c. 2 billion (reached in
1927)
Hitler publishes Mein Kampf and 1925 Germany
lauds Henry Ford for his anti-Jewish
publications
Public relations campaign to addict 1929 New York
American women to tobacco begins
Great Depression begins with stock 1929 USA, then the world
market crash
Fluorine ion discovered as cause of 1931 USA
tooth mottling
Hitler comes to power 1933 Germany
Attempted White House coup 1933 USA
The American Medical Association 1935 USA
helps provide “scientific” evidence to
promote tobacco smoking
World War II begins 1939 Europe
World War II ends with nuclear 1945 Japan
weapons dropped on cities
Post-war boom of unprecedented 1945 USA, with the rebuilding West also
prosperity begins benefitting
Communist Revolution begins 1946 China
Roswell UFO incident 1947 USA
National Security Act passed, CIA 1947 USA
founded
Public relations campaign begins for 1947 USA
putting fluoride ion in water supply as
tooth “medicine.”
Transistor invented 1947 USA
The CIA begins overthrowing elected 1953 Iran
governments on behalf of corporate
interests
The American Medical Association 1954 USA
stops promoting tobacco smoking in
its journal
Sputnik launch begins space race 1957 Soviet Union
Revolution overthrows American- 1959 Cuba c. 3 billion (reached in
friendly dictatorship 1960)
World War III narrowly averted 1962 Cuba, Soviet Union, USA
John Kennedy murdered 1963 USA
The USA invades Southeast Asia 1964 Southeast Asia
Apollo 11 lands on the moon 1969 The Moon
Peak oil production reached 1970 USA
West’s first oil crisis marks end of 1973 Earth, USA c. 4 billion (reached in
post-war boom; American energy 1974)
consumption and wages peak and
declined afterward
The USA lures the Soviet Union into 1979 Afghanistan
invading Afghanistan
Three Mile Island nuclear accident 1979 Pennsylvania
The American Medical Association’s 1979 USA
retirement fund is discovered to have
more than $1 million invested in
tobacco farms
Revolution overthrows the USA’s 1979 Iran
puppet dictator
The American Medical Association's 1985 USA
board members are discovered to
own tobacco farms
Chernobyl nuclear disaster 1986 Soviet Union
The USA uses the threat of trade 1986 Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and c. 5 billion (reached in
sanctions to open Asian markets to Thailand 1987)
tobacco companies, primarily to
addict their women and children,
using familiar “free market” principles
Microsoft makes its initial public stock 1986 USA
offering, with Bill Gates soon
becoming Earth’s richest human
Soviet Bloc begins fragmenting, 1989 Eastern Europe, Berlin
Berlin Wall falls
The USA attacks Iraq to begin 1991 Iraq, Kuwait
invasion of the oil-rich Middle East
The Soviet Union collapses 1991 Soviet Union
Internet revolution begins c. 1996 Industrialized nations c. 6 billion (reached in
1999)
Terror attacks on September 11 2001 USA
The USA invades Afghanistan 2001 Afghanistan
The USA invades Iraq, with imperial 2003 Iraq
nation assistance
Peak oil production reached c. 2006 Earth
 Financial panic 2008 Industrialized nations
Gulf oil spill 2010 Gulf of Mexico
Fukushima nuclear disaster 2011 Japan c. 7 billion

Humanity’s Epochal Events

Energy Epoch (see Primary Approximate Input – Energy Surplus Societal attributes Environmental effects
data derived here) Energy time when multiple Efficiency energy
Sources pristine of dietary produced
instance of calories
event began
1: Making stone tools/ Scavenged/ 3.4 mya for 1 (see this 0 Hand-to-mouth, organized No more than any other
controlling fire/ processed stone tools, discussio like chimpanzees or animal, at least before
growing the human (cooked?) 1-2 mya n) perhaps macaques; male fire harnessed.
brain food and years ago for dominated.
wood fire.
2: Super- Cooked 60-50 kya 2.5 <5% 0.1 Share the kills and Anthropogenic burning
predator/hunter- hunted and gathering results; fight alters ecosystems;
gatherer gathered other bands in raids, megafaunal extinctions.
food, and especially as territories
wood shrink.
3.1: Subsistence Cooked 11 kya 5 10% 0.5 Village life, beginning of Plants and animals
agricultural crops and social hierarchies as domesticated;
wood economic redistribution environments around
becomes more complex; villages and herds are
initially peaceful through transformed into
chiefdom phase, but human-useful biota.
organized warfare between
settlements develops as
 states begin to form.
3.2: Advanced Cooked 6 kya 10 15% 1.5 State formation, literacy, Plow agriculture
agricultural professional economic/social/political disturbs soils,
ly raised stratification: elites appear, professional
crops and mass slavery, pronounced deforestation, irrigation,
wood subjugation of women, competing predators
professions form, including eliminated, urban
soldiers, priests and environments formed,
craftsmen. with commensurate
large ecological
footprints.
4.1: Early industrial Coal 1700 CE 30 25% 7-to-8 Capitalist formation, end of Heavy mining
pronounced subjugation of operations, increasing
women and slavery air and water pollution,
abolished. Industrial increase in carbon
working class appears, dioxide content of
severed from land. atmosphere,
Warfare becomes disappearing forest and
industrialized. natural habitats in larger
Transcontinental, areas.
capitalist-based empires
form.
4.2: Advanced Coal, oil, 1860 CE 60 35% 21 Women liberated, Nature under siege.
industrial and capitalists dominate states, Roads and expanding
electricity and global wars as urban areas bring larger
empires fight over areas of nature under
controlling subject peoples human control and
and their resources. resultant destruction.
Conservation
movements begin.
4.3: Industrial- Oil, coal, 1950 CE 110 36% 40 Racism, sexism, and other Nature largely banished
technological and discriminatory ideologies from urban
electricity, largely overturned in environments,
with nuclear imperial heartlands, but humanity’s ecological
power exploitation exported to footprint encompasses
producing subject peoples. Warfare the entire planet,
some of it to secure energy resources species extinctions
becomes more intense, but accelerate at biosphere-
due to threat of nuclear threatening rates, and
weaponry, warfare is not human-induced climate
waged between change becomes
industrialized nations, but dramatic. As oil runs
against resource-rich but out, increasingly
industrially poor nations. marginal sources are
As oil runs out, the exploited, with resultant
standard of living in accidents.
industrialized nations
declines.
5: Free energy Zero-point 2020? Virtually Relatively 1,000 or End of scarcity-based Exploitation of nature
field unlimited unimportant 10,000 or ideologies. End of no longer necessary to
100,000 hierarchical societies. End improve human
or more, of urban societies. Race standard of living. No
reaching disappears. With the end more destructive mining
a "Type 1 of scarcity comes the end of materials or water
Civilizatio of war. Heaven on Earth – tables, and the end of
n" or do we blow Earth up? air and water pollution.
Nature reclaims
ecosystems, ideally with
human assistance.

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.466

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.467 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.468

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.469 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.470 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).471 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.472 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.473 Research has suggested that imitation (performing somebody
else’s actions) and empathy (feeling what somebody else feels) are related neurologically.474 Humans, however, are far
better than chimps in their social-cognitive skills, which brings in the "theory of mind," which is guessing what others are
thinking. This is suspected to be the key developmental trait that set humans apart from their cousins. 475

Many observable common 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.476 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 for 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.477 Stone tools also crushed bones to extract marrow,
and would have made harvesting and processing plant foods far easier.478

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.479 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.480 Humans developed
relatively larger brains and relatively smaller and weaker bodies, which was probably an energy tradeoff; something had
to give.481 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.482 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.483

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 have brains three times the size. 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.484 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.485 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 six486), 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.487

Gorillas and chimpanzees are hindgut fermenters and can digest cellulose while humans cannot. The human digestive
tract is only about 60% of the size expected for a primate of our size.488 Human guts are far smaller than chimp and
especially gorilla guts, which process all of that low-calorie foliage. Chimp 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.489 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.490 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.491 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.492

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.493

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.494 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.495 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. 496 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).497 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.498

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.499 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.500 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.501 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 its growing brain was, 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, it 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.502 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.503 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.504 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.505 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.506 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.507

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.508 Cooked food versus raw
food and the number of neurons that can be supported in a brain has been the focus of recent research.509 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 15 years of
normal conditions for finch beaks to return to their pre-drought length.510 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.511 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.512 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.513 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.514 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.515 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) so that 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 great release of energy
is the motion that powers the industrial age. Those rocketing molecules move pistons in automobile engines and turbine
blades in electric plants, and are behind the damaging explosions of bombs and the propulsive explosions of rockets. For
more than one million years, all human fires were made by burning vegetation, and wood in particular. What was fire
doing? Energy stored by plants, trees in particular, was violently released by controlled fires for human-serving purposes
of warmth, light, food preparation (to obtain more energy from food) and protection from predation, and it also became the
heart of social gatherings. Humans have stared into fires for a million years or more.

The energy from controlled fire allowed humans to leave the trees, grow their brains, and socially organize in new ways.
Humans commandeered energy that otherwise fed ecosystem processes and used it for immediate human benefit. It was
also the first great human robbery. All heterotrophs “rob” energy from other life forms to live. The primary exception is the
symbiosis that flowering plants enter into with animals. But no animal had ever robbed energy from ecosystems on that
scale before. By making fires, humans were liberating many times the energy that their biological processes used -
energy that could have fed forest ecosystems. While humans were only using deadwood, it was the least destructive to
forest ecosystems. But when humans began burning forests to flush out animals to kill and make biomes suitable for
animals to hunt, they were destroying and altering ecosystems on a vast scale. A cord of wood provides about four years
of the calories that fuel a human adult’s body, and one hectare can provide a sustainable annual harvest of about ten
years of human calories. A family of four using a hectare for firewood on a sustainable basis would be using more than
twice their caloric intake for burning wood. Very little of that released energy would benefit humans if they burned it over a
campfire, as humans did for the entire epoch of the hunter-gatherer; that liberated energy largely went straight into the
sky. The direct benefit to humans would be the energy that went into cooking food, what warmed human flesh, what was
used to make tools, and the benefits of scaring off predators and providing light at night. More indirect benefits would
have been ecosystem changes to provide human-digestible calories, such as American Indians burning the woodlands
and plains to make environments conducive to animals that they could easily hunt. In this table, the earliest epochs are
the most uncertain, but saying that hunter-gatherer humans used 2.5 times their dietary calories in their economy is
probably, perhaps greatly, understating the case. That 5% efficiency number is also a rough estimate, and both numbers
could be refined by a scientifically performed effort. Maybe somebody has already done it. The numbers in that table for
subsequent epochs are more accurate, and the most accurate of all are those for industrial-technological societies, and I
live in one. The increases in efficiency became more modest with each epoch as the limits of entropy were approached.

When humans began to raze forests and use the resultant soils to raise crops, they were working their way down through
the food chain, no longer harvesting ecosystem detritus but destroying entire ecosystems literally at their roots for short-
term human benefit. That practice eventually turned forest ecosystems into deserts. As this essay will survey, that was a
rampant problem in all early civilizations. Eventually, humans learned to reach even further back into the ecological
horizon as they began burning energy stores that were hundreds of millions of years old; coal was first and oil and gas
second. They were burned a million times as fast as they were created. In all instances, humans were releasing sunlight
energy that had been captured and stored by organisms. In the 20th century, when humans began using nuclear fission,
they were going even further back in time and harvesting energy stored via fusion processes in stars billions of years ago.
With each new energy source, humans were harvesting older, more concentrated energy sources, which released far
more energy than the previously used source. In each instance, humans plundered the energy source to exhaustion.
Humans have not lived in “harmony” with nature since they learned to control fire.

Until now, I have generally used the word “epoch” in this essay as geologists do, to denote timeframes smaller than
periods. But in describing the rise of humanity, I will use “epochal” to mean gigantic events, when the human condition
before and after the events became so radically different that the two times were like different geological epochs, when
the radical changes following the events are considered. I consider making stone tools, growing the protohuman brain,
and the control of fire to be the human journey’s first Epochal Events. In fact, those events led to human existence. They
were all probably related, and tightly related, and with the current uncertainty I have made them all aspects of the same
event. They could arguably be split, but the energy advantages of stone tools and fire surely contributed to the expanding
human brain, and the expanding human brain led to those inventions and more, in mutually reinforcing feedback loops.
The only things that scientists are certain that exist, energy and consciousness, interacted to produce humanity’s first
Epochal Event(s).

Stone tools and the control of fire had energy consequences to the human line far above all other effects. Whether they
happened within a few hundred thousand years of each other, or were separated by more than a million years, they were
the key technical/mental/social advances in early humanity’s ability to survive on Earth and expand its range to eventually
cover the planet.
If habilines began to control fire two mya, one thing is certain: the australopithecine Tesla who banged the first rocks
together that fashioned a stone tool, and who was able to continue doing it and eventually taught others, probably via
active demonstration and their observation, could not have imagined that his/her invention would lead to a relatively giant
descendant (or cousin of a descendant) that slept on the ground, controlled fire, and would quickly migrate to the ends of
Earth and traverse distances that were incomprehensible in australo-Tesla’s time. That relatively quick series of
innovations, never before seen on Earth, gave birth to a creature that would have simply been unrecognizable to that
australopithecine Tesla; it would have appeared magical. There have only been a few subsequent Epochal Events in the
human journey, and like the first one(s), they were all energy events above all else, and were all dependent on humans
gaining the technological prowess and social organization that enabled them to exploit a new energy source, which was
dependent on their increasing mental feats. Each time, the human reality after the Epochal Event was unimaginable to
the humans who lived immediately before it (1, 2, 3). Also, the events and their aftermaths became far more dramatic
each time, in shrinking the event’s timeframe and shortening the time until the next Epochal Event, and the energy levels
greatly increased each time, and by an order of magnitude for the most recent event.

Did the control of fire lead to Homo erectus, as Wrangham thinks? Or did Homo erectus merely use it to begin dominating
the world? Was cooking the seminal event in the appearance of humans? Those questions may not be definitively
answered in my lifetime, and led to the somewhat uncertain title of this chapter. Highly transformative developments
coincided with the appearance and dispersal of Homo erectus, which was a radical break from all that came before –
biologically, technically, and culturally – and strongly implies great cognitive enhancements. I believe that the control of
fire and cooking would leave deep cultural and biological impacts on the human journey, and because Homo erectus
barely changed during its nearly two-million year tenure on Earth, both in biology and in Acheulean artifacts, I favor
Wrangham’s hypothesis, at least until the Next Big Finding. Just as Einstein said that every theory is killed by a fact and
that his theories would one day become obsolete, but that their best parts would survive in the new theories, I suspect that
significant aspects of Wrangham’s hypothesis will live on in successor hypotheses, and other scientists have been
following Wrangham’s lead.

From the initial appearance of Homo erectus about 2.0-1.8 mya, Europe was periodically buried under the ice sheets that
began growing and receding when the first stone tools were made, so Homo erectus tended to appear and disappear in
Europe. The fact that humans evolved and spread during an ice age has led to competing hypotheses about many
aspects of humanity’s rise. Although the ice age began about 2.6-2.5 mya, and there have been 17 identified episodes of
advancing and retreating ice sheets, particularly in North America and northern Eurasia, the early ones were not as
severe, and they did not achieve clockwork-like regularity until the past million years, as the diagram below shows.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

But even though they were “regular” on the geologic time scale, driven by Milankovitch cycles, there would have been
nothing “regular” about them to evolving humans. When ice sheets advanced, global climate became cooler and dryer;
rainforests shrank and deserts expanded. Human adaptations to those changes, which could even be discerned in one
human lifetime, must have had profound impacts on the human journey. In short, humans had to readily adapt to rapidly
changing conditions, and rapid adaptation would have had selective effects on burgeoning human intelligence and
problem-solving ability; those that adapted, survived. Also, scientists think that the rapidly oscillating climate resulted in
migrations and pockets of isolated members of species that then underwent rapid evolutionary adaptation, the kind that
leads to speciation. This may have been partly responsible for the relatively rapid evolution of the human line, particularly
in the past million years.516

Although our species, Homo sapiens (named Homo sapiens sapiens if we consider that Neanderthals and an early
human are subspecies of Homo sapiens, but I will use Homo sapiens in this essay to denote today’s humans), is the only
survivor of the past several million years of human-line evolution, many of our cousins and ancestors were recognizably
human. When did language begin, especially spoken language? Language certainly predated the appearance of Homo
sapiens. All great apes readily learn sign language, and even when monkeys chatter, the same parts of their brains that
control human language are used, and there is plenty of evidence that great ape vocalizations can denote objects and
other ideas. The communicative abilities of crows and their corvid cousins can be hard to believe; they can solve some
problems better than great apes can, and birds do not have a neocortex, but another part of their brain seems to function
like the neocortex does. Becoming bipedal created those neck/skull changes that began to form the structures needed for
human speech. If fossils are sufficiently preserved, important anatomical features can provide key evidence for human
abilities and behaviors. Turkana Boy, for instance, had his inner ear, which is responsible for balance, preserved well
enough so that it provided more evidence that he did not spend time in trees (it is larger in primates that regularly
climb).517 Similarly, the outer and middle ear of Homo heidelbergensis, which succeeded Homo erectus, apparently
enabled keener hearing than its predecessors were capable of, and may have reflected the beginnings of spoken
language. There is strong evidence that Neanderthals were capable of using spoken language. As with many other
human traits, the potential for language seems to have existed with monkeys (even in dinosaurs), and it kept developing
more sophistication over vast stretches of time, and structural and cognitive changes interacted as human language
developed into today’s version.

Although many traits that led to human dominance of Earth can be discerned in our distant ancestors, a pile of baggage
came along with them. All great ape societies but bonobos are male dominated, and the most marginal macaque will
quickly become patriotic cannon fodder when his society is attacked. The traits almost always arose from economic costs
and benefits, which were always rooted in energy. How bonobos, also called pygmy chimpanzees, became the only great
ape species that is not male-dominated is primarily an economic tale.

The bonobos’ scientific name is Pan paniscus, and they live in the range in red in this image. (Source: Wikimedia
Commons)

The other colors represent ranges of other chimp species. Bonobos are separated from all other chimp species by the
Congo River, which forms the north, east, and west borders of their range. When the current ice age began 2.6-2.5 mya,
the current bonobo range began having droughts and the rainforest shrank. Gorillas are masters of the rainforest, and
when the rainforest south of the Congo disappeared during one of the dry periods (and it seems to be about one mya,
when the ice age patterns became regular), gorillas left and never returned. Humans are the only great apes that can
swim, so the Congo was an impenetrable barrier for chimps and gorillas.
Chimpanzee social organization has male and female hierarchies, and societies of up to 120 members. Fruit trees form
the center of a chimp society’s territory, where females forage with their offspring and males form foraging parties that
patrol the territorial perimeter.518 Chimps have foraging parties of less than 10 members, it ranges between two and nine,
and party size fluctuates rapidly. That is because chimps have to walk kilometers between food sources each day,
primarily fruit trees, and varying harvests cannot reliably support larger groups. In general, the larger a territory, the faster
chimps breed, as they have more available energy.

Bonobos have an average party size of about 17, and party sizes are consistent. How can they have such large and
stable foraging parties while no other chimps can? Because they eat gorilla food. Because gorillas no longer live south of
the Congo, the young leaves and herb stems not available to chimps where gorillas live make for pleasant bonobo
traveling snacks. Since the biomass concentration of gorillas and chimps is nearly the same where their ranges overlap, it
meant that bonobos had twice the food supply that chimps did.519 Bonobos also evolved to better digest gorilla foods, and
larger parties put females on a more equal footing with males. Bonobos, both males and females, did not tolerate the
alpha male model of other chimp societies in which male gangs dominated.

One chimpanzee and gorilla behavior that can be difficult to comprehend, mentally and emotionally, is male murder of
infants. If a chimp or gorilla encounters an infant that he knows he did not sire, he will kill it if he can. That behavior is
also common in monkeys. Gorillas have a potentate/harem social organization, and when a male matures he is usually
ejected from that gorilla society, but might become subordinate to the silverback patriarch (some troupes have more than
one dominant silverback, and even up to seven silverbacks in one troupe has been observed). Bachelor gorillas can try to
unseat a silverback to steal his harem, and if successful, the new potentate will kill all the infants he can. The average
female gorilla will lose an infant to murder by a male in her lifetime.520 In chimp society, when a female is sexually
receptive, she will mate with all males in the troupe, especially the dominant ones, so that every important male suspects
that the infant might be his, and thus will not kill it.521 That strategy has been nicknamed, “Who’s Your Daddy?”522 The
strategies of dominant males seem to work, as far as producing the most offspring. Paternity testing of chimpanzees, for
instance, shows that alpha males and their “lieutenants” sire nearly all offspring in a band.523

If a silverback dies, either from natural causes or murder by rivals, or chimps murder the males of a rival band and take
the females as “booty,” the infants of the dead males will all be killed. And the next activity tends to boggle people’s
minds: the females who lost their infants will then mate with the killers.524 That behavior is not confined to great apes:
lions (and housecats) and bears also do it. Humans cannot imagine a woman mating with her child’s killer, but it is
standard behavior in those species and provides stark evidence for the Selfish Gene Hypothesis. A male chimp or gorilla
will not invest time and energy in raising offspring that are not his. Killing them makes the female sexually receptive, as
she has a primordial urge to produce offspring. Female chimps and gorillas need protection from other males, and a male
strong enough to kill her mate gets the spoils, including her, and she will then mate with the killer and bear his young, and
can stay mated for life. Female chimps will kill each other’s infants sometimes, as they play their own dominance games,
but mating with the killers of their offspring stupefies humans and makes Darwin’s “war of nature” observations difficult to
deny. Male orangutans will not kill infants that they did not sire, but orangutan females are constantly under threat of
being raped by non-dominant males (called unflanged).

Bonobos are the only non-human African great ape exception to infanticide, and are also the only great ape species that
does not sexually coerce females, humans included. The reason seems to be the social organization that arose from a
plentiful food supply that allowed for larger groups in which females and males actively reduced male violence. Many
behaviors within and between bonobo bands are unknown with chimps. A male bonobo will remain with his mother for
her entire life, and male bonobos do not vie for dominance. Instead, bonobos have a sexuality that no other animal on
Earth has remotely approached. They settle nearly everything with sex. Female on female is common, particularly when
bands meet, but anything goes in bonobo society, with the sole exception of mothers and sons, as the aversion to
inbreeding is rooted very deeply in animals and is also responsible for the human incest taboo. Bonobo societies are
peaceful and seem to live by the slogan, “Make love, not war.” But it started with their economy, when their primary and
dominant competitor moved away. In recent studies, the only bonobo sexual coercive acts observed are females abusing
males, which is also rare.525 A likely influence on ending infanticide is that female bonobos, like humans, conceal their
ovulation, so males are not cued to compete to be the father. Also, since virtually all bonobos have sex all the time, there
is no way for bonobos to determine paternity.

Humans took a different path 2.5 mya. There are generally two schools of thought regarding the appearance of Homo
sapiens among scientists: one is called the Multiregional Model, and the other is called the “Out of Africa” Model. In their
essence, the Multiregional Model had those Homo erectus migrants eventually evolving into today’s races, and the “Out of
Africa” Model had humans evolve in Africa and then spread across the world and replace/displace all other members of
the Homo genus. The rise of molecular biology and DNA testing has largely resolved the issue in favor of the “Out of
Africa” Model. There are also intermediate views and variations of each hypothesis, which generally relate to the invaders
mating with the natives, even if they could be classified as separate species. For instance, Neanderthal DNA is part of the
human genome, which reflects interbreeding. Since Neanderthals were largely confined to Europe and what became the
Fertile Crescent, and the migration of the original Homo sapiens was from Africa, sub-Saharan Africans possess less
Neanderthal DNA than any other humans. Africans also have the most genetic divergence, which reflects the idea that
humans have lived longer in Africa than anywhere else. There is virtually no doubt that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.

Although Acheulean hand axes are rather beautiful, anthropologists have lamented the “boring million years” that existed
after Acheulean culture first appeared about 1.8-1.7 mya. It seems that not much was going on, anatomically or
technologically, with the human line, from the first appearance of Acheulean culture to about a half-million years ago.
There is evidence of Acheulean culture spreading in waves across Asia but never quite reaching those in East Asia in
what became their refugia. Acheulean tools were even made by a likely Homo sapiens subspecies less than 200 kya.
The Acheulean hand axe is the longest-lived technology in the human journey, other than the stick and maybe the
campfire.

The nexus of Europe, Asia, and Africa has been the site of great migrations, conflicts, extinctions, innovations, and the
like, all the way to today, and began when Asian mammals probably drove half of European mammals to extinction 34
mya. It continued to the invasion of Africa by Asian mammals 18 mya and to the travels of Miocene apes in and around
Africa as they migrated outward and then back home, between 16.5 mya and nine mya. The “friction” between collisions
of animal assemblages and human cultures, as well as the geographic and climatic variation in that region, not only gave
rise to humanity, but human civilization also first appeared in that region and is at the heart of the world’s attention and
woes today. That is where the energy is. Advancing and retreating ice sheets made Europe a difficult place for the
human line to inhabit, and they sporadically appeared and disappeared for more than one million years, all the way until
this current interglacial period called the Holocene. Homo erectus began appearing in southern Europe about 1.5 mya.
There were three basic routes to Europe. The easiest would have been largely overland, crossing today’s Turkey to
arrive in the region around today’s Greece. The other two routes crossed the Mediterranean Sea, one via Sicily to today’s
Italy, and the other took the Strait of Gibraltar to today’s Spain.526 Archeological sites show early humans using all three
routes. In the mountains of Spain is the earliest evidence of the human line in Europe and dates as far back as 1.2 mya.
The remains in that cave also show the first signs of human cannibalism. Those cannibals are also thought to be human-
line members, evolved from Homo erectus and called Homo antecessor. Today, anthropologists are confident that Homo
antecessor gave rise to Homo heidelbergensis, at least as confident as any early human ancestral relationships are, but
as can be seen with Stringer's graphic above, another school of thought has Homo antecessor being a dead end. Chimps
have also engaged in cannibalism, so that may be another ancient primate behavior. With recent advances in human
DNA studies, the human genome provides evidence that all early human societies engaged in cannibalism, possibly as a
ritual of eating rivals vanquished by violence, maybe as food, and there is a great deal of archeological evidence.527

Homo heidelbergensis fossils and artifacts are prevalent in Africa, Europe, and West Asia, and they may have lived from
1.3 mya to 200 kya, for another long-lived species. They had about the same stature as modern humans, but were more
robust and their brains were about the same size as those of modern humans. They may have been the first humans to
bury their dead. In this human-line narrative, species existences evidently overlap, when one ancestral species coexisted
with its probable descendants for hundreds of thousands of years. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, there is
nothing unusual about it. From a review of how speciation is thought to happen, it is apparent that genetically isolated
populations can adapt to new environments and eventually become new species, while ancestral and sibling species can
continue thriving, probably in the “homeland,” just as parents rarely die upon producing offspring, and the offspring
eventually leave home. The tree of life on Earth has many branches, and although all branches will eventually end, new
twigs from the same branch can grow while the original branch continues growing. Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a
transition to a new species averages about 15-to-20 thousand years.528 That is under the “natural” effects of geological
and climatic dynamics, and animals trying to survive. But the human line has changed all that. Animals make nests,
burrows, and other structures that enhance their ability to survive, but humans began making radically different
environments called “artificial” today, and the first artificial environments were campfires surrounded by Homo erecti or
close relatives trying to stay safe, warm, and well-fed. Those humans not only used fire to help conquer the world, they
also introduced “artificial” variables into human evolution, and the first may well have been the transition to ground-
dwelling and the changes that derived from eating cooked food. Humans introduced radical variables to evolution never
seen before on Earth.

Humans are unique in many ways, although a healthy behavior amongst scientists is stating that humanity is “just another
species.” There is even an acronym used in scientific circles to emphasize our mundane status, which is no better or
worse than any other organism. Humans are different, but using it to justify our status bestride Earth is egocentric, and
the humility of “just another species” scientists is badly needed in our world today.

During that boring million years, Homo erectus changed from hunted into hunter. They did not dominate their biomes, but
they were also respected by local predators and feared by what they hunted with their primitive weapons. At what stage
big cats and other megafauna in Africa learned to avoid Homo erectus and its descendants is not clear, but it happened,
and is thought by most scientists today to be why Africa retained its megafauna, and to a lesser extent Eurasia, when the
other continents quickly lost them soon after humans appeared, which is a subject for the next chapter. But an early
indicator of what probably happened, repeatedly in the coming rise and dominance of humanity, is when Homo erectus (or
habilines or australopiths) first made it to Flores Island about 900 kya (scientists have found tools but no human-like
fossils), perhaps by rafting: a pygmy elephant, a giant tortoise, and a giant lizard all quickly went extinct. 529 Today, it
appears that once the migrants made it to Flores Island they stayed and forgot how to leave. They eventually became
island-dwarfed and lived on Flores for nearly the next million years, and went extinct soon after Homo sapiens arrived.

The closer the timeline of life on Earth gets to the appearance of humanity, the less our ancestry is doubted among
scientists, and there is virtual certainty that Homo heidelbergensis is humanity’s direct ancestor. Their brains were nearly
the size of modern humans and they inherited Acheulean tools from their ancestors and used them for hundreds of
thousands of years. There is plenty of evidence that Homo heidelbergensis migrated to Western Eurasia about 800
kya.530 But there is evidence that somewhere around 500 kya that began to change; there is evidence of Homo
heidelbergensis using stone-tipped spears that long ago in today’s South Africa. Wooden throwing spears were recently
discovered in today’s Germany, along with butchered horses, dated to about 400 kya. Scientists today are confident that
Homo heidelbergensis was also the direct ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis, and the split began around 500 kya. The
range of Homo heidelbergensis was Africa, West Asia, and Europe, but the advancing and retreating ice sheets of
Eurasia, Europe in particular, kept driving Homo heidelbergensis southward, and during one of the retreats, it seems that
the ancestors of Neanderthals stayed. Neanderthals became a cold-adapted species that specialized in hunting big
game. As the evidence demonstrates today, life was a brutal proposition in humanity’s early days, and was particularly
harsh for Neanderthals. They probably could not throw very well and relied on ambush predation. Scientists have studied
Neanderthal bones and compared their injuries to those of rodeo riders, but a recent study cast some doubt on that, partly
in light of recent evidence that Neanderthals may have also developed wooden throwing spears. But whether
Neanderthals had to stab their prey in close quarters or eventually learned to throw weapons at them, the studies of early
human bones describe a grim existence. Breaking bones were regular events, particularly skull fractures, and that was
for trauma survivors.

Neanderthals invented more sophisticated stone tools about 300 kya, for the first significant advance in more than a
million years, and their toolset is called Mousterian, or Mode 3. Neanderthals had the largest human-line brains ever
measured, and they may have also invented the practice of burying the dead and placing grave goods with them, but they
could have inherited burial practices from their Homo heidelbergensis ancestors. As with their ancestors, they cooked
and ate vegetables and carved flesh from their corpses, in either cannibalism or a funerary practice. Neanderthals
seemed to be a regional human variation, adapted to colder environments, and the fact that they interbred with Homo
sapiens has caused some scientists to classify them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. If they did not become a truly
separate species, they were slowly speciating as they adapted to their ice age environment. Neanderthals built shelters,
may have drawn cave paintings, and engaged in activities comparable to Homo sapiens of the time. There seems to be
little reason to call them “primitive” when comparing them to Homo sapiens, particularly the early ones. The last
Neanderthals died out about 30 kya, about the same time that Cro-Magnon humans arrived in the region, and it was no
coincidence.

To revisit the Neanderthal split from Homo heidelbergensis about 500 kya, Homo heidelbergensis stayed in West Asia
and Africa. When evidence of stone-tipped spears being made 500 kya came to light, some scientists placed the
beginning of the Middle Stone Age at about 500 kya. Stone tools have recently been dated using thermoluminescence
dating, which works for stone tools heated by fires, and using obsidian hydration dating. That method measures water
absorption into the surface of obsidian tools. For dating artifacts before the appearance of behaviorally modern humans
about 70-50 kya, carbon-14 dating will not work, but other tests have been successful. Neanderthals dominated Europe
and today’s Middle East while Homo heidelbergensis’s home was Africa, and they also ranged to Europe and West Asia.
Whether Homo heidelbergensis existed for only a half-million years or a million is controversial today, but what is not very
controversial is that it is probably the direct ancestor of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and the first members of
our species appeared in Africa about 200 kya. There is evidence that other descendants of Homo heidelbergensis may
have existed, and a possible descendant was discovered in Siberia.531 It also could have been a Neanderthal
descendant. As with the discovery of the “hobbits” of Flores Island, it will not be surprising if scientists find more species
that branched off of those early human and protohuman lines and died out when behaviorally modern humans spread
across Africa and Eurasia.

When Homo sapiens first appeared about 200 kya, around when Homo heidelbergensis disappeared from the fossil
record, it was in Africa, East Africa in particular. That possible human subspecies or intermediate species between Homo
heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens lived in today’s Ethiopia about 160 kya, and there is evidence of Homo sapiens in
today’s Morocco about 160 kya. From Proconsul to Ardi, Lucy, Turkana Boy, and Homo sapiens, East Africa, particularly
around Lake Victoria and the Horn of Africa, seems to have been an auspicious place to evolve.532 Some have argued
that it may only seem that way because that region preserved fossils better.533 But stone tools preserve well. I doubt that
the cradle of humanity will move much from where anthropologists have currently placed it, and there are ecological
reasons for that region to have been so productive for fossil hunters.
Advancing and retreating ice sheets had major impacts on events of those times. Milankovitch cycles have 26,000,
41,000, and 100,000 year oscillations, among others, related to Earth’s solar orientation. The 100,000-year-effect is the
weakest of those three listed above, but for reasons still rather obscure, it has been the tipping point for advancing and
retreating ice sheets during the past million years. The million-year pattern has been creeping glaciation that oscillates,
and the glaciations reached their maximum soon before they rapidly retreated and Earth had a warm respite that lasted
for 10-20 thousand years before the ice sheets began to grow again, and another 100,000 years passed before the next
interglacial interval. Scientists expect that the current ice age will last for millions more years. The most extreme
glaciation during the current ice age happened between 475 kya and 425 kya. The last glacial maximum, about 25 kya,
soon after Neanderthals went extinct, looked like the below map, and the 475-425 kya glaciation map appeared similarly.
(Blue is ice, green is land. Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Neanderthals seem to have become permanently separated from their Homo heidelbergensis kin when the ice sheets
grew about 300 kya, and between 250 kya and 200 kya two glacial events happened, which roughly coincided with the
final exit of Homo heidelbergensis and the appearance of either Homo sapiens or that possible transitional species. The
previous interglacial period began 130 kya and ended 114 kya, and it appears that Homo sapiens left Africa for the first
time about then; evidence is found in a cave in today’s Israel, and they may have traveled much farther. When ice sheets
advanced, Neanderthals retreated southward, and one controversial area is the overlap of Neanderthals and Homo
sapiens in Israel during that interglacial period. Did Neanderthals wipe out those first Homo sapiens migrants from Africa?
Did they interbreed?

Whatever the case may be, it appears clear that the Homo sapiens population in Africa and Neanderthal population in
Europe and the Middle East were isolated for tens of thousands of years, perhaps far more than 100,000 years, and
humans used a toolkit like the Neanderthals’ until something happened between 70 and 50 kya. Just what happened is a
matter of great controversy, and in recent years, several disciplines have converged on the issue and are drawing a
clearer picture today. Some key findings that shed light came from global DNA studies, linguistics partnering with
evolutionary theory, and brain studies. In the past generation, as DNA sequencing has been applied to many areas, a
startling picture of the human journey has emerged. Mitochondria retained some of their DNA, probably for flexible power
generation. For animals that reproduce sexually, the mother’s mitochondria are passed to her offspring, while virtually
none comes from the father, if any. Geneticists can measure mutations in mitochondrial DNA and approximate when two
different animals shared a common ancestor, whether they belong to the same species or not. Similarly, regarding
nuclear DNA, the Y chromosome produces a male mammal, and mutations in the Y chromosome can also be analyzed to
estimate when two men shared the same ancestor. Putting absolute dates on DNA results has been problematic, but
scientists have been aligning DNA results with fossil dates, which are considered more reliable, and have been resolving
some limitations. But if the timing is suspect for such genetic analyses, far more confidence exists for descent
relationships. Human DNA testing is a burgeoning business, used for everything from freeing prisoners falsely convicted
to determining paternity to examining the genetic heritage of the sitting U.S. president’s wife.

The picture emerging from global DNA testing is that all humans on Earth today are descended from a founder population
that lived in East Africa, again near the Horn of Africa, around 60-50 kya. Geneticists think that the founder population
amounted to about five thousand people, and of that population, a few hundred humans at most left Africa about 60-50
kya and conquered the world.534 If any people ever lived up to Genesis’s instructions to subdue Earth, it would have been
them. It may have been because they were members of the first primate species to master language.
 Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution
Chapter summary:
 Humanity's progress up to the founder group that left Africa
 Thin fossil evidence for early human travels and development
 Global success of the elephant family
 Wild card of human consciousness
 Basics of human existence
 How right Darwin was
 Universal human traits
 Human mastery of language
 Evolutionary impacts on language and brain development
 Great Leap Forward to behavioral modernity, and Missing Links
 Founder group's exit from Africa
 Energy return on hunting large animals
 Tendency of hunters to overkill
 First megafauna mass extinction, in Australia
 Opposition to human agency in megafauna extinctions
 Myth of the peaceful savage
 Beginnings of warfare
 Beginnings of religion
 Universal human tendency to punish cheaters
 Unprecedented threat that humans posed to megafauna
 Human migration pattern from Africa, as established by DNA testing
 Short-lived Golden Age of the Hunter Gatherer
 Why the African and some Asian megafauna survived, and human DNA mixing with other humans
 Humans invade Europe, and Neanderthals quickly go extinct
 New stone tool culture is developed from Neanderthal tools
 Climate change and Neanderthals
 "Hobbits" are the last surviving non-sapiens humans
 Humans and the mammoth extinctions
 First fishermen
 Increase in human-on-human violence
 Debates on Western Hemisphere megafauna extinctions
 Native American migration from Asia
 Western Hemisphere's megafauna extinctions
 Humans making the world safe for themselves
 Megafauna survival on island refuges
 Human migration after the ice sheets melted, as determined by DNA testing
 Great increase in human violence once the megafauna were gone
 Energy superiority of farming over hunting and gathering
  High death rates of "primitive" warfare
 Economic basis of all warfare
 Dramatic effects of the melting ice sheets
 Why social animals are social, and hunter-gatherer social organization
 Resource-competition basis for warfare
 Societal male dominance and societal violence
 Peaceful beginnings of agricultural societies
 Fifth (microlith) stone technology culture appears
 Limbic conditioning of religion and warfare
 How unimaginable the result of the founder group's journey would have been to the founders
 Dogs are the first domesticated animals

Anthropologists and primate researchers long believed that culture was the unique province of humanity, but relatively
recent scientific findings have disproven that notion.535 Capuchin monkeys have cultural learning, and it is more
sophisticated with great apes. It took a few million years after the human/chimp split for our ancestors to learn to make
stone tools, and that culture then spread widely in Africa. The control of fire, appearance of Homo erectus, and
development of a new toolset were probably all closely related and at least partly interdependent, but little seemed to
change for the next million years or more. Then the next version of humanity appeared and possessed a larger brain, and
new tools and behaviors are evident beginning about a half-million years ago. The timeframes continually shrank
between major events in the human journey. Only 200 thousand years later, Neanderthals appeared and created a new
toolset, and new behaviors are in evidence. Only 100 thousand years after that, anatomically modern humans appeared.
Only 30 thousand years after that, about 170 kya, new tool-making techniques appeared, as well as humanity’s first
known exploitation of the seashore biome, probably due to necessity, where life once again was eked out on the margins,
and those humans may have decorated their bodies. About 100 kya, innovation seems to have accelerated again, and by
75-60 kya there is evidence of bedding and sophisticated tools made with complex processes. Needles and perhaps
even arrowheads first appeared about 60 kya. There is no doubt among scientists that members of Homo sapiens made
those advances, and their artifacts provided evidence of increasing cultural and technical sophistication, which soon left
Neanderthals and all other land animals far behind. About 75-70 kya, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia was Earth’s largest
in tens of millions of years, and there is controversy today whether that eruption was partly responsible for the genetic
bottleneck that Homo sapiens passed through not long afterward. What became today’s humanity seems to have nearly
gone extinct at that bottleneck.

Those issues will not be resolved in my lifetime, but Homo sapiens migrated past Africa in the interglacial period of 130
kya to 114 kya. There is evidence and speculation that those humans may have bred with Neanderthals, were killed off
by them, migrated across Eurasia, or some combination of those events. There is evidence that heidelbergensis or
Neanderthal descendants, the Denisovans, also migrated across Eurasia, perhaps expanding to Southeast Asia as Homo
erectus did. The Denisovan evidence arose from analyzing DNA from teeth and bones, which is the only physical
evidence of Denisovans discovered so far, and their genes are more prevalent in aboriginal Australians and Melanesians.
To summarize, there is substantial evidence that the human line probably populated Eurasia in significant numbers by 200
kya, and perhaps even anatomically modern humans around 100 kya. They could have driven vulnerable species to
extinction, with their advanced toolkit and hunting behaviors, long before behaviorally modern humans left Africa about
60-50 kya. Homo erectus became extinct less than 150 kya in East Asia or the islands off of it, and the largest primate
ever disappeared about 100 kya. Those two primates coexisted for more than a million years and disappeared concurrent
with the rise of humans with sophisticated toolsets. They may well have been early casualties of humanity’s success.

To briefly revisit conflicts between specialists and generalists, to that speculation above, scientists ideally want persuasive
evidence that humans drove Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus to extinction. They want Acheulean or later
technological artifacts associated with kills of those species. All that scientists have found for gigantopithecus so far are
some teeth and jawbones. Although such deductive reasoning is sound, the fossil and artifactual record is so thin that
such evidence will probably never be adduced, even if it was a common event 150-100 kya. Gigantopithecus survived for
nine million years and disappeared around when more lethal humans arrived, and a camel that roamed today’s Syria went
extinct about 100 kya, soon after anatomically modern humans arrived in the vicinity. Is that a coincidence? There is
genetic evidence that behaviorally modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps other early
humans, and they all went extinct soon after those behaviorally modern humans arrived. That they interbred put to bed
the hypotheses that they went extinct before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. If they went extinct after behaviorally
modern humans arrived, as the genetic evidence clearly tells us, the implications are obvious, and any extinction
hypothesis that invokes climate change or some other natural catastrophe has some high hurdles to overcome. Those
events were probably early salvos of the Sixth Mass Extinction.

As will be seen in this chapter, the spread of behaviorally modern humans closely coincided not only with the extinction of
humans and primates that existed for hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, but virtually all of the world’s
large animals went extinct almost exactly when behaviorally modern humans arrived, all except those that had evolved
alongside the human line for millions of years in Africa and Eurasia. Some vanished animals were among the most
successful in Earth’s history.

After Africa began colliding with Asia, about 18 mya Asian animals quickly invaded and dominated Africa. The two
primary exceptions were proboscideans and apes, both of which prospered at home in Africa and in Eurasia.
Proboscideans did even better; they did not only become prominent in Eurasia, but they also migrated to North America
by 16.5 mya. They migrated to South America about three mya, as soon as they could, and quickly succeeded in all
South American biomes, from rainforest to grasslands to mountains. They beat apes to the Western Hemisphere by 16.5
million years. Elephants have passed the mirror test and mourn their dead. Their huge size and prehensile trunks, as
well as their ability to eat a wide variety of vegetation, let proboscideans flourish everywhere that they possibly could.
They even formed biomes as a terraforming force. Until humans arrived, proboscideans were the most intelligent,
adaptable, and successful land mammals ever and arguably outperformed the dinosaurs. But after nearly 20 million years
of global success, they nearly all went extinct soon after encountering behaviorally modern humans. They went
completely extinct in the Western Hemisphere, and there has long been controversy among scientists whether humans
caused it, although the debate is fading as evidence of human agency becomes clearer.

Some scientists treat every proboscidean extinction as a unique mystery, unrelated to other proboscidean extinctions, and
climate and resulting vegetation changes are hypothesized as agents of extinction (or other causes invoked), when the
most probable cause stares at them each morning in the mirror. The devil is in the details, but regarding the megafauna
extinctions, some specialists cannot seem to discern a very clear pattern. Scientists, because they are human, have an
inherent conflict of interest when attributing such catastrophes to non-human causes. During the remainder of this essay,
it will become evident that there is a human penchant for absolving one’s in-group of responsibility for catastrophes and
crimes committed against the out-group, and historians, scientists, and other professionals regularly engage in such
interest-conflicted acts, whether they were defending their species, race, gender, nation, class, ideology, ethnicity, or
profession. That in-group/out-group difference in treatment has a long history and probably goes back to the beginnings
of territorial social animals.

As scientific investigations deal with the human line, the issues increasingly become more complex and difficult to
untangle and assess. This is largely because of human consciousness, which is a wild card, something that if not
different in kind, is vastly different in degree, at least for land animals; cetaceans may well be another matter. Designing
falsifiable hypotheses for testing human behavior and consciousness has provided challenges not seen in other sciences,
and experiments performed on our primate cousins have also become more humane. Dissecting chimp brains while they
are still alive is as ethically unacceptable today as doing it to humans. Even today, data on the effects of cold and altitude
on humans was primarily gleaned from Nazi experiments on prisoners. Today’s scientists who study human
consciousness and its relationship to physical reality have been limited by ethics and what is perhaps the primary
limitation: in studying human consciousness, scientists are studying themselves. The ideal of objective examination of the
material world is hampered by unresolved paradoxes right at the bedrock, and an objective examination of human
consciousness, by humans, may well be an impossible goal.

However, studying the human line is in many ways little different from studying other organisms. Maybe there was love
among the protists and trilobites, but life’s journey on Earth seemed to rarely stray far from the essentials of acquiring
energy, preserving it, and procreation. It is little different with today’s humans, even in the most “advanced” civilizations.
Whatever means humans have used since that founder group left Africa 60-50 kya, the primary goal was always the
same: survive long enough to produce offspring. All human societies had to meet that goal, first. There are no hungry
philosophers, and the concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can help rank human needs and desires. If a human does
not receive adequate food, water, air, shelter, sleep, and sex, the rest does not matter. Once those needs are met, social
needs become important. Virtually all higher primates are intensely social. But for nearly the entire human journey, the
primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time was food security. Until the Industrial Revolution, few humans ever rose
much past that most fundamental need of getting enough energy to power their biology. When preindustrial societies
ascended past that level, it was never for long, as famine and civilization collapses always brought humans back to the
basics of securing food. This essay’s primary purpose may be helping humanity past that threshold, where survival needs
are paramount and rarely recede from the forefront of human awareness, even when people pretend that they are not. I
live in history’s richest and most powerful nation, near the world’s richest man, and I pass by homeless people each day.
Just as the journey of life on Earth has always been primarily about physical well-being, which is always rooted in the
energy issue, so has the human journey, and the study of human well-being is called economics.
While performing the studies that became my website and this essay, one figure loomed, both within orthodoxy and on the
fringes: Charles Darwin. Perhaps because I live in the USA, which may have more hostility toward evolutionary theory
than anywhere else on Earth, with Biblical literalism still so popular, I have encountered many attacks on Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of evolution. I have continually read recent scientific works in which the authors remark,
“Darwin was right again!”, as another one of his hypotheses was confirmed by modern scientific investigation. When
Darwin wrote that the cradle of humanity was probably Africa, because that was where the most human-looking apes
were, his position was dismissed for generations and most contemporary scientists suspected that humans evolved in
Asia. Among Darwin’s many contributions to science, the most enduring may be that all life on Earth has an ancestry,
which can be traced all the way back to the beginning. Biology’s tree of life is only a more elaborate version of what
Darwin began sketching long ago.536 When DNA analysis became feasible in my lifetime, the findings led scientists to
say, “Darwin was right again!” Darwin died without ever hearing about genetic theory, but his theory of descent from
common ancestry has become the bedrock of evolutionary theory. In addition, scientists are using that idea to reconstruct
trees of human language and religion, among other human constructs, in which all languages and religions today are
descended from that founder group of 60-50 kya, and the results are impressive.

Donald Brown published Human Universals in 1991, which noted traits found among all human societies. That book was
published more than a decade before the human genome was sequenced and before scientists amassed the genetic
evidence that traced the human lineage to those five thousand people in East Africa 60-50 kya. Those universal human
features were almost certainly possessed by that founder population. The primary traits of “the Universal People” (“UP”)
are listed at this footnote.537 Some less-than-universal traits are not on that list, such as women terminating unwanted
pregnancies, killing unwanted children, and capital punishment, but were close to universal. That may mean that some
societies discarded those behaviors over time or that most adopted them later; the former situation seems more likely.

There have been many interesting divergences in descendants from that founder population, such as the way that the
West emphasizes linear time while the East emphasizes circular time, and some scientists wonder if that has been
reflected in the DNA of those peoples by now. How many of UP’s traits are biological? How many are culturally and
economically dependent? What is human nature, and can our seeming sentience change or overcome our natures?
Some of UP’s traits are evident in today’s monkeys and apes and are deeply ingrained into human consciousness if not
necessarily human biology. Others have declined in prominence or seeming importance in the historical era, particularly
since the Industrial Revolution began. However, when I compared that list to my American society, which is history’s most
“advanced,” all UP traits still exist, to one degree or another.

What heads that list may well be the primary trait that led to UP’s dominance of Earth: their mastery of language.
Although social communication via sound may have begun with dinosaurs and perhaps even earlier, and Homo
heidelbergensis had biological features that would have made vocal communication more sophisticated, and
Neanderthals had biological features that further enabled speech, scientists strongly suspect that the mastery of language
that today’s humans display probably allowed humans to rapidly develop their technology and culture. It was humanity’s
first Internet: a way to communicate ideas and information in a way previously unfeasible and even unimaginable, at a
level of sophistication that no other land animal ever achieved. That invention provided the opportunity for sharing
complex ideas, which created positive feedback loops that allowed for quicker cultural and technological advances. That
is not fanciful speculation; linguistics, the study of brain abnormalities, and genetics testing has converged on what seems
the most plausible hypothesis today, although in these areas the controversies can be fierce.

Noam Chomsky has been called “the Einstein of linguistics.” His influence on my political-economic thought has been
profound, and it has been interesting to stumble upon his work in diverse fields, largely related to linguistics and
psychology, but he is also a major figure in philosophy. Chomsky did not find an intellectually satisfying connection
between his scientific and political work, but others have.538 Chomsky has had an outsized influence on linguistics since
the 1950s, his interactive style can be polemic, and his tremendous influence arguably delayed some directions that
linguistics has taken.539 Darwin’s observations again found new relevance, this time in linguistics; he noted that language
acquisition seemed instinctual. Chomsky observed that any infant on Earth can be placed in any society, and will master
the language that he or she was raised with, which is one of UP’s traits. Darwin thought that human mental traits were
developed through natural selection, and although Chomsky thought that there was an innate language “organ” in human
biology, he did not pursue its evolutionary implications, and linguistics neglected that connection until recently.540 Since
the rise of DNA analysis and new directions in linguistics that even Chomsky began taking in his old age, scientists are
finding genes and brain regions closely related to language. The predominant evolutionary models have linked language
with other forms of communication such as gestures, and Broca’s area in the frontal lobe is closely associated with those
activities. One way that scientists linked brain regions with activities and traits was when those areas have been
damaged by accident or disease. In 1990, a scientist reported on a London family wherein a large fraction had severe
language deficits. In 1998, geneticists studied the DNA of that family and isolated the FOXP2 gene as the cause.541
Neanderthals shared the same gene with Homo sapiens and, together with other anatomical similarities, this suggests
that Neanderthals may have had spoken language.

However, all that scientists have determined so far for DNA's function is providing the “blueprint” for making proteins.
Proteins have four levels of structure, and the science of epigenetics studies the highly complex way that genes express
themselves. DNA provides the foundation for life’s structures, and as with Hox genes, the FOXP2 gene is highly
conserved in humans, which means that it does not change. Similar to my analogy of a house’s foundation determining
what kind of house can be built on it, those genes form the foundation of the biological structures built from them, and if
the foundation is damaged, the resulting house will be defective. Epigenetics and other factors are important, but if the
foundation is sufficiently flawed, the house may not stand at all.

The Great leap forward has been a prominent hypothesis that posited that behaviorally modern humans suddenly
appeared. It was once considered an abrupt event that began about 50-40 kya, but as new archeological finds are
amassed, as well as recent advances in genetic research and other areas, the story is familiar. Although on the
geological timescale the event was abrupt, radical, and unprecedented in life’s history on Earth, the “ramping” period
seems to have lasted longer than initially thought. A likelier story is that Homo sapiens first appeared about 200 kya in
East Africa, which conforms to a 25-million-year primate pattern of evolutionary innovation. Homo sapiens inherited
culture and tools from their ancestors and continued along the path of inventing more complex technologies and
techniques, exploiting new biomes, and reaching new levels of cognition. There does not seem to be any Missing Link or
development that needs to invoke divine or extraterrestrial intervention to explain the appearance and rise of Homo
sapiens. Some Homo sapiens migrated past their African homeland during the previous interglacial period of 130 kya to
114 kya and brought along their technology. Although they may have disappeared and perhaps became Neanderthal
prey, vestiges of their fate are probably yet to be discovered. They may have contributed to the biological and
technological wealth of Eurasian humans and may have begun to drive vulnerable species to extinction with their new
tools and techniques. However, Africa remained the crucible of primate biological and technological innovation, as it
almost always had to that time. By 70-60 kya, isolated African humans reached a level of sophistication called behavioral
modernity. Art was in evidence, needles made clothes and other sophisticated possessions, and they mastered
language, which was probably a unique trait among land animals. They made tools of a sophistication far advanced over
other humans, which probably included projectile weapons that radically changed the terms of engagement with prey
animals, predators, and other humans.
Those events happened during a glacial interval; the global ocean was about 70 meters lower than today, and today’s 18
kilometer gap at the Red Sea’s mouth was far narrower about 60-50 kya. Today, this seems to have been the founder
group’s point of exit from Africa. That route seems likely for a few reasons, one of which is the DNA evidence in the
peoples living along Southern Asia's periphery of all the way to Australia, and the other is that Homo sapiens were the first
humans to arrive in Australia, and it could only be reached by boat.542 Here is the map of the settlement pattern of
Eurasia from the founder group, as determined by DNA testing. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Taking a sea route was a new accomplishment by those behaviorally modern humans, and they probably reached
Australia about 48-46 kya, because the Australian megafauna began going extinct about then, and that event begins a
long and bloody tale that continues to this day. Earlier extinctions of the megafauna on Flores Island of nearly a million
years ago, or Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus between 150 kya and 100 kya, can be considered more equivocal, but
there is virtually no doubt among today’s scientists that the Sixth Mass Extinction began in earnest with the human
invasion of Australia.

Before examining the details of the barrage of extinctions that followed behaviorally modern humans wherever they
appeared during the next 50,000 years, a brief review of key dynamics is in order, and energy trumps all, as always. All
predators eat the easy meat first, and a cost/benefit decision drives the process, which today’s analysts call EROI. It was
an instinctual process with most animals. Many human practices today are similar; members of traditional societies
cannot provide answers for their mass behaviors other than, “We always did it this way,” or, “It is part of our religion,” but
scientists study their practices and find them energetically, even ingeniously, ideal, but nobody in those societies was
consciously aware of it.543 Societies without such energy-efficient practices failed, and those that religiously followed
them survived.

In today’s hunter-gatherer societies, the EROI for killing large animals dwarfs all other food sources. The EROI, of
calories produced divided by those burned during the hours of labor invested, for large game (a deer, for example), is
more than 100, and on average four times that of small game, fifteen times that of birds, about eight times that of roots
and tubers, and 10-15 times that of seeds and nuts.544 The hunter-gatherer EROI for seeds, nuts, and birds is around
ten-to-one. An average-sized adult African elephant carcass provides about 13 million calories, which would sustain a
band of 12 people for a year if they could eat it all before it rotted and did not die of protein poisoning. The EROI for those
easily killed proboscideans when humans invaded the Western Hemisphere could have been in the hundreds and even
more than one thousand. Large animals have always been the mother lode of hunter-gatherer peoples, and the
consensus among anthropologists is that no instincts urge a hunter to kill only what is needed, but a hunter will kill
whatever he can.545 That finding partly derives from studying modern hunter-gatherers. There is no doubt that when
early humans intruded into environments that never before encountered humans, where animals would have had no
intrinsic fear of humans, people would have had an exceptionally easy time killing all large animals encountered. Animals
without experience around humans, such as Antarctic penguins, are easily approached and killed. As happened
innumerable times in the historical era, intruding humans killed all the naïve animals that they could. The only animals
that survived developed a healthy fear of humans and avoided them, but how many could develop that fear before they
were all killed? From the very beginning of the eon of complex life, large size was an evolutionary advantage. More than
500 million years later, a new kind of animal appeared that turned that advantage into a fatal disadvantage, as it found a
way to mine that energy stored in large animals, and it quickly plundered it to exhaustion whenever it could.

As repeatedly seen in the historical era, if a new technology enabled great numbers of animals to be killed, hunters
quickly adopted the practice of killing the most animals that they could and harvested only the choicest cuts, as with bison
tongues in North America. The North American bison was quickly driven to the brink of extinction by American “pioneers.”
When Indians obtained horses from Europeans, they too killed all the bison that they could, and stampeding them off cliffs
was a common practice for thousands of years and accelerated when horses made the job easier.546 Some Indians used
all parts of a bison, but that seemed a minority practice, particularly after horses made hunting far easier, and was
probably economically mandated. Cultural differences between Plains tribes began disappearing with the radical changes
that horses and firearms brought to bison hunting, and stealing horses from neighboring tribes became a predilection.
Even today in 2015, fisherman procuring shark fins for soup just cut off the fins and throw the sharks back into the ocean
to die, which is driving shark species to extinction.

In the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Eurasia, the five-to-seven metric ton herbivores and the predators that hunted
them became guilds that stretched back to the dinosaurs, but in marsupial-dominated Australia they were a little smaller,
and the largest marsupial ever, Diprotodon, reached “only” about three metric tons. Australian animals enjoyed about 45
million years of isolation from the rest of Earth’s ecosystems, and large herbivore/predator guilds thrived there as they did
elsewhere. After appearing about 1.6 mya, Diprotodon quickly went extinct about 46 kya, and their bones have been
found with what appear to be butchering marks on them. The next largest denizen of Australia, Zygomaturus, weighed
about 500 kilograms and went extinct when Diprotodon did. Megafauna are variously defined as animals weighing at
least 45 or 100 kilograms, which is about as massive as humans. About 90% of Australia’s megafauna went extinct soon
after humans arrived. Lizards of up to two metric tons disappeared, a 500 kilogram, three-meter tall flightless bird also
disappeared after its family had a 15 million year existence, a gorilla-sized kangaroo, and so on. A number had fossil
records of more than 10 million years, to go extinct shortly after humans arrived. The list of suddenly extinct Australian
megafauna is horrifically impressive. I have yet to see a disinterested scientist or academic deny the idea that humans
were primarily responsible, and almost certainly solely responsible, for Australian megafauna extinctions.547 When a
“referee” paper was published in 2006, which assessed the state of the debate, the authors attributed Australian
megafauna extinctions entirely to humans.548 There is evidence that those early Australians engaged in setting great
fires. On Borneo, about the same time that humans first invaded Australia, near Niah Cave, humans also burned the
forests with abandon, as they probably tried to transform the rainforest environment into something friendlier to
humans.549

Along with huge Australian herbivores, their predators went extinct. Australia’s “marsupial lion” appeared about 1.6 mya
and went extinct about 46 kya, when its prey did. There is a “loyal opposition” to the idea of human agency for Australian
megafauna extinctions that regularly produces papers that attribute the extinctions to climate change.550 However, the
vast majority of research results points very clearly to human agency in the extinctions.551 The battle of the scientific
papers will not end soon, but this is where the pattern recognition of the generalist can greatly assist, while the specialists’
obsession with minutia can get them lost in the details. Although human-agency skeptics sometimes seem to look at the
big picture, their picture is not nearly big enough, in my opinion, and a generalist analysis follows.

What I have yet to see human-agency skeptics discuss is that guilds of multi-metric-ton herbivores and their attendant
predators appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, and attaining large size was both an offensive and defensive
strategy that goes back to the "arms wars" of the Cambrian Explosion. When mass extinction events happened, the race
began anew. Ornithischians rose to prominence along with flowering plants. When the Cretaceous extinction wiped out
those dinosaur guilds, it was not long before large herbivores began to reappear, with mammals in those niches. Within
25 million years of the bolide event, mammals reached their maximum size and remained there for the next 40 million
years, until humans arrived. Although species emerged and went extinct, just as they had for the entire eon of complex
life, that guild stayed relatively constant in size. When humans arrived, entire guilds disappeared. The five-to-seven ton
herbivores and their predators vanished and were replaced by guilds a tiny fraction of their size. Car-sized glyptodonts
inhabited a niche that ankylosaurs once resided in, and soon after humans arrived, only dog-sized armadillos remained.

What human-agency skeptics have ignored or argued around are unique features of the megafauna that went extinct and
the humans that preyed on them, while they examined minutia. Proboscideans were Earth’s most successful land
mammals ever before humans arrived. As modern research has discovered, African elephants help create the biomes
they live in, as terraforming agents. They were far from idle browsers and grazers, but had outsized impacts on the
vegetation, soils, and geological features such as water holes. Dinosaurs may have had similar biome impacts, and it
was probably a feature of that large herbivore guild. Scientists have been finding plenty of evidence that vegetation
changes that human-agency skeptics attribute to climate change may well be largely the result of the guild’s
disappearance, not a cause. Researchers in Africa have also discovered that changes wrought by elephants created
biomes dependent on elephant management. When elephants disappeared, so did the biomes that they created, which is
why smaller species could also disappear when the large herbivore guild vanished. Although Australia was the only non-
Antarctic continent without proboscideans 50 kya, and its guilds were comprised of somewhat smaller animals, probably
reflecting inherent differences between placental and marsupial mammals, Australia's large herbivores probably had
similar biome impacts.

Human-agency skeptics emphasize climate change above all other factors, but that seems a weak argument. Many of
the suddenly extinct Australian megafauna had lived for more than 10 million years and longer, such as that family of
large, flightless birds. Many others appeared during the current ice age and lived for more than a million years, to
suddenly go extinct when humans appeared. Scientists have counted 17 glacial episodes during the current ice age, and
they have had a clockwork-like regularity for the past million years. The most severe episode yet was more than 400 kya.
How can guilds that lived uninterrupted for at least 40 million years, in an increasingly cold and arid world, and survived
many climate fluctuations of the current ice age in fine shape, suddenly go extinct, worldwide, wherever humans
appeared, and it was all due to climate?

As impressive as the capabilities and survival history of the global megafauna were, what seems far more difficult to
explain away are the humans that arrived when the global megafauna went suddenly extinct. The only megafauna of note
to survive were those that had lived with humans in Africa and Eurasia for more than a million years and learned to avoid
them, as almost all game animals do today.

During the early days of imperialism, Thomas Hobbes argued that so-called primitive peoples lived lives that were “nasty,
brutish, and short.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau later promoted the idea that humanity’s natural state was gentle. During the
imperial “explorations,” conquests, and early anthropological studies, Hobbes’s vision prevailed, until the world wars of the
20th century.552 Anthropologists reacted to the devastating world wars in the 20th century's first half by creating a neo-
Rousseauian “peaceful savage” meme that dominated thinking regarding “primitive” and ancient peoples. In the early
1990s, as I began the study that became my website, which eventually led to this essay, I was influenced by “the peaceful
hunter-gatherer” meme. However, evidence has been adduced from numerous disciplines that that idea is false and can
even be seen as a romantic notion of looking back to a vanished golden age. Archeological evidence helped overturn the
“peaceful savage” myth. Often, it was not new evidence coming to light, but archeologists were no longer blinkered by
their indoctrination and denied what their eyes told them.553 The evidence finally prevailed, and on the heels of that
overturned dogma, genetic evidence provided new insights into the human journey since that founder group left Africa.

When protohumans mastered stone tools and fire, they eventually transformed from hunted to hunter, and there is no
persuasive reason to believe that an early application of their new ability to inflict wounds would have not been used on
each other. As this narrative reaches the rise of Homo sapiens and the archeological record’s changing toolsets before
people became sedentary, those artifacts may well reflect the conqueror’s toolsets, and the vanished toolsets also
represented vanquished and exterminated peoples.

To briefly revisit UP, men have always committed vastly more violence than women, were the primary hunters, and almost
always dominated all societies. In general, the higher women’s status, the healthier the society was. The !Kung people of
Africa stayed isolated hunter-gatherers to the present day. Their click language, with its click sounds shared with other
African groups, such as the last full-time hunter-gatherers left in Africa, the Hadza, probably sounded like the language
that the founder group left with and has since been lost beyond Africa.554 Genetic testing has demonstrated that the
!Kung and related groups remained in Africa when that founder group left, and their geographic isolation and warlike ways
kept them genetically isolated. Genetic testing also traced the migration path to Australia, and found peoples that stopped
along the way, as part of a coastal migration that eventually reached the Pacific side of Asia and maybe all the way to the
end of South America. One reason why the coastal route was probably the first was that it was warm and relatively easy.
Around 60 kya, the global climate warmed a little. It was about the warmest period in the 100 thousand years before this
interglacial period before it began oscillating toward the glacial maximum around 20 kya.

The Andaman Islands are positioned off the Malaysian coast. Sailors avoided the islands for centuries, as the natives
killed anybody who landed and burned their bodies. The Andamans looked like African pygmies. The British established
a penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the late 1700s, when about five thousand aboriginal Andamans lived on the
main islands. The Andaman population collapsed from the usual diseases, mayhem, and alcohol that Europeans brought
with them, and they were nearly extinct within a century of British contact. Less than one thousand aborigines survive
today. The genetic and other evidence has been used to make a convincing case that the aboriginal Andamans were
island-dwarfed descendants of the original inhabitants. The Andaman Islands were never connected to the mainland, so
the aborigines probably descended from people who stopped and stayed during that founder migration from Africa.
The Andamans are members of a racial group called Negritos, which appear to be remnant populations of the original
migration from Africa. They all survived in marginal environments where they subsisted as hunter-gatherers, while later
agricultural immigrants dominated arable lands. About 50 kya, a few thousand years before the migration to Australia
happened, the sea level was lower and the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo formed a contiguous peninsula today
called Sundaland. New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania were also connected and formed a continent today called
Sahul. Deep water lay between those two “lost continents,” and biologists drew lines between them that noted the
distribution of animals and plants that did not cross open water. Wallace’s Line is farthest north, followed by Weber’s
Line, and Lydekker’s Line is farthest south. Those lines mark the limits of migrations from Sundaland toward Sahul, which
followed sea level changes. About 48-46 kya, behaviorally modern humans crossed the water in boats to Sahul, and the
peoples of New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania largely lived in isolation until Europeans arrived. Those peoples have
Denisovan remnants in their DNA, which probably means that they interbred with them while driving them to extinction on
Sundaland and Southeast Asia, before some migrated to Sahul. Aboriginal Australian isolation was almost certainly
maintained in the way that Andaman Islanders did it: by killing strange peoples who came ashore. However, in 2012, a
paper was published regarding evidence of contact about four kya with people probably from India, when the dingo,
microlith technology, and some Indian DNA admixture were introduced into Australia, which seems related to a
colonization of northern Australia by an immigrant population.555 More of those kinds of migrations of human DNA,
technology, and domesticated species have yet to be discovered, and some may even be significant.

When Europeans invaded Australia in the late 1700s, the aborigines they encountered were in a state of almost constant
warfare. What seems to be the case is that the founder group of Australia lived in the easy meat days and they grew and
spread across the continent in a few thousand years. Once the golden age based on easy meat ended, they reverted
back to their territorial natures and formed 600 separate societies, with between 500 and 1,000 people in each one. They
all had unremitting hatred for their neighbors, with whom they were in constant warfare. The aboriginal genetic diversity
supports the idea that those societies did not interbreed with each other, but stayed insular. They were all patrilocal and
violent.556

About 43 kya, lowering sea levels due to increasing global glaciation formed a land bridge to Tasmania. People migrated
there, too, to become isolated when the seas rose again. The peoples of New Guinea’s highlands were the world’s most
isolated, not “discovered” until the 1930s. When Europeans first encountered them, the highlanders did not know that a
world existed outside of their highland home; they thought that they were Creation’s only people. Unlike other relict
populations of the original African migrants, New Guinea Highlanders practiced agriculture and lived in villages, but they
were as violent as the others.

Except for New Guinean highlanders, initial European contact with all of those relict populations was universally
disastrous, just as it had been in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere for centuries. Those initial contacts happened
in anthropology’s early days, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown studied the Andamans in the early 20th century, when they were
tattered remnants of the people of a century earlier.557 The San people were also devastated by European invasion.
When the Dutch invaded what became South Africa, the Southern San were driven to extinction while the !Kung survived
in the Kalahari Desert. Andamans, !Kung, and Aboriginal Australians all had/have strikingly similar religious ceremonies,
which were marathon singing and dancing sessions that could last all night. Some rituals lasted for months. Their rituals
are very likely what the first religions looked like, which were strenuous ordeals in which people reached frenzied states
that left them exhausted. Today’s leading hypothesis is that those rituals created group cohesion that held their society
together.558 The social glue of monkey and ape societies is grooming, but humans seem to have replaced it with
conversation when they mastered language, and those early rituals further cemented the bonds.

Social cohesion was not only attained by the benefits of social interactions, but also by punishments when freeloaders did
not pull their economic weight in a society. Scientists have developed a concept called reciprocal altruism that is not
altruistic (giving without an expectation of individual gain) at all, but more of a societal accounting concept. Universal
cooperation is seen as good for all of society’s members, and acts of “altruism” will eventually be “reciprocated” by some
member of the society, if not the member initially helped. A trait of UP is ensuring that exchanges are fair and that
cheaters are punished.559 The carrots and sticks of rewards and punishments are probably as old as the earliest social
animals, but as with all areas like this, humans have achieved the most sophisticated behaviors.

What all early UP societies had in common was that although they formed in-group cohesion with their rituals, it also
meant that out-groups were fair game, and the connection between religion and warfare precedes that migrating founder
group, perhaps more than 70 kya. As will be discussed later, warfare and violence have been enduring human behaviors
for the entire human journey, spanning from before the human/chimp split to today, with a brief hiatus when Homo
sapiens spread to open lands. Monkeys have wars, so that primate behavior probably has a history of tens of millions of
years.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever invoked a climate change hypothesis for the mass extinction of South American
mammals when the land bridge formed that allowed for invasion from North America, even though the formation of that
land bridge probably triggered the current ice age and the North American invasions of South America. Most South
American mammal species quickly went extinct when outcompeted by more cosmopolitan invaders that had survived
many millions of years of intercontinental invasions. It was a purely Darwinian event in which animals with greater
carrying capacities prevailed. There was no big picture awareness of events by the invaders or invaded, just as there had
never been during life’s history on Earth. They all just tried to survive, and previously isolated South American mammals
quickly lost the game. The survivors were able to live in niches that no North American animals did, such as New World
monkeys.

Earth had never before hosted anything like behaviorally modern humans. Nothing came close. They wielded fire and
began using it for offensive purposes, to shape environments to their liking. They had sophisticated stone tools and
weapons, they mastered language and could engage in group behaviors that no other land animal remotely
accomplished. They probably had sophisticated projectile weapons, and if the !Kung example is instructive, they may
have also known how to put poison on their weapons. One !Kung arrow can bring down a 200-kilogram antelope in less
than a day.560 What kind of animal in the Western Hemisphere and Australia, that had never seen anything like a human
before, and would have been the mother lode kill of the invaders, and the large ones all reproduced slowly, could have
withstood that onslaught? None that I can think of. Neanderthals were ambush predators of megafauna that were wary
of humans, and whatever projectile weapons they may have had, they would have been inferior to those that behaviorally
modern humans left Africa with about 60-50 kya. Neanderthals still lived off of those animals, with many broken bones
and undoubted deaths suffered during hunts. That would have been nothing like what the invaders of the Western
Hemisphere and Australia encountered. They could have walked right up to all of those animals with no conditioned fear
of humans and stuck their spears into them, maybe not even needing to use projectile weapons, much less poisoned
ones. That scenario has been called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, but it would not have seemed a rapid event to the
invaders. It would have been a butcher shop’s version of the Garden of Eden. Farther than they could imagine, in every
direction, were animals with no fear of humans that could be killed so easily that it may have literally become child’s
play.561 One argument by human-agency skeptics is that continental animals were subject to predation and would have
begun fleeing fast. That seems like a weak argument, and here is why.

The genetic testing that has been performed on humanity in the past generation has shown that the founder group’s
pattern of migration was to continually spread out, and once the original settlement covered the continents, people did not
move much at all, at least until Europe began conquering the world (and there were some farmer
displacements/absorptions of hunter-gatherers). There is little sign of warfare in those early days of migration, and the
leading hypothesis is that people moved to the next valley rather than be close enough to fight each other. Any conflict
would have been easily resolved by moving farther out, where more easily killed animals lived. Also, in those virgin
continents, people need not have roamed far to obtain food. Today, an !Kung woman will carry her child more than 7,000
kilometers before the child can walk for himself/herself. If an !Kung woman bears twins, it is her duty to pick which child to
murder, because she cannot afford to carry two. That demonstrates the limitations of today’s hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but
in those halcyonic days of invading virgin continents (which had to be the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer), those
kinds of practices probably waned and bands grew fast. When they reached their social limit they split, and the new
group moved to new lands where the animals, again, never saw people before. Unlike the case with humans, there would
not have been a grapevine so that animals told their neighbors about the new super-predator. The first time that those
megafauna saw humans was probably their last time. It is very likely, just as with all predators for all time, and as can be
seen with historical hunting events such as the decimation of the bison or today's shark finning, that those bands soon
took to killing animals, harvesting the best parts, and moving on. To them it would not have been a “blitzkrieg,” but more
like kids in candy stores. After a few thousand years of grabbing meat whenever the fancy took them, or perhaps less,
those halcyonic days were over as the far coasts of Australia were reached and the easy meat was gone. When that land
bridge formed to Tasmania about 43 kya, people crossed and were able to relive that “golden” time for a little while longer,
until all the megafauna was gone on Tasmania. They also may have worked their way through the food chain, in which
the first kills were the true mother lode. Nobody even deigned to raise a spear at anything less than a Diprotodon or
similar animal until they were gone. Then they started killing smaller prey, which eventually did wise up and were harder
to kill, so humans had to work at it again and the brief golden age was over. The huge fires that accompanied the
Australians as they shaped the new continent to their liking, maybe recreating the savanna conditions that they left in
Africa, may have also been used to flush out animals if they began to avoid humans.

All continental and even most island ecosystems that humans soon invaded contained predators, but they would have
been as ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers as their prey. They were capable of defending themselves, so were
probably rarely hunted except by the most foolish young men. No predator on Earth would have wanted to confront fire-
wielding humans with their array of weaponry and group skills. The megafauna predators went extinct when their prey
did, and probably not because of much direct human violence.
When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, islands off the coasts had not been inhabited for about 10 thousand years,
when the oceans rose and cut them off from the mainland. On King and Kangaroo islands, the wombats, emus,
kangaroos, and other animals were so tame that people killed them with no effort whatsoever. Europeans on one island
even built a hut for their wombats to sleep in at night, and they just pulled one from a hut when needed and slaughtered it.
No mainland animals acted remotely like that. They are shy and furtive around people, for good reason.562 It did not
matter if the environment was warm, dry, wet, or cold; all large animals quickly died off when humans arrived. New
Guinea had a similar megafauna extinction pattern: sudden and total.

Africa and Eurasia were another matter, as humans had been living and evolving there for around two million years, and
had been hunting for at least several hundred thousand years. Like those Negritos and other relict humans, some
animals found refugia or were lucky to live in them and did not go immediately extinct. That coastal route was only the
founder group’s initial route. The Fertile Crescent, India, and Southeast Asia were key points of settlement and radiation,
where the founder group’s descendants further spread across Eurasia. There are traces of other relict human species
DNA in the modern human genome, which some think might be Homo erectus.563 Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA are
in the human genome, which probably means that humans interbred with them as they drove them to extinction. Their
contribution to today’s human genome is small, on the order of a few percent. Many thousands of years later, as Europe
conquered the world, they interbred with all of the peoples that they drove to extinction, and there is little reason to doubt
that something similar happened as that founder group’s descendants conquered Earth.

The African and Eurasian megafauna learned to fear and avoid people after hundreds of thousands of years of human
hunting, but those extinct humans may have been worthy adversaries and unwary behaviorally modern humans could
have been occasional prey. Whatever behaviorally modern humans did to those virgin continents, there is no doubt that
they moved to the top of every food chain that they encountered. Nothing could withstand those people, and the easy
meat fueled humanity’s initial global expansion. That may be when humans became “energy windfall opportunists.” All
animals took energy windfalls when they found them, which fueled all those “golden ages” of the evolutionary past, but
humans have quested after them to this very day. The first instance was probably when that founder group exploded
across the planet and got all the easy energy that they could with their new, irresistible methods, and drove all other
human competitors to extinction. It seems that Denisovans quickly succumbed in the warmer climates and the “hobbits”
effectively hid in their refugia for tens of thousands of years while behaviorally modern humans passed them by. But
Neanderthals were a different matter. There are no known Neanderthal sites on the Mediterranean’s African shores,
which would have certainly been quite inhabitable. But contemporary remains of modern humans are found on the
southern shores. The divide is evident where Spain and Morocco meet at the strait of Gibraltar. I consider it quite likely
that inhabitants of the northern and southern shores were mutually hostile, and the Mediterranean formed a frontier. The
reason for not mixing was not because they adapted to different biomes and lifestyles, but they adapted to different
biomes due to mutual hostility. That did not mean constant warring, but they knew enough to avoid each other and
conflicts were not worth it. But the arrival of behaviorally modern humans, however, changed the terms of engagement.

By about 45-40 kya, that northward migrating band from the founder group reached Europe. Although the exact route is
in dispute, the genetic evidence supports the idea that the group originated from a migration into the Levant, probably via
the east end of the Arabian Peninsula. Those invaders are called Cro-Magnons today. When they reached the Levant,
they began migrating along the Mediterranean’s northern and southern shores, and Neanderthals began disappearing.
The process took several thousand years at minimum, and has been called a border war with Neanderthals, while others
have called it a genetic assimilation.564 The way that humans drove the megafauna to extinction, and then engaged in
warfare as they were driving the megafauna extinction, seems to favor a violent end for Neanderthals, and the “blitzkrieg”
of humans migrating across the length and breadth of Australia in a few thousand years was not in evidence for the
migration/invasion around the Mediterranean’s periphery. Neanderthals (nor maybe ancient Homo sapiens along the
southern shore), do not seem to have gone quietly or easily and may have been the biggest obstacle to Earth’s conquest
by behaviorally modern humans.

About 40-35 kya, a new stone technique, developed from the Neanderthals’ Mousterian technology and called
Châtelperronian, appeared in today’s France and Spain. It was succeeded by a new stone tool technology that appeared
about 30 kya called Mode 4, or Aurignacian, and the people making those tools also made cave paintings. Aurignacian
technology was a Cro-Magnon invention of unprecedented sophistication, with blades instead of flakes. There is
considerable uncertainty about the exact dates when those two technologies appeared, but the consensus is that
Aurignacian succeeded Châtelperronian, and Cro-Magnons invented the Aurignacian and Neanderthals used the
Châtelperronian. There seems to have been cultural interaction between the two peoples, as well as genetic
interchange.565 The controversies regarding Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interaction and mutual influence will not end in
my lifetime, but what virtually everybody agrees on is that by about 30-27 kya, Neanderthals were extinct, and maybe
even thousands of years before that. The Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal controversy is one of the more heated in
anthropology, and there are two basic camps on the Neanderthal extinction, just as with the Australian megafauna
extinctions: behaviorally modern humans did it, or climate did it.
In the historical period, when technologically advanced humans encountered less advanced ones, there was cultural and
genetic interchange, but in the end, the technologically advanced peoples marginalized the less advanced ones or drove
them to extinction. If any place on Earth could have been used as an illustration of the climate change hypothesis for the
megafauna extinctions, ice age Europe would have been it. Ice sheets extended so far southward that Neanderthals lived
in relatively few refugia, but I highly doubt that it caused their extinction. Neanderthals lived for at least 300,000 years and
survived radical climate changes just fine. Human-agency skeptics have invoked unusually violent climate changes that
coincidentally appeared when behaviorally advanced humans arrived around the world, but that seems to be grasping at
straws. Again, there is nothing climatically unique about the past 60,000 years, not compared to what had happened
during the past million years, so invoking climate-change effects for humans and animals that weathered the ice age’s
vagaries just fine seems to be a huge conjecture that may be politically motivated. Human-agency skeptics have crafted
different kinds of climate explanations for each major extinction, such as drying in Australia, getting colder and dryer in
Europe, or getting warmer and wetter when most of the extinctions happened. At most, climate was a proximate cause,
not the ultimate one. The ultimate one was people virtually every time.

About 30-27 kya, after Neanderthals made their final exit, the only other humans on Earth were “hobbits,” hiding in their
refugia. They disappeared around when behaviorally modern humans arrived, too. For the “hobbits,” a volcanic
explanation has been proffered for their extinction, although they probably coexisted with modern humans. A problem I
have noticed with the arguments of human-agency skeptics is that the fossil and archeological record is currently too thin
and the dates too equivocal to confidently place closely occurring events in sequence and establish causal relationships
that precludes behaviorally modern human influence. In all such extinctions, I have seen no convincing arguments and
evidence that rules out the involvement of behaviorally modern humans, and their “contribution” to those extinctions is
perfectly logical and understandable, if not something to beam with pride over.

As scientists have been putting this picture together, one irony is that Cro-Magnons had black skin, and Neanderthals
might have had light hair and eyes, as an adaptation to the cold climates that they lived in, as with Europeans today. It
turns the racist aspect of Europe’s conquest of the world on its head, and has been noted in some scientific corners. For
the remainder of this essay, as all other human species were extinct but for the “hobbits” by 30 kya, the word “human” will
refer to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.

From about 32 kya to 22 kya, Gravettian culture prevailed in Europe. That culture produced the first ceramics and art
such as the Venus of Willendorf. By 20 kya, pottery appeared in China. But as far as human expansion is concerned, the
Gravettian (and related Pavlovian cultures) are most notorious as mammoth hunters extraordinaire for those that lived on
the mammoth steppe near the ice sheets. To revisit proboscideans, they could not swim to Sahul, but flourished
everywhere else they could get to. At more than 10 million calories per carcass, they were the ultimate hunter-gatherer
kill. Also, near the ice sheets, meat could be stored in the ground. Cro-Magnons did just that, and that “freezer” full of
meat led to the first seasonally sedentary humans. It long predated the Domestication Revolution when people could be
sedentary year-round, but while the megafauna lasted, the first signs of what came later appeared as Cro-Magnons
created villages around frozen mammoth meat. Gravettians hunted along migration routes and set traps and ambushes
for mammoths.566 For thousands of years, mammoths were the primary focus of Gravettian hunters, and many scientists
believe that humans at least helped drive European mammoths to extinction. Gravettians probably used the bow and
arrow, and using poisoned arrows on mammoths would have been child’s play, not a hazardous undertaking. They also
tended to focus on the easy meat: the young, relatively defenseless, tender mammoths. Killing the offspring alone would
have driven the slowly reproducing mammoths to extinction, and as the interglacial period began around 15 kya, there
would have been new pressures on mammoths. One of them was that fewer mammoths meant that they were not
terraforming their environments like they used to, and the warming climate probably reduced their range. For a mammoth
facing humans, there was literally no place to hide (except maybe in the living room), and there is little reason to think that
hunters would have eased up when mammoth numbers dwindled. If anything, their efforts would have increased to get
the last ones, as they competed and fought over the final mammoths. In one lifetime or even several, the changes would
have been barely noticeable, if at all. There was simply no way out for mammoths, and they went extinct south of the
European ice sheets under the ministrations of Cro-Magnon hunters. More evidence of their fate is some mammoths
surviving in refugia: islands where humans did not arrive until thousands of years later. Island-dwarfed mammoths
survived on St. Paul Island in the Pribilof chain off of Alaska until less than six kya, and went extinct when humans arrived.
Several hundred apparently full-sized mammoths survived on Wrangel Island near Siberia and went extinct less than five
kya, when humans arrived. In today's France and Spain, Gravettians also semi-settled along the migration routes of
reindeer and red deer. From Spain across Europe, into today's Russia, Gravettians hunted migrating herds, and not only
the mammoth was driven to extinction, but also the wooly rhino, the Irish elk, the musk ox, and steppe bison were driven
to extinction as the ice sheets retreated.567 Neanderthals had been ambush hunting in similar fashion, and those animals,
like the African megafauna, grew wary of humans, and killing those animals probably took planning and guile.

The earliest evidence of fishing is from a man in China from 40 kya who apparently subsisted on freshwater fish, and
evidence of harpooned seals dates from 16 kya in Southern France. The techniques of today’s fisherman, such as hook-
and-line tackle, did not appear until well into the Neolithic, which began about 12 kya.
This chapter’s reconstruction is largely based on the latest scientific findings as of 2013, along with a little interpretation
and speculation on my part. For instance, those mammoth villages have been discovered, with pits for mammoth meat
and houses built from mammoth bones. But scientists argue whether Cro-Magnons killed those mammoths or merely
scavenged them. I have little doubt that they were primarily hunted mammoths, not scavenged, and killed along their
migration routes.

There is great controversy regarding how violent Neanderthals were and how much Cro-Magnons hastened their demise,
but there is no doubt that sophisticated stone tools were used for far more than hunting mammoths. A Gravettian child’s
vertebra was found with a projectile point lodged in it.568 Flint blades and projectile points lodged in vertebrae and other
bones, and skulls broken by stone weapons, are common finds in Stone Age graves around the world.569 Before the
Paleolithic Era’s end about 12 kya, cave paintings depict torture, people pin-cushioned with arrows, and other violent
scenes.570 In 1964, a cemetery discovered in Egypt held the remains of dozens of slaughtered people, which has been
dated to about 13 kya.571 Such finds are increasingly common, and are often situated near coveted resources such as
riverbanks. The Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer was long gone by 15 kya in the Eastern Hemisphere but would briefly
flourish again in the last continents that humans conquered. Here is a map, based on DNA analysis, of the dates of
human migration to the Americas. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The idea that the American mastodon was killed off by hunting was first proposed by George Turner in 1799, and Jean-
Baptiste Lamarck, an early evolutionist, thought that humans exterminated the extinct ice age mammals. By 1860,
Richard Owen wondered whether anything but humans could have caused that mass extinction.572 Therefore, when Paul
Martin first proposed his Overkill Hypothesis in 1966, it was by no means novel, but he started the modern debate and the
controversy quickly focused on North America, beginning about 15 kya.

As this narrative shows, the North American extinctions came relatively late in the process, but they have been by far the
most controversial. The reasons for that appear to be several. One is that North America is the home of history’s richest
and most powerful nation, and when Martin first published his proposal, the USA was in the midst of a cultural awakening
(as well as an imperial slaughter), and the awesome crimes that Europeans committed against indigenous Americans
were brought to widespread public awareness for the first time. American Indian activist Vine Deloria dismissed the idea
of overkill, and until his death he attributed the extinctions to catastrophic celestial events. He was a follower of Immanuel
Velikovsky’s work.573 The idea that American Indians hunted North American mammoths to extinction also conflicted with
the then prominent “peaceful savage” and “ecological Indian” themes, so the denial partly reflected political bias.

Scientists are unanimous that the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples primarily came from East Asia, but there
has been a cottage industry for centuries proposing other ideas. When Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark
expedition to North America’s west coast in 1804 to sketch the ultimate reach of empire, they were alerted to find the lost
tribes of Israel.574 But genetic, anatomical, archeological, and other evidence has long since settled the issue of where
American Indians came from, and by far the leading hypothesis is that humans migrated to North and South America
beginning about 15 kya, and there may have been a migration along the Pacific coastline, which continued the pattern
established about 60-50 kya out of Africa. As the ice sheets began melting about 15 kya in North America, a corridor
between them formed and humans walked to North America about 11 kya. Those arrivals founded the Clovis culture.
The sudden disappearance of virtually all the megafauna of North and South America followed those humans, particularly
those that came by land and spread. That situation is where the original “Blitzkrieg Hypothesis” label was used.

Proboscideans abounded across the Western Hemisphere’s length and breadth, camels and horses evolved in North
America tens of millions of years earlier and still lived there. North America hosted giant beavers, the largest carnivore
ever, the largest cats and wolves ever, and a stunning variety of huge animals that must have been a wondrous sight.
South America had a less spectacular assemblage, but was still highly impressive. Earth’s largest land animal during the
Pleistocene, next to the largest mammoths, was the ground sloth, which survived the Great American Biotic Interchange,
and existed for about 30 million years. Within a couple of thousand years of initial contact by those humans that came
overland, virtually all of the Western Hemisphere’s megafauna went extinct. In South America, the invading humans
made dwellings out of proboscidean hides, so they certainly did not go extinct before humans arrived. The South
American Toxodon survived the Interchange, to go extinct after humans arrived, and projectile points are found with many
Toxodon skeletons.

The Western Hemisphere, more than anyplace else, has been the focus of human-agency skeptics who claim that climate
change did it all, or that the human contribution was insignificant. Their arguments have failed to convince me or virtually
anybody else looking into the issue. There has been a trend to put “nuance” into evolutionary dynamics, in which multiple
causes for events are considered, particularly extinction events. People can go overboard on nuance, which can
obfuscate important issues and confuse ultimate and proximate causes. I wonder if some of the “nuance” I am seeing is
intentionally misleading or is merely another scientific fashion run amok.575 If an ultimate cause overwhelms everything
else, focusing on the “nuance” of dynamics that are minor at best is misleading. North America had the greatest ice
sheets of the current ice age, and Arctic proboscideans would have been affected somewhat, but they survived the
previous 16 glacial events just fine and were a minor aspect of the Western Hemisphere’s megafauna holocaust. South
America did not have ice sheets, but merely larger glaciers than today’s along the Andes. From Arctic tundra to Tierra del
Fuego, from desert to rainforest, all large animals quickly went extinct soon after humans arrived, when it got warmer and
wetter.

My initial 1990s interest in climate change and other hypotheses for megafauna extinctions has gradually turned into
skepticism and dismay. At the footnote that ends this sentence, I provide some context for my skepticism of climate
change and other non-human-agency hypotheses.576

The Clovis culture’s killing implements abruptly appeared in the archeological record and disappeared just as fast, after
the easily killable megafauna went extinct. Today’s North American megafauna are nearly all migrants from Asia, not
North American megafauna that learned to avoid humans. Bison are the only significant exception, although they came
from Asia, too, and explaining their survival remains a minor curiosity, but is about the only circumstance not neatly
aligned with the overkill scenario. The “referee” paper concluded that although the South American extinction was the
greatest of all, it is the most poorly investigated and that the overkill hypothesis cannot yet be attached to South American
extinctions. That may be a prudent position for a specialist who pronounces judgment only when all the evidence is in,
but I will be among the most surprised people on Earth if the pattern of 50 thousand years did not continue there,
especially since it had no ice sheets. There can be no more pertinent example than comparing Africa to South America.
They inhabited the same latitudes and have similar climates, separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Africa was the home of
humanity, where its animals had millions of years to adapt to the human presence, and Africa only lost about 10% of its
megafauna (probably to human hunters with their advanced weaponry) while South America lost nearly all of its
megafauna, and quickly. Climate change did it? How could it have even contributed?

Gorillas and chimpanzees suffer very little from predation in their rainforest homes. Maybe they made it that way, ridding
their environments of threats, and today, other than humans, the greatest threats to gorillas and chimps are other gorillas
and chimps. Humans began their journey when a chimp-like ancestor left the dwindling rainforest, probably because it
was the loser of rainforest life and was forced to live on the margins. It learned to walk upright as a result, began to make
tools and grow its brain, and several million years later it reacquired the level of security that those gorillas and chimps
had, where it mastered its environment, a global environment, and the only threat that humans really faced afterward were
each other. Achieving global mastery was humanity’s Second Epochal Event, as humans became the greatest predators
that Earth has known.

As the megafauna that fueled humanity’s global expansion went extinct, all human populations became relatively
immobile, and even hunter-gatherers had proscribed ranges. There were no more virgin continents to fill with people, and
then humans began to turn on each other in earnest as they fought over their reduced energy supplies. Between the
coalitionary killing of chimps and the human warfare of the late hunter-gatherer phase, there seems to have been an
intermediate stage that lasted from up to a million years ago among Homo erectus. Until hunter-gatherers began forming
segmented societies (with some hierarchy) in the past 30 thousand years or so, the risks of killing one’s neighbor
outweighed the advantages, especially when resolving conflicts meant easily moving to new, unoccupied lands. Although
there was probably plenty of interpersonal violence, warfare did not appear until there was resource competition among
the humans that conquered Earth.577 It is even speculated that when Homo erectus left Africa nearly two mya, it was the
path of least resistance to resolve local resource competition.

Some island refuges around the world where humans had not yet invaded, such as New Zealand, Madagascar, the
Caribbean, and Polynesia, including Hawaii, retained their megafauna (the large birds were often not quite large enough
to meet the megafauna definition, but they were relatively large). That huge sloth survived in the Caribbean for several
thousand years after its mainland brethren went extinct upon meeting humans, and when humans reached the Caribbean
islands, that sloth quickly made its final exit. Most of those islands were not invaded by humans until the historical era,
and the story was always the same: the rapid extinction of all easy meat. The pattern is painfully clear, ever since that
founder group left Africa, and it continues apace and accelerates. The Sixth Mass Extinction is well underway; more than
half of Earth’s remaining species may go extinct in my lifetime and almost certainly will by the year 2100 at the current
trajectory. Today’s primary culprit is habitat destruction, as the world’s poor raze tropical forests to raise crops and
procure firewood. But humans have been working their way to the bottom of Earth’s food chains as they scrape the last
morsels from the ecosystems. When Europe learned to sail the oceans, an oceanic holocaust began, which began with
the global ocean’s primary megafauna: whales. They comprised an energy mother lode that was plundered when
humans reached the level of technical sophistication that could exploit it, and they did it until the 1960s when nearly all of
Earth’s whales were at the brink of extinction. Humans have never practiced conservation except when forced into it as
they began feeling the pinch of exhausting their energy resources. It is no different today with the exploitation of fossil
fuels. Humanity’s energy windfall opportunism may be its most characteristic behavior.

As ice sheets retreated and today’s interglacial period began, humans already at the margins of those ice age
environments simply spread toward the Arctic as far as they could. From then until Europe began conquering the world
500 years ago, there were few mass migrations of note, such as the Bantu expansion in Africa, when pastoral nomads
conquered parts of Eurasia, and when agricultural peoples displaced hunter-gatherers, particularly in Australia and the
Americas. But even with those migrations, it could be more of a cultural and technological migration than a human one, in
which the “invaded” peoples adopted the often energetically superior practices of the “invaders” rather than being
replaced by them. Genetic testing has shown that this was largely the case in Europe (although perhaps more for the
women than the men), which has been one of the greater surprises of global genetic testing, although the research is in
its early days, and more controversial findings are sure to come.

The evidence of inter-human violence, both between early Homo sapiens groups and what happened to Neanderthals,
Denisovans, Homo erectus, and the “hobbits” is more circumstantial than finding corpus delicti. But after the megafauna
were gone, the evidence becomes staggering for universal human violence, the kind that anthropologists pretended was
not there for generations. Those early slaughters before the Holocene were only a prelude. When those relict
populations were discovered by Europeans, they were all tremendously violent, both the hunter-gatherers and the
agriculturalists of New Guinea’s highlands. Their level of warfare technology obviously could not compete with Europe’s,
and their style of warfare was dismissed by early European observers as ineffective and ritualized, but those Europeans
understood “primitive” people’s warfare as well as they understood their cultures, which was not well at all, but that is also
a trait of UP.578

Hunter-gatherer lands are far more sparsely populated than agricultural or industrial lands because of how much energy
people can extract from their environments. Japanese rice farmers can extract 10 thousand times as much food energy
from a hectare of land as Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers could.579 At Japanese rice farmer levels of productivity, the yard
of the home I was raised in could have met my family’s food requirements.580

The hunter-gatherer means of production and style of warfare seemed hopelessly inept when compared to European
methods, but proportionally the violence of those societies was more than an order of magnitude greater than that seen in
European societies. As an example, the Chippewa people lived near North America’s Great Lakes and European
expansion decimated them. They had population attrition rates from warfare (between Indians) about four times that of
Germany and Russia in the 20th century. In the 20th century, which is history’s most war-torn in terms of absolute war
deaths, if it had the war death rates of typical nonliterate societies instead of around 100 million war dead, there would
have been two billion war dead.581 The high death rates from pre-state warfare were due to their political-economies. In
“civilized” war, the goal was conquering the enemy and extracting taxes from them, which could range from women (fertile
females have been war booty for at least ten million years), to fighting-age men, to food, gold, and other economic
windfalls that are often called “tribute” in preindustrial societies. That can only be accomplished with sedentary
populations. For hunter-gatherers, about the only “asset” other than useful women would have been the rivals’ lands, so
complete genocide and taking the vanquished’s lands and women was a goal met often enough, although a phenomenon
appeared that continues to this day. The economic bounty was often taken almost absent-mindedly, while the obsession
was on humiliation, acquiring war trophies, etc. Modern statesmen play a similar game, but it is for show, not taken
seriously by the war planners, and used to manipulate the masses.

The vicious, take-no-prisoners approach to pre-civilized (also called “nonliterate” or “native,” formerly called “primitive”)
warfare was typical, and surprise raids that killed everybody in their beds was the preferred means of attack. That
graveyard in Egypt is probably an early example of that mode of warfare, in which nobody was spared. A couple
thousand years later, about 12 kya, arrows, slings, and maces were added to humanity’s growing arsenal, and the
deadliness of warfare escalated. Projectile wounds and all manner of trauma became common findings in excavations of
European graves from eight kya to four kya.582 As anthropologists gradually abandoned their “peaceful savage” meme,
they began sorting out ultimate and proximate causes for pre-civilized warfare.
Anthropologists have derived these reasons why all societies go to war: defense, plunder, prestige, and control.583 Only
states have control as a motive, because they can only tax sedentary peoples with economic surpluses. “Defense” is a
territorial motive (retaliation and revenge also neatly fit into this category), which is economic, plunder is nakedly
economic, and prestige only reinforces or enhances a man’s economic status. So, all motives for war are ultimately
economic in nature. All wars had some kind of proximate cause, some triggering event that began the hostilities, and
feuds could last for generations, but when the bickering and noise was removed from the signal, nonliterate societies, just
like civilized ones, fought primarily for economic reasons, and resource access was always first and foremost.584 Because
land is the source of all wealth (particularly in preindustrial civilizations), as it is where the energy comes from, all
societies, from the smallest band of hunter-gatherers to today’s modern states, fight over territory, which is no different in
kind than what chimps do. It has been that way since macaques and may have begun with some of the earliest social
animals. At the bottom of it all, all people instinctually know that it is all about economics, with the rest just noise, if
sometimes pleasantly diverting noise.

This interglacial period has also witnessed spectacular geophysical events, largely related to ice sheet effects. The ice
sheets of the Northern Hemisphere sequestered an immense volume of water, which lowered sea levels. When the
global ocean rose with melting ice sheets, portions of continents such as Japan and New Guinea became islands. The
land bridge of Beringia slipped beneath the seas and isolated the Western Hemisphere’s aboriginal peoples. They were
not “rediscovered” to any significant degree until Columbus sailed in 1492. Near my home in Washington State is one of
many stark remnants of the prodigious floods that attended melting ice sheets. When the obvious evidence of vast floods
were linked with ice age melting nearly a century ago, the idea was initially dismissed as crazy speculation, as it conflicted
with uniformitarian beliefs of the day. It is now universally accepted as one of many events when ice dams broke and
awesome floods scoured the Northern Hemisphere. Catastrophists have long invoked celestial explanations for the
demise of the mammoth while others have cited glacial floods. Those buried mammoths that keep appearing as the
Arctic melts due to global warming were probably killed in the innumerable floods that attended melting ice sheets, but
that is a far cry from driving the species to extinction. The most violent glacial event may have created a global climate
change about 12 kya, and the resulting thousand year period is called the Younger Dryas. The current ice age began in
the North Atlantic, and when the Laurentide ice sheet melted, vast floods into the North Atlantic may have reversed
Earth’s oceanic circulation and dramatically changed Earth’s climate systems. If agriculture had developed by then, the
Younger Dryas would have created epic famines, wars, and population displacements. But because few humans were
sedentary at that time, that did not happen. However, that event may have been responsible for humanity’s next Epochal
Event: the Domestication Revolution, which is the next chapter’s subject.

As can be seen with bonobos, economics is the foundation of social organization. Social animals are social because their
survival chances increase when they combine their efforts. All animal social behaviors are interpreted as strategies
toward meeting life’s essential requirements. How far has human behavior “risen” past those basics? In this narrative of
the journey of life on Earth, where can we draw the line of when the human line became “sentient”? Are we sentient even
now? That question is not easily answered. Bonobo females can be brutal in coercing males back in line with their social
plan, and chewed-off fingers have been noted. Although bonobo life was filled with sex and cooperation, social
enforcement could be savage. Hunter-gatherer social organization is egalitarian, partly because when people carry their
only possessions on their backs, there is little opportunity for economic inequality to gain political power. However,
hunter-gatherers have very strict and vigilantly enforced social norms with ancient roots that ensure that level economic
and political playing field. A successful hunter must share his kills with all, and anybody who tries to dominate the band
immediately has a coalition formed against him (it is always a male, reflecting that ape heritage), putting him back in line.
If a man gets too far out of line, there are two fatal punishments. One is banishment from the band. The life expectancy
of a solitary hunter-gatherer is minimal; banishment is usually a death sentence. The exile may try to join another band,
but that is highly risky, partly because any man banished from his band is going to be suspect. The second is capital
punishment, and to avoid initiating a feud, the band will “hire” kin of the condemned to perform the execution.585

Studies of warfare have shown that absolute population density has little influence on how warlike societies are.586
However, the proper way to analyze population density and conflict is probably not in absolute terms, but relative terms.
Hunter-gatherer bands slaughtered each other over access to resources such as waterholes, stone quarries, and salt
deposits.587 Ancient states of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean fought over access to forests, arable lands, and
low-energy transportation lanes (usually waterways), and no informed observer thinks that the USA would have invaded
Iraq in 2003, after more than a decade of genocidal economic sanctions and helping to bankrupt its own economy by
hosting a huge military presence in that region, if the USA was sitting atop enough high-EROI oil to power its economy for
centuries. It is the relative abundance of resources that supports a people’s means of production that largely determines
how warlike they are going to be. Scarcity leads to violence, whether it is a gang of chimps looking for a neighbor to
murder or history’s richest and most powerful nation invading peoples half a planet away to steal their energy resources.
Some nonliterate societies do not engage in warfare. They are a vanishingly small proportion of the world’s native
societies, but almost without exception, they are not warlike because they are geographically isolated. The most
important variable in predicting a society’s level of internal and external violence is male dominance. Monkeys are
matrilocal (matrilineal), and males leave their society of birth to mate, gorillas and chimps are patrilocal (patrilineal), where
females leave their natal society to mate, and humans have both kinds of pre-state societies, along with some minor
variations. Patrilocal societies are run by gangs of related men, are by far the most violent, engage in the most warfare,
and women are subjected to the most violence. Patrilocal societies can also have harems or many “wives” for the alpha
males.588 Patrilocal societies make up nearly 70% of the world’s native cultures that have been documented.
Neanderthals and australopiths appear to have been patrilocal. The primary determinant of patrilocal or matrilocal
residence in humans is the economic contribution of women. In general, where gathering and horticulture brought in more
calories than hunting, women had more influence and the society tended to become matrilocal. Those relationships only
hold for societies that are not economically centralized. When surplus redistribution appeared, men began to dominate,
and the chiefdom was the first step toward state formation.589 Organized violence only began increasing as states began
to form.

The next chapter will explore the issue more fully, but the rise of agriculture was a peaceful process, and all “pristine”
civilizations began peacefully. They only became violent when early states formed and men dominated. The formation of
urban communities and states always followed the invention of agriculture. The pattern seems to have been that women
dominated food production in pre-state horticultural/agricultural societies, so they were matrilocal (or women had high
status). With the formation of states and the rise of male domination, women’s status universally declined, and did not
rise again until industrialization.

Internally, pre-state societies could be quite violent, even the “peaceful” ones, usually with men going at it. In matrilocal
societies, the fighting was more like wrestling matches than deadly encounters. When women fought each other, it was
often in “cat-fighting” style with which they tried to disfigure each other’s faces as a way to make them less attractive to
men.590

The Solutrean culture (x. 22 kya to 17 kya) succeeded the Gravettian culture, to in its turn be succeeded by Magdalenian
culture (c. 17 kya to 12 kya), and Mode V tools (also called microliths) appeared. Those cultures were in France and
Spain, the Neanderthals’ former range, in the refugia from the ice sheets that blanketed northern Europe, and the
Magdalenian culture spread northward as the current interglacial interval began.
Europe was a crucible for violence probably ever since the human conquest of Neanderthals, and evidence for warfare
and mass violence increases as the timeline progressed from then. But going back to those chimp gangs, violence is not
instinctual as much as calculated, and is a response to economic scarcity above all else. However, those early religious
rituals were not only a method to form group cohesion; they were also a way to condition men to throw their lives away
while trying to take the lives of others. The rituals and rites of passage for men were often extremely painful ordeals that
conditioned them for the short life of a warrior, and forming highly contrasting in-group/out-group beliefs that facilitated
killing other people. The portion of the human brain where emotions appear to be seated, in the limbic system, is no
larger than in our great ape cousins. It is well-known that fear shuts down the neocortex, as animals prepare for fight-or-
flight responses, and it is no different with humans. However, the response is much more dramatic with humans, with
their huge neocortexes and frontal lobes. So the human response to fear is losing much of what makes humans
seemingly sentient. Those religious rituals seem designed to bypass the neocortex and form a bridge to the limbic system
where emotions rule. Religion seems to have arisen as a response to warfare, but that will be explored in the next
chapter, which covers the civilizing of humanity, which is the Third Epochal Event.

Just as the reason why our ancestors may have left the trees and why Homo erectus may have left Africa, that founder
group may well have left Africa as an act of desperation, driven to the margins by their neighbors. If they left about 60-50
kya, as seems the most likely timeframe in light of today’s evidence, by 10 kya the entire planet had been conquered.
Behaviorally modern humans were atop all terrestrial food chains outside of Africa, and in Africa megafauna avoided
them, so there was nothing on Earth that threatened human existence except for other humans. Like the way in which the
australopithecine Tesla who made the first stone tool could not have imagined the Homo erectus that emerged from
his/her act a half-million years later, by 10 kya (about a tenth as long as the previous epochal innovative interval). Several
million descendants of that founder group were spread across the planet, from tundra to desert to rainforest, and they
filled all inhabitable continents. The people existing 10 kya would have been anatomically recognizable and all had UP’s
traits, as they do today. However, with cave paintings, microliths versus what the founders left Africa with (several million
people versus a few hundred), the immensely diverse climates and the tools used to survive in them, as well as their
mutually unintelligible languages, the founder group’s members would not have comprehended a tour of their
descendants’ world. The founder’s descendants even began to look different as evolution marched onward, and many
racial differences would have been noticeable, although the bizarre white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes had yet to
appear in Homo sapiens. Some people of 10 kya even had companions called dogs (first domesticated as long as 33
kya, wolves were domesticated more than once, and the modern dog was domesticated about 15 kya), which would have
seemed a miracle, terror, or strange beyond imagining. The world’s large animals paid the ultimate price for fueling that
expansion, and the Sixth Mass Extinction thus began.

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
 The absorption/displacement of hunter-gatherers by farmers
 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
 Declining EROI and declining energy surplus 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
 The lack of rainforest civilizations
 Mesoamerican civilization's developmental trajectory
 Andean civilization's developmental trajectory
 Relative environmental gentleness of the Western Hemisphere's Stone Age cultures
 Mississippian culture
  Escalation of indigenous violence with European weapons
 Unsustainability of deforestation and agriculture
 The similarities of all agrarian cultures
 Inability of hunter-gatherer peoples to imagine civilization

There are dry and wet seasons in the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, 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.591 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 them more attractive to other animals. What all major crops
developed by humans had in common was the domesticated plants' existence in tropical or warm temperate regions with
a dry season. Those plants developed strategies to survive the dry season and stored energy in seeds, roots, and
legumes. People learned to exploit that stored energy and they domesticated those plants. Many of today’s domestic
crops could not survive in the wild, and protecting crops from other animals and competition from other plants has been
an integral part of the Domestication Revolution.592 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. 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.593 In the four places on Earth
where civilization 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.594 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 agriculture's appearance.595 The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-
gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident, at least after the first easy phase, when intact forests and soils were there
for the plundering. On the advancing front of agricultural expansion, life was easy, but as forests and soils were depleted,
population pressures led to disease, "pests" learned to consume that human-raised food, and agricultural life became a
life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle.596 Sanitation issues, disease, and environmental
decline plagued early settlements, and humans became shorter and less healthy not long after 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.597 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.

The Selfish Gene Hypothesis explains plenty, and one reality is that women will always have a genetic investment in their
offspring no matter who the fathers are. As civilizations rose and men climbed atop the hierarchies, they all had
enhanced reproductive rights (many wives, harems, etc.), and many women found the situation tolerable and even
attractive, although there could be coercion in the unions and there are many obvious disadvantages to being a "kept"
woman. However, being a wife/concubine for an elite man usually meant a pretty good life and children being provided
for. The biggest losers in such societies were non-dominant men, who had diminished procreation opportunities (and
eunuchs guarded harems, for instance). With the rise of DNA testing, a repeating dynamic is seen: when one people at a
higher economic level (energy use) encountered another, the women from the poorer culture bred with the men from the
richer culture, and men from the poorer culture began vanishing from the gene pool. It is particularly noticeable among
agriculturalist expansions into hunter-gatherer lands, such as the Bantu Expansion and from the Fertile Crescent into
Europe and North Africa, and seems to be implicated in the spread of Mesoamerican farmers into the USA's
Southwest.598 The general pattern during the Neolithic Expansion seems to have been farmers migrating to arable land
and establishing agricultural communities that were surrounded by hunter-gatherers, and it seems more common that the
farmer populations expanded and displaced (the men)/absorbed (the women) the hunter-gatherer population than hunter-
gatherers learned agriculture. After a career of studying human migrations, Peter Bellwood had this to say about what
motivated them:

"Why did ancient populations commence their migrations? My instinct would be to place a need for land and resources as
the most common causal factor in situations in free and considered migration (not forced by war or other sources of
desperation) both in the prehistoric past and in more recent history." 599
In other words, the motivation was primarily economic, usually after depleting the energy resources of the lands that they
migrated from, whether they were megafauna, forests, or soils. After the Neolithic Expansion, migrations that displaced
the natives seem rare, at least until Europe began conquering the world. That is the general pattern that I have noticed,
but controversies are ongoing in 2015 as I write this. During Spain's genocidal invasion of the Caribbean, in which about
the only immigrants were European men with dreams of riches or captured African men who looked forward to short lives
of slavery, the surviving native women became concubines for the invaders and native male DNA vanished from the
genome. Recent research regarding Puerto Rico showed a complete eradication of native men from the genome.600

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.601

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.602 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.603 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.604 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. That pattern of population
growth and apparent overtaxing of the environment was common all across the Fertile Crescent around eight-to nine kya,
and populations migrated away from the first settlements in search of new lands to exploit, and animal herding became a
more commonplace method of sustenance. 605 Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed
many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan
civilizations.606

A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and
male/female differences in diet.607 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, erosion, salination, and other insults. 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,
which 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.608 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 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.609
Everyplace that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested.610 Humanity has reduced Earth’s plant-based
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 people 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
the 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 40 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.611 In 1800, it cost as much to ship
a ton of goods more than 5,000 kilometers to American shores from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers
overland in the USA.612 In England, in the 13th 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.613

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.614 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.615

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.616

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.617 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The word “urban” is derived from the Sumerian “ur.”618 About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established,
upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumer’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.619 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 of the new border.620
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.621 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, so that 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, which was 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.622

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.623 In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities
were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions.624 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.625 All pristine states passed through similar developmental stages, and some features appeared 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.”626

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.627 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.628

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.629 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.630 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.631

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 filled with silt.632 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.633 Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, 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 closer 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.634 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.635 Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization’s EROI.636
Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts.637 What they are all stating, in one fashion or
another, is that the civilizations ran out of energy. All resources are either energy or energy makes them available,
whether they are food, timber, water, metal, or today’s hydrocarbon deposits; wars are once again fought in Mesopotamia
to secure energy.638 Tainter’s idea of declining marginal returns in investment in complexity is perhaps the most
prominent current explanation, but it also did not engage the dynamic’s physics, which others have done. Homer-Dixon
has perhaps elucidated the energetics the most clearly, with his concept of declining EROI, for which he writes articles
and gives public speeches. Homer-Dixon’s ideas also incorporate C.S. Holling’s ecosystems theories. Whether climate
change did it, humans wiped out their environments, or humanity has reached Peak Oil and a global collapse is just
around the corner, it always meant a decline in energy-delivered resources as well as energy itself. Tainter’s moment of a
civilization’s collapse was when a hungry urban professional returned to rural life to gain greater energy (food) security,
but a long, often slow decline usually led to that moment, as a society’s return on investment in complexity declined or, as
Homer-Dixon stated it, the EROI and resiliency declined to a disruptive level where the energy surplus dwindled and
civilization eventually collapsed. Just as with wars, the ultimate cause was economic, but some kind of triggering event
was the proximate cause, which was warfare often enough. But Rome was sacked three times in less than two centuries
only after centuries of declining EROI and surplus energy.639 That pattern of deforestation, agriculture, and the resulting
environmental degradation that reduced the society's EROI and surplus energy is common to the decline and fall of all
early civilizations that have been studied.640

When historians debated the causes of Rome's decline and fall, for instance, they were merely debating proximate
causes, which was understandable, as the science of energy did not yet exist when Edward Gibbon wrote his tomes.
Once scientists began to study the issue, running out of energy became seen as the ultimate cause, even though
scientists still argue over environmental causes, for instance, but what some seem to miss in their arguments is that they
are all just ways of saying that the civilization ran out of energy, whether humans contributed to the environmental failure
(and declining EROI and surplus energy) or not.641

One key feature of Mesopotamian life resulted from wars and migrations: in cities, social organization along family or clan
lines became obsolete, and professional associations became prominent. Mesopotamian cities absorbed invader cultures
while also adapting to them, and ancient Mesopotamian civilizations became multicultural.642 The first cities also had
many problems to solve, such as sanitation, in which the water supply and sewage system had to be separated. Also, in
a pattern that continues to this day, upriver settlements usually flushed their sewage into the rivers, as they no longer had
to concern themselves with it, but it obviously affected downstream civilizations. In many poor nations today, as major
rivers enter the oceans they are virtually open sewers as they become increasingly polluted as rivers pass settlements
and cities. Also, the domestication of animals is generally considered to be the origin of many epidemic diseases, and the
close quarters of urban-living often meant epidemics that decimated urban populations; the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE,
during the Peloponnesian War, was one of the earliest recorded epidemics. Filth, pollution, and crowding were major
problems for early cities, and life expectancy was always lower in the cities than in the hinterland. Life expectancy in
cities did not rise to the hinterlands' until the 20th century.643 Surplus population from the hinterland repopulated all cities
in history until the 20th century.

Fertile Crescent civilizations are universally regarded as humanity’s first. In China, people began to domesticate millet
around eight kya, which was about 3,000 years after Fertile Crescent farming began. Some scientists are skeptical that
Chinese domestication really developed without any Fertile Crescent influence, even if it was just the idea of
domestication. Similarly, agriculture began in the Western Hemisphere in Mesoamerica, and people domesticated
squash about 10-8 kya. The potato could have begun domestication in Peru at about the same time. Those are the
primary places where plants were domesticated independently in the Western Hemisphere, and the practice spread.
Plants were independently domesticated in only a handful of regions on Earth.644 Whether the idea of domestication
passed between regions where it is thought to have appeared independently, where the pig, for instance, may have been
domesticated independently in the Fertile Crescent and China, nearly all domesticated plants and animals were probably
domesticated once, and the idea/technique/offspring spread. The horse, first domesticated about 4000 BCE, is an
instance when genetic evidence points to domestication happening once, with a limited number of stallions, and wild
mares were subsequently incorporated into domestic herds. Once a herd animal was domesticated in the Fertile
Crescent, the idea of domesticating herd animals certainly made subsequent domestication events less innovative. The
Domestication Revolution, even if it happened in as many as nine places independently, as with the previous two Epochal
Events (stone tools/controlling fire, and that found group that left Africa), the people who initiated the Third Epochal Event
were relatively few. Probably only a few hundred people were beacons of innovation, or maybe even only a few dozen or
less, when they are added together, and the domestication of animals in the Fertile Crescent may have had a lone
inventor, or handful of them, who initiated the process, and the domestication of plants may have had similarly few
inventors.

As has been evident in this essay so far, and will become more evident, scientific orthodoxy and I do not agree on
everything, far from it. Not only is mainstream science imprisoned by barriers erected by a faction of the global elite, as
paradigm-shattering scientific findings and world-changing technologies are ruthlessly suppressed, but all of my fellow
travelers were, to one extent or another, mystical in their orientation. Their mystical persuasion had nothing to do with
beliefs, studying sacred texts, or other indoctrination, but their experiences. Brian O’Leary was a staunch advocate of
scientific testing of “paranormal” phenomena. After I had dramatic experiences that initiated my mystical awakening, I
also performed experiments and witnessed many undeniable events that clearly demonstrated that the materialistic
models of consciousness that dominate mainstream science rest on false foundations. Brian nearly lost his life, courtesy
of the USA’s military, when he looked into the UFO phenomenon, after being made an offer he could not refuse, and the
attack shortened his life. Far more is happening than the TV news tells us.
The physical dimension is not the only one, and accomplished psychonauts can visit others, some of whom I know, and
some have even brought back designs for inventions used in every Western home today. Scientists call flashes of
inventive insight “the creative moment,” but there is often far more to it than novel and poorly understood brain activity.

When scientists attribute all “beliefs” in the “supernatural” to superstition, wishful thinking, reaching a delusionary “high” by
stressing the body to exhaustion, like a substance-induced state, and other human foibles, they err. Instead of
considering that accomplished mystics can visit other dimensions or gain perspectives regarding this one that could be
called “magical,” scientists tend to see those “primitive” states that may provide windows to other dimensions as nothing
more than “a distorting mirror.”645 There is something real at the root of religious behavior and belief, but just as with
everything else in a world of scarcity, people corrupted it into a way of getting fed, men used it to gain sexual access to
women, and the like. The same scandalous behaviors haunt today's New Age community. No worthy mystic is going to
ask people to “believe,” have “faith,” memorize “sacred” texts, and the like. Those are the tools of religious racketeers.
People can seek their own experiences, and there is a mountain of scientific data that supports the reality of “paranormal”
phenomena. Even calling it “paranormal” is misleading. Those abilities of consciousness are normal, if only
underdeveloped in the West and abused by charlatans and other opportunists. Many “mystics” have faked such abilities,
but relatively few in the milieu do. For all the many failings of organized religion and the rampant mystical hucksterism
that abounds, materialism is a religion and not much different from the world’s religions, but its founding articles of faith
are called “assumptions.” I understand and can even appreciate the seductions of the rationalist-materialist paradigm, but
it rests on a false foundation. There are some highly sophisticated ways of viewing the cosmos and the human role in it
that have little to do with dogma and the usual trappings of organized religion; a lot of it can be tested, even
scientifically.646

One enduring question about civilization is “Why?” Why would somebody leave a village for a shortened life expectancy
in a city? Ever since the ancient Greeks and Confucius, that question has been asked. There are two basic theoretical
camps: one is integration theory, and the other is conflict theory. Integration theories have people moving to civilization
because of the attendant benefits, which are obviously many. Conflict theories, of which Karl Marx was a proponent, have
elites exploiting civilizations in service of greedy and vain motivations. Academics have written that integration theories
account best for providing life’s necessities for the masses, which is why they migrate to civilizations, and conflict theories
best explain elite appropriation of economic surpluses.647
In Sumer in the third millennium BCE, about 80% of the population lived in cities so that they could sleep behind
fortifications to protect against attack.648 However, about 80-90% of the population was engaged in agriculture. Before
industrialization, the vast majority of civilized populations were involved in agriculture, as the surplus could only support a
small non-agricultural population, which was comprised of professionals and the elite. All elites for all time have engaged
in conspicuous economic consumption as the mark of their status, as a form of display. Until the Industrial Revolution,
except for the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, the primary preoccupation of all people for all time has been food
security, as hunger was a constant specter.649 Just as the energy surplus defines the fortunes of individuals and species,
it also defines the fortunes of civilizations.

People on the edge of starvation will rarely if ever display enlightened activities in relationship to their environment or each
other, as they battle for survival. Early farmers could see the effects of deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion, but
gentle, sustainable practices were often defeated by market forces, imperial prerogatives, and warfare.650 What could be
obvious to farmers was not evident to potentates sitting on distant urban thrones, merchants, or money-changers, and as
the city conquered what became the hinterland, short-term economic plunder took precedence over long-term
environmental management far too frequently.

Until the 20th century, people had no idea how their activities impacted a portion of their environment that may end up
hastening humanity’s demise more than self-made deserts: the atmosphere. Agriculture and civilization meant
deforestation, and there is compelling evidence that the Domestication Revolution began altering the composition of
Earth’s atmosphere from its earliest days. The natural trend of carbon dioxide decline was reversed beginning about
6000 BCE. Instead of declining from about 260 PPM at 6000 BCE to about 240 PPM today, which would have been the
natural trend, it began rising and reached 275 PPM by about 3000 BCE.651 At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were about 40 PPM higher than the natural trend would suggest. When a
forest is razed and the resultant wood is burned, which is usually wood’s ultimate fate in civilizations, it liberated carbon
that the tree absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and human
activities began measurably adding methane to the atmosphere by about 3000 BCE, which coincided with the rise of the
rice paddy system in China.652 In nature, methane is primarily produced by decaying vegetation in wetlands, both in the
tropics and the Arctic, and human activities have increased wetlands even as they made other regions arid. Domestic
grazing animals and human digestive systems also contribute to methane production. Atmospheric alteration by human
activities has only come to public awareness in my lifetime, but human activities have had a measurable effect on
greenhouse gases since the beginnings of civilization, even though the effects were modest compared to what has
happened during the Industrial Revolution, as humans burn Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits with abandon.

All early cities were built in warm climates, to take advantage of their “energy subsidy.” Heating cool-climate buildings is
extremely energy-intensive, and growing seasons are shorter farther from the equator, which explains why cool-climate
civilizations developed much later than warm-climate civilizations.653 From its beginnings in the region that included
Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, agriculture made its inexorable march across the land masses and spread to the
farthest arable reaches of Europe before 3500 BCE.654 As agriculture spread, so did warring empires. What is called the
Near East and Mediterranean region was slaked with blood early and often, as empires rose and fell. Sumer was
conquered by Akkad, and when Akkad fell, Ur had a resurgence, to be supplanted by Babylon, which was supplanted by
Assyria, which was supplanted by a neo-Babylonian civilization, which was supplanted by Persia, which was supplanted
by Macedonians led by Alexander the Great, whose military methods were unsurpassed for the remainder of humanity’s
preindustrial times. Alexander’s forces could have arguably defeated Wellington’s forces at Waterloo in 1815.655 The
wars over control of Mesopotamia have continued until this day. History’s richest and most powerful nation recently
invaded the region to secure hydrocarbon energy while purveying blatantly fraudulent rationales which fooled nobody
except for the imperial citizenry, and even they largely winked at the “noble” rationales given.

The rest of this chapter will trace many important preindustrial developments which helped set the stage for the Industrial
Revolution, which is humanity’s fourth and most recent Epochal Event. But until the last few centuries in Europe
preceding the Industrial Revolution, the basics among all civilizations did not appreciably change. Agriculture provided a
local and stable energy supply that allowed for sedentism, forests were removed to make way for crops, and domestic
animals were used to provide labor and/or flesh products, while their manure helped replenish soil nutrients depleted by
agriculture. Virtually everywhere that agriculture appeared, so did civilization, with varying levels of urbanity. Elites
dominated all civilizations, and they almost always invoked either a divine nature or divine sanction to justify their status,
and they always engaged in conspicuous economic consumption. Cities situated on low-energy transportation lanes,
which were almost always bodies of water, exploited forested and agricultural hinterlands, which were worked by
peasants and slaves, while cities housed professionals and the elite. Forests and agriculture provided the primary energy
supply of all preindustrial civilizations, which was usually supplemented with the products and services of domestic
animals. All preindustrial civilizations were steeply hierarchical - economically, socially, and politically – and the means of
production provided small surpluses that supported a small elite and professional class. Fighting over resources and
plunder has been the primary predilection of all civilizations for all time, except for a very brief interlude at the beginnings
of pristine civilizations.

Those basics never really changed, and environmental destruction accompanied all civilizations, as razing forests and
growing crops could never really be sustainable and certainly could not form the foundation for economically abundant
societies. Economic scarcity, which is always rooted in energy scarcity, was as deeply ingrained into all ideologies as
thoroughly as those early religions that accessed the limbic system to reinforce group cohesion. Economic scarcity was
and is so pervasive that it is an assumption of all of today’s dominant ideologies. As with all assumptions, scarcity has
become a barely visible framework to adherents of all dominant ideologies. If energy were abundant, scarcity-based
realities and ideologies would quickly become obsolete, as well as many societal features that are scarcity’s side-effects,
such as elites, greed, warfare, exchange professions, and environmental destruction.

In the waning days of early Mesopotamian civilizations, conservation became a concept. That pattern was repeated
innumerable times over the succeeding millennia, when an early golden age of civilization, with the lands blanketed in
forests and fertile soils, gave way to increasingly desertified lands and a conservation ethic began to take root. It was
always too little and too late, however; the civilization collapsed and left behind a wasteland that did not recover for
centuries, often to be devastated once again should civilization reappear. To those other universal aspects of
preindustrial civilizations, that dynamic should be added.

As southern Mesopotamia slowly became a wasteland, people began migrating away as environmental refugees, and
perhaps the most famous is Abraham, the Old Testament’s founder of the Israelites. Abraham migrated from Ur around
2000 BCE and ultimately settled in Canaan. I respect the inspiration likely behind Jesus, who was a historical figure, but
modern archeologists and historians have not been able to establish much historical accuracy in the sacred texts of
Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. There is little or no evidence that Moses existed, or that the Exodus, conquest of Canaan
(the evidence is that Israelites were Canaanites), and many other Old Testament events really happened. If there was
any historical truth at all, the facts were inflated into fantastic stories designed to serve various agendas.

Key events in the popular story of Jesus's life, such as the virgin birth and resurrection, were already circulating in other
religions of the day. There is little evidence that Muhammad existed, and if he did, he probably lived around Jerusalem,
not on the Arabian Peninsula.656 After a career of archeological investigation in the region where the Biblical Israel was
founded, one anthropologist likened the Hebrew Bible to propaganda with tiny bits of historical truth in it, as some facts
are needed to help people swallow fanciful stories.657 To modern observers not under the thrall of limbic conditioning,
tales of people living to be nearly a thousand (Old Testament), or more than 40,000 years (Sumerian King List) are not
taken seriously. But literalist interpretations of ancient texts abound, whether they come from religious fundamentalists or
scholars such as Velikovsky and Sitchin who tried to explain mythical events as if ancient texts depicted literal truth.
Promoting symbols and myths as literal reality is a major component of how modern populations are controlled.

The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, are considered by today’s scholars to have been a political tract
written centuries after the alleged events occurred. It was like the fabrications in the American history taught to today’s
schoolchildren as a way to cultivate blind obedience to the state. Early Israel and Judah were tiny kingdoms in the hills,
sandwiched between Assyria and Egypt, which were warring regional powers. Israel was destroyed about 722 BCE after
the Israeli king defied the Assyrian king, and ten of Israel’s tribes were forcibly relocated by Assyria and became lost to
history.658 The Assyrians forcibly relocated more than four million people. Those “lost tribes” became the focus of all
manner of fantasy for millennia. Writing the Pentateuch was an understandable effort to help Israelites survive, as a kind
of nationalistic parable. The New Testament and Koran were also written long after the alleged events, accompanied by
huge political battles over what the official story would be. Whatever divine inspiration Jesus may have had access to,
("love the enemy" (AKA "out-group") is perhaps the most enlightened message ever given to humanity), or other figures in
Judeo-Christian or Islamic tales, what is certain is that priesthoods and rulers shamelessly distorted them to serve their
agendas of amassing and maintaining wealth and power, in a pattern that begins with the first civilization and lasts to this
day.

The Nile River's valley made the rise of Egyptian civilization possible, and it had the Old World’s most reliable food supply.
Even today, half of Egypt’s population lives on the Nile’s delta. Annual floods brought silt from deforestation and erosion
from the highlands to the delta, which kept the fields fertile.659 Unlike the Mesopotamian disaster, salination was not a
major problem for Egyptians, except at Faiyum and irrigated areas above the flood line.660 The Egyptian and Harappan
civilizations were not pristine, as they were beneficiaries of Fertile Crescent innovations, and arose from hunter-gatherer
societies that did not pass through the learning and evolutionary curve for domesticating their plants and animals. Those
pristine civilizations may have been the only places on Earth where civilization could first appear. If not for those regions
where people domesticated plants, humanity might still be living like aboriginal Australians did for nearly 50,000 years.

The peoples of the African rainforests found life relatively easy, mainly because of the same bounty that kept the gorillas
and chimps at home in them, while loser apes were driven to the margins and learned to walk upright. For those reasons,
agriculture and civilization came late to the rainforests.661 Domestication in equatorial Africa was likely not pristine but the
result of diffusion from the Fertile Crescent.

Although Africa did not lose its megafauna as Australia and the Americas did, visitors to North Africa today from 10,000
years ago would be amazed, and not just because of modern civilization, but because of all the megafauna that
disappeared from North Africa and how desert-like the environment became. Before Egyptian civilization arose, the Nile
valley hosted nearly the full complement of iconic African megafauna, with elephants, hippos, lions, rhinos, giraffes, and
many others, and a staggering abundance of waterfowl lived in the Nile valley and on its delta. That early graveyard of
slaughtered humans (which was only discovered because the dammed Nile would soon sink it), was on the Nile’s banks,
so humans had been fighting over the Nile’s resources for many millennia when civilization appeared there. Migrants
from the Fertile Crescent began settling in the Nile valley beginning about 6000 BCE, not long before Çatal Höyük and
Jordan Valley settlements were abandoned. Around 3600 BCE, the Nile’s villages began their rise to civilization, and
about 3100 BCE the first polity that controlled Upper and Lower Egypt appeared and dynastic rule began. Gold was
mined for the first time on Earth on an industrial scale, and Egypt set the standard for labor brutality in gold mining, not
pyramid building. In one of many juxtapositions of the “divine” and profane that would be seen in subsequent civilizations,
gold was a sacred metal in Egypt, and pharaohs were literally depicted as sons of the solar deity Ra. A pharaoh’s primary
“job” was interceding with the gods to ensure a proper annual Nile flood. When the floods failed, so did the peasantry’s
faith in the nobility, and droughts brought an end to pharaonic dynasties; subsequent rulers were more modest about their
divine abilities to affect the Nile’s annual flood.662

By the end of the Old Kingdom around 2200 BCE, elephants, rhinos, wild camels, and giraffes were locally extinct in the
Nile valley or on the brink of it.663 Old Kingdom ships sailed to Lebanon to raze their trees by 2650 BCE, which was a
century before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Slaves do not seem to have built the pyramids, but mainly agricultural
workers working for a wage during the off-season. The entire Giza complex was built in about a century and remains the
ultimate elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture. It has been estimated that all the energy of Egypt’s agricultural
surplus for a century was devoted to building the complex at Giza.664 Ancient Egypt reached the height of its power
during the reign of Amenhotep III in about 1350 BCE. Amenhotep III claimed that he personally killed 102 lions; hunting
lions was the ultimate sport of pharaohs, after playing with their harems. Tutankhamun, the pharaoh with the resplendent
tomb, ruled a generation after Amenhotep III. The lives of thousands of slaves paid for the solid gold coffin and the mask
of Tutankhamun’s mummy. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Nubian gold mines were filled with the skeletons of dead miners. Nobody survived mining for the pharaohs; they were
uniformly worked to death, whether they were men, women, children, elderly, or disabled, and an endless supply of new
slaves replaced the dead ones.665 The Incas had a Sun god religion, and gold became a sacred metal reserved for
royalty (and silver was sacred and represented the Moon, which Incan royalty also claimed descent from), but they did not
work people to death to obtain it.666 A great deal of Nubian gold ended up in royal tombs, to be looted after the New
Kingdom collapsed after the Twentieth Dynasty in about 1060 BCE.

The relatively gentle river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt saw long, slow declines in their environments, but when
civilization came to the more mountainous periphery of the Mediterranean Sea, environmental damage came much faster
and more dramatically, particularly as the Stone Age gave way to the Bronze and Iron ages. Before civilization arrived,
the Mediterranean’s periphery was heavily forested and, as with Lebanon, cedars were plentiful. Today, Lebanon has
several small groves of cedar, as a kind of museum of former greatness, and efforts to regenerate the cedar forests are
ongoing. The Mediterranean islands had their own megafauna extinctions about 12 kya, and island-dwarfed hippos and
elephants went extinct soon after humans arrived. Any land that can support hippos is blessed with an abundance of
water, and islands such as Crete and Cyprus were blanketed with verdant forests before the rise of civilization.

As people fled from the increasingly barren and devastated Fertile Crescent, Bronze Age settlements began growing on
the Mediterranean’s east end. During the Babylonian reign of Hammurabi, wood was extremely scarce and his agents
were charged with finding more wood. Under Hammurabi, illegal woodcutting was a capital crime. The search for wood
extended past deforested Lebanon to the Mediterranean’s periphery, and Crete’s inhabitants began to trade wood for
luxury items with Near East civilizations. The nearly extinct Near East cedar was reserved for palaces and temples in
Mesopotamia, but on Crete, cedar was so abundant that it was used for tool handles and had other mundane purposes.667
Trade with the Near East quickly boosted Crete from a forested hinterland, isolated in the eastern Mediterranean, into a
powerful state, at least while its forests lasted.668 In early Minoan civilization, wood was used lavishly. The Minoan
success influenced the nearby Peloponnesian peninsula, and Mycenaean civilization began about 1600 BCE. Minoans
developed the still-undeciphered Linear A script. Mycenaean Greeks developed Linear B, which has been largely
decoded and was all elite accounting; it is likely that Linear A also was only accounting. About 1700 BCE, the Minoan
palaces were destroyed, probably by an earthquake. The palaces were rebuilt on a grand scale, and settlements
expanded in the Minoan golden age, which lasted about three centuries. Then a swift decline collapsed the Minoan
civilization by 1200 BCE. Mycenaeans then annexed the island.

Many reasons were proffered to explain the Minoan decline and collapse, including the now-rejected idea that a volcanic
eruption did it. What is increasingly cited as the reason for the Minoan decline (and was probably the ultimate reason for
its collapse), was that Minoans depleted their energy supply, primarily via deforestation. Minoans, just as with many other
collapsed civilizations, exceeded their land's carrying capacity. For organisms, carrying capacity always meant food and
the ability to reproduce, but for civilizations, it also meant the energy needed to run the civilization’s moving parts,
including transportation and the energy used to build structures and goods. If we revisit the “decision” that life faces,
whether to use energy to fuel biological processes or build biological structures, civilizations faced the same choice.
Humans commandeered the energy that a tree invested in its growth, and there were two basic ways to use it: liberate the
energy in the structure by burning it, or use that structure for building human-usable tools or structures, which included
buildings and ships. Metal smelting used stupendous amounts of wood, as did pottery-making and fireplaces and
furnaces to heat buildings. Minoans also built a tremendous fleet of ships for trade and military dominance. When
rebuilding Minoan palaces, Crete’s inhabitants used wood exuberantly, but by 1500 BCE, the use of wood in palaces
declined precipitously, and when Mycenaean Greece annexed Crete, the forests were gone and Greeks used Crete for
pasturing their sheep.669

In relatively recent history, deforestation and the introduction of sheep was an effective method of turning forests into
deserts. Within a few centuries, Crete was turned from thick forest to sheep pasture, and a civilization arose, briefly
flourished, and vanished. In the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean's periphery, introducing goats was another way
to ensure that forests never reappeared. Goats easily climb into trees to eat them, but the primary damage that goats and
sheep inflicted was that they ate any attempts by the forest to regenerate. Also, their hooves pounded the ground,
flattening and compacting the soils, and completed the process begun with deforestation of killing the soil’s role in the
hydrological cycle.670

As Minoan civilization collapsed and Mycenaean civilization expanded, the forests of Cyprus were the next to go.
Beginning around 1300 BCE, Cyprus, with largely intact forests and rich copper deposits, became the center of bronze
production, and a deforestation effort even more spectacular than Crete’s commenced. Again, Crete and Cyprus once
hosted hippos, and in the pre-deforestation period on Cyprus, pigs roamed the forests. As the moist woodlands quickly
disappeared, pigs could no longer be raised, and goats and sheep were introduced to graze the denuded hillsides.671
Mycenaean Greeks also rapidly deforested the Peloponnesian Peninsula, but they took steps to at least try to protect their
urban areas from the flooding and erosion that deforestation caused, by building dams and dikes to prevent and redirect
floods. The Cypriots took no such measures, and torrents and silt washed down the exposed hillsides and quickly buried
and washed away towns and filled harbors. By 1100 BCE, the harbor at Hala Sultan Tekke was completely filled with silt
and its use as a port ended. Similarly, Enkomi quickly silted up and changed from a coastal city to an inland one that was
often flooded with mud and debris from the hillsides. In 1050 BCE, the town was abandoned, as well as 90% of Cyprus's
settlements.672 In less than three centuries, Cyprus was turned from a heavily forested island into a deserted wasteland,
and the collapse of Cyprus ushered in the Mediterranean’s Iron Age.

Copper, silver, and gold are in the same elemental family, and all are relatively non-reactive and could be found in
o
nuggets; they were worked before humans learned to smelt metal. Copper melts at 1085 C, and a good campfire is still a
couple hundred degrees Celsius short of that, so it is thought that copper was first smelted in pottery kilns. Iron, however,
o
melts at 1538 C, and was not smelted until people made blast furnaces, which oxygenates fires to reach those high
temperatures and must use charcoal. Iron smelting was probably first accomplished around Anatolia, maybe as early as
2500 BCE, but smelted iron did not begin to become common until a thousand years later, and the Iron Age of
Mesopotamia did not begin until around 1300 BCE. The earliest iron smelting operation remains yet found dated to 930
BCE in Jordan. Iron is lighter than bronze and can better hold an edge when made into steel. When the Iron Age
appeared, cultures changed. Felling trees became easier, warfare became deadlier, and plows became more effective.
The sword did not become ubiquitous until the Iron Age, as iron was much more abundant than the tin required for
bronze.673

Mycenaean Greece arose from Minoan influence, and the Greeks quickly set about to reproduce the Minoan “success.”
There was a seductive logic to deforestation and agriculture. The products of deforestation were the very stuff of
civilization, as cities were built from and supplied by plundered wood and crops raised on exposed soils. Goats and
sheep were pastured on the former forest’s soils. It all made great sense, if only short-term. As Mycenaean civilization
quickly expanded via those dynamics, people only saw it as “progress” and something to be celebrated, not viewed with
alarm.674

As the Peloponnesian plains near shore were deforested, settlements expanded into the hills. Pottery operations began
relocating far from settlements so they could have unchallenged access to fuel for their kilns. The deforested hillsides of
Mycenaean Greece unleashed torrents of mud during the rainy season. The Mycenaean port of Pylos was surrounded by
barren lands, and the pine forests were long gone. Mycenaean engineers built earthworks that rerouted the local river
around Pylos.675 Today, the typical Mediterranean “soil” is either limestone bedrock or reddish “soils” that lie atop the
limestone and remain after forests and brown topsoils are removed. The Mediterranean’s “soils,” climate, and biomes are
not “natural,” but are the result of millennia of Mediterranean civilization. In its turn, Mycenaean civilization collapsed, for
the same reasons as the others, as its energy practices were anything but sustainable.
In the late Mediterranean Bronze Age, Troy, situated on the waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean,
became a coveted port that sat near Scamander Bay.676 The Trojan War, made famous by Homer, was fought about
1200 BCE. It was long thought to be a fanciful tale, but archeologists doggedly searched for Troy and excavated it in the
19th century. Scamander Bay is long gone, filled with silt, and Troy was buried by nearly ten meters of silt. The wars that
Mycenaean Greeks fought with their neighbors, as with all wars, were primarily resource-based, as the environmentally
devastated homeland could no longer support the people in their accustomed style.

By 1150 BCE, the civilizations of Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire of Anatolia, the New Kingdom of Egypt’s in Syria
and Canaan had all collapsed, and many causes have been considered, but the deforestation and desertification of the
region must have been a major influence and was probably the ultimate cause. In Pylos, post-Mycenaean farmers began
planting olive trees instead of farming grain, as olive trees can grow in depleted soils and can even grow in the limestone
bedrock. Olives became a famous Greek crop because of Greece’s lost soils. Contemporary observers noticed the
environmental devastation that Mycenaean civilization inflicted, and the epic Greek tale Cypria clearly attributes the
decline and collapse of Mycenaean civilization to overpopulation and related environmental ruination, and Zeus saved the
land by getting rid of humans.677

Greece entered a 300-year Dark Age and their forests began to recover; a great migration of Greeks to the Anatolian
peninsula commenced, and the pattern of deforestation, siltation, and desertification was repeated.678 Myus was a port
city founded by fleeing Mycenaean Greeks, and today that port sits more than 20 kilometers inland, buried beneath the silt
of upriver deforestation and agriculture. Ephesus suffered an identical fate, and that pattern repeated across the entire
Mediterranean's periphery and reached its peak with Roman civilization.

As Mycenaean and other civilizations declined and fell, Phoenician civilization saw its civilization peak between 1200 BCE
and 800 BCE, and its great fleets ruled the Mediterranean. As with the preceding powers, Phoenicians established
colonies on the Mediterranean’s periphery that had not yet been devastated, and established Carthage about 850-810
BCE.

After centuries of ecological recovery, Greek civilization began to rise again beginning about 700 BCE, and it was an Iron
Age civilization, not a Bronze Age one. Those Greeks were humble farmers, able to use partially regenerated forests for
a self-sufficient lifestyle that could later be seen in the Protestant work ethic and the pioneering spirit. The poet Hesiod
hectored his farmer audience with homilies that could have been uttered by Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard. Athens was
established before 1400 BCE and became an important Mycenaean city. It began its resurgence in the late years of
Greece’s Dark Age, and between 900 BCE and 300 BCE it became one of the more remarkable experiments in the
human journey. By 600 BCE, the reviving civilization had once more eroded the Greek countryside, and Peisistratus, also
known as the Tyrant of Athens, offered a bounty to farmers to plant olive trees, as it was about the only crop that could
grow on the badly eroded hills, and farming them did not increase erosion. Greek cities never became very large because
the environment could not support large cities. When Greek cities reached about 20,000-to-30,000 people, new colonies
were established. That practice led to the Greek colonies that dotted the Mediterranean’s periphery.679 Also, those
colonies founded during the Greek classic era became a hinterland that helped support Athens. There is still debate
whether commercial, military, or Malthusian incentives/pressures led to Greek colonization, but with the obvious
environmental degradation of Greece, I lean toward Malthusian dynamics being the impetus, and the other factors were
making the best of the situation. People rarely leave their homelands if they do not have to.

In 508 BCE, Athens entered its classical period, which lasted for nearly two centuries. In those two centuries, so much
was invented by Greek philosophers and proto-scientists that it has been studied by scholars for thousands of years. One
provocative question that scholars have posed is why the Industrial Revolution did not begin with the Greeks. The answer
seems to be along the lines of Classic Greeks not having the social organization or sufficient history of technological
innovation before wars and environmental destruction ended the Greek experiment. The achievements of Greece over
the millennium of their intellectual fecundity are far too many to explore in this essay, but briefly, the Greeks invented:
democracy, Western philosophy, Western medicine, the watermill, a monetized economy, systematic historical thought,
branches of mathematics such as geometry, while developing other branches to unprecedented sophistication, and
heliocentric astronomy, which included the idea that Earth was spherical in shape. Long after the Classic Greek period
was over, Hellenic intellectuals and inventors kept making innovations that had major impacts on later civilizations, such
as Heron of Alexandria (or some other Greeks) inventing the windmill and steam engine.

For all the nascent enlightenment fermenting in Greece, it was still limited by its resource situation and was in regular
warfare with its neighbors. Greek colonies along the Anatolian peninsula’s edge were conquered by Lydia, led by
Croesus, who minted the first standardized coins, of electrum, which is a naturally occurring gold/silver alloy. Croesus
was defeated in his turn by Persians led by Cyrus the Great. In 499 BCE, Anatolian Greeks waged a war that threw off
Persian rule, but started a series of wars with Persia that lasted to 449 BCE. Building the fleets that defeated Persia
began decimating Greece’s forests once again, and much of the diplomatic wrangling and outright battling was to deny
the belligerents access to forests to build their fleets.680 Conquering and then destroying entire cities was a Persian tactic
and common for the time, and the Persian extermination of Athenian forces at Thermopylae is one of history’s legendary
battles. When Athens emerged victorious (after the Persians sacked and burned Athens), they probably had the world’s
greatest navy. Building the Parthenon was one of many civic undertakings during Athens’s golden age, but it lasted only
a generation, and few today would call it very golden. In the world’s first “democracy,” slaves outnumbered citizens and
women were virtual prisoners in their homes.

Athens began a war with the Spartan-led Peloponnesian peoples that lasted from 431 BCE to 404 BCE. The war was
largely another naval one, and fighting over forest access was the prominent dynamic; Spartans invaded Attica and
leveled its trees, turning it into a barren wasteland.681 In the aftermath of Attica’s destruction, a disease broke out and
accompanied Attica’s refugees to an increasingly overcrowded Athens and initiated one of the world’s first recorded
epidemics, today called the Plague of Athens. Historians and scientists have made many guesses as to the disease’s
identity.

As the war continued, the Athenian hinterland was turned into a desert. Plato described the deforestation of Mount
Hymettus, which remained barren until my lifetime, when the Greek government began to reforest it; many trees could
only be planted by blasting holes in the limestone bedrock.682 When Attica's residents returned home after the Spartan
occupation, they built their homes with a southern orientation to take advantage of sunlight, as wood was scarce. After
five years of peace with Sparta subsequent to signing a treaty in 421 BCE, Athens took to the offensive again and
pretended to intervene in a war in Sicily to protect Ionian colonists, but they really did it to conquer Sicily and plunder its
forests and other resources, and thereby build another naval fleet to conquer Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition was a
catastrophe for Athens, and it lost most of its navy. There were other setbacks and victories, but a starving and besieged
Athens finally surrendered to the Spartans in 404 BCE. The environment around Athens could feed nothing but “bees,”
and where wolves once abounded, not a rabbit could be found. As Athens slowly became the center of a wasteland, the
changing perceptions could be seen in contemporary writing. When forests were plentiful in 700 BCE, Greek authors
wrote of trees in pragmatic fashion or as impediments to progress. As the forests disappeared along with the ecosystems
they supported, an ecological consciousness began to appear. Plato and Aristotle placed forests at the root of a
civilization’s health, and Plato gave trees a major role in his Utopia. Conservation only became an idea when the
environment had already been ruined by “progress."683 Numerous commentators of the day wrote about the connections
between forests and a healthy water supply, and many clearly saw the relationship between deforestation, erosion, and
desertification, including Plato.684 Aristotle and his professional heir Theophrastus wrote about ecological ideas.
Theophrastus could be considered the first ecological writer, and he had the beginnings of an ecosystems approach. He
noted that when the region surrounding Philippi was deforested, it became dryer and warmer.685

By 395 BCE, Athens joined in the Corinthian War against Sparta, and the diplomatic maneuvering included Persia and
Egypt. Sparta prevailed with the treaty signed in 387 BCE, but Athens also began recovering and Persia had
unchallenged rule over Ionia for more than 50 years, until Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered them all; he
began his rise to empire in 336 BCE. Possessing a military prowess unsurpassed until the advent of industrialized
warfare, Alexander's troops conquered all early civilizations of note that sprang from the Fertile Crescent, including
Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and all the way to the edge of India and the Himalayas, as can be seen in
the below map. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Alexander died in a Babylonian palace in 323 BCE, perhaps from poisoning, and his legacy created new connections
between East and West, widely spread Greek culture, and helped inspire the next imperial aspirant: Rome.

Rome began as a settlement of shepherd’s huts, became a city around 750 BCE, and they naturally fought their
neighbors. Etruscan civilization dominated the northern Italian Peninsula during Rome’s early years. But as with all
civilizations previously reviewed, they only appeared where the essentials of a stable and relatively abundant energy
supply could be exploited, which consisted of a navigable body of water, exploitable forests, and arable land that was
usually exposed for agriculture after the forests were removed. Greek colonies on the southern end of the Italian
peninsula influenced Etruscan culture, which in turn influenced Rome. The Italian Peninsula and vicinity was about the
last region in southern Europe that had timber suitable for shipbuilding, and forests near Rome boasted fir and silver fir,
which were ideal for building naval ships. Some of Rome’s hills were named after trees that grew on them, such as oak,
laurel, and willow. Thick forests grew near Rome in its early days; a warring tribe was able to elude the Roman army by
disappearing into a forest near Antium (now called Anzio), and near today’s Naples were the “Avernian” woods, which
meant “birdless,” because the trees were so thick that birds did not enter it. A little north of Rome sat the Ciminian forest,
a deep and dark forest which no Roman dared enter before 310 BCE, when a Roman expedition explored it. The Senate
forbade such a dangerous expedition into the unknown, but the intrepid party investigated the forest and the Roman
public avidly followed news of their findings.686 Like early Crete, early Rome’s most important export was wood, sold to
obtain finished goods from more developed eastern Mediterranean civilizations that had already lost their forests.

Between 540 BCE and 535 BCE, Carthage and Etruria combined to fight Greek colonies where today’s Marseille is and
on Corsica. The Greeks won, but it was a Cadmean “victory” that ended their Corsican settlement. Etruscans ruled
Rome in its early days. Around 509 BCE, Rome overthrew its monarchy, established its independence from Etruria, and
formed what today is called a republic. It held a tension between the aristocratic ruling class (patricians) and the
commoners (plebeians). Centuries of interactions and wars with Etruria concluded with the final battle in 282 BCE, and
Etruscans were absorbed into Roman culture and disappeared as a people. Etruscan cities became Roman cities, and
Etruria’s fate was a preview of the polyglot empire that Rome would become, as it absorbed conquered peoples.

As with Spartans, Macedonians, and other contemporary cultures, military prowess was greatly honored, in that “might
makes right” Roman world. Rome began battling its neighbors early and often, in wars of both offense and defense. Its
strategies and tactics borrowed from the Greeks, and it expanded its control over the Italian Peninsula. Other than an
invasion and sack of Rome around 390 BCE by Celts, Rome was usually on the winning side. The bountiful forests in the
vicinity allowed Rome to rebuild after it was sacked and burned. Even when Rome lost, such as against the Greek
Pyrrhus in 280 BCE, he remarked that he could not withstand another “victory” like that, and that comment immortalized
him.

As Rome rose, it subdued its neighbors with a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and military superiority. Once it conquered
and digested the Italian Peninsula, it played on a larger stage, and the first war with Carthage began in 264 BCE, which
was initially fought over Sicily but came to mean Mediterranean dominance. Rome built its first navy during that First
Punic War, and local forests provided the wood. The First Punic War lasted to 241 BCE and ravaged both sides, but
Rome prevailed. Rome’s success partly relied on its ability to attract private investment for building its navy. Once
Carthage was dealt with, Rome began a series of wars across the Adriatic that lasted for generations, and by 218 BCE, it
was at war with Carthage again. Hannibal led elephants through the Alps in the Second Punic War, and an axiom of
warfare was born in that war, which is, “The only battle that you have to win is the last one.” Hannibal defeated the
Roman armies in his battles, but had logistical problems and could not gather sufficient forces to conquer Rome. Rome
simultaneously fought a war in Macedonia, which was a preview of the imperial troubles it would have centuries later,
when it became an empire. Carthage was a merchant power and hired mercenaries to fight its wars, which has rarely
proven effective. The Second Punic War ended in 201 BCE and Carthage’s Mediterranean influence became a shadow
of its former glory, and a couple of generations later, Rome completely destroyed Carthage in a “war” that was essentially
an extermination campaign. Rome burned Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE and Carthage’s 50,000 surviving citizens
lived short lives of slavery after that, and Carthage’s settlements became Roman settlements. The same year, the Greek
city of Corinth suffered the identical fate at Rome’s hands, and Rome ruled the Mediterranean virtually unchallenged.
Ancient warfare had always been savage, but the fate of Carthage and Corinth marked a change in how Rome conducted
its wars and helped set the stage for Rome’s transformation into an empire.

The lake that surrounded Tenochtitlán greatly increased its effective hinterland, as the lake was one big low-energy
transportation lane. The Mediterranean Sea was essentially one huge lake that provided a low-energy transportation lane
to all civilizations along its periphery. Rome was the only power to ever really control all of it for any length of time, and
that was a key to its dominance. Romans invented the lateen sail, which made it easier to sail into the wind, and lateen
sails were used in the first ships that Europe used to conquer the world.

In 112 BCE, Rome fought a war against the last resistance in Northern Africa, but the war displayed signs of internal
corruption in the Roman Republic, where officials were for sale. Military conquest, with its resultant spoils of plunder,
quickly became the Roman way. Rome eventually became a huge parasite that provided almost nothing of value to the
world while sending its soldiers to distant lands to conquer and rape them, and plunder routes into Rome’s maw covered
vast distances.687 During the height of the Roman Empire, about 50 million imperial subjects were exploited to essentially
feed the capital city’s residents, of which hundreds of thousands received free food. As the Republic became more far-
flung and dominated the Mediterranean’s periphery, soldiers began having more allegiance to their generals than the
Republic, and that situation contributed to the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic and began its status as an
empire.

Scholars have argued whether the civil wars began in the second or first century BCE, but political strife began with a
proposal for land reform, tendered in 133 BCE. After Rome’s republican conquests it was flush with slaves, and rich
landowners began to create great plantations. The farmers that had been Rome's backbone were pushed off the land
and outcompeted by slave labor. The situation was a preview of today’s agribusiness conglomerates. The land reform
measure tried to reverse that trend, which enraged rich landowners. Slaves also began rebelling; the first slave revolt
began in 135 BCE, and the third and last one, led by Spartacus, ended in 71 BCE. Those slave revolts cost about a
million lives. Roman politics was a very bloody affair; the losers of political contests would be murdered, along with their
entire families and supporters. The man who proposed the populist land reform law, Tiberius Gracchus, was murdered in
the Senate in 133 BCE, along with more than 300 of his supporters. A decade later, his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was
elected to office and pursued the same land reforms, and he was murdered along with 3,000 of his followers. That was
the beginning of the Roman Republic’s end.

In 63 BCE, a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic was exposed by Cicero, and in 60 BCE the First Triumvirate was
formed and its three members, including Julius Caesar, all came to violent ends; then the Roman civil wars began in
earnest. The Second Triumvirate was formed in 43 BCE, and included Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony, of Cleopatra
fame. After Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet in the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, the Roman Republic
ended and Rome became an empire, the greatest that humanity has known. At its height, it governed a quarter of
humanity. From the beginnings of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 CE,
Rome as a republic or empire lasted for nearly two millennia. Its impact on Western Civilization, and hence the world, has
been incalculable. There are far too many important lessons to be learned from the Roman experience than this essay
can explore, but I will try to keep the lessons within this essay’s theme and purpose, which is humanity’s relationship to
energy and our collective future.

To modern observers, Imperial Rome’s rapaciousness and brutality may be its most notable aspects. Rome’s favorite
entertainment was watching people being forced to murder each other. It was originally an Etruscan funerary rite but
began getting out of hand by 200 BCE, and by 100 BCE the “games” were state-sponsored. By Rome’s imperial days,
emperors tried to exceed their predecessors with gory spectacles. The Coliseum, built at the height of the “Peace of
Rome,” became the center of that imperial entertainment, but arenas dotted the Empire. The Roman Empire’s gladiatorial
games consumed at least a million lives. With such blatant disregard for their innumerable victims, Romans could not be
expected to display much enlightenment in their relationship with their fellow species, and in fact, the Roman Empire was
by far the most environmentally destructive polity of the ancient world. The environmental devastation that previous
civilizations imposed on their environments was merely a preview. This litany will start with animals. Although Egyptian
civilization drove all megafauna and many other species to extinction in the Nile Valley, Rome initiated waves of wildlife
extinctions that covered all of North Africa, and a great deal of it was for entertainment in the arenas.

Mock “hunts” were staged in the arenas, and a law forbade using African animals for that purpose, but in 170 BCE an
official exemption was issued and animals then died in the arenas in mind-boggling numbers. Crocodiles and hippos from
the Nile, elephants and lions from northern Africa, tigers from India, polar bears eating seals, and leopards, bears, bulls,
and other animals unfortunate enough to be caught ended up in the arenas. They were often used as instruments of
execution of condemned people, including criminals, Christians, and other enemies of the state. Cicero mentioned one
lion that executed 200 people in the arena. But there was also a professional class that “hunted” those animals, and the
animals were also regularly pitted against each other. Augustus had 3,500 animals killed in 26 such events; 9,000 were
killed to dedicate the Coliseum, and Trajan’s victory over Dacia was celebrated with 11,000 wild animals killed. 688
Elephants, rhinos, and zebras went extinct in North Africa, but some lions survived in the Atlas Mountains until the 20th
century. Lions, leopards, and hyenas once lived in Greece, and leopards lived in Anatolia as late as the first century BCE.
The Roman arenas were primarily responsible for their extinction.689 Hunting animals to extinction are rare events today;
most animals go extinct due to human-caused habitat destruction, but the Roman arenas were a kind of continuation of
the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, at least until the animals went extinct. But habitat destruction was also
widespread during Rome’s reign.

The EROI of elephant flesh easily explains the Cro-Magnon obsession with mammoths, as well as why they disappeared
so quickly along with the other megafauna, but the really big game were whales. Whales are an order of magnitude larger
than elephants; the largest blue whale is about 25 times the size of today’s largest elephant. Claudius played “gladiator”
with a trapped killer whale at the Roman port of Ostia, and by about 500 CE, whales had been hunted to extinction in the
Mediterranean. Until humans achieved the social organization and technological prowess that allowed them to sail the
seas and hunt whales, that energy source remained unexploited. After Rome collapsed, professional whaling did not
resume for another millennium (other than Basques in the Bay of Biscay, beginning around 1050 CE), when Europeans
learned to sail the oceans with history’s greatest energy technology to that time: sailing ships that could navigate the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE), recorded the astonishment of his contemporaries when they
learned that the Ciminian forest was once as dense as those at the Empire’s edge, in today’s Germany. Augustus and
Agrippa had just returned from the frontier in Germany, and the Roman public was amazed that such a forest existed;
nobody suspected that only a few centuries earlier, the Italian Peninsula had such forests.690 When the soils of the
deforested hillsides came down, they often formed marshes and swamps. Malaria is Italian for “bad air,” and by about
300 BCE, Greece got malaria from its deforestation and marshes, and the Italian Peninsula got it a couple of centuries
later.691

Compared to the Greeks, Romans were not very innovative; they largely copied the peoples they conquered, but the
Romans did invent window glass in the first century CE. Just as with those earlier civilizations, as Rome began turning
Italy into an arid land, shorn of its forests, Romans began to learn conservation, and they used glass panes and oriented
their homes to the Sun, to reduce fuel use.692 Just like the Greeks, as the forests disappeared, the day’s writers
developed a romantic view of forests as places for quiet contemplation and, as in Hammurabi’s time, wood rustling
became a lucrative pastime for the Italian Peninsula’s thieves.693 The first technology suppression stories that I have
heard of came from Rome. Pliny wrote that Tiberius heard that unbreakable and flexible glass was invented and he
suppressed it, as it would be more valuable than gold and would wreck the monetary system. Vespasian was rumored to
have rejected a column-moving machine because it would eliminate the need for strong backs and produce
unemployment.694 The stories were probably not true, but such technology suppression “conspiracy theories” have
existed for millennia.

Rome had an underdeveloped economy.695 It largely relied on military conquest and plunder, not developing its domestic
economy. Nevertheless, on an absolute scale, Rome was unprecedented; a lead spike in Greenland’s ice cores in the
first century CE provides evidence of Rome’s level of industrial activity. The world’s lead mining did not reach Roman
levels again until the 1700s. The arenas were only one venue of many where slaves died. The mines in Spain were also
charnel houses that consumed lives at an astonishing pace.696 Many Carthaginians ended up in the mines, and Spain
was deforested just like Greece, Italy, Anatolia, and the like. Modern observers, like those first century Romans, would
scarcely believe that those arid nations hosted lush forests not long ago. I spent two months in Europe when I was 16
and traveled the length of Italy, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia, and sailed through the Greek isles. I vividly recall the
tremendous olive groves of Delphi and starker scenes, in which islands were nothing more than barren rock. The
mountains could possess an austere beauty like a moonscape, and had I been told that all of those places hosted thick,
moist forests a few millennia ago, I might not have believed it, either.

The Italian Peninsula, during Rome’s Republic days, hosted ceramic and glass-making industries. Those industries died
out in Etruria and moved to today’s France, in the Rhone river valley in particular, and by 300 CE, the industry died in
France due to deforestation and moved to today’s Germany before the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Rome invaded
the British Isles, too, and leveled about a thousand square kilometers of Great Britain’s forest for its iron industry. Within a
century, the region was deforested and mining collapsed.697 As with those earlier civilizations, silt filled ports. Ravenna
was a coastal town before the Roman conquest, near the mouth of the Po River, and today it sits several kilometers
inland. Ostia, Rome’s port at the Tiber’s mouth, was abandoned after numerous dredging and earthworks projects, filled
with silt, and became a malaria-infested marsh, and Claudius built an artificial harbor at Portus. Trajan enlarged it, but
ultimately Trajan built the new port at Civitavecchia, 80 kilometers away, which proved a very costly move.698 Numerous
Roman ports suffered similar fates, such as Paestum.699

Cyprus’s inhabitants learned the lesson of the first forest holocaust, and for the next millennium they carefully managed
their wood resources. Then the Romans arrived, and two centuries of Roman copper operations completely deforested
Cyprus. It was not the last time that Cyprus’s forests became the focus of imperial plunder, because after a couple of
centuries of recovery from Rome, Islamic and Christian empires fought over its forests.700

North Africa was treated the same way. The Carthaginian environs became one big plantation for Rome, and centuries of
Roman farming and deforestation turned Carthage into today’s desert nation of Libya.701 Rome ruthlessly deforested
North Africa, especially near Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The lavish lifestyles in Rome, compared to the short lives of
misery of those who supported it, has no greater contrast in the ancient world and arguably in world history. The Romans
loved their baths and bacchanalian delights, and a fleet of 60 ships sailed the Mediterranean to find wood to heat Rome’s
baths. Most of their loads came from Africa’s forests.702 I believe that it is the only time in world history when firewood
was freight for seagoing ships, and the relatively calm “lake” of the Mediterranean made that enterprise feasible. The
energy-density of wood and the energy costs of shipping it make firewood uneconomical for shipping by sea, except in the
Roman Empire’s insane economy. Roman aristocrats developed a fetish for a type of sandarac tree, and within a century
that species was driven to extinction.703
After defeating Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet, Augustus and succeeding Roman Emperors made the Nile’s breadbasket
their personal preserve. The arrival of the emperor’s wheat fleet from Egypt each year was a big event for Rome’s hungry
mouths. It is somewhat fitting that the last remnant of the ocean that has provided humanity with most of its oil was also
the low-energy transportation lane for Earth's greatest empire.

Economics is the study of humanity’s material well-being, but humans have rarely thought past their immediate economic
self-interest, even when the long-term prospects were obviously suicidal, such as today’s global energy paradigm.
Because environmental issues affect humanity’s material well-being, they are economic in nature. As can be seen so far
in this essay, there was little awareness or seeming caring in early civilizations whether they were destroying the very
foundations of their civilizations. Even if they did not care how much other life forms suffered, they did not seem to realize
that it also meant that those oppressed and exterminated organisms and wrecked environments would not provide much
benefit to humanity in the future, especially energy, whether it was food or wood.

Far more oblivious, however, is when the predilection is not using yardsticks to measure economic reality, but
manipulating the yardsticks. From the earliest days of using “precious” metals as a medium of exchange, humans have
been obsessed with cheating the system. As Adam Smith once noted, so-called precious metals are only “precious”
because they are scarce. The obsession with gold did not even rise to the level of economic short-sightedness; people
questing after easy gold were thieves trying to steal from their societies to get a free ride. When nations invaded others to
steal their gold, it was naked, aggressive theft. With the economic logic that had a fleet sailing around the Mediterranean
seeking firewood for hot baths, Rome invading other peoples to steal their gold makes a certain absurd and evil sense,
and Rome did it regularly. Rome's invasion of Dacia (today’s Romania) in 105 CE was one of those instances, and it was
done by one of the “good emperors,” Trajan, during the Peace of Rome. After conquering Dacia to fill the coffers with
gold, silver, and plunder, and they razed the capital city to the ground, Trajan’s troops brought 50 thousand prisoners to
Rome to be sold as slaves, 10 thousand captured Dacians were forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat in the
ensuing celebration, when 11,000 animals also died, and a still-standing monument commemorates Trajan’s heroic deed.
During the Peace of Rome, Jews had uprisings against Roman rule, and Rome brutally put down the final revolt in 135
CE. What Assyria and Babylonia began, Rome finished. Slaves comprised a quarter of the Roman Empire's population
and more than a third of the Italian Peninsula's.

The Roman Empire relied on the plunder it could seize, and scholars studied Rome in light of where it obtained that loot,
as the map below demonstrates.704
After two centuries of “peace” and good times, the Empire began unraveling. The debate surrounding the Roman
Empire’s collapse has been a far larger cottage industry than arguing why the megafauna went extinct, but I think that
Thomas Homer-Dixon has it right that Rome ran out of energy, or stated more precisely, its EROI and surplus energy
declined to a level where the Empire became vulnerable to disruptions. When Rome crashed, it crashed hard.

Rome debased its currency. Rome's Denarius was nearly pure silver in 211 BCE when it was first minted; by 269 CE, as
the Empire was slowly coming apart, the coin had almost no silver at all in it.705 Money is only accounting, and debasing it
was only a symptom of Rome’s decline, not a cause. Currency debasement is a governmental choice by which it
essentially steals from those who use the currency. There are arguments that it can forestall a deflationary trend, but it
has always been used as an easy form of taxation that benefits those creating the money. All currencies for all time have
been made worthless by those creating the money, as the short-term temptations for debasing a currency are too
seductive. Energy is the meaningful measure of macroeconomic health, not money.

Energy is the master resource of all organisms, all ecosystems, and all economies. When a civilization centralizes its
energy consumption, which were food and wood in preindustrial civilizations, to a central city, and it has to keep
expanding farther and farther from that city to obtain that energy, the tyranny of distance is going to reduce the EROI of
those increasingly distant energy resources, and hence reduce the energy surplus. Also, the practices of deforestation
and agriculture provide short-term agricultural yields, but the wood would be almost instantly used (about 90% of the
wood imported to Rome was burned, which was the typical ratio for ancient cities706). The soils became eroded, depleted,
and often abandoned as the land could no longer support farming, partly because the entire process made the land more
arid. If they could import water to irrigate (usually a rare situation), that could help ameliorate the process, but it took more
time and effort and made it more difficult. There were no accountants, scientists, or engineers monitoring and measuring
the process, but all of those dynamics would reduce the system’s EROI and surplus energy and make it less resilient, so it
was vulnerable to disruptive shocks.

After newly exposed forest soils have produced a few crops, the yield will decline due to nutrient depletion. When the
croplands receive less precipitation, yields drop. When soils wash away due to erosion, crop yields in those eroded soils
will decline. Those effects reduce the EROI and surplus energy of farming those lands. When cropland is abandoned
due to aridity, nutrient depletion, and erosion, and lands farther from Rome were conquered, deforested, and farmed, it
took more energy to transport those crops to Rome than with farms closer to Rome. That also depressed the EROI and
surplus energy. When harbors silted up and needed dredging, or were eventually abandoned and a port was built farther
away, that also reduced the EROI and surplus energy of Rome-bound food. When food was used to feed soldiers who
traveled increasingly vast distances to conquer and plunder peoples and their lands, those would be lower-EROI ventures
than conquests closer to Rome. That dynamic has also been called imperial overreach in academic parlance, but in
scientific terms, it is really just sucking the dregs of low-EROI resources after high-EROI energy sources have been
depleted. Rome’s decline was really just another resource-depletion dynamic. Humanity’s first one was killing off the
megafauna, and Rome only experienced what Sumerian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Athenian, and numerous other early
civilizations already suffered. Rome just did it on an unprecedented scale.

Rome's imperial logic of devouring ever-more territory and people was doomed to end. The world’s first great epidemic,
the Antonine Plague, began in 165 CE. It seems to have carried off one emperor in 169 CE and may have killed Marcus
Aurelius in 180 CE. In a possible case of the chickens coming home to roost, the plague was carried to Rome by troops
coming back from a “good emperor” campaign in Mesopotamia. Marcus Aurelius’s death marked the Peace of Rome’s
end. Another epidemic appeared in 250 CE and claimed another emperor in 270 CE as it still raged. After Rome was no
longer the Empire’s capital, in 541 CE the Plague of Justinian hit Constantinople and killed up to half of Europe. It may
have been bubonic plague. Those are about the only known epidemics of ancient times, including the Plague of Athens.
By 600 CE, Rome’s population collapsed to about 100,000 people from one million at 100 CE. In 1084, during the peak of
the Medieval Warming Period and a time of great city-building in Europe, Rome's population was 15,000, as people lived
among the ruins of the greatest civilization that Earth had yet seen.707 After Rome collapsed, the entire Mediterranean's
periphery went moribund for centuries and slowly recovered from the environmental and human devastation of Rome’s
reign.

When scientists and scholars discuss megafauna extinctions, or the demise of Neanderthals, or the collapse of
civilizations, some will always attribute such events to climate change as they deflect responsibility from humans. Climate
change has probably never been the ultimate cause for such events. The ultimate cause was probably always humans,
and everything else was a proximate cause, at most. In the past several hundred years, there are clear instances when
deforestation and sheep grazing quickly turned moist forests and/or fertile farmland into semi-deserts in less than a
century, particularly in the kinds of temperate regions where the first civilizations arose. When scientists have
investigated and reconstructed the dynamics that led to the collapse of Cahokia, the classic Maya, or the Anasazi, the
story was always the same. Human civilizations altered the ecosystems, usually via deforestation and agriculture, which
made them lose their resilience, and a drought did them in. Those urban areas were permanently abandoned. That
civilization-collapse dynamic is like the hypothesis for why mass extinctions have punctuated the eon of complex life:
those multi-tiered energy systems are inherently unstable and susceptible to collapse.

The rise and fall of Rome is an iconic example of the trajectories of preindustrial civilizations. Only so much surplus can
be skimmed from economic systems based on the energy of wood, food, and muscle power. I wanted to cover some
civilizations in detail to make the pattern clear, and will largely only survey other preindustrial civilizations, as the dynamics
were similar, but with some important variations.

China’s was the second pristine civilization to rise, and although the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas separated China from
the Fertile Crescent and India, there was cultural and technological diffusion. At times, China was ahead of Fertile
Crescent civilizations in technological and cultural innovation. By eight kya, agriculture was firmly established in China.
China has had less investigation of its prehistory, but it seems clear that China’s deforestation began with agriculture, just
like everyplace else, and by 1000 BCE, China was largely deforested.708 The East Asian food complex is markedly
different from the Fertile Crescent's, largely because East Asia relied on summer monsoons for its water, and winter rains
provided water for the Fertile Crescent and westward, although all civilizations were primarily based on seed and root
crops.709 The rice paddy is the most sophisticated preindustrial agricultural system ever created. It began adding to
Earth’s methane concentration by 3000 BCE, and rice paddies bred malaria to the extent that the paddy system in
southern China was not successful until the local populace had partially adapted to malaria.710 Deforested lands
alternately flood and desertify, and managing water in China became the foundation of imperial practice like nowhere else
in history. Although pharaohs claimed divine control over the Nile’s flood, in practice they did nothing at all. Chinese
emperors and the states they controlled, however, owed their legitimacy in their subjects’ eyes to how well they controlled
flooding and drainage.711 The Yellow and Yangtze rivers carried more than 30 times the silt that the Nile did, and
deforestation with the resulting flooding, siltation, and desertification have been major Chinese problems for thousands of
years. Although it has been challenged, the idea that China reached early political unity due to few geographic barriers
has merit.712 China has been politically unified almost continually for more than two millennia. The Han Chinese that
dominate China are like white Americans, Canadians, or Australians, in that they invaded, conquered, and came to
dominate lands initially settled by others.713

In northern China, beginning with millet, dry farming was practiced, and in southern China the rice paddy system
dominated. China and East Asia never had the level of animal domestication that Fertile Crescent and European
civilizations had. For millennia, human excrement was used to fertilize East Asian crops and even feed pigs, until
industrialization.714 The lack of domestic animals in China meant that any kind of wild animal, including arthropods,
became food.

Many important early innovations can be traced to China, and the earliest pottery yet discovered was made there about
20 kya. The Chinese invented paper about 100 CE, the fishing reel in the fourth century CE, toilet paper in the sixth
century CE, paper money and porcelain in the seventh century CE, gunpowder in the ninth century CE, movable type and
the compass for navigation around 1040 CE, bombs and hand cannons in the 13th century CE, along with other weaponry
such as land and water mines. Chinese innovations helped lead to Europe’s rise. Horses were not used much for
plowing until the Chinese invention in the fifth century CE of the horse collar, which was used in Europe by 1000 CE.
Horse-drawn plows could move 50% faster than ox-drawn plows, which increased Europe’s agricultural surplus. China
mounted the largest oceanic naval excursions to their time, between 1405 CE and 1433 CE, but China soon became
insular for reasons still debated. Europe then took the technological lead and soon conquered the world. China’s political
unity was a key reason for its change in direction: controlling the throne controlled the empire’s direction.

China followed the developmental trajectory of other pristine states; it was initially peaceful for thousands of years until
chiefdoms began giving way to early states, and potentates were men, they had harems, and so forth. Early Chinese
elites relied on their family descent lines for their status, and early settlements could relocate often, which likely reflected
shifting cultivation as soils were depleted. Even those that had some urban features quickly came and went, and those
movements could have seemingly had more to do with political reasons than ecological/economic ones, although politics
are always proximate causes, not ultimate ones. While investigation of China's early civilizations are still in their early
stages compared to other inquiries, that variation from the other pristine states persisted until the Warring States period,
more than two kya, not long after Confucius lived. Chinese civilization then began to resemble other Eurasian
civilizations. Today's scholars suspect that that change reflected influences from other Eurasian civilizations.715

China and Fertile Crescent civilizations both suffered from intrusions by pastoral societies from Eurasia’s grasslands.
Marija Gimbutas presented her Kurgan Hypothesis in 1956 to explain the spread of Indo-European languages, and the
hypothesis’s primary thrust was that male-dominated pastoral peoples, with their male, sky-god religions, conquered
agricultural peoples with their Earth-based goddess religions. Her hypothesis was used by feminists ever since and
created a firestorm of controversy. The Kurgan Hypothesis may not be as wrong as its detractors allege. However, as
with many radical hypotheses, the initial one was found deficient during testing, but variants of the original hypothesis
survive today.
Nomadic pastoral societies did attack and invade settled agricultural ones, and the spread of the Indo-European language
and pastoralism is probably a valid connection, but seemingly for different reasons than Gimbutas hypothesized. Human
herder societies independently developed the ability to digest milk past infancy, which increased their carrying capacity
five-fold versus raising animals for meat, and then they became a threat to sedentary civilizations. Not only was it a huge
energy advantage for pastoral societies that could digest milk, but it made many marginally fertile environments
inhabitable by sedentary societies, and made already settled ones more energy and nutrient secure. Also, when peoples
began to rely more on cattle than crops, they could become more mobile. Pastoral societies of the steppe were
patrilineal, which are the most violent societies, and they indeed invaded settled societies and often set themselves up as
the new elite.716 Peoples who could digest milk not only came to dominate grasslands, but they also did well on marginal
agricultural lands, such as those in northern Europe.717 The allele that allows lactose digestion reaches nearly 100% in
northern Europe, but those that evolved without milk-producing animals, such as Chinese and Native American peoples,
cannot digest milk at all. Lactose tolerance appeared about eight kya in pastoralists and spread with their migrations. In
places such as northern Europe, there were no vast grasslands to roam, pastoralists became sedentary, and the
combination of farming and dairy cows was northern Europe’s staple for millennia.

Other genetic adaptations happened in the same region around the same time. Blue eyes are blue due to a lack of iris
pigment, and first appeared between six kya and ten kya. The region around the Baltic states is thought to be the home
of blue eyes, as it has the highest blue-eye frequency on Earth. Blond hair first appeared in northern Europe about 11
kya, and first became prevalent around Lithuania about five kya. Those pigment losses are related to light skin, which
was an adaptation to reduced sunlight in regions farther from the equator. Lighter skin evolved independently in Europe
and East Asia, may have evolved numerous times, and in Europe it seems to have evolved about six kya.718 Racism is a
relatively recent phenomenon because race itself is recent on the evolutionary scale, as geographically isolated humans
began the process of speciation.

It is generally accepted today that the original pristine states were based on agriculture, and before those societies
became states, when they were at the village level of social organization, they were largely classless and women had high
status, related to women’s economic (caloric) contribution. As agriculture became masculinized, probably due to the
physical requirements of forest clearance and handling draft animals, men ascended in importance and women’s status
declined.719 The general thrust of the Kurgan Hypothesis is probably accurate in that pastoralists invaded agricultural
societies. Violent patrilineal nomadic societies invaded sedentary societies and set themselves up as the elite and the
religion of the conquerors became the religion of the conquered. The agriculturalists of Europe were largely farmers from
the direction of pristine states that invaded hunter-gatherer lands and displaced/absorbed the "natives." A European
mass grave from today’s Germany dates to about seven kya, about the time of the alleged Kurgan Invasion, and debate
has raged as to whether that grave was due to endemic violence or invaders, as hunter-gatherers, farmers, and
pastoralists met.720 Beginning about 3500 BCE, from archeological examinations of European graves, evidence of violent
death, particularly for males, shows a dramatic increase.721 Between 3500 BCE and 2000 BCE, the rise of the
professional warrior can be seen in Europe’s artifacts and grave goods, and the concept of the hero emerged.722 The
Iceman died in the Alps about 3300 BCE, and he died violently. New Guinea’s highlanders lived in isolation for many
millennia and adopted agriculture, but as with other relict populations of the founder group migrations, they were in
continual warfare, and straying into another village’s territory meant risking a violent death. Anthropologists looking for an
epoch in the human journey when neighboring peoples coexisted peacefully have always come away disappointed.723
There have been brief, non-violent phases of the human journey, in some situations, usually when there was relative
economic abundance. When resources became scarce, and theft, coercion, and violence became profitable, then
bloodshed usually attended the situation.

About 1000 BCE, one of the largest migrations in the human journey, the Bantu Expansion, began, and it expanded
because of the Bantus' use of iron and agriculture, and they displaced or absorbed hunter-gatherers as they expanded
across sub-Saharan Africa. In a dynamic too common in human history, invading men mated with women of the invaded;
mitochondrial DNA studies provide evidence of this.724

Equatorial rainforests never produced civilizations, whether it was South America, Africa, or Oceania. All three rainforests
were penetrated by agricultural humans late, were sparsely populated, and settlements rarely if ever extended far past the
riverbanks.725 However, New Guinea was an exception, and may be an independently developed agriculture, which was
based on bananas, taro, sugarcane, and yams, primarily within the past six millennia.726 But their highlander altitude
made it different from the typical tropical rainforest. The banana was domesticated there as many at 10 kya. New
Guinea's Highlanders lived in isolation from the rest of the world until the 20th century. But nothing that could be called an
urban environment ever developed in Oceania or the African and South American rainforests. They were always villages
at most, although parts of Amazonia that were likely influenced by Andean civilizations had connected villages, and some
could have been called towns, which reflected a kind of urban planning.
Mesoamerica’s Domestication Revolution was one of the two certainly pristine ones known, and the one around today’s
Peru may have been another. The other two pristine states of the human journey arose there, and they followed the
same general patterns as Sumer and China in that they began peacefully with no classes and, as they grew into states,
men came to dominate, elites appeared with monumental architecture devoted to them, potentates had harems and divine
sanction, and there were other features that seemingly evidenced universal human traits and/or reactions to similar
conditions. The development of religion in what became Mesoamerica’s pristine civilization, the Zapotec state, has been
documented by archeologists who traced a seven-thousand-year progression from hunter-gatherers to egalitarian early
agriculturists to an elite-dominated society to a pristine state.727 It was similar to how Mesopotamian civilization
developed, including the replacement of singing and dancing by priestly rituals (today’s rock stars have been likened to
the new shamans, as their concerts revive pre-civilized gatherings and rituals). Controversial aspects of Mesoamerican
societies have included human sacrifice and cannibalism. They definitely happened, and human sacrifice was practiced
on a pretty grand scale at times. The question of Western Hemispheric cannibalism has touched on the lack of domestic
animals, so it may have had nutritional aspects, or what is called culinary cannibalism. But most seeming cannibalism is
of the cultural cannibalism variety, in which eating flesh has symbolic meaning, whether it is eating somebody to keep
their spirit in the family/tribe or to gain spiritual dominance over a fallen foe.728 Cannibalism was a common charge made
against peoples that Europe conquered, but was usually a sensational allegation to remove their humanity and justify their
bloody treatment by Europe. Columbus made his cannibalism accusations against Caribs from whole cloth.

It took about two millennia to domesticate maize in Mesoamerica (wheat may have only taken a couple of centuries or
less to domesticate), in one of humanity’s greatest feats of domestication. Maize was a near-universal staple among the
Western Hemisphere’s agrarian natives in 1492. Anthropologists have surmised that the Western Hemisphere was a few
thousand years “behind” Old World civilizations in 1492.

While there is evidence of agriculture along the Andes before 4000 BCE, it was not until about 2500 BCE that agriculture
in Peru began in earnest, and they farmed maize by 2000 BCE.729 The potato was the Andean peoples' greatest culinary
contribution to the world. There is evidence of Peruvian warfare and population collapse by 1000 BCE, probably due to
the familiar environmental degradation that civilizations have always inflicted.730 In another millennium, the Moche culture
appeared, which produced the Western Hemisphere’s other pristine state. It began smelting bronze about a thousand
years before Europeans arrived, as elite prestige goods.
The Incan Empire that the Spaniards conquered was merely the latest in a series of rising and falling polities over several
millennia, which likely influenced Amazonian cultures. While the markets in Aztec-run Tenochtitlán were incomparable
and conquering Spaniards had an appreciation for the materialistic and greedy aspects of Aztec culture, Incan culture was
another matter entirely. There were no vast markets in Incan society, but it was run more like a communist regime, with
central planning of the economy. The Incas had ornate rituals combined with feasts and festivals, in which religion,
warfare, economic reciprocity, and an elite-justifying ideology were inextricably linked, which formed the social cohesion of
the empire. They naturally had human sacrifice to appease the gods in their Sun-worshipping imperial religion. The Incan
Empire, which was the Western Hemisphere's largest, by far, stretched along the Andes Mountains for thousands of
kilometers and was continually subjected to El Niño's vagaries. The Incas had novel means of dealing with it, including
forming a vast network of storage facilities along the Incan "highway" on the Andes's high Western slopes, which like
those Gravettian mammoth villages took advantage of the "freezer effect" (and drying) of preserving food, and the Incas
advertised their ability to provide for their subjects. The empire's taxation was often more in the form of services than
food.731 Those peoples were arguably the greatest agricultural experimenters of pre-industrial peoples, getting the most
out of their challenging environments.

Because the Western Hemisphere’s inhabitants were virtually all in their Stone Age, they did not ravage their
environments as greatly as Old World civilizations did, and many societies were environmentally sustainable and provided
seeming answers to questions that scientists have asked about Old World civilizations’ development. The natives of
coastal California were familiar with agriculture, as it was practiced by nearby inland tribes, but they never adopted it.
California was so bountiful, and its climate was so human-friendly, that its natives retained their hunter-gatherer
lifestyle.732 Similarly, northward on the Pacific Northwest's coast, natives created an economy in which half of its calories
derived from salmon runs, and those peoples were relatively sedentary without agriculture. Natives turned the Great
Plains into a big pasture for bison, and the biome was partly maintained by annual burning of the grasslands. In
Mesoamerica, milpa farming has been sustainable for thousands of years. In the Amazon, the natives transformed the
rainforest, and a higher proportion of plants and trees provided human-digestible foods than in any other “wild” place on
Earth, those natives also terraformed thin tropical soils with ceramics (maybe unintentional) and charcoals (intentional)
and made super-soils called terra mulata and terra preta.733 In summary, native practices in the Western Hemisphere
were often sustainable if not quite abundant. But when civilizations arose, they had problems that were like their Old
World counterparts'. Their problems were also environmental and not just the injustices of hierarchal societies, often
steeply hierarchical.
In the Eastern Woodlands of North America, natives began domesticating plants before 2500 BCE. It may well be an
independent domestication event.734 Those horticulturalists largely became matrilineal societies. The Adena culture was
succeeded by the Hopewell culture, in which maize seems to have made its way from Mesoamerica. Around 500 CE, the
Late Woodland period began, the bow and arrow supplanted the spear and atlatl, and the "three sisters" - maize, beans,
and squash - began dominating food production. When the Medieval Warming Period began around 800 CE, intensive
maize production began and spread, which led to rapid population growth and the rise of Mississippian culture, which led
to the only pre-Columbian North American city, at Cahokia, which collapsed, almost certainly from environmental over-
taxation and a cooling climate, before 1400 CE. The mound-building Mississippian culture had a familiar trajectory, as
intensive agriculture led to an agricultural surplus. Men, who controlled the surplus and rose to dominance,
commandeered the local religion into granting them divine status or sanction and erected monumental architecture to
themselves and their divine yet invisible patrons. As in Sumer, they made their structures from earth instead of stone.
Soil fertilization for maize-growing was not practiced, which rapidly depleted the soils (there were no domestic animals to
provide manure, and the Indians did not adopt the night soil practices of East Asia), and the cooling of the Little Ice Age,
along with declining soil fertility, spelled the decline of Mississippian culture before Europe's first invasions of the
Columbian era. The Soto entrada and its aftermath was a catastrophe for Mississippian peoples.735 Later European
invaders encountered lands long since depopulated. By the 1600s, when England began invading the Eastern
Woodlands, the Mississippian culture had vanished, and by the late 1700s, the Southeastern Indians not only retained no
memory of who made those mounds that they lived near, they also had no memory of the social order that built them.
The Cherokee seemed to retain some vestigial memory of Mississippian culture, as they had stories of despotic Indians
that the Cherokee annihilated, but the mounds had become the source of a myth that spirit warriors lived in the mounds
and could issue forth and fight Cherokee enemies.736

Anasazi civilization also overtaxed its environment and collapsed in a drought, as did the Classic Maya. The lauding of
Native American environmental conscience seems largely a romantic invention, like the “peaceful savage” fantasy.
Although Native Americans obviously had a far gentler tenure on the land than what happened in the Old World, it may
have been only a matter of time before they “progressed” with metal smelting, rampant deforestation, and the like.
Without draft animals (bison were probably the only candidate for that, and turning them into domesticated draft animals
may not have been feasible), their civilizations might have taken very different paths than the Old World’s. What kinds of
civilizations might have emerged from the Western Hemisphere had Europe not intervened will always remain a
tantalizing question, but we will never know; those civilizations did show different ways to do it, even if what the Spaniards
stumbled into seemed familiar, with cities, markets, elites, monumental architecture, warriors, priests, peasants, slaves,
and so on.

Along with the disruptions that Europe caused to the world’s people, it was depressingly common how often the natives
used the newcomers to conquer their neighbors. Although Spaniards inflicted history’s greatest demographic catastrophe
onto the Western Hemisphere in the 1500s, they often had native assistance. The Aztecs were anything but benevolent
rulers; their bloody altar constantly sacrificed prisoners (it was an endemic practice in Mesoamerica), and when Cortes
commandeered the invasion that ultimately conquered the Aztecs, his native allies did most of the fighting. Any natives
who helped the Spaniards helped depopulate their hemisphere. When the French allied with the Huron, the first thing that
the Huron did was use them as a secret weapon against the Mohawks. That backfired on the Huron, as their tribe
became extinct within 40 years. In Africa and North America, when European slavers came, the natives were often only
too happy to sell their neighbors into slavery, and some American tribes made brief livings as slavers for Europeans
before they themselves became extinct. With a few possible early exceptions, natives almost never realized what the
coming of Europeans ultimately meant. With some notable exceptions, such as Pontiac and Tecumseh, natives could not
put aside their differences and try ridding their lands of the invaders, and when some tried, it was already too late. When
the British began “settling” the South Pacific, the natives used European weapons to slaughter or enslave their neighbors
or build empires.

Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby noted that Eurasia was spread along an east-west axis, while Africa and the Americas
were north-south, which made Old World diffusion easier, but that idea also has problems, as Fertile Crescent crops did
not spread to East Asia due to rainfall timing differences (winter rains in the west and summer monsoons in the east).
Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations had dramatic geographic limitations, which was their greatest contrast with
Eurasian civilizations.737 However, like the migration of Asian mammals into Europe or the exchange when Africa collided
with Eurasia, it was easier for cultural innovations to spread along the same latitude, as they would move through similar
biomes. North-south diffusion is far more difficult, as it moves through different biomes, such as tropical forests and
temperate deserts. Eurasia's geography was more conducive to communicating innovations, which made it more
cosmopolitan than sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, which helped them technologically advance at a faster pace.
Isolated peoples are usually culturally and technologically backward compared to nearby peoples who are more
cosmopolitan, and people isolated by mountainous geography, such as those of the Scottish Highlands, Balkans,
Appalachia, and Southeast Asia were relatively primitive compared to those around them.738 Negritos and aboriginal
Australians are classic instances of isolated peoples keeping their cultures intact, which provided a window into the
human past, but their cultures also did not "progress," which included their technology.

The orientation of the Americas meant that few innovations traveled between continental civilizations. The only pack
animals in the Americas, llamas and alpacas, never made it past South America before the European invasion. But there
was a continual migration of innovations between China, Europe, and the Fertile Crescent. That is thought to be partly
why Eurasian cultures became technologically advanced over those of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Australia.

This essay’s purpose, regarding the human journey’s epochal phases, is to show how humans achieved each Epochal
Event, which was always about exploiting a new energy source, and how each event transformed the human journey.
Although the civilizations of India and Southeast Asia had unique qualities and achievements, and the Buddhist religion
has a great deal to commend (founded, as Christianity was, in the name of another “rebel,”) as well as other world
religions, the primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time before the Industrial Revolution was avoiding starvation.
Industrialized peoples seem to have partly forgotten this motivation.

The methods of preindustrial civilizations, with deforestation and agriculture, were never really sustainable, as they
disrupted ecosystems and even affected local climates. The only way that the milpa system, for instance, was
sustainable was that they let the land go fallow for eight years after two years of crops, in order to let the damage heal
before farmers repeated the cycle. Only when practices were intermittent, to allow ecosystems to recover somewhat,
could they be called sustainable, but even then the idea is somewhat misleading. It was an ecosystem commandeered
for human benefit at the expense of the original ecosystem’s denizens, and the practice never approached true
abundance. Those civilizations were all mired in scarcity, with only about one person in a thousand living to a ripe old
age, and only about one-in-100,000 “making it” economically (the potentate). In such a world of scarcity, life was often
cheap, and virtually every preindustrial civilization had forced servitude, from forced marriages to debt bondage to chattel
slavery to becoming a human sacrifice to other forms.

Across all preindustrial civilizations, UP reacted in different ways to the energy surplus that domestication afforded, which
usually depended on environmental variables, such as whether the arable land was bounded or whether shifting
cultivation (as the soils were depleted) was feasible for relatively sedentary populations. The early states that arose
where cultivation could be continual for a plot of land (through fertilizer and other methods) and were geographically
bounded by barriers such as mountains, deserts, and bodies of water (Peru and Egypt), were generally dominated by an
elite in a steeply hierarchical society in what has been called the "exclusionary domination" model. The "corporate" model
was more feasible where shifting cultivation could be practiced and geographical boundaries were minor (pre-state China,
the ancient Yoruba culture in today's Nigeria) and less dominated by "great men" (monarchies) and more by groups that
shared power (oligarchies, while constantly jockeying for it), and their control was more over labor than land. Most states
arose where the arable land was both unbounded and permanent, or at least relatively permanent.739 In anthropological
circles, the corporate and exclusionary domination models of early civilizations often seemed to vie and interact, with one
succeeding the other at times.740 However, whether it was monarchy or corporate oligarchy, the surplus was so small in
agrarian civilizations that only a small elite and professional class could exist. Freedom was always a scarce commodity
that primarily resided with the elite. While there was some variation in social organization across the world's agrarian
cultures, the basics were identical for all of them, with elites and professionals riding atop the peasant class and extracting
the agricultural surplus from them via a variety of carrots and sticks. Without the energy that agriculture provided, large
sedentary populations were not possible, and without an agricultural surplus, civilization could not have formed.
Everything about the formation and trajectory of all civilizations depended on those energy dynamics. Without those
levels of energy generation, the game simply could not be played. In their most essential fundamentals, they were all the
same.

With help from contributions from China and other civilizations, much of it coerced, such as what the Western Hemisphere
provided to the world (potatoes, cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, a functioning democracy, mountains of gold and silver,
and many other benefits), Europe conquered the world, and along the way it tapped a new energy source. The early days
of exploiting a new energy source were characterized by relative abundance that led to golden ages that people in later
times, after the energy supply was depleted (easy meat, pristine forests and soils, oil) looked back to with yearning, if they
could even recall those days in their cultural memory. I live in a declining society that is looking back to its golden age,
which I grew up in, when energy was cheap and plentiful. Those days are long gone. The middle-class lifestyles of my
childhood are scarcely imaginable today, 50 years later.

I earlier compared people from different epochs. That stone tool Tesla could not have imagined what his/her invention
would lead to a half-million years later, and members of the founding group could not have comprehended what their
journey led to 50,000 years later. Imagine a hunter-gatherer of 10 kya being dropped into Rome in 100 CE or London in
1500 CE. History has some relevant examples. When Ishi, about the last of his people, came out of hiding in his dying
world and strode into civilization, it caused a sensation. He soon died of tuberculosis, but his encounters with civilization
were recorded. He attended an opera, and the popular account portrayed his rapport with the diva, but Ishi actually
stared in amazement at the audience, as he had never before seen so many people in one place. When he saw an
airplane in flight, he laughed in amazement. Imagine a hunter-gatherer of 10 kya being dropped into imperial Rome. That
hunter-gatherer had probably seen dogs, but horses, cows, sheep, and the like would have been astounding, and
watching a horse or ox pull a cart would have been stunning. Crops would have been an amazing sight. Imagine that
hunter-gatherer at the Coliseum. The building and crowd alone would have boggled his mind, even if the festivities might
have been horrifically familiar. Metals and glass would have seemed magical. Writing had not yet been invented in that
hunter-gatherer’s world, so even the concept would have been difficult. Imagine him trying to learn math. There were no
more singing and dancing religious rituals, and no wide-open spaces to hunt a meal. Imagine that hunter-gatherer visiting
a Roman bath. Hot water alone would have been surreal, while the cavorting might have been delightful. What would his
reaction have been to Rome’s markets? Rome was also loud and could be hellish, so the hunter-gatherer might have
longed to flee to the countryside before long, but the countryside would have little resembled the one he knew. He
obviously would not have understood anything that anybody said, but they were also all members of UP, so he would
have seen many behaviors and traits that he eventually understood. But how long would his shock have lasted? Could
he have really ever adapted to Roman society (if he did not quickly end up on the arena’s stage as a novelty)? Another
surprise for that hunter-gatherer would be seeing people interact who did not know each other. People were interacting
with out-group members and not trying to kill them on sight, which became standard behavior in most hunter-gatherer
societies that battled over territory (their food supply). Civilized life was all made possible by the local and stable energy
source that agriculture provided, which led to an epoch that changed very little until the next energy source was tapped:
the hydrocarbon energy that powered the Industrial Revolution. The next chapter will survey the developments that led to
that momentous event. It is the only Epochal Event with historical documentation that showed how it developed, which is
easier to reconstruct than examining stones and bones.

Few dates before 1 CE will be used beyond this point in this essay, so for the remainder of this essay, unless "BCE" is
applied to them, all dates will be CE dates, with “CE” dropped from them.

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 and surplus energy 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.741

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 was partly attributable to 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 become sufficiently arable to feed Europe’s High Middle Age peoples.742 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, it 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.743 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.744

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.745 Each mill produced at least two-to-three horsepower, which was the equivalent labor
of about 50 men. In 11th-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.746 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 1185.747 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. 748

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.
The Church became infamously corrupt, called for 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 Ages 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 20th 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.749 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.750
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, which 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.751 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 16th 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
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.752

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 17th century’s end.753 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.754 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 the dominance of Europeans were their violence and greed. Europe’s 16th 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.
That 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, 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
humiliating 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 20th 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 20th 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 of them 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 Eastern 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 19th 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, they laid 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 forests 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.755 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 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.756 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.757 As with the “green effect” of the Mongol hordes on much of Asia, 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 20th 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; 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.758
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.759 Japan is the other isolated industrialized island 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, and southern England
exported wood to deforested France.760

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 1543.761 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.762

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.763
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. Wayward religious fanatics got lost on the
way to the mouth of the Hudson River in 1620, stumbled into today’s Massachusetts, and became the “pilgrims” of
American lore. The witch-hunting craze followed 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.764
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.765 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.766 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.767
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.768 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.769 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 19th 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 17th 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-19th 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.770 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.771 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 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. A common misconception regarding the Industrial Revolution is that it was an urban phenomenon, but it really
began in the countryside, where the energy was. 772 England’s watermills, necessarily located along rural rivers and
streams, powered the cotton-spinning machines tended by dispossessed peasants, which turned England into the world’s
workshop well before 1800. England had nearly a century’s lead on its rivals, and was eventually supplanted atop the
global imperial hierarchy by its descendent and rival, the USA. London played little role in early industrialization, similar to
a parasite like Rome. The cotton spinning machine was the iconic technology of the early Industrial Revolution, but two
events in the early 1700s had greater ultimate importance: using coal to smelt iron in 1709, and creating the first
commercial steam engine in 1710. The stage was thus set for machines that could be built and powered by hydrocarbon
energy, which is still the foundation of today’s global industrial economy, more than three centuries later. With those
events, the Industrial Revolution began.

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution

Chapter summary:
 Relationship of England's deforestation and coal use
 Use of coal for smelting metal, and the explosion in English iron production
 First commercial steam engine
 Life of English peasants in 1500, and how unimaginable 2014 London would be to them
 How cognitive and social changes are predicated on the economic situation
 Europe's fitful rise of science
 Elite control of society, and the rise of the classical economist
 Economic uselessness of gold rushes
 Rise of mercantilism
 Classical economists, their notions of wealth, and their service to the elite
 The British "free trade" invasion of China in its Opium Wars
 Karl Marx names capitalism, and for the first time provided an honest explanation of capital accumulation
 Retail politics and political systems competition
 Voltaire and the Enlightenment
 Isaac Newton and slave trade
 Contrast of industrial and preindustrial economies
 Energetic basis of World Wars
 Slavery ends with industrialization
 Rise of the corporation
 Benefits of England's invasion of North America
 English invention of spinning machines
 Victory of the capitalist press over the working-class press
 Hellish conditions of early industrial England
 Genocidal English invasions of Virginia and New England
 Rise of racism with Europe's conquest of the world
 English/American deforestation and resultant extinctions of North America
 English deportation of "criminals," and invasion of Australia and Tasmania
 Great Britain's global imperial conquests and subjugations
 British rule leading to famines
 Overcoming malaria and scurvy in global conquest
 Fake imperial "philanthropy"
 Fake robber baron "philanthropy" and the rise of public relations
 World's poor ship food to world's rich
 Insider revelations of the real game being played by the West
 Purpose of imperialism
 Imperial indoctrination, public relations, and "education" making FE unimaginable
 Damage that the UK and USA have inflicted on humanity and the world
 Rise of American whaling
 The USA's quick industrial rise
 Coal power overtakes water power in the USA
 Deforestation and environmental devastation of New England and its conversion to coal
 American competition between canals and railroads
 Richness of the North American continent, and how the USA quickly became the leading industrial nation
 Dramatic changes in making a living in the industrialized world
  False self-image of American pioneers
 The USA's anachronistic embracement of slavery
 Rise of science and its relationship to imperialist and capitalist interests
 America's Founding Fathers and the fairy tales of American nationalism
 Mixed results of investigating life processes
 Mixed results of using fossil fuels
 Role of carbon dioxide in the current ice age and the current global warming
 World's first industrial wars
 Real economy has always run on energy

The previous chapter surveyed some English trends that led to industrialization, and one controversial subject is whether
England turned to coal because of deforestation.773 The mainstream view is that they were directly related, and I agree.
Nobody used coal if they could avoid it. The first ironworks in England almost immediately caused protest and rebellion
because they led to rapid deforestation and rising wood prices. Metal smelting is very energy-intensive, as Cyprus and
many other places discovered the hard way, but coal could not be used for metal smelting because of its impurities,
primarily sulfur, which also produced the noxious stench that made it so infamous and produced acid rain among other
effects. London in the mid-1600s had Earth’s worst air quality, by far. In 1661, in one of the earliest works on air
pollution, John Evelyn wrote that Londoners had more lung disease than the rest of humanity combined. London Fog was
coal smoke, and until the mid-20th century, London was legendary for its coal pollution, and 4,000 people died in a few
days during a pollution event in 1952. Many years ago, when I first viewed casual photographs of residents of early 20th
century European cities, I was struck by how everybody was covered in soot.

In 1600, England produced about 18,000 tons of pig iron, and a century later, it only produced a little more, while it
imported nearly 10,000 tons, mainly from Sweden, which still had plentiful forests if not much mast wood. Swedish iron
was price competitive with English iron, even with a stiff tariff imposed on it.774 English ironworks competed for wood with
breweries and cider and cheese producers, as well as textile manufacturers and related businesses. Also, canal builders
and wagonway builders (building low-energy transportation lanes, and wagonways were railroad predecessors) competed
for wood in a rapidly industrializing England.

Coke is coal with its impurities, mainly sulfur, “baked” out, and it burns like charcoal. Coal was used in the British Isles as
early as 3000 BCE. Coke was made in China in ancient times, but that practice did not migrate to Europe. The Chinese
used it to smelt metal by about 1000 BCE. In 1589, a patent was granted in England for using coal to smelt iron, and
there is other evidence of coke’s use in 1600s England, but by brewers. In the 1600s, coal became a nearly-universal
industrial fuel in England, while wood was still used in homes. In 1709, Abraham Darby built the first commercially
successful coke-fueled blast furnace. Until that time, not only was wood expensive, charcoal was so fragile that it could
not be shipped far. Coalbrookdale, where Darby’s furnace resided, had England’s greatest ironworks density. Darby
combined his knowledge of using coke in brewing, the low-sulfur coal in Coalbrookdale, and his newcomer status, which
limited his access to exorbitantly priced charcoal, to give coke a try. As usual, necessity was the mother of invention.
Others had tried coke-fueled smelting before, but nobody had lasted long. Darby’s furnace, however, became so
successful that he could sell his iron much cheaper than his competitors. For the first time ever, cast iron became a
household consumer good, for items such as kettles, stoves, and pots. In the 1740s, Darby’s son helped invent a method
of using coal to further refine pig iron into wrought iron, and his grandson built the world’s first iron bridge in 1779, which
still stands.

In 1750, only 5% of England’s pig iron was produced with coke, but by 1800, with new processes and the continuing rising
price of charcoal, British pig iron production was 150,000-200,000 metric tons annually, and almost all was coke-smelted.
It was ten times greater than annual production in the 18th century’s first half, and the steep ascent began in the 1770s.775
In the first decade of the 19th century, it doubled again.776 During the 18th century, British coal production increased five-
fold, to more than 15 million metric tons, and it doubled again by 1830.777 It took ten times its weight in fuel to produce ten
tons of iron, and twenty times for copper.778 One reason for iron’s relative “cheapness,” energy-wise, is that life processes
already partially refined the ore into oxides. In 1900, the British produced five million tons of pig iron annually, the USA
produced twice as much, and Germany produced more than six million tons.779 In 2011, the UK produced only seven
million tons of pig iron, China produced nearly a hundred times as much, and global production was 1.1 billion tons, which
was several thousand times what England, the early leader in industrialization, produced two centuries earlier. In 2008,
global coal production was estimated at 5.8 billion metric tons, which was nearly 400 times what the UK mined in 1800.
A careful estimate as of 2013 determined that humanity has reduced Earth’s plant-based biomass by more than a third
since the beginnings of agriculture.780 Humanity certainly could not have industrialized by using wood. Arguments
making the case that deforestation was not why coal was adopted in England are shaky and also irrelevant to the fact that
England could not have industrialized with wood. Iron operations regularly shut down during England’s early industrial
history due to wood shortages. The economics of coal were evident to even imperial Romans, but nobody would use coal
if they could avoid it. Some ironworking operations used wood until the late 19th century. But using sunlight energy
captured during the tree’s life could not compete for long with mining ancient sunlight trapped in coal that was collected
over tens of millions of years, even if nobody initially knew how coal was formed. Even today, the British Isles’ grassy hills
provide austere evidence of the rampant deforestation that those lands have yet to recover from. That the British Isles
have any woods at all is a testament to using fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution.

The other critical innovation was the modern steam engine, which was intimately related to coal. Burgeoning coal mines
quickly exhausted deposits above the water table and began digging deeply into the earth, and water in the mines
became a great problem. Not only were floods killing miners, but standing water made mines inoperable. Romans
pumped water from their mines (water pumps may have been another Hellenic invention).781 So did British mining
operations, and around 1710, Thomas Newcomen combined the ideas of a French inventor and an English inventor to
make the first industrial steam engine, to pump water from coal mines. In a parallel case of using coal for smelting, the
coal-fired Newcomen engine was common in mining by 1725. It was the first of its kind, primitive compared to later
engines, and its spread was gradual. James Watt was asked to fix a Newcomen engine in 1763. He eventually invented
an improved version with a separate condenser that was first commercially installed in 1776. The steam engine that
powered the Industrial Revolution was thus born, although, as with coal, its spread was gradual, and wind and water
power were competitive with coal for nearly a century. The hydrocarbon-fueled steam engine was the key to the Industrial
Revolution, in which the energy of ancient sunlight was exploited to generate previously unimaginable power. A steam
locomotive of 1850 roaring through the English countryside would have been inconceivable to an English peasant of
1500. From a half-million years to 50 thousand years to 10 thousand years to less than five hundred years, the duration
of each Epochal Event continued to shrink as levels of energy use increased dramatically and eventually nearly
geometrically with each event.

As with the previous Epochal Events (1, 2, 3), imagine an English peasant of 1500 being placed in the midst of London in
2014, or visiting today's average American home. The only metal in an English home of 1500 might have been some
tools and eating utensils. Wood and wool were the primary materials in an English home. Some metals of the modern
world would be vaguely familiar, but plastic would be unrecognizable. English peasants’ homes had thatched roofs, dirt
floors, no plumbing, and people rarely bathed. Glass windows only existed in rich homes, which were built like fortresses.
London was a walled city in 1500, and nobody went outside after dark if they valued their lives. Sewers did not yet exist,
and violence and capital punishment were common. In England in 1500, only 1% of women were literate and only 10% of
men. About half of all people died before adulthood, and if they survived that long, they could expect to live into their early
60s if they were lucky. Few made it to 70. Only rich people were fat. Strangers roaming the countryside could legally be
enslaved. Modern appliances and machines would all be incomprehensible, and all electronic devices would seem
magical. How much of a modern TV show would be understandable? Cars, trains, airplanes, and rockets would be mind-
boggling. By 1500, news would have filtered into learned circles that Spain discovered some Atlantic islands, but nobody
yet suspected that new continents had been discovered. The telescope would not be invented for another century, Earth
was seen as the center of the universe, and the concept of a galaxy did not really exist. Imagine trying to explain the
Apollo moon landings to that peasant, if the peasant did not regard it as some fairy tale (many people today regard it as a
fairy tale). Could an English peasant from 1500 dropped into 2014 London have ever adapted?

As with previous Epochal Events, the advances in mental achievement were as dramatic as material changes. However,
other than the First Epochal Event, humans largely possessed the same cognitive equipment. If an infant girl from the
founder group that left Africa could have been placed in a home in an industrialized nation today, there is little reason to
believe that she would not live a normal life. The changes in mental achievement during the journeys of Homo sapiens
have had little to do with biological changes and, in fact, human brains have shrunk by about 10% in the past 30,000
years. Humanity’s material and mental changes were thoroughly interrelated. The human world became vastly more
complex with the rise of industrialization, so much so that most people today have very little understanding of how their
world actually works. It usually takes systems thinkers with scientific training to begin to understand the modern world’s
complexities. For instance, about 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate and have little idea where their energy
comes from or how the myriad moving parts of their civilizations operate and interact. Americans are effective consumers
and are history’s fattest people, and the rest of the industrialized world is close behind, but they have little idea where any
of it comes from or how it was produced and delivered to them.

Several interacting trends created the phenomenon called the Industrial Revolution, but as with the previous Epochal
Events, it all rode atop the energy practices. Cognitive and social changes were predicated on the economic situation,
which was always based on the level of energy consumption. Without that foundation of increased energy generation, the
rest could not have happened. Since the beginnings of civilization, the level of energy surplus (the produced energy not
devoted to agriculture), including feeding its workforce, has always been the primary determinant of how a civilization
could develop and whether it survived.

When Greek teachings were reintroduced to Europe, it was already greatly benefitting from that banned culture’s
technologies, and the rise of science in Europe began, but it was a fitful journey. Powerful interests direct mainstream
science’s development even today, and have made it largely irrelevant for solving humanity’s greatest problems. Early
on, the greatest enemy of Europe’s rise of science was the Catholic Church, which ironically was the same institution that
initially translated those Greek works. Although Greek teachings began the ferment that led to the Renaissance and
humanism, the Inquisition formed not long after those teachings were introduced, to wipe out a side-effect of the
Crusades: bringing “heretical” Christian teachings to Europe with returning soldiers. After annihilating the Cathars and
concocting an ersatz version of their “product” with the mendicant orders, the Church maintained its religious monopoly for
a few more centuries until another strategy backfired: embracing the printing press, which was invented by Johannes
Gutenberg in Germany around 1439. Instead of expanding its influence by allowing literate subjects to study the Bible, it
helped ignite the Reformation, which led to Europe’s bloodiest period to that time, with perhaps the exception of Rome.
Martin Luther’s seemingly innocuous declaration in 1517 led to a series of wars that engulfed Europe, which climaxed with
the Thirty Years’ War that killed several million people. Late in that series of conflicts, England began its religious wars
that ultimately ended its royalty’s absolute rule. In northern Europe, the Church never recovered.

In 1543, two works widely considered modern science’s first were published. One pertained to astronomy: Nicolaus
Copernicus, a devout Catholic, independently revived the Greek teaching that Earth orbited the Sun. The other was the
first great work on anatomy, by Andreas Vesalius, which overturned more than a millennium of Galenic dogma. In a
preview of how the West’s practice of science would progress, the dogmatists that Vesalius offended were not Church
officials but his peers, who attacked him so viciously that he eventually burned his notes and retired from the field. Most
notable pioneers of medicine received similar treatment from their peers, which harkens back to that “shark tank”
observation.

Copernicus died as his book was being published, and he apparently did not suspect that his work would cause a
backlash. However, the path that heliocentric theory took to overcoming dogma, both from the Church and the day’s
scientists, is one of the greatest cautionary tales in science’s history, and shows how science took misdirections that it has
yet to recover from. The Inquisition began banning books in 1559, and its list lasted until the 1960s.
In 1553, the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva after being denounced in
Spain and fleeing to “safety” in a Protestant region. He was the first European to correctly describe pulmonary circulation.
In 1600, Giordano Bruno, a friar, was burned at the stake in Rome for heresies that he refused to recant, and the most
famous was that the universe was boundless, held many planets besides Earth, and Earth was in no way Creation’s
center. A decade later, Galileo Galilei used a new technology, the telescope, to see moons orbiting Jupiter. It clearly
demonstrated that Earth was not the universe’s center that everything revolved around. As with Vesalius, the dogmatic
resistance that Galileo initially encountered did not come from the Church, but from his “peers” who refused to look
through the telescope and see with their own eyes what Galileo was referring to. However, the Church initiated a series
of actions that led to Galileo being brought to his knees and forced to recant in 1633 to avoid Bruno’s fate, and he
remained under house arrest for the rest of his life. In his battles with the Church, Galileo took a strategic stand that has
been argued to have sent science awry ever since; he couched his theories in math as a way to defeat the Church’s
theologians. Isaac Newton did something similar a generation later. Math was a realm of pure logic, and Galileo‘s
couching his theories in math instead of observation was a strategic decision that arguably sent science in the direction of
becoming its own arcane priesthood, as it used math to help make it unintelligible to outsiders. Modern scientific
popularizers, such as Stephen Hawking, have tried to write without using much math, such as in his A Brief History of
Time. Albert Einstein was one of history’s greatest scientific popularizers who tried to make his theories understandable
to the general public, and he avoided math in his professional work when he could.

Galileo’s use of the telescope to overthrow scientific theories is an important example of how scientific and technological
advances spurred each other. Many times technological advances were derided as “impossible” by the scientific
establishment’s leaders; those authorities had abandoned the principle of observation and relied on their theories and
“laws of science” to tell them what was possible. Two infamous examples were the initial derision that Edison’s light bulb
received and the Wright brothers’ reception. In both instances, the public watched the “impossible” happen, but leading
scientists could not be bothered to leave their armchairs and go see for themselves, and the situation is arguably worse
today than back then.

Science thus made its erratic rise, battling both the Church and the pioneers’ “peers,” and dismaying battles for
“precedence” and outright theft of theories and technologies has marred science and technology for the past several
centuries. Organized suppression of disruptive technologies has become a lucrative cottage industry today as global
racketeers maintain their fiefs, while mainstream scientists are blithely unaware of the activity or they irrationally dismiss
evidence of organized suppression as a conspiracy theory. Every one of my first professional mentor’s inventions was
either stolen or suppressed. That is how the real world of science and technology operates, particularly in areas that can
dethrone the world’s power structure. Until now, this essay has largely dealt with areas where organized suppression was
rare, but those relatively innocent subjects will gradually be left behind as this essay progresses toward its conclusion.
The answer to the question of whether dinosaurs had feathers does not threaten global rackets.

From Sumer onward, the priesthood conferred deific status or divine sanction to elites, and that unholy union still exists
today in many places, including England. As other professions arose, they also groveled before political-economic power,
and historians have repeatedly prostituted themselves. They did it from the beginnings of their profession, do it to this
very day, and those historians selling their souls early on became known as court historians. They concocted history that
portrayed the elite path to dominance as a valiant quest, when the reality was almost always the opposite. That issue led
to the cynical but true observation that history is written by the winners.

In the totalitarian society that George Orwell presciently wrote about in 1984 there were three basic classes: lows,
middles, and highs, and the middles continually attempted to overthrow the highs. Orwell was alluding to a historical
phenomenon in which economic and political revolutions became controlled by a new class that displaced the previous
one.

By the late 1700s, another profession appeared: a new variety of court historian known today as the classical economist.
From civilization’s earliest days, controlling markets has been the primary method by which elites arose. Essentially, it
became a place to skim energy flows, which has been a feature of life since the very beginning. When a brown bear
wades into a stream to catch migrating salmon, as shown below, (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
it skims off the results of hard work that salmon performed to live long enough to return home to spawn. When Gravettian
mammoth hunters established villages along mammoth migration routes, they were harvesting the energy flow of passing
mammoths that pursued their own energy resources. In those instances, elites did not dictate how peasants should farm,
nor did bears tell salmon how to live, nor did Gravettians help mammoths learn subsistence practices; they all intervened
at an advantageous moment, usually near the end of the energy production process, to steal the fruit of somebody else’s
hard work. Skimming rather than plundering is more sustainable. Elites learned this early on. Skim too much and the
system collapses, but skim the right amount and skimming can continue almost indefinitely. However, no human
civilization has truly been sustainable, so elites usually skimmed while they could. If they were fortunate and possessed
sufficient foresight, they could abandon one collapsing system and skim from another.

When Spaniards conquered the Aztecs and Incas and engaged in mining operations with native labor, they redirected the
labor itself, as somebody had to mine the gold. It was far from sustainable, as the operations treated workers as
expendable, and unlike ancient Egyptians with their easily replenished supply, Spaniards killed off their workforce during
history’s greatest demographic catastrophe. That plunder operation is not very useful for analyzing the development of
new economic institutions that accompanied Europe’s rise. Adam Smith called gold rushes humanity’s most unproductive
activity, essentially a counterfeiting operation. He stopped short of calling the Spanish experience in the New World
“stupid,” but other scholars have used that adjective.

When Portugal conquered the spice trade in the early 1500s, there was real economic benefit from their activities, not
simply accounting legerdemain, and their mercantilism was more sustainable. Venetians and Genoese engaged in early
instances of a similar process, but it began ascending in earnest as Europe conquered the world. The basic tenet of
mercantilism was the acquisition of “treasure” by the mother nation via “trade.”782 The classic mercantile situation was
forcing subjugated people to produce raw material for shipment to the imperial nation for processing. The finished goods
would be shipped back to the subjugated people at an inflated price, as the imperial nation slowly milked the subject
nation by unfair terms of exchange that they controlled (or sold such cheaply produced goods to other nations). In
mercantilist practice, they did not usually dictate how the workforce was organized or how they worked. The intervention
was at the market level, by interposing themselves into the process in which producers were enslaved and bled dry by
unfair pricing for both raw goods and finished goods. The imperial power had both captive producers and markets for
finished goods. Early colonial efforts were largely mercantilist in nature when they were not simply gold rushes.
The earliest economic school of thought was French, and its practitioners were called Physiocrats. They formed the first
and so-far only economic school that rooted economic activity and wealth in energy terms. Physiocrats worked before the
science of energy was invented, but they understood that land was the basis of wealth, or more specifically, the crops,
timber, metals, and other resources that could be wrested from them via labor (AKA "work"). Physiocrats were
opportunists who developed economic theories that they planned to profit from, in order to climb into the aristocracy.783
The first English economist of what later became the classical school of economics was arguably William Petty who, like
his successors, derived theories that he planned to benefit from. They either tried to join the rising rich classes
themselves or performed ideological services on their behalf to curry favor. There was nothing of the disinterested
scientist in their work, but they became ideological warriors of the rising capitalist class. It became Karl Marx’s task to
name that rising class; he called them the bourgeoisie. Preceding the nominal classical economists was James Steaurt,
who is called a mercantilist philosopher today, but he was really one of the most honest classical economists in describing
the early forces of capitalism, of forcing peasants off the land and enslaving them to market forces. 784

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is widely considered the first work of classical economics. Smith
was more of a court historian than scientist, and in a trend highly germane to this essay’s thrust, he and his successors,
such as Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, provided ideological service to capitalists by making their
crimes and even themselves invisible. The dispossession of English and Scottish peasantry by Game Laws and
Enclosure is virtually nowhere to be found in the work of classical economists, and was never identified as the primary
vehicle by which early capitalists amassed their fortunes. The huge accumulations of wealth by capitalists were only
obtained by “efficiency” and clever organization of the workforces, according to the public writings of classical economists.
The elites of pristine civilizations prevailed via ruthlessness and violence and, after their control was established, they
skimmed the economic cream of the civilizations that they controlled. Capitalists did the same thing, becoming elites in a
pristine system, and once they controlled the economic system’s foundation (the land that provided food, coal, running
water for mills, and wood), they then let the “market” dominate, which might appear “free” to the casual observer. As
dispossessed peasants began their virtual enslavement in the “satanic mills” of William Blake’s poetry, including the novel
institution of child labor, writers who opposed such evils, such as Thomas Spence, were silenced and imprisoned.785

Classical economists portrayed greedy and violent acts as a noble pursuit of innovation and efficiency that somehow
served the common good. To call it a conspiracy might be too dramatic, but it was essentially no different from the
deification and heroification of early elites.786 Only after the British violently acquired control of markets did it call for “free
trade.” It was a fantasy that served the capital class, which provided the illusion of freedom far more than its substance.
In private correspondence, classical economists could be quite frank about the real game being played: actual free
markets were a threat to capitalist interests. The British invaded China under the principles of “free trade,” which was the
right to addict China to opium grown by British-enslaved peoples in India. In moments of candor, British statesmen could
also be startlingly honest about the true nature of their success, but such moments could be censored. Nehru noted that
the longer that the British controlled an Indian province, the poorer it became. There has never been a free market in
world history, or if there was, it was not for long. The closest thing may have been markets that arose in pristine states,
but what became the first elites quickly conquered and exploited them. In new, arguably “pristine” industries that were not
seen as immediate threats to established interests, such as oil and personal computers, there was initially something
resembling an open market, but in those two instances, organizations founded by John Rockefeller and Bill Gates quickly
conquered and controlled them, and they officially became the richest people on Earth and later became “philanthropists.”

Ben Franklin was the capitalist epitome in North America’s British colonies, but his fortune was significantly amassed by
running ads to capture runaway slaves and by wiping out competitors. When the Constitutional Convention began its
power play, the local newspaper reporting on the illegal proceedings was purchased and silenced by the Founding
Fathers, in an early instance of capitalist censorship of the “free press.” Private “free market” censorship has always been
the preferred method of capitalists, not governmental intervention, such as the way that George Orwell’s’ work was
censored.

Although there was early dissent to the classical economists’ contrived ideology, it was largely consigned to oblivion.787 It
was not until Karl Marx that an economist honestly described the early accumulation of capitalist wealth. He pointed out
that capitalist accumulation was accomplished by bloodshed, coercion, slavery, and the standard tools of despots, not by
courageous feats of innovation and efficiency.788 As this essay will make the case, capitalism may well be the most
inefficient system yet developed, and its apparent “efficiency” is only maintained by wiping out alternative systems and
innovations that could unseat the capitalists who quickly consume and destroy Earth’s real wealth, which largely lies in its
ecosystems and exploitable hydrocarbons. Today’s global political economy as popularly presented is an elaborate
fiction, and all important decisions are made in unaccountable privacy by largely invisible ultra-capitalist interests. What I
encountered during my adventures was capitalism on steroids. Private interests run the world, not governments, and they
are helping to make Earth uninhabitable. They have mostly achieved the true invisibility that classical economists
enabled. Bill Gates is a member of what I call the “retail elite,” whom the true global elite view as a boy playing with his
toys and a useful figurehead, not as somebody important.
Similarly, I call public officials, particularly elected ones, “retail politicians,” as they are actors in the public sphere but have
little real power, particularly of the kind that impacts important issues. R. Buckminster Fuller called political actors
“stooges” of economic interests, and from what I have seen, he was right. Fuller also noted that political systems
competition was not a solution to humanity’s current predicament. The “competition” between socialism (or communism)
and capitalism is ineffectual and distracts from important issues. Not only are today’s political-economic system debates
useless for solving humanity’s fundamental problems, but a world based on FE technology and economic abundance
renders today’s debates meaningless, making them akin to arguing which microlith was superior before metals were
smelted, or discussing the most benign form of slavery in 1700. Such debates had seeming validity during one epoch but
became pointless in the next.

By the early 1700s, Voltaire and other writers began openly challenging the Church and began arguing for freedom as
everybody’s birthright, and the Enlightenment began. Voltaire spent his first stint behind bars in 1717 for his satirical
writings. Some have placed the Enlightenment’s beginning in the 1600s, with the feats of Descartes and Newton, but as
with many other movements, their beginnings were modest. Not until about 1750 was the institution of slavery, hallowed
for several thousand years by that time, challenged for the first time on universal grounds. In 1315, France’s Louis X
abolished slavery, but as France joined the colonial competition, it relied on slave labor for its Caribbean plantations.
Ironically, history’s only successful slave revolt happened in a French colony, Haiti, although the victory was pyrrhic in
ways, as that former slave colony is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Although Enlightenment philosophers acknowledged their debt to Newton (the world’s most towering intellectual of his
time and one of history’s greatest scientists and mathematicians), he saw nothing improper with the slave trade and lost
his life’s fortune speculating in it in 1720. When machines began reproducing human labor, the abolition of slavery also
began, as it made unskilled labor uneconomical. Slavery, particularly the genocidal forms inflicted by Europe, were viable
only for situations in which little professional skill was needed. Slavery worked best in mine and plantation work that used
illiterate and often-expendable people. What became the USA was unique in the European age of slavery, in that tobacco
operations, unlike sugar plantations, had more seasonal labor demands. Moreover, the environment of southeast North
America was conducive to long-lived and fertile slaves, so that they could reproduce.789 Consequently, what became the
USA was a minor recipient of the transatlantic slave trade, with its large slave population largely bred, not captured.
People born into slavery are easier to keep enslaved than those born free, but they had to be kept illiterate and at low skill
levels, or else they might desire freedom and obtain it. Late in the American era of slavery, some slaves were taught to
read, but generally only one book, which justified slavery: the Bible. All the way to America’s Civil War, apologists for
slavery used Biblical passages to justify it. Many also justified antebellum slavery with economic arguments, stating that
people took better care of something they owned rather than something they rented.790

I know of no more informative contrast between industrial and preindustrial economies than comparing the USA’s North
and South on the eve of its Civil War. The North had a vibrant, industrializing economy that quickly became history’s
greatest, with its labor nominally free, and the South had a relatively moribund economy based on slave labor. The North
used its industrial capacity to grind down the South in a war of attrition, just as the USA later did to its opponents in World
War II. Superior industrial capacity, which is rooted in energy supplies, has won all major wars during the past two
centuries. World War I ended when the Allies blocked German access to oil, and much of the war was devoted to cutting
off the other belligerents’ oil supplies. When Germany surrendered, it had one day’s worth of fuel. Japan attacked Pearl
Harbor in 1941 only after the Allies cut off its access to oil, and Germany lost World War II after its route to oil was again
severed, and the Nazis simply ran out of fuel.791 Cutting off access to hydrocarbons, oil in particular, was the industrial
equivalent of starving out the enemy in a siege, or how Athens and Sparta continually tried to cut off the other's access to
wood. Oil has been humanity’s primary geopolitical prize since the early 20th century, and completely explains imperial
meddling and warfare in the Middle East. All other factors are irrelevant or of extremely minor importance and are often
promoted in an attempt to deceive uninformed observers such as the American public; proximate causes, if not entirely
fictional to begin with, were elevated above the ultimate cause in those delusion-inducing analyses.

Rising standards of living ended slavery, and nothing elevated it like industrialization did. When slavery became
uneconomical, people developed consciences, not the other way around. Wealth is freedom, and has always been based
on a society’s energy surplus. The innate human desire for freedom became uneconomical to suppress when large
energy surpluses existed. Slavery began with domestication and ended with industrialization. There was little “natural”
about it, but in that phase of human economic development the institution made sense, if hideous sense.

The rise of science, industry, capitalism, and the Enlightenment cannot be effectively separated from Europe’s conquest
of the world. They were profoundly interrelated and began with the rise of Greek technology and teachings, but its ascent
became steep when Europeans turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Europe’s incessant wars,
with technological advances usually first devoted to warfare, made Europeans an irresistible force. When they rode low-
energy transportation lanes to distant lands, the rest of humanity never had a chance. Europe raped and plundered
humanity on an unprecedented scale, and as with Roman imperial ideology, there was little consideration shown to the
world’s peoples, in practice or theory, by Europeans. They ravaged humanity because they could.
The deep-seated connection between mercantilism and imperialism became evident with Spanish efforts. Expeditions
were privately financed with royal sanction, and the Crown got a cut of the loot. The Spanish effort was far cruder than
what its rivals and successors devised, and it eventually became capitalist in orientation.792 Forerunners to modern
corporations were formed by the English and Dutch at the beginning of their imperial ascents, with trading companies.
The English East India Company, founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, were
corporations acting on behalf of their sponsoring states, and were designed to wrest the spice trade from Portugal, along
with seizing other imperial opportunities. The French regularly bought up the rear, empire-wise, and did not charter their
East India Company until 1664. In the early 1800s, in the wake of classical economics, corporations became private
enterprises and soon were granted limited shareholder liability, unlimited life, and even the rights of people. Greed was
not only enshrined in modern economic ideology as a virtue, but corporations are legally compelled to seek profits above
all else.

While European rivals were fighting over plunder rights, the imperial venture with the greatest global impact was the
English invasion of North America. The Western Hemisphere had been in its Stone Age until Europe arrived, and its
ecosystems were in far better shape than Europe’s. Earth’s greatest temperate forest was North America’s Eastern
Woodlands, and it may have been no exaggeration when a European observer noted that a squirrel could travel from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and never touch the ground. The Eastern Woodlands’ peoples were largely
spared violent invasion and conquest during the 1500s because they had no immediately evident gold or silver to steal.
But when the English finally arrived, after determining that there was no gold to be had, they wanted the land. Thus
began one of history’s better-documented genocides. The Eastern Woodlands’ natives mostly lived in those relatively
gentle matrilineal societies (including the first two that the English met, in Massachusetts and Virginia), inhabiting what
seemed a paradise to early invaders, once they learned to farm the native way. A continual problem among English
invaders was “settlers” running off and “going native,” and the English made it a capital crime. Classic Athens invented
democracy in the West, but their slaves outnumbered citizens, and European invaders of North America discovered native
societies with functioning democracies. Although racist and imperial scholars have long dismissed the evidence, it is very
possible that the European experience in the New World helped ignite the Enlightenment, where Europeans encountered
peoples freer than previously thought possible. The evidence is also strong that the USA’s Constitution, the
Enlightenment’s ultimate political document, was deeply influenced by the Founding Fathers’ experience with the Iroquois
Confederation, Ben Franklin in particular. He first proposed an Iroquoian form of colonial government in 1754.
But what led to English success in North America, more than anything else, was the energy-rich continent that they
stumbled into. Intact forests and soils were long gone in Europe, and seemingly virgin lands were there for the taking, as
long as the natives were removed. Soon after the USA achieved its independence from Great Britain, during a meeting of
English and American diplomats, a British diplomat noted that despite their many similarities, among them their common
heritage, the Americans at that meeting were all about a foot taller than their British counterparts. Colonial New
Englanders lived several years longer than their British counterparts. The rich soils of North America grew larger people
than Europe’s depleted soils, and Americans always had one of humanity’s longest life expectancies. That was largely
why they could breed slaves.

Colonial commerce was never sustainable. It was based on fashion such as furs and dyes, mast wood for warships,
substance addiction such as sugar and tobacco, or genocide, such as transatlantic slavery. "Settlers" wiped out natives
to either take their land or work them to death in mining and plantation operations. It was arguably all evil. The classic
triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and rum had not one redeeming quality or any economic necessity. The rise of Europe
was an unprecedented evil inflicted on the world’s peoples, and any analysis of the economic benefits of colonialism and
global conquest has to weigh those unparalleled crimes on its scales. Economists from Physiocrats onward have rarely
performed such an analysis. Marx is one of the few exceptions.

England had nearly a century’s head start on the competition with its Industrial Revolution, which is why it became the
world’s triumphant imperial power, to be later supplanted by its offspring and rival, the USA. Turning coal into an
industrial fuel, for smelting iron and powering machines, initiated the Industrial Revolution, and the next big innovation was
making machines to replace hands. English inventors began making spinning machines in the 1740s, and the 1760s and
1770s were the golden age of spinning innovation, and the spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule were all
invented. By the 1790s, people using such machines spun cotton more than 150 times faster than in 1740. I call one
worker with a machine outperforming 150 people without one an energy-and-technology-leveraged human. Energy-
powered technology allowed a person to vastly outperform humans without it. Was that person 150 times more
dexterous? Smarter? Faster? Stronger? The machine did the work, not the person, and energy made it all happen, not
the equipment. Without energy to run it, machinery is useless, but without human-made technology, the energy was
unavailable. Such machines would never have been conceived without the available energy to run them. Those early
spinning machines ran on water power from the British countryside’s mills.
To an overwhelming extent, energy powering machines was the Industrial Revolution and remains so to this day, whether
it is computers, the Internet, airplanes, rockets, factories, electric plants – either hydrocarbon-, hydroelectric-, or fission-
powered – automobiles, trains, mining and oilfield equipment, farming equipment, household appliances, and so on. Even
the industrial world’s materials are energy-intensive, as materials become more expensive the more energy-intensive they
are to produce.

Capitalism radically changed the way that people worked. While court historians for capitalism glossed over the awesome
human toll of industrialization, some dissent came from ignored corners until Marx. In the 20th century, histories that
focused on working class struggles against the capitalists were in the great minority and never promoted by capitalist-
controlled presses. The British had a working-class press before it was driven out of existence by market forces, after
governmental efforts failed to destroy it. The USA has never had a working-class press, and works such as Howard
Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States only appeared late in the 20th century. Charles Dickens drew on his life’s
experiences, including factory work as a boy and his father’s incarceration in a debtor’s prison, to write his great works.

Life for early industrial British workers was hellish. However, it was far more hellish for those that the British invaded,
conquered, and exterminated. When the English finally established a beachhead at Jamestown in 1607, after its
Roanoke colony failed, epidemics introduced by European invaders had already thinned the population in what became
Virginia. In the first generation, more than 80% of the English invaders (nearly half of them were indentured servants)
died from the vagaries of “settling” Jamestown. But England's “surplus” population kept arriving in endless waves and
overwhelmed the natives. Within 40 years, the original inhabitants of Jamestown’s vicinity, the Pamunkey, had been
almost entirely exterminated. The “settlers” then engaged in raising tobacco with African slave labor, and the Virginian
plantation economy was born. Pocahontas fantasies aside, the relationship between the natives and invaders was almost
universally hostile from the beginning; the invaders quickly wore out their welcome after the natives initially feted them, as
hospitality is a feature of UP.

The story in Massachusetts was slightly different from Virginia’s early days. The “pilgrims” aboard the Mayflower, contrary
to the myths, were not coming to North America to escape persecution, but largely sought economic opportunity. They
lived in the Netherlands, free of persecution, when they decided to sail on the Mayflower in 1620.793 They were aiming to
settle around the Hudson River’s mouth, but missed and invaded land that had been cleared by another European-
introduced epidemic. As with Jamestown, the “settlers” had high mortality rates, and only about half of them survived the
first winter. Without native help, the intruders would not have survived. For about 10 years, the pilgrims and their
benefactors lived in a golden age of peace, but boatloads of land-hungry English came behind the pilgrims, and wholesale
slaughters of Indians and theft of their lands became regular affairs. In 1675, a war virtually exterminated the tribe that
welcomed the pilgrims; the welcoming chief’s son was killed and his head was mounted on a pole at Plymouth for a
generation. That happened with the “friendly” settlement. Extermination and dispossession came to all native tribes that
the English encountered as they stole the coveted land. The USA’s first president and its richest citizen crafted the plan
to steal native lands with treaties that the invaders would never honor. It is history’s greatest swindle, which
Washington's biographers, in court-historian style, cannot bring themselves to mention.

Although racism has some roots in antiquity, it began its institutionalization with Europe’s conquest of the world. For the
first time ever, a person could board a ship in a land of people with skin of one color and disembark and see people with
skins of markedly different colors. Also, since the people with non-white skin that Europeans encountered were always
exploited, slaughtered, or dispossessed, their differing skin color became part of the abuse-justifying ideology of the
conquerors. Racism reached its zenith in the USA, which in scale, intensity, and duration is history’s most racist nation.
The racism always had an underlying economic rationale, which justified the genocide of Indians, enslavement of
Africans, horrific treatment of East Asians, today’s agricultural labors of Latinos, and so on. When Europeans fought each
other in the imperial age, they had a rather gentlemanly way of fighting and treating captured prisoners, but when the
opponents were Indians, for instance, scalping them, making clothing from their skins, and the like was standard behavior.
The death camp Nazis’ “souvenirs” were only unusual in that they had white skin on them. That kind of behavior was
evident from the very beginnings of the European invasion of North America, and during the USA’s theft of temperate
North America, its future presidents could be found at the forefront of such trophy collecting. Intentionally inflicting
disease onto the Indians was part of the British bag of tricks, and hunting Indians like animals was a favorite sport of both
Spaniards and Americans.

Within three centuries, the Eastern Woodlands between the Atlantic Ocean and Mississippi River were completely
consumed in the human journey’s most dramatic deforestation, during the golden age of European expansion into North
America. Virtually all Indian tribes in what became the continental USA were exterminated to one degree or another, and
bedraggled survivors were banished to the worst land in “reservations,” and the "settlers" continually cheered the
slaughter and dispossession. The passenger pigeon, which probably flew in the greatest flocks that Earth has seen,
became extinct during the USA’s final consolidation of its continental theft, and the bison was nearly driven to extinction.
In 1890, after the final massacre at Wounded Knee, the genocide that began in 1492 was largely complete. In the words
of a keen critic of Europe’s invasion of the Western Hemisphere, “There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.”794 The
Spanish and Portuguese presence in South America in the 1500s caused the third major catastrophe that that continent’s
dominant mammals have endured on what was once Earth’s most isolated continent. The first was the Great American
Biotic Interchange of three mya, in which most mammalian species went extinct, displaced by invaders from North
America. The second was about 10 kya, which killed off nearly all the megafauna and was extremely likely due to
humans invading from Asia. The genocide of the 1500s probably killed off at least 75% of the indigenous humans and
perhaps more than 90%. The damage that Europeans and their descendants meted out to the Western Hemisphere’s
peoples and lands was far greater than what Rome inflicted on the Mediterranean’s periphery and Europe, and those
seeking evidence of an imperial conscience among members of the Roman and American polities will usually be
disappointed. Even today, humanity may have no more collective conscience toward out-groups than it had 50 kya, which
is a potentially fatal problem for complex life on Earth, including humanity. However, in many ways, industrialized
civilization is far more humane than preindustrial civilization.

As the British upper classes dispossessed the peasantry and forced them into factories and mines, the recalcitrant were
judged “criminals” and deported, which further conditioned the remainder into obedience. Georgia became a penal
colony, and after the American Revolution, Australia and Tasmania became the dumping ground for British “criminals.”
Whether the "immigrants" were criminals or not, the isolation of Australians and Tasmanians came to a sudden end when
the British arrived, and aboriginal Tasmanians were driven to extinction within a century, and within 60 years of British
“settlement,” about 95% of southeastern Australia’s aborigines had died off.795 The ships that conquered the world were
not filled with the best and brightest. They were often prisoners captured via “impressment,” and enslavement of labor via
“blackbirding” was done even after the official end of slavery. With those kinds of labor practices, the vile fashion in which
Europe engaged the world’s peoples was merely a sign of the times. When the peasantry gained some rights, such as
with the Magna Carta, it was often as a side-effect of elite squabbles.

About the same time that British industrialization really began growing, its imperial ascendance commenced. It was no
coincidence. When that land-greedy president was young, he led a land-grabbing expedition into the Ohio River Valley
that ignited what became humanity’s first war fought on multiple continents. When Great Britain won that war in 1763, the
French gained vengeance a decade later by supporting the elite rebellion that led to establishing the USA. Just as the
development of the Western Hemisphere’s civilizations was radically altered by Spanish invasions, and we will never
know how they might have independently developed, whomever Europeans conquered had their economies
commandeered by their new overlords, and their developments traveled very different paths than they might have. As
soon as Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, its rape of India began, which started with Bengal in
1764. Before the British conquest, India was ahead on the industrialization curve in ways, and early British visitors
learned Indian steel-making techniques. Bengal’s capital was Dacca, a textile center and arguably the world’s richest city,
which was precisely why the British conquered it first. English visitors in 1757 judged Dacca to be every bit as rich as
London. Instead of feeding themselves and producing their own finished goods, Bengal was enslaved by the British and
the region was turned into a giant plantation under the auspices of Great Britain’s East India Company. British dominance
led to a famine beginning in 1770 that killed off about ten million people, and the second great period of European-
induced genocide began. By 1840, Dacca’s population had collapsed from 150,000 to 30,000 people, and even today,
Bangladesh is one of Earth's most miserable nations. Ironically, it is a textile center once again, which is a legacy of
British conquest and subjugation.

The practice of enslaving the local populace into growing crops, both food and textile fibers such as jute and cotton, for
shipment to the imperial homeland, was not just confined to the world’s dark-skinned peoples. One of the greatest boons
to humanity from the Western Hemispheres’ conquest was the introduction of native crops. The introduction of cassava,
potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and other New World foods is credited with the rapidly growing world population that
began taking off in the late 1700s. More than half of the world’s crops grown today originated in the Western Hemisphere.
An impact of that introduction in Europe was Ireland’s skyrocketing population, fueled by potatoes, which became the
peasantry’s staple. That monocrop strategy backfired in the 1840s with the Great Potato Blight. What is less known is
that the famine in Ireland would not have happened if they had not exported their other crops to England during the Blight.
The Irish famine was one of many “free market” famines that England imposed on its subjects, while obesity began
becoming an issue in England in the late 19th century. It was a direct energy transfer from subjugated peoples to imperial
overlords.

Earth's human population reached a billion people in the first decade of the 19 th century, which was about 200 times
Earth's human population on the eve of the Domestication Revolution, and 100 times Earth's estimated carrying capacity
in the absence of agriculture and domesticated animals. Although Peak Oil was reached globally in 2005-2006, the
median UN estimate as of 2010 is that Earth's human population will reach 10 billion people by 2100. Only industrialized
farming methods allowed Earth's human population to grow as much as it has, and estimates of Earth's carrying capacity
after we run out of fossil fuels are well less than a billion, particularly with how greatly the ecosystems have been taxed by
humanity. Humanity's fate, in many ways, rides on the energy issue, and almost everything else is of little consequence.
Beginning in 1875, El Niño events precipitated famines that took the lives of tens of millions of people, in China and India
in particular. While India was starving, its wheat exports to the UK quadrupled. In the two millennia before British
hegemony, India had less than one famine per century. Under British rule, famines happened every few years, for about
a 3,000% increase in frequency. In the midst of the carnage, British “philanthropists” touted the railroads and other
“benefits” that India received from the British presence, but India’s native scholars noted that the railroads were built to
take the plunder from India, not bring needed food and other goods to its masses. A similar railroad plunder route was
built during the Scramble for Africa. Europeans could not invade equatorial Africa until they began to use quinine to
prevent malaria. The situation with malaria and quinine was another one in which practice was ahead of theory. Quinine
was developed in the 1820s, but the cause of malaria was not discovered until the 1890s.796 Similarly, even though
Europe’s early voyages to India, the Western Hemisphere, and the South Pacific were accompanied by scurvy that the
locals cured with citrus fruit and other plants high in vitamin C, millions of sailors died of scurvy in the succeeding
centuries as the medical authorities of the day ignored the cures. The British navy finally began to use limes to prevent
scurvy in the late 1700s, but vitamin C was not isolated and identified until the 1920s.

Once lands, peoples, and markets had been conquered, “philanthropy” was a primary means to administer even more
oppression. Other “philanthropists” took the British lead, and the final theft of Cherokee lands in Oklahoma was achieved
under the rubric of “philanthropy.” Belgium initiated the first African genocide of the industrial age under King Leopold’s
“philanthropy,” which killed about half of the Congo’s subject peoples, and Belgium’s rivals achieved similar levels of
extermination during the “rubber boom” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not long after King Leopold’s
“philanthropic” genocide, John Rockefeller’s strikebreakers machine-gunned striking coal miners in 1914 in one of the
great robber baron outrages.

In that massacre’s wake, Rockefeller hired J.P. Morgan’s publicist, Ivy Lee, who soon concocted the charade of
Rockefeller giving a dime to everybody that he met, and he became a great “philanthropist” who helped establish today’s
medical racket, with help from fellow robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie. Ivy Lee is considered the father of public
relations. The public relations industry is a scientific way to manipulate the public's mind. It has reached a high degree of
sophistication, particularly in the USA and the UK. In the early days of public relations, terms such as “propaganda” had a
positive technical meaning. Edward Bernays wrote a book with that title, and addicting women to tobacco was one of his
many feats. The roots of public relations lie in the English civil wars of the 1600s, when the absolute power of royalty was
permanently undermined and the “rabble” began to have some say in their governance.797 When the state could no
longer inflict violence with impunity on its subjects, controlling what people thought became the preeminent tool of
population control. Indoctrination and brainwashing began its progress in the UK to previously unimagined levels, which
led to works such as Orwell’s 1984. During my adventures, I have heard tales from fellow travelers about their encounters
with “humanitarians” and “philanthropists,” and one of them, after numerous encounters with such “benefactors,” asked
the question: “If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”

Most of the world’s poorest nations export food to the West’s industrialized nations, who are history’s fattest people, while
people in the exporting nations are often hungry and underweight. Neocolonial institutions such as the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund perform “philanthropic” duties. Once in a great while, somebody from the inside of such
“philanthropic” organizations comes forward and discloses the real game, such as John Perkins and those that his
revelations inspired to come forward.798 Imperialism seemed more honest in Rome’s time, or Spain’s, when it was simply
might makes right, and they conquered, raped, murdered, enslaved, and plundered because they could. Conquest,
exploitation, and genocide under the banners of “philanthropy,” “humanitarian intervention,” “liberating Iraq,” and “freeing
markets” is a far more dishonest exercise. Is it an improvement to perform the same malevolent deeds under a thinly-
veiled “humanitarian” cover story? It seems to only give a superficially plausible rationale for the imperial class, which in
the USA is all who live in it (except maybe reservation Indians, Latinos working in the fields, deeply impoverished African-
Americans, and prisoners), so that the imperial class can sleep better at night, but it seems to largely be a wink-and-nod
exercise.

In summary, the industrialization of the UK, the USA, and Europe was greatly enabled via robberies on an epic scale,
such as entire continents. Where the people could not be easily eradicated or where tropical diseases decimated the
invaders, the conquerors “only” enslaved them as they turned their economies into mines and plantations for the
conquerors' benefit. Most of humanity’s misery today is a legacy of those activities and a key dynamic of the Sixth Mass
Extinction, as the world’s poor are destroying the habitats of the world’s endangered species in order to eat.

Not only did imperial exploitation impoverish the world’s peoples, it also enriched the imperial peoples. That was the
entire point of imperialism. Just as the priesthood and court historians glorified early elites, all manner of apologist
justified imperial crimes, and Rudyard Kipling’s welcoming the USA to the imperial smorgasbord with his poem “The White
Man’s Burden” is an infamous example of arrogant imperial delusions, at least those held by court bards. The USA
carried its “burden” by bringing genocide to hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who could not be dissuaded from childish
notions of freedom; the USA slaughtered and tortured them into submission. Kipling’s imperial enthusiasm declined after
he incited his son to join in World War I’s festivities, who met the typical soldier’s fate. The most neglected part of Mark
Twain’s body of writings is his anti-imperialist work, which was marginalized by both his family and American publishers.

Those imperial games of indoctrination, apology, censorship, obfuscation, and turning reality upside-down are highly
relevant to the West’s economic trajectory, and are leading reasons why FE and its potential outcomes reside outside the
realm of possibility for the world’s people, particularly those living in industrial societies. Sources of energy not endorsed
by the scientific establishment and its patrons are unthinkable today, and this is arguably the greatest triumph of
humanity’s social managers. When people encounter the idea of FE, they almost invariably have reactions of denial that
range from reflexive to thoughtful to sophisticated. For those of us who know that FE and related technologies exist,
witnessing that entrenched denial can be quite a spectacle. That subject will be revisited in this essay, but the
development of industry, science, and political-economic ideologies, even though they are inextricably entangled with
imperial dynamics, deserve much more treatment.

The relationship between the British and their North American colonies has greatly influenced global civilization for the
past few centuries. Whether the balance tipped to the side of good or evil depends on who is asked. Many extinct
peoples of North America cannot answer, but we can reasonably infer their reply. The passenger pigeon would probably
vote in the negative, as would the peoples of India, as would most surviving remnants of Native American societies, as
would many other colonized peoples, both during the ascent and dominance of the British Empire and the American
Empire. The preferred fiction is that the USA is not an empire, even though it has several hundred military bases
scattered across the world, even though it has killed far more people internationally than the rest of the world combined
since World War II, and the tally does not include the millions, even billions, immiserated by the USA’s neocolonial
policies. Below is a map of the British Empire's territorial control. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The methods and technologies of industrializing England quickly began appearing in its North American colonies; the first
colonial blast furnace was built in Massachusetts in 1644.799 By 1775, North American British colonies were producing as
much iron as England and Wales.800 The first sawmill in North America was built in Virginia in 1611 by German
immigrants recruited by England, as deforested England did not have sawmills. 801 Over the next two centuries, towns in
the Eastern Woodlands were often founded by and built around sawmills. John Adams, the USA’s second president
whose family lands were on Thomas Morton’s idyllic Merry Mount, once “boasted” that his family may have felled more
trees than any other family in the USA. The colonists acted like Earth’s greatest beaver-infestation, as they leveled the
forests with abandon. A deciduous forest can create about a foot of topsoil in four centuries, so the soils of the Eastern
Woodlands were fertile beyond the wildest European imagination.

After a celebrated whaling incident in 1672, Nantucket became the headquarters of colonial American whaling. By the
1730s, the American colonies had 60 whaling ships competing with European ships in eradicating the North Atlantic’s
megafauna during the Golden Age of Whaling. Rorquals could not be profitably slaughtered until the advent of industrial
whaling in the late 1800s, so the sailing ships immortalized in Moby-Dick scoured the world of its preindustrially gainful
whales. Before 1800, the whales catchable by the day’s technology were quickly going extinct in the Atlantic, and the
fleets began sailing the Pacific and Indian oceans in search of whales.

With the Eastern Woodlands’ tremendous forests, iron could be smelted with the preferred wood, and in 1810 the USA
produced 45,000 metric tons of pig iron. As previously stated, the colonial era was marked early on by mercantilist
practices. In Mesoamerica, where the first European colony was established in an urban area, royal monopolies in gold
and silver, stealing arable land from the natives, and banning industries that could compete with those in Spain were
predominant practices. When the British conquered Bengal as their foothold in India, they immediately began to ban
weaving and turn Bengal into a plantation to supply British mills. British soldiers eventually amputated the thumbs of
Bengali weavers. When Mohandas Gandhi began agitating for freedom from the British, one of his campaigns was
reviving locally made cloth to replace imported British textiles.

Even with their white colonists in North America, the British prevented textile mills from appearing. It was not until the
Revolutionary War that the American colonies began to make textile mills. In a celebrated incident, an advocate of
American industry tried to smuggle out models of the latest British textile machinery, which the ambassador to France,
Thomas Jefferson, would then route to America. British officials uncovered the plot and initially prevented the transfer of
that key technology, but within a year the entrepreneur still obtained the models.802 There was great debate on the
direction of the USA among the Founding Fathers. Although they were not very heroic, the Founding Fathers were
students of history and knew the sorry trajectory of the Old World’s civilizations; republics became empires that collapsed.
New England was dominated by family farms, while the southern colonies were dominated by plantations run with slave
labor. Most early American presidents were slave-owning members of the “Virginia aristocracy.” The day’s debates
centered on whether the USA would abandon its mercantilist roots and become a capitalist economy. In general, slave-
owning aristocrats were against industrialization, while cities of northern states began embracing the Industrial Revolution.
The first successful cotton mill in the USA was built in Rhode Island in 1793.803 The USA had a more locally-integrated
economy than Great Britain’s. Instead of growing cotton in India and shipping it across the world to British mills, the USA
could grow cotton on southern plantations and ship it up the coast to New England’s mills.

Although the power of coal was primarily responsible for the USA’s great industrial ascent in the late 19 th century, the wind
and water power that Europe exploited for several centuries remained competitive with steam power until the last half of
the 19th century, and Americans only turned to coal as the forests disappeared. All along the USA’s eastern seaboard,
mills appeared along the streams and rivers. In the hills surrounding Providence, Rhode Island in the 1830s were 120
mills, which were all water-powered. In 1838, there were only two thousand steam engines in the USA, and all but 600
were used to propel boats and trains. In the USA in 1840, 60,000 small water-powered establishments existed alongside
fewer than 1,200 steam-powered manufacturers.804 Water was still the dominant industrial source of power.805

By the American Revolution, the eastern seaboard had already been largely deforested by “settlers.” Boston had wood
shortages beginning as early as 1638, and New England had almost been completely deforested when the Revolutionary
War began.806 One key issue leading to the Revolutionary War was the “king’s trees” in New England: those tall pines
coveted for naval mast wood.807 During the Revolutionary War, it was seen as a patriotic duty to cut down the king’s
trees.

As with the Spanish experience in Mesoamerica and the British experience in Australia, contemporary New English
observers noted the local climate changes in New England by the late 1700s, when the summers got hotter, the winters
colder, and the land became more arid. Streams disappeared during the summer and flooded in the winter. In his classic
study, William Cronon noted that New England became “sunnier, windier, hotter, colder, and drier” than before it was
deforested.808 The eastern seaboard began turning to British coal soon after the American Revolution. British coal was
cheaper than coal hauled 50 kilometers overland in the USA, and early America relied on British coal. It was not until
canals and railroads were built that the USA began to use its domestically mined coal. The anthracite mines of
Pennsylvania turned Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and other cities in the region into the heart of early American
industry. Steam locomotives were invented in Great Britain and the USA in the late 1700s, and Richard Trevithick is
credited with building the first steam-powered railroad in 1804, after many years of effort. The Erie Canal opened for
business in 1825, and the USA’s first common carrier railroad was built between Baltimore and the Ohio River in 1830, as
Baltimore competed with the canals that serviced Philadelphia and New York. Railroads became humanity’s first low-
energy transportation lanes that were not bodies of water (roads kind of qualified, but they were minor advances
compared to railroads). Many American cites were not built on bodies of water but along rail lines and, later, roads
traveled by cars and trucks.

Canals were competitive with railroads, sailing ships were competitive with steamboats, and watermills were competitive
with steam-powered mills until around 1850. It took nearly 150 years for coal-powered steam to prevail against wind and
water power. Water and wind power were not only geographically restricted, but they were also dependent on the
weather. Calm air (and storms) and droughts (and floods) were the bane of wind and water power. Coal did not have
those restrictions. American towns were built on hillsides above watermills to house the workforce. As coal-power made
its ascendance, those mills and towns were abandoned. The pollution of industrial America’s cities could rival London’s.
A visitor to Pittsburgh in 1841 described approaching the city as entering a dark cloud of coal smoke; the peoples and
buildings inside it were blackened like some vision from hell. Far from an indictment, however, the visitor happily saw it as
“progress” that would soon arrive at his home town of Cincinnati.809 The rivers of the Eastern Woodlands ran blue and
clear before Europeans arrived. When I lived in Ohio, the Ohio River at Cincinnati in the 1990s had brown, stinking
waters that nobody in their right minds would swim in. The Cuyahoga River that flows through Cleveland first caught fire
in 1868, and the 1969 fire finally led to environmental legislation that began to clean up the USA’s lakes, rivers, and air.
The air pollution that I experienced in Los Angeles in the 1980s rivaled conditions reported in China in the early 21st
century.

Railroads became the USA’s largest enterprises before the Civil War, and the first robber baron fortunes were built then;
the Vanderbilt fortune began with steamboats. North America is the richest continent ever stolen, and Americans pillaged
it to a scale never seen before or since. American prosperity was almost wholly founded on the rich energy resources
that they stole from the original inhabitants, and the first was the forests, soils, and streams of the Eastern Woodlands, to
be followed closely by coal, and then oil. No people in world history had access to that kind of loot and the means to
exploit it. The USA spent the 19th century stealing the continent from the natives and erecting an industrial civilization,
and then the losers of Europe’s competitive existence poured into it. In 1800, the British Isles had four times the USA’s
population, but by 1900 the USA had nearly twice the UK's population.810 In 2013, the USA had nearly five times the
population of the UK, but the UK had more than seven times the population density. The Western Hemisphere and
Australia are markedly underpopulated compared to the Old World. While the USA was raping a continent, the UK was
preying upon much of the planet. In 1815, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the UK’s navy was nearly three
times the size of France’s, which was its only rival. Naval power was the key to colonial success and world domination
during the 19th century. The UK led the effort, and its industrial production was the key. In 1750, Europe had less than a
quarter of the world’s industrial output, and by 1900, it and the USA comprised more than 85% of global output. The
USA’s industrial output was little more than a third of the UK’s in 1860, but by 1900 the USA surpassed its ancestor and
reached nearly a quarter of global production, although the UK still had more per-capita industrialization.811 In 1929, on
the eve of the Great Depression, the USA produced more than 40% of the world’s manufactured goods, which was more
than the UK, Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Japan, and Italy combined.812 In 1950, as the world recovered from the
great imperial battle known as World War II, the USA’s Gross National Product (“GNP”) was larger than those same
nations, and the USA’s per-capita GNP was nearly twice the UK’s and nearly seven times Japan’s.813

Among the many outcomes in the British Isles and the rest of humanity as it fell under capitalist domination was a
profound alteration in how people made a living. The “benefits” that Earth’s conquered peoples enjoyed from Europe’s
rise to dominance were highly equivocal, and Europe shattered millennia of economic, political, and social relations. What
started as feudal domination in England gave way to Game Laws, Enclosure, and other ways to drive the peasantry from
the land and into the mines and mills, which deepened the British class divide. Capitalism began in the English
countryside but soon unseated mercantilist colonial domination with capitalist practices. The primary outcome of
capitalism, socially, was severing the connection of peasants to the land and reorganizing their efforts into what Marx
called the capitalist mode of production. It was radically different from just skimming their efforts, and changed how they
worked. Contemporary observers in the 19th century clearly saw that a new class of humans was created by that change,
today called the working class, and Marx called it the proletariat.814 The working class was comprised of peoples who no
longer had any claim to land for farming and only had their labor to sell in a monetized market. The capitalist class
violently formed the working class, from the countryside of England to the plains of Bengal. The USA was a more rural
phenomenon, with a virgin continent there for the taking, and the illusion of self-sufficiency was pursued by “pioneers,”
which is still reflected in its national character. Similar to how hunter-gatherer societies became dependent on agricultural
and pastoral ones, if they survived at all, the so-called pioneers of American expansion across the continent were
dependent on industrialization and its markets. The American image of an independent pioneer taming the vast
wilderness is a fantasy, and especially in light of what happened in the western half of North America during the last half
of the 19th century.

A string of slave-owning aristocrats and slavery advocates paraded through the White House up to the beginning of the
Civil War. By the 1840s, the USA’s continued embracement of slavery made it an embarrassing anachronism among
Western nations. The USA was about Earth’s last nation to recognize Haitian independence; it did not formally
acknowledge the world’s only successful slave rebellion until 1862, for obvious reasons, although the USA began shipping
freed American slaves to Haiti in 1824 and established Liberia for that expressed purpose in 1820.

Until about 1880, American immigration came largely from the Anglo, Celtic, and Germanic peoples; then the flood from
Eastern Europe and Scandinavia began, soon followed by Southern Europe. By 1890, the American “frontier” had
officially vanished along with the Indians.

The rise of science accompanied the rise of industrialization, capitalism, and global empires, and they all interacted. The
greatest scientists always stressed how little they and their profession knew. However, they were always in the minority,
as the priest class of the scientific endeavor has continually tried to make science into an arcane province that holds the
keys to the universe's secrets. From those ranks have regularly come self-satisfied utterances that they have it all figured
out and that the universe’s mysteries are completely resolved or nearly so.

Newton invented his Laws of Motion, but the science of energy did not develop until more than a century after the steam
engine appeared. I have heard physicists question whether thermodynamics owed more to the steam engine than the
converse. The so-called laws of thermodynamics began their formulation with Sadi Carnot’s publication in 1824, which is
actually the third of the four laws of thermodynamics and is the earliest enunciation of the concept of entropy, and Carnot
built on his father’s work. A generation later, European scientists began taking his work further.815 The great works of
Maxwell, Faraday, and friends formed the foundation of today’s science of energy, and many basic terms of today’s
energy science were named after the pioneers of energy technology and theory, including Joule, Watt, Volt, Ampere,
Coulomb, Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, and Rankine.816

That phenomenon of placing human names on the natural world was like when European “explorers” placed their names
on Earth’s geographical features as they “discovered” them. It was a bid for immortality, although naming it after
themselves was frowned upon. It was usually an honor bestowed by others in the same enterprise. I was born and live in
Washington State, bounded by the Columbia River, in a nation with its capital city named Washington, the District of
Columbia. I once worked in Columbus, Ohio. It is impossible for Americans to avoid the influence of the USA’s two
greatest Founding Fathers, who were greedy, mass murdering thieves above all else (1, 2). Fairy tales have been told to
American schoolchildren for centuries about Washington, as well as about Columbus’s heroic feat, and there was even an
effort to canonize Columbus. American ideologists thereby turned darkness into light, and few Americans ever discover
any differently. In preparation for the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s feat, which had the highest event
attendance in world history to that time, American children were trained to worship a flag. The original gesture was copied
by Hitler and Mussolini, which led Americans to taking down their arms and putting their hands on their chests, and a
decade later, overtly religious terminology was added to the ritual. Those issues are highly relevant to this essay’s subject
matter, as such indoctrination is another form of limbic conditioning designed to bypass the neocortex and conscious
thought to control people, so that they either throw their lives away “defending” the tribe or nation, cheer as others do so,
or many other actions designed to serve those manipulating the symbols. Monkeys can be trained to salute flags or Der
Führer, as could be seen in that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but they cannot pass the mirror test, so “patriotism” is
no great mental feat. Mark Twain had perceptive observations about "patriotism."

The practice of scientists achieving immortality by having the natural world named after them was far from innocent, and
the battle for precedence and its attendant riches has sent science and technology awry in ways that few suspect. For
instance, in the 1850s a key scientific question was what life was and how it came to be. Louis Pasteur is credited with
winning the “spontaneous generation” debate, which is still taught in microbiology classes, but today’s microbiology
students are taught something that resembles a utilitarian fairy tale more than the truth. Pasteur’s life’s ambition was to
become rich and famous, which he achieved. In an action that foreshadowed the Nazi’s human experiments, Pasteur
advocated potentially fatal medical experiments on condemned prisoners. Pasteur was one of science history’s more
unlikeable figures, but that aside, he may have plagiarized a contemporary in his rush to fame and fortune. His alleged
plagiarisms may have marched biology off in the wrong direction in the 1850s, which “impossible” microscopes in the 20th
century revealed. Like Galileo’s problems with his peers, few scientists have bothered to see what those microscopes
have revealed, partly because their findings threaten the foundations of Western biology and medicine. That seeming
misdirection of mainstream science is a relatively innocent example of pure science conflicting with vested economic
interests and losing, when compared to what happened in energy theory and technology.

At the same time that the spontaneous generation debate was waning, the theory of evolution exploded onto the scene in
1859. That theory had no immediate economic impact, and scientists have pursued it relatively free of vested-interest
influence. Western science has progressed through several phases. Since those seminal works of 1543, early scientists
struggled with the Church’s suppression efforts as well as the attacks of their peers, but by the Enlightenment, science
became the epitome of the Age of Reason. Deductive reasoning and reductionism reigned, and many saw nature as a
big mechanism. The early 1800s witnessed the Romantic era, which impacted science and in which holistic approaches,
inductive reasoning, and emotions were appreciated. The late 1800s saw the rise of positivism, which placed all
authoritative knowledge within a framework of the senses (and their extensions) and logic. I have called it the rationalist-
materialist paradigm, and it is still highly influential in the ranks of establishment science. Then the 20th century’s relativity
and quantum theory led to something verging on the mystical, with that wave/particle duality of light paradox and the
observer effect, which mainstream scientists have yet to resolve.

Other paradoxes arose with industrialization. At least within industrial societies, the energy of fossil fuels elevated
everybody’s standard of living. Today’s poorest Americans enjoy amenities that the world’s richest people of three
centuries ago could not imagine. The USA’s poor are generally obese, which was unimaginable for preindustrial peoples;
poverty meant starvation in preindustrial societies. Chattel slavery ended with industrialization, and with strong backs and
quick hands no longer in such demand, women also became liberated, as they no longer “needed” to give birth to
exploitable farmhands and cannon fodder. Life expectancies rose and birth rates fell in the demographic transition.

Using fossil fuels saved trees but ruined soils with overeager plowing, as the steam tractor made its appearance in the
late 19th century. When Americans invaded and “settled” the Great Plains, the rich ice age soils were easily plowed, and
the Great Plains quickly lost about half of its topsoil (a greatly accelerated process when compared to Sumer and
subsequent preindustrial civilizations), and in the 1930s those methods took their toll in the Dust Bowl. For the second
time that I know of, my ancestors became environmental refugees due to their economic practices, and that is how my
father’s family came to Washington State.

With industrialization, peoples could export their environmental devastation onto other unfortunates. An early trick of
smokestack industries was making the smokestacks taller so that the pollution was “airmailed” to their neighbors. Japan
regenerated its forests by importing timber from raped forests abroad, mostly from the Asian mainland and North America.
Burning fossil fuels has also raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content, which has warmed Earth. It was not until
1859 that the radiation-absorbing properties of greenhouse gases were measured, and it took another half century before
scientists began to suspect that the fossil fuel era might be warming Earth’s atmosphere. A century later, there is still a
faux debate regarding the atmospheric-warming effects of burning fossil fuels, and I will briefly address the issue.

This essay has presented Earth’s many changing faces during its journey. Earth had molten beginnings, was battered by
planetesimals, and may have had an atmosphere like Venus’s. Later, continents appeared and life oxygenated the
atmosphere and covered those continents. Earth experienced swings from hothouse to icehouse conditions as
atmospheric gases dramatically changed, continents moved, and vast extinctions and proliferations of complex life played
out on land and sea. But the changes happened over timescales of millions and billions of years, not hundreds. No
climate scientist will deny that carbon dioxide traps infrared radiation and warms Earth’s atmosphere. The volcanism of
the Mesozoic Era vented enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to create 200 million years of Greenhouse Earth
conditions, when reptiles ruled Earth. Volcanism waned and carbon dioxide levels began declining around 150-to-100
mya. By 35 mya, they declined to less than 600 PPM and the Antarctic ice sheet began forming. Every paleoclimate
study I have seen places greenhouse gas (and primarily carbon dioxide) concentrations as the primary determinant of
global surface temperatures, after the Sun's radiation, but the Sun's output is considered to have been exceptionally
stable and has risen slowly over the eons. Methane plays a sporadic role, usually by accentuating the carbon dioxide with
a positive feedback effect that may have reached runaway conditions at times.

There have been other proximate causes of our current ice age, beginning with Antarctica becoming isolated at the South
Pole around 40 mya, and when the land bridge formed between the Americas around three mya the current ice age
began, and Milankovitch cycles are responsible for the "wobble" of advancing and retreating ice sheets in the Northern
Hemisphere during this ice age. There is always the battle of the hypotheses in scientific circles, but the nearly universal
consensus is that greenhouse gases, oceanic currents (with a land mass at the South Pole, and the landlocked North
Pole), and Milankovitch cycle dynamics, in that ranking of importance, have caused the current ice age. Until the rise of
humanity, the primary carbon dioxide input into the carbon cycle was via volcanism, which is related to tectonic plate
movements, and plate movements also affected oceanic currents.817 Scientists are continually surprised by the dynamics
and extent of Global Warming, and usually an unpleasant surprise, such as the findings published in 2014 which show
that the Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, and in unexpected ways, and the Greenland ice sheet is
also yielding alarming surprises.818

The only global warming “debate” is whether proximate causes will have local and oscillating effects as Earth warms, as
they already have, which is normal.819 I have seen no credible climate change “skepticism” that does not focus on the
local and temporary variations due to proximate causes. The “debate” is almost entirely a concoction of the hydrocarbon
lobby, scientists on its payroll, and the enabling media, so that they can justify business as usual. Climate scientists
without conflicts of interest are terrified by what is happening. We are not playing with a proximate cause, but the ultimate
cause of Earth’s surface temperature. Humanity is conducting a vast experiment with the only atmosphere and biosphere
that we have, and its outcome could spell the doom for billions of people, not to mention many other species, and the
catastrophe could manifest in a number of ways.
With industrialization’s rising living standards, poverty was less desperate and violence was proportionally reduced.
However, warfare, when it was waged, became far deadlier in absolute numbers. With the vast populations of
industrialized nations, armed forces of previously unimaginable size, mobility, and destructive capacity appeared. The
British first militarily used steamships to addict China to opium raised by captive Indian labor. The world’s first truly
industrial war was The Crimean War, which began in 1853. Steamships and railroads were tactically used in warfare for
the first time, and new inventions such as the telegraph were used. It was also the first war to be photographed. The
debt that Russia incurred for the war induced it to “sell” Alaska to the USA. As with the Louisiana Purchase and other
imperial transactions, the natives were never consulted about such “sales,” nor did they receive any proceeds. As I write
this in March 2014, Crimea is once again the focus of imperial wrangling, and the participants are nearly the same ones
as 160 years ago, and the only major addition was the USA (and the West dismantled the Ottoman Empire after World
War I), which had yet to reach global imperial status in 1853, although its first imperial foray into Asia began the same
year.

More than a half-million people died in the Crimean War. Several years later, the USA had the second industrialized war,
inflicted on itself, and its death toll was higher than Crimea’s. Those wars provided a preview of industrial warfare.
Although the death toll from industrialized nation warfare was proportionally less than in “primitive” civilizations, the
warfare itself was more horrific. Germans brought their factory expertise to genocide in World War II, and the USA
developed a bomb that vaporized entire cities. The industrial powers realized that humanity might not survive another war
between industrial powers, so all wars since then have been against largely defenseless peoples, which the USA has
excelled at.

The USA’s Civil War was not only a watershed event in American history, but it also became a pivotal event in world
history. It marked the transition from a largely rural nation, still engaged with subduing the natives and stealing their last
lands, to quickly becoming an industrial juggernaut that Earth had never before witnessed, with consequences both
salubrious and catastrophic. The final chapters of the USA's imperial history have yet to be written. With the Civil War,
the robber barons began their ascent to dominance. What I call phase two of the Industrial Revolution began, and the rise
of oil and electricity dramatically transformed industrial civilization.

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 from 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 Nevada'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 1900.820 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 1945.821
The USA has been a plutocracy since the very beginning. George Washington was the USA’s richest man when he
became president. He was a slave-owning land baron whose armies that he commanded made him richer. John Jay was
the USA’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and strongly believed that those who owned 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.822 Fear 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, 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.823 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 that 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 21st 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 2015, 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 means 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. Psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their
affliction is advantageous in organizations in which amassing wealth and power are primary 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 2015. People like them do not have consciences.

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 an exercise 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 that 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 (or electro-gravity) 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 protects 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. Howard Taft, 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, as politicians were routinely bought by robber barons.824

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. Edison's team engaged in brute force experimentation
with thousands of filaments before they hit on something that worked in 1879. Edison may have suggested 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 declared 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 back then was that resistance in electric lines quickly saps
low-voltage 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
back then (it can today). 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 became a
household name today while Tesla’s name languished 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 animals
electrocuted in demonstrations of the hazards of alternating current, including dogs and horses. 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.825 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” by proposing free energy for everybody that nobody could meter.826 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.827 Tesla also originated an idea for a “death
ray” weapon and other inventions that have cast him as an enigmatic figure.828 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.829 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, although humans induced the electron flow, unlike the
hydrological cycle. 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 21st 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 innate 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 from 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.830 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.831 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.832 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 19th 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, in which 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 19th 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 21st 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 Iraq-Iran 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 Baptist, and in 1887 he began to donate to the Baptist University of Chicago.833 The University of
Chicago subsequently became the ideological headquarters of economics. By the 1870s, the science of energy had
developed greatly from the previous century, when fire was thought to be caused by phlogiston, but economics entered its
neoclassical phase from which it has yet to emerge. It competed with Keynesian economics for much of the 20th century,
and neoclassical economics reached its triumphant phase with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Chicago School
economists were the dominant Nobel Laureates in the early 1990s, but the school has recently been receiving “credit” for
the economic collapses in the first decade of the 21st century.

Neoclassical economics focuses on how markets optimize economic activity, and Milton Friedman became the guru of
neoclassical economics with his monetarist thought, which began its rise in the 1950s. Friedman picked up his Nobel
Prize in 1976, three years after Henry Kissinger won his Peace Prize, and Friedman even had a prize named after him by
an arch-conservative organization. Classical economists carefully obscured the true nature of “primitive accumulation”
that Marx eventually pointed out, and removed the focus from the real world of how wealth is created and placed it onto
theories of markets and exchange, but neoclassical economists had far less excuse to ignore the real world and new
scientific findings. They viewed economic activity as a purely social phenomenon. Energy and other resources were
simply assumed as an economic input only limited by market forces. That nonsensical style of analysis reached its
apogee with economists such as Julian Simon and his stable of corporately owned “scientists,” and is still dominant today
and called neoliberalism. The “free market” can solve all of humanity’s problems, according to neoliberal doctrine.
Unfortunately, there are no free markets and they probably never existed. Neoclassical economists tried to ape physicists
by using differential calculus in their analytics, but they were mimicking the style, not the process, of science.834 The
obsession with math was an aspect of mainstream science that also helped send it awry. In order to use calculus and
other sophisticated analytic schemes, economists have to make numerous untested assumptions about the real world,
which generally made the analyses worthless.835 In dealing with the real world, Einstein said that the more elegant and
beautiful the math used to describe a theory, the more likely that the theory was wrong.

As Adam Smith’s invisible hand, fear, became an assumption of classical economics, neoclassical economists assumed
greed in their supply and demand curves. Greed and fear are thereby foundational principles in today’s economic theory,
and greed is literally cheered on Wall Street as a salubrious and critical aspect of capitalism. How can an ideology that
elevates, even celebrates, greed and fear be considered beneficial? The obsession with prices and money has also
promoted an egocentric view of economic reality. Whenever people think of economics today, they generally only think in
terms of money, as that is the medium of exchange by which individuals currently acquire the food, goods, and services
that make their modern lives possible. Consequently, the real economy, which runs on matter and energy, not money,
becomes demoted and even ignored while the magic of markets and money are worshipped. The financial economy is
not real, but is an elaborate accounting fiction subject to great manipulation. Theorists such as Marx put money in its
proper place, as only accounting. Money-based economics is egocentric, in which the focus is on money and greed and
everybody’s primary question is “What is in it for me?” That view is also disconnected from the real world.

Many assumptions of neoclassical economics have been convincingly falsified by the physical, biological, and social
sciences. Some of those assumptions are that people are independently minded rational actors who do not look to what
others do (i.e., humans are not herd animals), that the economy can be divorced from the ecosystem that supports it, that
money can substitute for anything, and that economic production can be described without referencing physical work.
Neoclassical economics ignores the fact that entropy saps the efficiency of any system, economic or otherwise. Unlike a
genuine science, almost no branches of today’s economics, particularly neoclassical economics, base their theories on
hypotheses that can be tested and falsified. Today’s mainstream economics resembles a faith more than a science.836

In 2003, when I began studying Peak Oil literature, the disdain with which scientists held economists was evident, and
they articulated the difficulties that I had with mainstream economics since my business school days. A textbook
published in 2011 by an economist and ecologist analyzed the disconnection between economists and the real world, and
the way that all economic schools have ignored energy was, in the opinion of the authors, their most grievous error.837 I
do not take overarching conspiracy theories very seriously, as they do not adequately explain how most people act.
People blindly and uncaringly performing their jobs are how most of the FE suppression that I survived was inflicted.
Structural features, candidly admitted by some as they bludgeoned us, explain most activity. However, that did not mean
that those at the top did not know what they were doing, or even those further down the command chain, and my life’s
turning point was when a public official revealed his true motivation. Organized suppression is one part conspiratorial and
nine parts or more structural, in my experience. Those doing most of the dirty work really do not know whose interests
they serve or even if they are abetting evil, and most do not even care much as long as it pays well, which was my
journey’s primary lesson.

The chief medical racketeer of the mid-20th century, Morris Fishbein, actively promoted the single greatest cause of
cancer while trying to monopolize cancer cures. Did his right and left hands not know of each other? History’s greatest
energy mogul, John D. Rockefeller, established a world-leading school that ignored energy and obsessively focused on
money and exchange as the linchpin of economic activity. Could that have merely been a coincidence? Or were we
seeing a new level of the game of elite obfuscation in which the very foundation of life on Earth and all economic activity
was made invisible in the day’s dominant economic ideology? Unfortunately, I have even seen “radical” economists
completely ignore energy, as they were trapped within a paradigm from the 18th century. That dismissal of energy and the
real world in economic theory has been defended to this day with “fallacious arguments and lies.”838 When scientists and
academics have engaged in a multidisciplinary examination of today’s economics, they are astounded at how primitive it
is and how it used the “laws of physics” as they were understood in the 19th century before the concept of entropy was
introduced.839 Modern economics has used an obsolete framework for two centuries, and its obvious conflicts of interest
need to be considered when assessing why it became that way and has remained there.

A key question for any investigation into skullduggery is cui bono, or “who benefits?” Without any significant exception
that I know of, academic and corporate institutions always created ideologies and analyses that benefitted the institution’s
patrons. Why would it be any different? That is why “corporate philanthropy” is an oxymoron, and virtually all robber
baron “philanthropy” had zero humanitarian impulse behind it. How could the most ingeniously ruthless men of their
generation suddenly grow big hearts? I see the same kind of “humanitarian” impulses today with billionaire
philanthropists. When my former partner was riding high and in the spotlight before the sledgehammers came down (and
they always eventually did), billionaires swarmed him, with many self-professed “philanthropists” in their ranks; none ever
helped, and they usually tried to wreck or hijack the effort.

The institutional control created by robber barons became ubiquitous. In the 20th century’s first decade, Rockefeller and
Carnegie funded a 1910 report that began to take the practice of Western medicine in new directions, and alternative
approaches were wiped out as the “philanthropists” joined forces with rising medical racketeers. Huge drug empires then
began their climb, after getting their start in the Civil War by providing mercury “medicine” to the troops, and industrial
“medicine” made its appearance. Cancer treatment became an “attack-the-tumor” racket in the late 19th century when
sterile surgery was developed, soon followed by radiation and then chemical attacks, which derived from chemical warfare
experiments in World War II. Just as evolution’s course was always contingent on previous developments, where novel
fundamental developmental paths became infeasible, once the foundation of Western medicine was created by robber
baron “philanthropists,” it influenced all future development, not because it was the ideal approach, but because the
“approved” approaches grew from within the paradigm and anything outside it was marginalized or wiped out. One of the
USA’s Founding Fathers specifically warned against such a racket forming. Those foundational assumptions are taught
to all students on their first day of class and they are not challenged from that day forward and regurgitated as tautologies
for the rest of the adherents’ lives. The ideological momentum of such indoctrination goes deeply, right into the limbic
system. That was exactly what Brian O’Leary encountered when he tried interesting his peers in FE. I have called it
being blinded by the paradigm. Scientists may be the most blinded of all groups to the reality and potential of FE
technology, and they have made the most sophisticated arguments to support their denial. Fuller believed that their
naïveté and blindness was carefully cultivated by the elite.

American nationalism reached orgiastic dimensions by 1890. The Columbian Exhibition, held in 1893, was powered with
Tesla’s alternating current and American “progress” seemed limitless. At that time, other imperial aspirants were
feverishly trying to catch up. The USA forced Japan into the international arena in order to exploit it, and
Germany/Prussia rose in the late 19th century. Japan kept the West out for centuries, until Perry’s “diplomatic” invasion of
1853, and Japanese elites could easily see what colonization would mean to Japan, with Bengal and other colonized
regions not far away. Japan avoided India’s and China’s fates by a steep ascent to industrialization, transitioning from a
feudal land where the sword and musket prevailed to winning a war with China in 1894 and beating Russia in 1905. After
Napoleon inflicted the Enlightenment onto Germany, it also began playing catch-up with the West. Unfortunately for
Germany and Japan, the UK, France, Russia, and the USA had already laid claim to most of the world. Japan, an island
nation like the UK with even fewer natural resources, began to look at the Asian mainland as the USA looked at North
America: theirs for the taking under a “Manifest Destiny” ideology.840 Germany had plenty of coal but few other industrial
resources, and it developed a similar “lebensraum” ideology toward Eastern Europe, and Hitler emulated the USA’s Indian
reservation system with his concentration camps, and he admired the “efficient” methods of genocide that the USA used
on its natives.841 When Hitler came to power, Germany had to buy 33 of 35 essential industrial materials on the world
market, while the USA, the UK, and France could largely obtain them by plundering their colonies or conquered lands in
their contiguous polities.842 Germany could not expand without encroaching on another empire.843 The Western
Hemisphere was long ago declared off-limits by the USA, and the UK, France, and Russia controlled nearly everything
else, so there was little opportunity for Germany or Japan to garner any plunder. Germany had to content itself with
scraps from the Scramble for Africa, and both imperial newcomers enthusiastically raped China during the Boxer
Rebellion, along with the other imperial powers. But their opportunities were limited in a colonized Earth, and that, far
more than any other reason, led to the World Wars.

In 1910, humanity’s greatest balance-of-payment disparity was between the UK and India, as India provided 60 million
pounds to the UK, which was more than matched by British Commonwealth payments to the USA of about 80 million
pounds.844 No other nation had a notable impact on international monetary exchanges. The single most telling statistic of
the British pillage of India is that as the UK became Earth’s richest nation during its colonial heyday as it led the Industrial
Revolution, per capita income in India did not increase between 1757 and 1947, and its excess death toll was
awesome.845 All imperial and colonial efforts were simply plunder operations. The USA engaged in neocolonialism early
on, which was colonialism in everything but the name. The USA’s flag does not fly over Iraq today, but everybody knows
who calls the shots. Once in a great while, even American soldiers figured out the real game and named it, but they were
always marginalized or silenced.

By the 1850s, Germany was the heart of laboratory science, and seminal discoveries and achievements came from
German labs. As agriculture became industrialized, two nutrients were identified as key limiting resources as per Liebig’s
Law: phosphorous and nitrogen. Until 1909, humanity’s source of nitrogen for agriculture was manure. Guano was even
the main source of nitrate for gunpowder when World War I began in 1914. After a century of failure by many eminent
chemists, in 1909 Fritz Haber made one of history’s most momentous breakthroughs when he discovered a way to fix
nitrogen from the atmosphere and make ammonia. That energy-intensive process is responsible for half of humanity’s
food supply today. It is also partly responsible for a great deal of water pollution, dead zones in the oceans, and
proliferation of weaponry. Haber has also been called the father of chemical warfare, as he was instrumental in
developing the poison gases used in World War I, but he nevertheless won his Nobel Prize in 1918 for his nitrogen
breakthrough. Phosphorus, which forms the coin of energy in all life on Earth, is the sole element that humanity has not
found a substitute for in industrial civilization. Energy makes nitrogen and other elements more available or allows for
substitution, while phosphorous must be mined or recycled.846 German chemical wizardry continued after World War I,
and Germany was the center of science in the early 20th century. Relativity and quantum theory, the two pillars of today’s
physics, were developed in Germanic nations, and Einstein, Planck, Lorentz, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and Bohr
dominated physics in the early 20th century, with relatively minor contributions from American, British, and French
scientists. From the first Nobel prizes awarded in 1901 to the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933, more than a third of the
awards in physics and chemistry went to Germans, and if the Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, Danish, and Swedish laureates are
added, they amount to well more than half, particularly for their theoretical work.

World-class geniuses such as Einstein and von Neumann were Ashkenazi Jews, which is an ethnic group with 10 times
the Nobel Prizes that their proportion of the USA’s population would suggest. To take a recent example, in the three-year
period ended in 2013 (the most recent prizes awarded when I drafted this chapter), four of the seven physics and five of
the six chemistry Nobel laureates were Ashkenazi Jews, and they amount to far less than 1% of the world’s population. A
recent controversy surrounds why they have such high achievement, which was ignited by a 2005 paper that argued that
Ashkenazi Jews have exceptionally high verbal and mathematical skills as a genetic effect due to their insular mating
habits and intellectually demanding professions in finance and business for most of a millennium in Eastern Europe.847
The controversy will not end soon, but the genetic and biological aspects of what is called “intelligence” are very real, but
the “nurture” aspect of mental achievement is also well-founded. If the hypothesis about Ashkenazi Jews is valid, it
means that nurture became nature, and helps support the idea that, as a species, we become what we do.

Also evident with those geniuses and their technical and theoretical achievements was predominantly using them in what
Fuller called humanity’s “suicidal fixity” on weaponry. The first practical application of E = MC2 was making the most
destructive weapons ever devised. Einstein said that the greatest mistake of his life was urging the USA to develop
nuclear weapons before Germany did. The chemical prowess of German scientists was prominent in both World Wars,
and World War II perhaps even more notoriously; Zyklon-B was used in the Nazis’ death factories, and they used
industrial methods for genocide. Sarin was supposed to replace Zyklon-B in the gas chambers, but the war ended before
the Germans could deploy it. Sarin was developed at Earth's largest chemical company: IG Farben. When Hitler came to
power in 1933, American industrialists were solidly behind Hitler. In his Mein Kampf, Hitler openly acknowledged his debt
to Henry Ford. Hitler later said that he learned everything he knew about Jews from Ford, and Ford received an award
from Germany in 1938. Ford's Model T inspired Hitler's Volkswagen. The Rockefellers sent their PR wizard, Ivy Lee, to
Germany in 1934 to burnish Farben’s and the Third Reich’s images.848 I have heard via World War II participants about
the demoralization that American soldiers experienced when they captured German trucks and about a third were Fords.
The Rockefellers’ relationship to the Third Reich was so cozy that they nearly faced charges of treason under the Trading
with the Enemy Act, and apparently kept working with Hitler’s regime clear until the end of World War II. Standard Oil
escaped asset seizure, but the Bush family’s company did not, when Prescott Bush (George H.W.’s father and George
W.’s grandfather), was a director of a company that was seized for its support of the Third Reich while it was at war with
the USA. The Bush political dynasty got its start as sycophants and political fixers for robber baron interests. In my
circles, it is acknowledged that David Rockefeller was George H.W.’s mentor. I cannot publicly disclose my connections,
but I have more than one single degree of separation from key players in that community; the relationships between
members of Europe’s and America’s oligarchies can seem incestuous. Many conspiracy theories surrounding them are
understandable and likely significantly true. However, the GCs have merely taken elite games as old as civilization to
high levels of reach and sophistication. The power for change is in our hands, not theirs, but not while we are easily
manipulated.

Examining the belligerents in World War II makes the childish nature of imperial peoples evident. Going back to the
English civil wars, when Western states began losing their ability to rule by violence, elites began developing the science
of controlling what people thought. Ideological indoctrination to accept elite rule is as old as civilization, but with the rise of
science and industry, indoctrination became scientific. By the early 20th century, people such as Bernays and Lee boldly
advocated their strategies for molding the public’s mind; terms such as “the manufacture of consent” and “necessary
illusions” were openly used by such pioneers. The basic premise was that the masses were too stupid to know what was
good for them, so their collective mind needed molding by professional managers working on behalf of the “public good.”
In reality, it was manipulation of the masses for elite benefit. Sell industrial waste to the public as medicine, make
attacking the body the only path to healing, turn mass-murdering thieves into national heroes, portray a deadly addictive
substance as a badge of freedom while medical authorities promote the same deadly substance, etc., and it all worked
brilliantly. I have watched people choose certain death over questioning their indoctrination. While drafting this chapter, I
attended the funeral of a friend who died of a horrific cancer that quickly kills the patients (life expectancy of about a year
after diagnosis when using mainstream treatments). I learned long ago that disease patients almost never want to hear
about alternatives, so I rarely volunteer the information. However, that friend knew that I was familiar with alternatives and
even asked me the last time we met what I would have done. I replied with treatments which have cured that particular
cancer, and my friend regarded my information with a kind of amused detachment, continued the orthodox treatments,
and died six months later.

Because the Soviet Union was created through violent revolution that took years to complete, like a pristine state, its new
elites continually vied for legitimacy and resorted to extreme violence to consolidate their rule. When dictators can rule by
violence, they do not need to manufacture consent. The other belligerents in World War II were more mature states, and
the primary ones were: Germany, the UK, the USA, and Japan. Each one had nationalist ideologies that resembled fairy
tales. The UK had royalty worship and racist imperial ideology, the USA had an even more bizarre flag worship and
Founding Father stories that were literally fables. Japan had a religion that elevated its emperor above the Creator in the
eyes of some of its theologians, and combined it with a feudal warrior code. Hitler tried to recapture a golden age that
never was, as he revived Roman iconography and staged grandiose mass rituals such as the Nuremberg Rallies, which
resembled the USA’s Democratic and Republican presidential conventions. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”
stunt would have been approved by Hitler, and Bush's fighter jock landing on the aircraft carrier was eerily reminiscent of
how Hitler arrived at the infamous Nuremburg Rally of 1934. Those national ideologies were all based on kindergarten-
level indoctrination, the Judeo-Christian religions were all based on myths, and the dominant economic ideology was a
fake science that dismissed reality in favor of heroic tales of efficiency. Little resembling clear adult thought could be
found in those dominant ideologies.

The racist ideology that Hitler’s regime promoted was only a slightly more extreme version of what other imperial aspirants
already had, and Hitler learned it from one of the USA’s greatest industrialists and he modeled his genocidal plans for
Eastern Europe after what the English and Americans did to the American Indian. Hitler’s ideological crime was using
racist ideology to make chosen white people inferior. All such ideologies appealed to people’s egos as they elevated their
in-group at the expense of others and, with their superiority then self-evident, they could commit their awesome crimes
with clear consciences, free of cognitive dissonance.

In a striking similarity to the dual-use purposes of evolutionary innovations, many human traits are vestiges of our history
but have yet to disappear, but various social managers have used them to exploit the masses. For instance, the human
taste for fatty and sweet foods has a very long pedigree and developed because those were the most energy-rich foods
that existed. But the incredibly high sugar and fat content of processed food vended by Western agribusiness companies
plays to those biological proclivities in the name of profit. Diets based on such foods are disastrous for human health, and
industrialized peoples, led by the USA, are the fattest of the entire human journey. Similarly, in-group "loyalty" (to fight the
out-group) is a pre-sentient behavior that arose to ensure survival. Ever since the first religions, a goal of social managers
has been forming that in-group cohesion to battle the out-group. There is not much sentient about it. As the Stanford
prison experiment and other events have made clear, people can be arbitrarily split along almost any lines and form an in-
group and out-group, and the out-group will then be treated terribly.849 Darwin's "from the war of nature" comes "higher
animals" conclusion in his Origin of Species is mirrored in the work of Marx and Hitler, in that they believed that human
"progress" was produced by one social group violently prevailing over another. Hitler avidly read Marx, and may be how
he received his "revolutionary" ideas.850
The militaries of World War II’s warring nations all committed heinous atrocities, but no domestic presses reported on their
troops’ atrocities. Everybody was a cheerleader, but fabricating atrocity stories about the other side was typical. One
reason why few believed early stories about the Jewish Holocaust as it was happening was that the British media
fabricated similar stories about Germans in World War I, so many thought that it was just more British propaganda. Hitler
realized that the British won the propaganda war in World War I and he was determined that Germany would win the next
war of lies. Goebbels studied the work of Bernays and other mind-control specialists to create the Third Reich’s message
to its masses. Nazi and communist propaganda was relatively clumsy, in ways far behind the English and American art
forms. Since the 1980s, I have seen Soviet and Chinese immigrants to the USA asked what the difference was between
communist indoctrination systems and the Western media and educational institutions, and the answer was
approximately: “In my homeland, everybody knew that they were being lied to, but Americans usually believe the lies that
they are fed.”

Above all else, the Industrial Revolution rode on the energy of hydrocarbon fuels. A very strong American, hauling water,
can perform about one kilowatt-hour of work in a 10-hour day, and a typical American about half that. An electric pump
could do the same work for less than 1/2000th of the worker’s wage cost.851 Not only could the Industrial Revolution’s
energy technologies work far more cheaply than humans could, they could perform feats far beyond what muscle power
could achieve. A slave-borne palanquin never attained a speed of 100 KPH, nor could it fly or travel to the moon. The
energy of fossil fuels allowed for previously unimaginable feats of strength and speed, and materials and machines were
created that would have seemed magical to preindustrial peoples such as plastics and electronic equipment. The
relationship between energy use and economic output, measured in Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”), is nearly linear,
and half of GDP changes are correlated with oil use. The relationship between GDP and energy consumption in Japan is
a typical example, as shown below. The near-linear relationship is primarily due to energy-driven machines performing
work; market prices reflect the work used in the production of goods and services. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In 2013, average Americans used about 80 times the energy that was provided by their diets, which has been called
having 80 energy slaves, but that understates the reality.852 A barrel of oil provides about one year of the calories needed
to fuel a human body, but if that oil were used to power machines, it would perform more than ten man-years of work,
often doing work that humans could not perform in any case, such as propelling an automobile. Each American really has
several hundred energy slaves working for him/her, which is why the average American lives a richer lifestyle than Earth’s
richest human of two centuries ago. In 2013, the energy in the oil wrested from Earth’s crust contained enough energy to
power several hundred billion energy slaves. Add in the other energy resources, and industrialized humanity rode on the
backs of about one trillion energy slaves.853 In today's industrialized nations, humans perform a tiny fraction of one
percent of the actual work done; energy-powered machines perform more than 99.9% of it. In contrast, the reproduction
of intelligence is in its infancy. In 2012, humanity's 500 most powerful supercomputers achieved the combined computing
power of three human brains.854 The day that each human has even one "mind slave" is a distant future event.

Fuller said that if oil were priced by the benefit that humans received, every barrel should cost $1 million. But because it
takes relatively little human effort to obtain oil, it sells for only about $100 per barrel today (and $50 in early 2015, as
another easy money bubble is collapsing). Similarly, the Sun’s energy powers the hydrological cycle, without which there
would not be land-based life. If humans had to desalinate water instead of rely on the Sun for the energy to provide fresh
water, and humanity did not have an energy source such as fossil fuels, humans would quickly go extinct. But because
nature provides the water that humans use and nobody pays for it (a concept that is eroding, as corporations are busy
privatizing humanity’s water supplies), neoclassical economists ignore the critical economic benefits provided by the
hydrological cycle.855 Homogenizing everything with market prices and then creating differential calculus analytics is not
helpful for understanding how the world really works. Neoclassical economists have tried to divorce energy consumption
from economic production, but such analyses only have seeming validity if the way that the world actually works is
ignored. American food production takes nearly 20% of the USA’s energy use, and more than 10 calories of fossil fuels
are burned to provide every calorie of food eaten.856 The concept of diminishing returns and energy consumption applies
to national economies. Poorer nations receive a relatively large benefit for incremental energy use, while the
industrialized nations do not get as great a proportional increase.857 But statistics such as worker productivity in the USA
had a tight linear relationship with energy use for 80 years, from 1905 to 1984, when the Reagan administration ceased
collecting the data.858

In very real terms, economic production relies on work performed, and the scientific definition of work is what economic
work is rooted in. Moving an automobile or airplane requires work. Moving water requires work, as does running a
household appliance or computer. Electricity can power a machine or a light. Energy consumption causes work to be
performed, and that is why energy consumption and GDP have that tight relationship. Neoclassical economists, with their
supply and demand curves and other social/monetary constructs generally disregard that relationship, as they abandoned
the real world for social theories, which is why scientists do not have much respect for them. Those all-too-rare
economists challenging neoclassical economics from a scientific perspective focus on energy above all else, and the labor
and technological capital (real capital, not the accounting claim on it that capitalists have) that use that energy to turn
material resources into useful products and services. They focus on the real economy and actual human benefit, in what I
call the anthropocentric economy.

American Indians were astounded by the crazed European attitude, as gold rushes, genocide, and deforestation swept
across their lands. The Spanish obsession with gold was evident as early as the second day of Columbus’s “discovery” of
the Western Hemisphere. When the invaders finally found a civilization with ample gold a generation later, the Aztecs
described the Spaniards in their throes of gold lust as “monkeys” and “pigs.”859 In light of the awesome cruelties
subsequently inflicted on the natives, the priest Las Casas summarized the Spanish attitude with:

“I say that they do not want to kill them directly, from the hate they bear them; they kill them because they want to be rich
and have much gold, which is their whole aim, through the toil and sweat of the afflicted and unhappy.” 860

That century-long gold rush bankrupted Spain. Recently, Canadian Indians stated:

“Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your
people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is
polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you
can’t eat money.”861

At this juncture, I will ask my readers to perform an exercise that I first saw described by Peak Oil advocate Richard
Heinberg, which is to lay aside data and graphs and just think about how energy makes everything in our daily lives
possible. Think about your food, water, mode of transportation, and materials that comprise your home and possessions,
and think of the role that energy played in providing them. Think about the energy that you use each day in powering your
home and in your transportation, even if it is just walking. Then imagine running out of energy. When you flipped on a
light switch, nothing happened. When you turned on the tap, no water came out. Your refrigerator stopped working, food
deliveries to your community ceased, and no electricity, oil, gas, coal, or even wind or water power was available.
Everything in your life would come to a sudden halt. When people have tried to demote energy below spirituality, social
relations, or even made it irrelevant to economics, my question is for them to see what they can forego the longest:
prayer/meditation, social interaction, sex, or energy. The fossil fuels burned to power industrial civilization provide several
hundred energy slaves for each American and no less than hundreds per person in every industrialized nation. All that
those energy-leveraged humans do is direct the energy, like holding the reins of a gigantic beast that each person rides
each day. Airline pilots half-joke that they begin their workday by strapping jet airliners to their waists. Without that
energy to direct in the myriad ways that industrialized humans use it, modern civilization would come to an abrupt end.

Another important energy concept is efficiency. For the hunter-gatherers who cooked food over the campfire, the energy
was used with an efficiency of less than 5% (the energy that benefited the user, such as cooking the food, warming the
air, providing light, etc.). When humans began using hearths as they became more sedentary, their energy efficiency
increased. As humans built dwellings and fireplaces, energy efficiency increased, and today, energy efficiency in
advanced industrialized civilization reaches more than 35%. As humans kept increasing their gross energy input and the
efficiency in using the energy, the energy surplus increased. Just as with all life forms, an increased energy surplus
meant an easier life and a better chance of survival.862 In recent years, while the USA’s GDP-per-capita has risen, its
energy-consumption-per-capita has been stagnant since the 1970s. Some have argued that it shows how much more
efficient the USA’s economy has become, but it is more likely related to the USA’s de-industrialization, as heavy industry
has moved to low-wage nations with weak environmental laws.863 The USA imports more finished goods in which the
energy for mining and manufacturing them was used in other nations, like the imperial subsidy that the British received
from their colonies, but far more pronounced when the USA is receiving finished industrial goods and not raw materials,
as the British received from India. In generating energy, so-called technological societies have nearly the same energy
efficiency as advanced industrial ones, largely due to the entropy created by power generation.

The rise in energy use, particularly fossil fuel use, has been highly dramatic during the Industrial Revolution. Today’s
global hydrocarbon use has increased 800-fold since 1750, and 12-fold during the 20th century, and about 90% of the 20th
century’s increase happened after World War II.864 The seven billion barrels of oil burned by the entire world during World
War II is equal to what the USA burned in 2010.865 When the English began to invade North America, they stumbled into
Earth’s richest continent. An English “settler” in North America in 1670 consumed as much energy as a person today
does in Uruguay and more than in about half of today’s nations. Between 1880 and 1920, American energy consumption
per capita doubled, and between World War II and 1970 it nearly doubled again, as Americans became the richest and
most powerful people in world history.
Going back to the beginnings of the first mercantilist powers and their corporations to how the first capitalists gained their
“capital” violently to the rise of the robber barons, what Marx called separating the workers from the means of production
had to be performed first so that the ownership class could form. With the workers put in their place, then the “owners”
could create instruments of ownership and trade them. Thus began stock markets. Similar to how economics became
divorced from the real world, when stock markets formed, owners became divorced from operations. In corporate
America, for instance, there are theoretical governance mechanisms such as boards of directors and company officers
that answer to the shareholders, but the relationship is often more theoretical than actual, and “cooking the books” to
make management look good and inflate the stock price is as old as corporations. Dealing with that aspect of
corporations is largely what I do to make a living. I have lived through several major financial scandals in my career, and
they are nowhere near finished.

With that separation from physical reality, speculation frenzies have been major aspects of how stock markets operate.
The first bout of market insanity was the Dutch tulip mania in the 1630s. The slave-trade frenzy that wiped out Isaac
Newton's fortune was less than a century later and was a stock speculation issue. The boom/bust capitalist economy was
born, in which greed and fear prevailed. The USA has devolved into the serial bubble economy as its empire has
declined, and until the crises of the early 21st century, the USA’s previous market mania was in the 1920s. Back then,
companies with nothing more than “blue sky” behind them sold stock to the public. It was essentially no different from the
Spanish gold rush that Columbus began. Those orgies of greed were usually associated with some new product, market,
or a financial sleight of hand to finance them. The 1920s bubble was sandwiched between World War I and its sequel,
and a depression led to the rise of fascism and the second war. American industrialists warmly embraced fascism, and
there was even a plotted White House coup about when Hitler came to power, backed by leading industrialists and
politicians who tried to entice America’s greatest war hero into becoming their front man.

Hitler tried to avoid Germany’s mistakes of World War I, but his biggest mistake was the same one that Napoleon made in
the previous century: invading Russia. History’s greatest battles were fought between the German and Soviet armies and
their brutality was unmatched, which is saying something. The Jewish Holocaust was a side-effect of the German
invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Jews and Gypsies were merely the first on Hitler’s list of
“subhuman” races to be cleared for German “settlement” of Eastern Europe under his lebensraum program. The death
toll of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, from purely exterminatory campaigns, is estimated to
be between 15 and 20 million people.866 The Soviet “intelligence” files that the USA built the CIA on were residue from
the murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. Hiring death camp Nazis, many of whom were actually involved with
human experiments, became a common American activity after World War II. Death camp Nazis became space race
heroes, nuclear industry propagandists, and stars of Disney TV shows for children, and said stars also wrote children’s
books. Mind control programs such as MKUltra came from those death camp Nazis that the USA “rehabilitated” into
heroes. You could not make this up if you tried. From what I have been privy to, those programs and Nazis exposed by
declassified documents comprise only the tip of the iceberg, and the worst activities happened in private settings or
federal operations that will never be declassified. I have encountered that situation repeatedly on my journey, not only
from my studies, but hearing about the operations firsthand or secondhand. I never pursued such testimonies, but people
had a need to tell me about them and, as previously stated, I do not like knowing many names, places, and dates, and I
will take most of them to my grave with me. It simply comes with the territory, although I have revealed some of the more
personally and globally relevant anecdotes while keeping identities private, usually because the participants/victims fear
reprisals, even extending to their families. Brian O’Leary took his story of surviving a murder attempt to his grave (more
details are here). He never publicly disclosed the details and only alluded to it in a very general way. That was a typical
response.

The USA finished off humanity’s greatest war by dropping history’s most destructive weapons on cities, and then lied to
the jubilant American people about whom it was dropped on and why. In the wake of dropping nuclear weapons on
women and children, the USA had unprecedented global hegemony, controlled both sides of both major oceans, and
possessed half of the world’s wealth and industrial capacity. Then began the postwar boom, which was an era of
economic prosperity never seen before or since, and I had the good fortune to be born in the midst of it. Above all else, it
was an economic event born of cheap energy and has been called the Golden Age of American Capitalism. When energy
ceased being cheap in the 1970s, the boom ended and the long decline set in, not just for the USA, but the world in
general, which is the next chapter's subject.

The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization
Chapter summary:
 Demographic catastrophes that Europe inflicted on humanity
 Industrial Revolution's demographic transition
  Advantages of cities
 Workforce of preindustrial civilization
 Disadvantages of cities
 Robber baron fake philanthropy goes global
 Structural analysis
 Birth of the USA's security state
 Postwar boom
 John Kennedy, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Kennedy's assassination
 Energy concepts for understanding economies
 Peak Oil
 Energy Return on Investment ("EROI")
 Minimum EROI to sustain civilization
 Low energy availability and low EROIs of traditional alternative energy
 The USA's declining energy production and standard of living
 Why the world's poor are poor
 Sixth Mass Extinction
 Which catastrophe happens first?

Europe’s conquest of Earth set numerous demographic trends in motion, some of which were new in the human journey.
Of the many calamities that humanity has inflicted onto its fellows, the greatest proportional one was when our distant
ancestors, themselves descendants of the founder group that left Africa, drove all other human species to extinction,
probably violently. Also, all of the largest megafauna on three continents that had never before encountered humans
were driven to extinction soon after humans arrived. The next genocide of such proportion was 50 thousand years later
with Europe’s conquest and “settling” of the Western Hemisphere and Australia. The result of Europe’s exploitation of
Africa, including the transatlantic slave trade and the rubber boom’s “philanthropic” genocide, is proportionally also one of
the greatest disasters in the human journey. The Arab slave trade also deserves “credit”: although it was not as intense
as Europe’s rape of Africa, it lasted for longer and ultimately tallied more victims. Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and
Australia are all relatively underpopulated compared to Eurasia today, largely due to those holocausts primarily inflicted by
European peoples. The West’s immense debt to the rest of humanity may never be repaid. The West rarely even
acknowledges it. Also, peoples in Asia suffered demographic catastrophes as a result of Europe’s conquest, and
Bengal’s rape is a seminal instance. Asia’s proportion of the world’s population declined relative to Europe’s between
1750 and 1900 as it suffered under Europe's lash.867 India’s excess deaths under British hegemony have been estimated
at nearly two billion.868

But Europe received a “boost” by exploiting humanity and Earth, and key trends emerged that may see the West begin to
repay its debt. One trend appearing with the Industrial Revolution is called the demographic transition. Preindustrial
societies had high birth and death rates, and as industrialization progressed, several changes happened, which included:

1. Improvements in sanitation and nutrition reduced death rates, and particularly infant mortality;
2. Machines made human labor less valuable, particularly unskilled labor, which led to these consequences:
a. Slavery became economically obsolete;
b. Children were no longer net assets to parents but net liabilities, so women gave birth to fewer children;
c. Women began to receive education, and their “opportunities” were no longer confined to producing
exploitable children.

The result was that industrialized societies had educated populations with long life expectancies and low infant mortality,
women’s status was higher than ever before, and slavery was seen as a barbaric relic of primitive times.

For the initial demographic transition of industrialization, the mortality decline preceded the fertility decline by about a
century, and mortality decline preceding fertility decline has been a universal feature of subsequent transitions.869
Although slavery’s end is not considered part of the demographic transition, the demographic transition and slavery’s end
had the same ultimate cause: the rising standard of living of industrialized lifestyles that made exploitation of children,
women, and slaves uneconomical. Also, as people became more affluent, they developed new levels of social
conscience.

Few would argue that industrialized peoples live in the best of all possible worlds, but industrialization triggered those
changes, and few would say that they did not benefit humanity. In very real terms, an increase in energy use was an
increase in freedom, as it provided choices either previously unimaginable or unavailable to non-elites. All non-
industrialized peoples long to enjoy the benefits of industrialization. The only pristine industrialization was the UK’s, which
influenced other nations’ industrialization experiences. After World War II, Europe lost its empires. Imperialism was partly
replaced by neocolonial exploitation that the USA largely imposed, and its intentions were made clear in declassified
documents, but once the de jure imperial masters were gone, all newly freed nations embarked on industrialization if they
could. The key constraints were access to hydrocarbon fuels and the ability to exploit them.

From the very first settlements to the very first cities, the advantages of bringing humans together in such groups were
primarily economic and social. With urbanity, mass communication and professions became possible for the first time. All
human settlements were located on low-energy transportation lanes, where food and energy-related materials could
cheaply (“cheap” is always primarily an energy concept) supply the settlements’ residents. Virtually all settlements were
dependent on surplus energy provided by domestication and low-energy transportation lanes to deliver it (one of the few
exceptions was the Pacific Northwest’s salmon-based economy in which the energy supply delivered itself to the
settlement, but it was still an energy delivery via a low-energy transportation lane). The critical attribute of all civilizations
was the energy surplus generated by agriculture that allowed for a proportion of the population that did not acquire food
and could learn new skills. They became the first professionals and elites. But early agriculture’s surplus was modest,
and in Sumerian cities, more than 75% of the residents were full-time farmers.870 All early civilizations needed at least
90% of the workforce engaged in agriculture, to support a relatively small professional class and elite. The
peasant/slave/serf and their variants formed the backbone of all preindustrial civilizations. Because the energy surplus
was so small, freedom was limited, and social structures were rigid and often enforced with draconian measures. The
relationship between elite and commoners was a carrot-and-stick relationship: civilization’s benefits attracted the populace
from the hinterland and partial appropriation of the surplus by elites came with the “deal.” Religions and customs were
bent to elite benefit or were invented wholesale, but were also used to keep civilization orderly, which was one of its
primary attractions. The violence of early states on their domestic populations eventually gave way to milder forms of
coercion. Although cities oppressed their hinterlands, they could also stimulate innovation and economic growth. Clear
until the 20th century, cities only maintained their populations by a constant influx of “surplus” population from the
hinterland to the city. Even in the late 19th century, migrating to the city meant a 50% increase in infant mortality.871 Rural
wet-nursing became a profession in European civilization, as affluent urban mothers sent their infants to be raised in the
hinterland. In nations such as the USA, Sweden, and Japan, urban life expectancy did not reach rural life expectancy
until World War II.872

During the urbanization of the High Middle Ages, and even with the spread of watermills, Europe’s workforce was still
about 80% devoted to farming.873 The productivity of industrialized agriculture led to the great decline in agricultural
workers. By 1800, less than 40% of the English workforce was involved in agriculture.874 As late as 1870, more than 70%
of the USA’s workforce was still engaged in agriculture, and that figure is less than 2% today.

When a city attains a population of about 100,000-to-200,000 people, the costs of civilization begin outweighing the
benefits, and when a city reaches a population of about one million, the detriments become so pronounced (clogged
transportation lanes, pollution, crowding, crime, disease, etc.) that it must enact extraordinary measures to remain
livable.875

One outcome of the colonial and continuing neocolonial eras is a population explosion in poor nations. Paradoxes and
contradictions are debated, but the primary outcome is the West feeding the urban hells of poor nations. Until World War
II, the so-called Third World was a net exporter of food, but by the 1980s, imports of Western-grown food (primarily grain)
provided nearly half of the calories consumed in cities of Third World market economies.876 The other trend was the
“Green Revolution,” in which industrialized agricultural methods were introduced to Third World nations. Increased
calories and decreased infant mortality led to the population explosion, but the demographic transition has been global; in
my lifetime, global fertility has declined from five to fewer than three children per woman. Deeply impoverished Africa is
Earth’s only remaining place with high birthrates. Women need to produce 2.1 children on average for a population to
remain stable, and Europe’s birth rate has fallen to 1.4 per woman in 2015. All industrial civilizations currently have less
than replacement-rate fertility. In the USA, exceptions to that proclivity are largely confined to immigrants from
preindustrial societies and members of preindustrial religions that supported high birthrates in order to keep the religions
flush with adherents, and in the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches in particular. In 2015, I live near Microsoft’s
headquarters and am surrounded by immigrants from across the world. Microsoft’s employees from preindustrial
societies, such as India, China, Africa, and Latin America, often have large families, while Microsoft’s employees from
industrialized nations have small families. Also, employees from preindustrial nations often bring their parents, who help
provide child care. Such multi-generational households disappeared in the USA long ago. It has been interesting to
witness the contrasts.

As the West's conquest and subjugation of humanity gave way to neocolonialism and global capitalism, the fake
philanthropy of John Rockefeller and the robber barons simply went global and complemented the fake philanthropy of the
imperial powers. Playing the “humanitarian” game is quite a racket. Even “saints” such as Mother Teresa and the pious
padre Junípero Serra (my elementary school was named after him) did not fare well under scrutiny. As I studied the
“radical” works of my early mentors, it became obvious that international and American institutions officially devoted to
alleviating the suffering of the world’s poorest people were often as phony as Rockefeller “charities.” The World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, USAID, and even the Peace Corps are all neocolonial tools designed to oppress the world’s
poor, not help them. Nearly all of the world’s poorest nations export food to the USA, even as their urban hells are largely
fed by Western farms, as different interests at play create such paradoxes. Overall, it is little different from what the
British did to Bengal or even Ireland, where people starve while they ship food to rich nations. The desire of the world’s
poor to be free of colonial and neocolonial oppression, and how Western institutions lie about it, is something that people
such as Ralph McGehee learned through bitter experience.

The work of Chomsky, Ed Herman, and friends is called institutional analysis, structural analysis, or functionalism, but
they are often charged with being conspiracy theorists or conspirators themselves, which is the opposite of the truth.
Since the 1980s, I have studied a wide array of analyses, from far-right conspiracy theories to far-left Marxian analytics,
and it took me many years to finally realize why neither conspiracists nor structuralists seemed capable of understanding
the milieu surrounding exotic technologies and their organized suppression. Conspiracists believed in conscious
manipulation dictating how events manifested, while structuralists believed that conscious intent was not necessary to
explain how events transpired. Although structural analysis is far more sophisticated than conspiracy theories, both views
suffer from their foundational assumptions. Humanity’s current state is largely due to people’s lack of personal integrity
and their limited awareness as they try surviving in a world that is complex beyond their understanding, but that does not
mean that everybody is so unaware. Ultra-elites know what they are doing, after a fashion, and they have taken their lack
of personal integrity to awe-inspiring levels. However, their control is far less than total and they do not need to
micromanage the situation. As with bears and John Rockefeller, ultra-elites know that if they only control key choke
points, they can control the entire planet. For the herd’s size, the shepherd’s task has been surprisingly easy. As always,
finding an opportune place to intervene in the energy production/consumption process was the key to control and
receiving the highest EROI, and ultra-elites “vertically integrated” to control production, or more accurately, to prevent
production of FE. The organized suppression of disruptive energy technologies has become a science at the ultra-elite
level, and as Chomsky has pointed out, elites will choose hegemony over survival. However, playing chicken with Earth
has even made ultra-elites uneasy, and most currently favor disseminating FE and related technologies, which could
readily move humanity back from the brink of the abyss.

Soon after hiring all the useful Nazis at World War II’s end, the USA’s national security state was born. The CIA was
founded then, as was the NSA. It did not take long for the USA to begin wars both hot and cold, and the USA of Truman’s
administration invaded Korea in 1950. The Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy was dominated by the Dulles
brothers, who long represented robber baron interests. One was the Secretary of State and the other ran the CIA. They
got their start at the same company that conspired with Morgan to swindle the American government on the Panama
Canal deal. Robber baron interests rode roughshod over Latin America for generations, and those brothers’
achievements included overthrowing the Iranian government on behalf of American and British oil companies in 1953.
They engineered the overthrow of the Guatemalan government on behalf of United Fruit in 1954, which the brothers
literally had a financial stake in, as the CIA brother served on United Fruit’s board of directors and the Secretary of State
brother was a major shareholder. The Secretary of State brother’s activities inspired the term “brinkmanship,” as his
notion of diplomacy was threatening the Soviet Union with nuclear attack. The CIA brother was deeply involved with Nazi
Germany and was instrumental in “rehabilitating” some of Hitler’s biggest supporters and putting them back into the same
positions they had while funding and cheering along Hitler. The Secretary of State brother chaired the Rockefeller
Foundation’s board of trustees for a generation. John Kennedy fired the CIA brother for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and that
brother sat on the Warren Commission and covered up the CIA’s involvement in Kennedy’s murder. The CIA brother is
one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s murder among independent researchers, and he led the “investigation” into the
murder.877 Such stark conflicts of interest have characterized American government since its first president, although that
“investigation” situation was more along the “fox in the henhouse” variety that became increasingly common in the USA
since 1963.

The USA enjoyed its postwar boom until the oil crisis of 1973. Rosie the Riveter went home and got pregnant by her
returning war-hero husband. I was born in 1958, during that heyday when having children became the national pastime.
The USA’s postwar boom was the greatest prosperity that any peoples ever had, and television shows such as Lassie,
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, and Leave it to Beaver depicted that golden
age, or at least how it ideally appeared. The average American family more resembled Archie Bunker’s, not Ozzie’s. In
the 1950s, June Cleaver replaced Rosie as an icon who got her husband’s pipe, paper, and dinner ready after his
workday in corporate America. By the early 1960s, the American housewife was liberally imbibing Librium and Valium,
and The Rolling Stones soon sang about Mother’s Little Helper.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union promoted its political-economic system to newly free former colonies as a path to
industrializing within a generation. Mutually Assured Destruction was a real threat, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is the
closest that humanity has yet come to a nuclear war. I doubt that John Kennedy’s murder will ever be solved, but my
policeman friend, who helped me spring my partner from jail, who knew of Oswald’s involvement in the operation that got
John Kennedy killed, believed that Kennedy was killed because he began negotiating world peace.878 My friend’s account
of Oswald’s involvement took on a new level of credibility with the declassification of the Operation Northwoods
documents, and a recent book on the John Kennedy assassination, endorsed by Robert Kennedy Jr., also makes the
case that John Kennedy was murdered because he was attempting to negotiate the Cold War's end after realizing how
close the USA came to igniting a nuclear war.879

The corporate order that rebranded industrial waste as “medicine” or that overthrew the Iranian and Guatemalan
governments probably resided some levels below the GCs in Earth’s power structure. The connections between them will
have almost no publicly available documentation, and what might become public will always have its authenticity debated,
and again, I will leave those issues behind for now and focus on more publicly known issues of history and science.

Several energy concepts are important for understanding the health and trajectory of economies, and some key ones are:

1. The total energy available for exploitation;

2. How efficiently that energy can be recovered (EROI);
3. How efficiently that recovered energy can be transported to where it is used (transmission losses);
4. How efficiently that energy can be converted into work and other useful forms (how much is lost to entropy);
5. The amount of energy that can be converted into work per unit of time (power).

For the first concept presented above, for conventional renewable energy sources, they are replenished by sunlight or
radiation from Earth’s interior; one is fusion, and the other is fission. For so-called non-renewable energy sources, such
as hydrocarbons and fissile materials, they are either renewed on timescales so vast that they are effectively non-
renewable for humans (such as hydrocarbons), or are “renewed” by the fusion processes in stars (fissile materials), so
could only be renewed with new planetary formation. In mainstream thought, the currently non-renewable energy
resources are primarily hydrocarbons (petroleum, coal, and natural gas) and uranium. Much of the Peak Oil debate
centers around the definition of oil. What has been called oil for the past 150 years is today called conventional oil. It is
the oil formed by the previously described geological processes, and can be mined by drilling wells and extracting it with
the conventional methods that have been used since the beginning, and new techniques are periodically invented to
increase the rate and total extraction. For conventional oil, humanity has unearthed about 1.1 trillion barrels since 1859,
and about 1.2 trillion remained as of 2014. Production of conventional oil peaked in 2006 at 25 billion barrels per year and
has declined since then. At current production rates, conventional oil will be completely depleted in less than 50 years.
About another five billion barrels per year are called unconventional oil, which is called heavy oil, extra heavy oil, and oil
sands. Those unconventional oils comprise trillions more barrels, and total about 70% of Earth’s oil reserves and
arguably more. For fissile materials, primarily uranium, the peak may have already been reached by 2014, or it might be
a few decades into the future. For natural gas the situation is similar, in that the peak may have already been reached, or
it is only a few decades into the future at most. For coal, peak extraction may also be only a few decades into the future.
Peak extraction usually occurs when about half of the recoverable energy resource has been mined. In summary, the
energy resources that have powered the Industrial Revolution are all on their way to largely vanishing in this century. The
only resources with seeming viability past this century are coal and unconventional oil, which brings us to the second
concept: EROI.

EROI is a key concept to describe any economy. When 90% of a population devoted its effort to procuring food, virtually
all human effort went into acquiring energy, and little surplus energy existed to supply professions and the elite. In those
early societies, their societal EROI was about 1.1. If all of a person’s effort goes into procuring food, his/her EROI is one,
as it takes all of his/her energy to obtain his/her energy. If one person can provide food for two, then his/her personal
EROI is two. The EROI concept is used for various energy situations. The Roman Empire's EROI for wheat and alfalfa
cultivation has been estimated at 12 and 27, respectively. 880 That reduction in agricultural workforce in industrializing
England reflected a rising EROI for food production, which came from mechanization and more efficient methods. A
concept for helping to understand EROI is return on financial investment, but return on financial investment only mimics
the real world and is not itself real. Money and finances are accounting abstractions that are only meaningful if they
reflect the real world, but they often do not. When American whaling ships were sailing around the world in search of
whales, it reflected a plummeting EROI. Whales took more energy to find, they became smaller as the biggest ones were
targeted first, and the like. Only because European sailing technology turned the world’s oceans into low-energy
transportation lanes could whaling like that be feasible, but declining EROI also reflected declining absolute energy that
could be exploited. As Gravettians drove mammoths to extinction, their mammoth EROI declined, as well as the amount
of energy that could be exploited. When both sank far enough, that first “civilization” would have collapsed and they
moved in search of easier meat, for those who survived the “mammoth famine.”

That decline in whaling EROI and the gross amount of exploitable whale oil set the stage for exploiting a new energy
source, and the rise of oil then happened. Oil’s EROI and total exploitable energy made whales insignificant by
comparison. In the 1930s, the EROI for East Texas oil wells was more than 100. Those days of easy oil are long gone.
The global EROI of oil and gas production has fallen from about 30 in 1990 to less than 20 in 2014 and may decline to 10
by 2020. That means increasing amounts of energy are expended to extract the energy. Reports of increasing gross
global energy extraction are misleading, as the more important measure is net energy acquired. At an EROI of two, half
the energy acquired is used for extracting it. At a gross 100 barrels of oil extracted at an EROI of 100, 99 barrels are
available for societal use. At a gross 100 barrels of oil and an EROI of two, only 50 barrels are available. Only about a
third of an oilfield’s deposit is recoverable. Once a third of the oil is extracted, the energy surplus quickly falls to zero and
it takes as much energy to extract the oil as is acquired, or stated another way, the EROI falls to one.

Leaders in developing the concept of EROI believe that an EROI of at least five, and closer to ten, is needed to run a
modern civilization.881 The shale oil and tar sands that were touted in the first decade of the 21st century have EROIs of
less than five and as low as two, and similarly promoted biofuels have an EROI of about one. Exploiting inferior energy
sources is a classic resource depletion scenario that has played out numerous times during the human journey, as each
energy resource was plundered to exhaustion, whether it was terrestrial megafauna, forests, soils, or whales. Industrial
civilization is fast approaching the level where it cannot energetically sustain itself. Below is a chart of EROIs for various,
mostly American, energy sources. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Almost all traditional alternative energy sources and related technologies have low EROIs (direct solar 2-to-8, wind
turbines 18, geothermal less than 5).882 Those alternative sources all have the same problems that wind and water power
had before the Industrial Revolution and more, such as being intermittent, not much energy is available to begin with, and
they all create environmental impacts that, although not as great as fossil and nuclear fuels, are still considerable. Wind
turbines not only kill vast numbers of birds each year, but they are noisy and create inland turbulence. In order to replace
fossil fuels, there would need to be about four hundred times as many windmills on Earth as there already are, and I have
driven through several windmill farms in the USA, which are spread across many miles of suitable terrain. In order to
raise humanity to the American standard of living, there would need to be far more than a thousand times as many
windmills. There may not be enough suitable land on Earth to host those windmills, and windmills are considered the
most viable traditional alternative. Direct solar, including photovoltaics, makes the most sense in deserts. It does not
deliver much energy, but it is considered the next most viable alternative, and there would have to be about four thousand
times as many photovoltaic arrays as already exist to raise the world to the American standard of living. 883 Again, finding
the land to host them is a problem, and the materials need to be mined. There are maintenance issues and other
problems. Rock is not a good conductor, so heat is rapidly depleted from the geothermal source and it quickly goes “dry,”
and has to go “fallow” to recover.884

Brian O’Leary began his alternative energy career promoting traditional alternatives, and the plan that he developed for
American presidential candidate Mo Udall looked startlingly like what the winner of that election, Jimmy Carter, soon
unveiled. In his last years, Brian called traditional alternatives too little and too late to solve our energy problems.885
Although the organized suppression inflicted on technologies such as my partner’s heat pump are partly why there is not
much alternative energy technology on the market, their low EROI and low available energy are leading reasons why
those traditional alternative energy sources are not viable replacements for hydrocarbon energy, which in 2014 amounts
to more than 80% of the non-food energy that humanity uses. Nearly 40 years after Jimmy declared the moral equivalent
of war on energy, traditional alternative energy still amounts to less than 1% of American energy production. Zero-point
energy technology dwarfs all alternative and mainstream energy sources, with available energy and EROIs that go off the
scale.

Once the energy is delivered into a gas tank or turbine boiler, the efficiency of turning that chemical energy into
mechanical energy is what Carnot first dealt with. Mechanical energy is called work, whether it comes from human
muscles, the muscles of draft animals, or machines. Also, the concept of power is critical, which is the amount of work
performed over a time period. How quickly energy can be released and used is the crux of how rockets work, for
instance. To get more power, more sophisticated technology was required, from taller masts in sailing ships to stronger
components for watermills to high-performance engines (which run hotter with greater pressures). Generating more
power was always a technological feat but was dependent on how much energy could be delivered and utilized and how
quickly.
The concepts of total energy available, EROI, and the efficiencies of delivering and using them all contribute to what may
be the most important energy concept of all, as far as the human standard of living goes: surplus energy, which is the
energy available to humans beyond what feeds them, which will be discussed more in the next chapter.

Those energy concepts are real ones that all economies face, and financial measures only reflect them. In the USA, just
as M. King Hubbert predicted, Peak Oil was reached in 1970. In 1973, the first oil crisis hit, real wages per hour peaked
the same year and have declined since then. Wages were only a reflection of energy consumption, which also peaked in
the 1970s for the USA and have since declined by nearly the same proportion that real wages per hour have. The USA’s
declining standard of living since the 1970s was minor compared to the devastation inflicted on developing nations. The
beginning of the end of Yugoslavia was initiated by the oil price shocks of the 1970s. Many nations have yet to recover.
When the oil price shocks hit, Structural Adjustment Programs and other measures were inflicted by Western institutions
on developing nations. As people such as John Perkins eventually admitted, those policies were intentionally used to
enslave those nations. On the world stage, the self-image promoted by the West is that of blundering do-gooders. As
people such as Noam Chomsky have clearly pointed out many times, it is a false narrative designed to hide corrupt
motivation from the outset. It is simply more of that fake philanthropy. I have written a great deal elsewhere on how
corrupt the global media is, how the history taught imperial citizens resembles fairy tales, how professions and industries
have largely degenerated into rackets, how the USA’s genocidal invasions, just like all genocidal invasions, were always
economically motivated, usually to secure energy resources. This essay does not need to belabor those trends, but
anybody not blinded by their ideologies of choice can clearly see that the game being played on the global stage is the
same one that has always been played: economically exploiting others. Because industrialized civilization is beginning to
run out of the energy sources that the West used to industrialize, a universal decline in humanity’s standard of living has
begun. The USA has transitioned from the land of opportunity to a deindustrializing economy in which bankers and other
capitalists are blowing serial bubbles designed to rob one class in favor of another. The zero-sum-game aspect of those
machinations is painfully obvious. The mind-control techniques that Orwell and Huxley wrote about have been turned into
sciences, and there are even “competitions” between their dystopian visions to see which one will predominate.

To return to an early chapter in this essay, why do those children starve and live grim lives, while people like me live in
relative plenty? This essay has answered it. In essence, that child belonged to a race conquered by Europeans, and
instead of charting their own economic path, that child’s ancestors lived in virtual or actual slavery to Western economic
interests. Even when de jure colonialism ended, American-and-European-backed neocolonialism replaced it, and that
child’s nation still lives under the West’s oppression. Most importantly of all, that child’s nation does not have much
access to the world’s hydrocarbon energy, and the infrastructure and education to take advantage of such energy was
never developed, usually as a consequence of not having energy access in the first place. If that starving child lives in
Iraq, for instance, the great irony is that the child lives in a nation sitting on some of the world’s greatest hydrocarbon
deposits, but Iraq was raped on behalf of Western oil interests, just as the Iranian government was overthrown
generations previously, and Iran has yet to recover from that raping, and the West is still threatening it after it kicked out
the Western oil companies, as Iraq also did.

Meanwhile, Spaceship Earth is crashing. As I have performed my studies since 1990, including numerous scientific
topics, one issue became clear: biologists and climate scientists are in a panic regarding what is happening. Biologists
know that they are living through the Sixth Mass Extinction, which is caused by humans and is happening before their
eyes. Climate scientists are watching humans alter the atmosphere to the extent that dramatic geophysical and
geochemical events may be caused within a geologic timescale’s blink of an eye. It took more than two billion years for
photosynthetic organisms to oxygenate Earth’s atmosphere, and the first forests may have initiated an ice age, which took
many millions of years to transpire. But humanity may end up altering the atmosphere so much in a mere few hundred
years to actually turn Earth from an Icehouse Earth into a Greenhouse Earth, create anoxic ocean and hydrogen sulfide
events, or myriad other potential outcomes. Industrial humanity is engaging in a chemistry and physics experiment with
our home planet, and hardly anybody seems to notice or care. That frightens climate scientists, and biologists know that
those potential geophysical events can make the current extinction event even more pronounced, and humans may
achieve a mass extinction that exceeds even the Permian Extinction, and do it quicker than every previous extinction
event other than that dinosaur-destroying asteroid. For one of many ominous trends, the oceans are being acidified by
the increasingly acidic rain, which is already threatening Arctic shellfish with extinction. Peter Ward’s Medea hypothesis is
not so farfetched, as he churns out grim books with his emeritus years not far off, but humans are the current agents of
destruction, not Mother Earth and her other species. On several fronts, humanity is peering into the abyss.886

Some “race of the catastrophes” scenarios are being considered. Will peak hydrocarbons lead to a stabilization of carbon
dioxide levels somewhere below 1,000 PPM (above 1,000 PPM could trigger hydrogen sulfide events)? Will we be
“saved” by running out of hydrocarbons, and the human population declines to under a billion people once again, which is
Earth's near-term human carrying capacity in the absence of fossil fuels? But we are already witnessing hydrocarbon-
control genocides, and if World War III is fought, the smart money is putting it on fighting over the world’s dwindling oil
deposits. Will we keep burning hydrocarbons for another few centuries (by relying on coal and nonconventional oil),
reaching several hundred PPM carbon dioxide levels, somehow avoid anoxic and hydrogen sulfide events and World War
III, to only have the ice sheets melt, displace billions of people, precipitate global famines and other calamities, while we
drive nearly all other species to extinction? Which way will it play out? Who would want to find out? Informed scientists
see all of those dynamics coming into play and more, and who knows how they will manifest and interact? What
everybody is certain of, however, is that they do not want to live to see them happen. People my age might get “lucky”
and die before the meltdown begins. Today’s children, however, may not be so fortunate. There is a solution to all of
those looming disasters, which is the subject of this essay's coming chapters. But implementing it will require an
unprecedented act of integrity and sentience. The good news is that it would not take many people to do it, of somewhere
on the order of 0.0001% of today’s humanity.

What Running out of Energy Looks Like

Pre-human mass extinctions
Human-caused extinctions
Early civilization collapses
Declining industrial civilization
The relationship between real and financial economies
Discretionary income and energy surplus
Today's global class war and "race to the bottom"
Canada's tar sands operation as an example of mining low-EROI energy sources
Recent, ongoing, and looming catastrophes due to dwindling hydrocarbon energy supplies
It does not have to be this way

During the eon of complex life, when ecosystems had their energy supplies disrupted, they collapsed and mass
extinctions resulted. The oceanic mass extinctions before the appearance of humans were probably caused by anoxia,
temperature change, hydrogen sulfide, and other physical events. An asteroid "winter" helped drive dinosaurs to
extinction. When that asteroid-induced global "winter" blocked sunlight, the ecosystems had an energy shortage at their
base, as photosynthesis was interrupted, both on land and in water. That dinosaur-destroying asteroid also incinerated
land-based ecosystems. It is doubtful that any pre-human mass extinction was caused by a disruption at the food chains'
tops, but near their bases. Human-caused extinctions had different dynamics.
Human-caused extinctions began with humans hunting large herbivores to extinction, which in turn drove their predators
to extinction and had cascading ecosystem effects, particularly those resulting from the loss of keystone species such as
proboscideans. The so-called trophic cascades that scientists have been studying have been all human-induced, as
humans eliminated predators, who were their energetic competitors. Driving the world's large animals to extinction was
probably the impetus behind the Domestication Revolution, and agriculture led to the first civilizations.

The first civilizations, located in the Fertile Crescent, also impaired their energy supplies through unsustainable practices
such as deforestation and plow agriculture. Those civilizations all collapsed, and the death knell was always starvation,
which is running out of the energy (i.e., food) needed to fuel human bodies. There was an exodus from Mesopotamia and
vicinity to lands yet to be despoiled by civilization, and that is how Jews and other peoples ended up on the
Mediterranean's periphery. In their turn, those Mediterranean civilizations repeated the dynamic of deforestation and
agriculture, and they all eventually collapsed, from Minoan to Mycenaean to Classic Greek to Roman. In those examples,
the trajectory was generally one of profligate deforestation and agriculture on newly exposed forest soils, to a decline in
yields due to soil depletion and desertification, to belated attempts at conservation and attempts to boost the energy
supply, to a final collapse. Conquering and plundering one's neighbors was one way to temporarily boost the energy
supply, which Rome refined to a science, as it drove species and peoples to extinction. As Rome's EROI declined, it had
to plunder from farther and farther abroad, which further reduced its EROI. Those practices were anything but
sustainable, and when each civilization collapsed, the region went moribund for centuries as ecosystems recovered to the
point where they could sustain civilization again. However, those practices eventually turned verdant forests into deserts,
as any visitor to the Mediterranean can easily see. The energy provided by wood and soils was depleted by all early
civilizations, and their collapses were energy crises above all else.

As industrial civilization has been declining, those hundreds of billions of energy slaves have been the first to starve, and
the USA's first taste was the crisis of 1973-1974, as cars sat in gas lines, waiting their turn to get their energy, which
happened a few years after American oil production peaked. As of 2014, the USA has largely been spared it, but other
industrial nations, or those beginning to industrialize, have suffered brownouts, in which the electricity supply is
temporarily diminished. That can make cities grind to a halt. Those are effects of a declining energy supply in
industrialized nations. Although energy slaves are the first to feel the effects, they suffer in silence. Food shortages are
when energy shortages really begin to hurt, literally, as people go hungry, and few suffer that deprivation with equanimity.
In the USA in 2014, tens of millions of people, in history's richest and most powerful nation, have difficulty staving off
hunger.
Although I am an accountant by profession, I try to avoid using the terminology and ideology of the financial economy, as
it is an accounting fiction with little relevance to the real world, but discussing a few financial terms can make it clearer to
some readers. The USA's real wages per hour peaked in 1973, when its first oil crisis began, and history's greatest era of
economic prosperity ended. American energy consumption per capita also peaked then, as the dramatic rise in energy
consumption that powered the Industrial Revolution ended, and the average American's energy consumption and real
wages have subsequently declined by about the same proportion. As an example, in my early years during the 1960s, a
gallon of gasoline retailed for around $0.20. In 2014, the price of gasoline was around $4.00 per gallon, which reflected a
2,000% increase over the previous 50 years. Similarly, our family home was purchased in 1967 for about $20,000, and
that house cost $400,000 in 2014. In the late 1960s, my middle-class father earned about $20,000 per year, so in 2014
dollars I would have needed to earn around $400,000 per year to enjoy his standard of living, but the median American
family income was around $50,000 per year in 2014. Those easy-living days of the 1960s' USA are long gone.

The decline in real wages per hour and attendant rise in real prices for gasoline and homes is only a financial measure of
the decline in energy resources and consumption. At the family budget level, as energy prices increase, all goods
needing energy to produce such as gasoline, food, housing, medicine, and the like cost more. If they can even hold their
marriages together (if they even get married anymore), both parents in American households work outside of their homes
today, when only one did during the postwar boom. As businesses try to remain competitive, wages are lower for those
fortunate enough to keep their jobs, social goods such as education are prohibitively more expensive, and less money is
available for anything beyond survival. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s I received a nearly free college
education. In 2014, a college education comes with crippling debt as each student's "graduation present," unless the
student has parents from the affluent class.

The idea of discretionary income is probably the financial economy's closest concept to energy surplus, and the idea of
savings is the financial economy's closest idea to stored energy. As the American middle class has been shrinking,
discretionary income has been vanishing. That trend happened in history's richest and most powerful nation during the 40
years since energy consumption began declining. Global oil production peaked in 2006, and the rest of the world's
nations will decline like the USA has, but from a far lower initial plateau. Those are the important measures, not financial
ones. In a world of scarcity, the exchange function of economics assumes great importance at the social level, as people
scrap for their piece of the scarce economic pie. But fighting over slices does not help grow the pie. In a world of
abundance, money and financial concepts truly become meaningless.
The deindustrialization and financialization of the USA's economy since the energy crisis of 1973-1974 has also been
class warfare by the global capitalist class against the global working class, in what has been called the "Race to the
Bottom." But class warfare and other such strategies are doomed ways to maintain or enhance one's economic position,
as energy is the basis for all of the world’s wealth. The banks have been blowing serial asset price bubbles in the past
generation, which further enrich the rich at the expense of the lower classes. If the American dollar loses its reserve
status (more a question of when, rather than if), another subsidy to the American economy will disappear, which will
further mark the USA's decline as an imperial power. There are no financial, political, or social solutions to running out of
energy, other than for people to get out of the way and stop suppressing FE and its attendant technologies, either
consciously, as the GCs and lower-level energy interests do, or mindlessly, as when the masses help crucify those trying
to introduce FE and prevent Spaceship Earth from crashing, or do not pay attention to the situation unless there is
immediate personal gain for doing so.

In the end, energy surplus is the most meaningful standard of living measure. Declining total available energy and
declining EROI contribute to a declining energy surplus. Most people have some understanding of hunger, and if they
have experienced blackouts, brownouts, or gas shortages, they have keenly felt the loss of energy. But the decline of
industrial civilization has many other signs that comfortable Westerners can have difficulty grasping, and the following
examples are intended to make it clearer.

As previously stated, shale oil and tar sands have abysmally low EROIs, which are probably too low to sustain industrial
civilization, but are presented today as some kind of magic answer to the USA's energy problems (in 2015, the oil price
collapse was caused by the easy money policies of the central banks, and great havoc is coming to the world economy).
But, what does that mean, as far as what a person could witness in such a declining civilization? The impact of Canada's
tar sands operations can provide a preview. Not only do Canada's tar sands operations remind visitors of Tolkien's
Mordor (Source: Wikimedia Commons – google "tar sands Mordor" and view the image results):
but the pollution will inflict an awesome price on Canada, as the tar sands region becomes a "national sacrifice zone."
That low EROI reflects highly detrimental impacts. A huge proportion of Canada's natural gas supply will be needed for
extracting and processing the tar sands, and multi-billion-dollar pipelines and other infrastructure projects are proceeding
(but delayed in 2015). Beleaguered Canadian Native American nations are overwhelmed by the industrial initiatives,
which are already inflicting economic and environmental havoc.887 I heard from local friends in the summer of 2014 that
the projected pipeline to the nearby waters of British Columbia will present great environmental risk, and the only question
is not if disastrous oil spills will happen, but how many, how large, and how damaging they will be. One of Earth's most
diverse aquatic ecosystems will be put at risk (Puget Sound is in second place, next to the Great Barrier Reef).

The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon energy disasters may only be previews of future events. The USA's invasion of
Iraq and its military presence in the Middle East is all about controlling Earth's remaining high-EROI oil. Everything else
pales in significance. Ever since the UK's navy converted to oil from coal in 1911, the West has been invading and
meddling in the oil-rich Middle East.

The irony of all this is that FE technologies already exist and humanity does not have to head down this path where
conventional energy prices continue to increase as we deplete the last remaining resources. The choice is really ours; do
we continue down this path of declining living standards for the majority of humanity or move into a world of energy
abundance for all on Earth? Some of us have been trying to rectify the situation, which is the next chapter's subject.

My Adventures and Those of My Fellow Travelers

Chapter summary:
 Dennis Lee's, Brian O'Leary's, and my journeys
 Dennis's ingenious methods
 Offers to make us disappear, before they began playing rough
 A friend receives an exotic technology show
 Our initial ignorance of the free energy field and its history
 Brian's work on asteroid mining and space colonies
 Brian's life-shortening investigations of UFOs
 Brian plays the Paul Revere of free energy
 Is humanity a sentient species?
 Our experiences were far from unique
  The many libels directed at Dennis
 What attracted me to Dennis and Brian
 My changing views
 The easy life of a Global Controller, as everybody helps out
 Dennis's many approaches
 Hazards for the ego
 My influences
 Direct personal experience, and scientific investigation of the paranormal
 The UFO/ET issue
 Antigravity, free energy, and ETs
 Thousands of failed attempts to bring free energy to the public
 Hints of the future

In this essay’s first chapter, I reviewed my journey and touched on Dennis Lee’s, who was my partner during my days of
pursuing FE, and that chapter also mentioned Brian O’Leary’s amazing explorations. This chapter will dig a little deeper
into our experiences. Our odysseys into alternative and free energy all began at about the same time: in 1973-1974,
during the USA’s first energy crisis, which ended the USA's postwar boom. Mine started when my first professional
mentor invented what was hailed as the world’s best engine for powering an automobile, which he invented in about 1968
and began to patent just before the crisis, and it caused great commotion within the federal government. During that
furor, I had my mystical awakening, spent two months in Europe absorbing its art and culture, and began dreaming of
changing the energy industry. Dennis is 12 years older than I am, and as I dreamed of changing the energy industry, he
had his first company destroyed in the energy crisis's mayhem. Brian began his alternative energy pursuit around the
same time, as he engaged in Capitol Hill activism and advised presidential candidates.
Dennis was raised as a poor rural white of Scots-Irish heritage, growing up as a migrant farm worker when white people
still did that in the USA. He left home at age 13 because his family could no longer afford to feed him, and his journey
took him to Vietnam in 1968, as a paratrooping medic who saw combat. Not long after his Vietnam experience, Dennis
had his mystical awakening in an event far more dramatic than mine, when he heard a voice in his head that he calls
“God.” Several years later, as I had my first existential crisis and prayed for guidance, I too heard a voice, which changed
my studies from science to business. Several years after that, I prayed for guidance for the second and so far last time in
my life. The voice again responded, suggested that I move far away, and I immediately landed in the midst of Dennis’s
company. I heard from that voice one more time, that time unbidden, and do not want to hear from it anymore.888 I have
no idea who or what the voice was, but it had an omniscience that I certainly do not possess. Even though I have not
asked for that voice again and have not heard it, while I wrote this essay, I can tell that my “friends” have been
orchestrating my life’s events once again. Such events are not uniformly unpleasant, but they usually challenge me in
uncomfortable ways that seem to come with the territory. I have never heard of any other FE attempts with such
preposterous levels of otherworldly “intervention,” but efforts like ours have often been accompanied by similar incidents.
We all lose any beliefs that we might have had in random coincidence.

All of those hard-to-believe events aside, I became a student of genius while under my first professional mentor’s tutelage.
The great integrity that Dennis displayed as his Seattle company was being destroyed sold me on him (as well as that
voice leading me to him), but when I chased him to Boston to help rebuild his effort, it quickly became evident that I was
learning from another world-class genius, and I avidly studied his efforts. As far as I know, his effort in Seattle is the
greatest attempt yet made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. He probably did his most interesting
work before I met him. He invented the energy industry’s first shared savings program, and his marketing programs were
awe-inspiring. Dennis was an untrained businessman, but his ability to erect a disruptive energy technology company
with no capital and create the entire process, from developing the technology to building it, marketing it, and installing it, is
the best that I have ever seen or heard of, and his public image rarely even touched upon his unparalleled talent in that
area. Yet those abilities paled beside his other qualifications, which nobody else that I know of has matched. That voice
knew what it was doing in leading me to Dennis, but playing Indiana Jones’s sidekick was not an easy ride, and I have
generally rejected Dennis’s entreaties to rejoin him after I helped free him from jail. Even as I write this, I know that our
story seems ridiculously fanciful, but it all happened and more, with connections and events I am not at liberty to publicly
disclose that makes Indiana Jones’s journey resemble Walter Mitty’s. As dramatic as those events were, our focus was
always on bringing FE to the world.
In Boston, we were still recovering from our Seattle effort when we were offered $10 million for Dennis’s initial idea for
making FE. Although Dennis began awakening to the energy industry’s reality before I met him, when we received that
first offer to buy us out, neither of us seriously suspected that it was an entreaty from those who run the world. A year
later, just before we were wiped out, Dennis received an offer of about $1 billion to fold our operation, delivered by a CIA
man who said that he represented “European interests.” It became obvious that we had attracted the attention of the
people who ran the world, although the group has apparently split along factional lines, and we heard from the "good
guys" periodically. Soon after Dennis rejected the offer, our nightmare truly began, as our effort was destroyed in one of
the most spectacular wipeouts in the entire history of FE attempts. When the dust settled a couple of years later, my life
was shattered, I was radicalized, and I would never again see the world in the same way. Mr. Professor, who helped me
free Dennis from jail, had his life wrecked and shortened. The carnage spread far and wide, distantly peripheral players
had their lives wrecked, and I heard sad stories from participants even as I wrote this essay.

To trip the light fantastic, back in those days, members of that disenchanted ultra-elite faction gave a close friend a
demonstration of some of their hoarded technologies. However, the dark heart of that organization is as black as a
moonless midnight in the mountains, and in my circles it is known that one deranged ultra-elite contingency plan is
terraforming Mars if Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable. Sanity may prevail, but I will not idly hope for the best.

When Dennis and I began our FE efforts, we were ignorant of many aspects of how the world really worked or important
precedents to our efforts. Probably neither of us had even heard of Nikola Tesla and really did not know that there was an
FE field, but we began hearing about it soon enough, as people approached us with hair-raising tales of woe. Their
stories were not only about FE, but any technologies that various oligarchies believed threatened their rackets, from high-
MPG cars to windmill farms to innovative mining techniques to even low-water toilets. We heard of FE inventors having
their entire families murdered and their homes burned down and bulldozed, inventors thrown in jail on the flimsiest
pretexts, and many other outrages, primarily occurring in the USA, the land of the free and the home of the brave. The
stories began to become monotonous.

As Dennis and I were receiving a harsh education in how the world really works, Brian was exploring the frontiers of
science. When Brian taught at Princeton, he was a leading voice regarding asteroid mining and space colonization. The
reasons for that pursuit were several. The first was that if asteroids were mined, the energy spent to overcome Earth’s
gravity would not be needed, so refining asteroids into their constituent elements (largely iron) would be far cheaper,
energetically, than mining them on Earth and rocketing them into space. The second was that mining asteroids would not
cause any of the environmental devastation that mining on Earth causes. The third was that new environments for
humans would be created that would not disturb Earth’s beleaguered ecosystems. Brian’s work was some of the first on a
practical, space-based Utopia. He was ahead of his time in more ways than one.

After his Establishment days ended, Brian not only investigated FE technologies, but began probing the UFO
phenomenon and subsequently nearly lost his life at the hands of the USA’s military. Like us, Brian began waking up fast.
The year after leaving my home town forever, I met Brian while he was traveling the world and investigating FE efforts,
which resulted in his Miracle in the Void, published in late 1995. I became attracted to Brian’s work when I read, for the
first time that I could recall, somebody in the FE field writing about Dennis without lying about him. Brian then embarked
on a journey of playing the Paul Revere of FE. For five years he faithfully rode, and he had access to the highest levels of
the world's scientific, environmental, and related institutions. Brian beseeched his peers to simply entertain the idea of
FE.

I eventually carried Brian's spears, and they were fortunately much lighter than Dennis’s. In 2001, as we were nearly run
out of town when trying to interest California's governor in alternative energy as Enron was raping California, which
caused the governor to lose his job, Brian told me how his ride as Paul Revere went: he openly wondered if humanity was
a sentient species, as all that he received were crazed reactions of denial and fear. I sadly understood his query. It was a
fair question, and forms the crux of the FE conundrum. During that same conversation, when I told Brian about that exotic
technology show that my close friend received, his response was nearly, “So, what else is new?” Few fellow travelers
played near our level (not many survive for long in those environments), but when we encountered them and traded
notes, they all described similar terrain. Everybody that I most respected in the FE and related milieus began their
journeys as overgrown Boy Scouts, not rebels or opportunists.

The media had libeled Dennis since I met him, but what initially shocked me as I became aware of the FE field was that
leading voices in the FE field also libeled Dennis. They were not little white lies, but Big Lies that served as centerpieces
of their attacks. When the libelers were confronted with their lies, sometimes by me, they either gave the challengers the
finger or made up more lies. I also watched big names in the field eagerly embrace the libelers and their lies while they
attacked Dennis and Brian. They essentially acted like the psychopaths on the GCs’ payroll who were sicced on us over
the years. Those behaviors only reinforced the primary lesson of my journey and provided more evidence that the enemy
is us. Probably more disconcerting was FE enthusiasts presenting me one libel tract in particular as an example of great
writing about the FE issue (!). That libel tract has been presented to me more than a dozen times.
I always respected Dennis and Brian the most in the FE field, and I valued their integrity above all else. Their great hearts
attracted me to them, not their talent, genius, or fame. I have written plenty about my days with Dennis and Brian, and
interested readers can discover more if they wish. I hope to convey what the learning experience of carrying their spears
was like. My learning curve with Dennis was insanely steep and comprised the kind of education that few survive for long.
Although my education with Brian was far gentler, I learned important lessons from him. If not for my adventures, I would
not have much worth saying. Even though much of this essay “merely” deals with mainstream science theory and data,
my radicalized perspective was responsible for how I approached the issues. This essay is obviously not the work of a
professional scientist, historian, or economist.

My adventures after the 1980s were milder, even though I risked prison again with Dennis, but I have had too much
adventure and I am trying to live a fairly quiet life. As I stepped back periodically, during the quiet times, I reflected on our
experiences and what our fellow travelers reported, and my views gradually changed. My initial orientation was the
inventor’s approach, and that I got it the same year as my mystical awakening was likely significant for evolving my
current perspective. Three years later, that voice suggested that I study business, and I began developing the
businessman’s perspective long before I met Dennis. My years with Dennis were about trying to make those teenage
dreams a reality. I soon realized that my first mentor’s attitude misled me about inventors in general. Nearly all inventors
invent to get rich and famous, not to help the world. I never met an altruistic inventor. I soon saw many unethical and
criminal acts engaged in by Dennis’s “allies.” When I told Dennis how shocking it was to see, he told me to join the club.

Witnessing the orgies of fear and greed that Dennis’s associates regularly engaged in was a critical aspect of my
awakening process, but what may have been more “fascinating” was how easily the GCs’ agents played Dennis’s
associates like musical instruments, as they used everybody’s fear and greed to push the effort into self-destruction.
Those “instruments” that they so effortlessly played included people far older and supposedly worldlier than me. Bill the
BPA Hit Man was definitely a professional provocateur, Mr. Texas was almost certainly one, and Mr. Deputy was also
one. People like them rarely knew exactly whom they really worked for, nor did they care, as long as they were
handsomely compensated, which included the "psychic income" of wrecking and even ending innocent lives. I had
difficultly believing that “smart” people could be manipulated in the way that I saw the GCs’ agents play them, but I soon
understood that I was witnessing them surpass the limits of their integrity more than I was watching naïveté at work.
Those affable and talented psychopaths on the GCs’ payroll usually played a fake angel game to get “allies” to betray us,
and it regularly worked. After several years of observing such events, and seeing people that I had known for nearly my
entire life acting dishonorably, naïvely, cowardly, and even criminally, I finally learned my journey’s primary lesson:
personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity. The reason why we do not have FE and a healed planet today is
because of the general population’s low integrity. I resisted that lesson every step of the way, until I had it beaten into my
head in no uncertain terms. Today’s situation has little to do with the GCs and their minions. Almost nobody wants to
hear that sobering truth, however, which is also part of the problem. Denial of how the world really works will not help for
manifesting FE and a healed planet and humanity. The enemy is us, and always has been.

I watched Dennis try every approach that he could think of, from businesses to non-profits to volunteers to the “patriot”
approach and more. Dennis is a literalist Christian and has tried the religion route several times, which always ended in
disaster, along with every other approach, and his self-professed religious fanaticism understandably dissuaded many
from becoming involved with our efforts. Even though Dennis may be the most enlightened literalist Christian that I have
yet met, I was always with Dennis in spite of his religious views, not because of them. All FE aspirants that I knew of had
personal idiosyncrasies and foibles, including me, which comes with being human. Brian readily admitted that his
astronaut and “bright lights” days tended to inflate his ego, and he had his Lapis Pig and Einsteinian hair. The Disclosure
Project’s founder took the über-warrior approach after his team was killed off soon after those Congressional hearings. I
am a reclusive semi-nerd (hermit archetype) who can become overemotional. We are/were all citizens of history’s most
arrogant nation and were all geniuses, which presented all of us with challenges in humility. I have watched FE aspirants
disappear down the mystical rabbit hole and fall into the many pitfalls that await the newcomer. A week before I finished
drafting this essay, a relatively new FE hopeful claimed that he was the Messiah, and he was not the first one to do that.
The perfect candidate to lead an FE effort probably does not exist, but personal integrity is the quality that I value above
all others. If a person does not have a sufficient store of it to begin with, the rest will not matter. The FE pursuit by people
of low integrity does not have a prayer of success for navigating the innumerable perils and temptations that await. There
are far more pretenders than contenders in the field, and the hazards of the FE pursuit are too overwhelming for most
people to navigate for more than a few minutes.

When I first dreamed of changing the energy industry when I was 16, I imagined that not everybody would welcome a
change in humanity’s energy paradigm. I clearly recall thinking that the resistance would come from foreign interests in
tropical locales. I was probably influenced by the propaganda surrounding the USA’s invasion of Southeast Asia. Little
did I suspect that the interests most hostile to changing humanity’s energy paradigm lived in the West. After my life was
wrecked, I staggered from my home town, knowing that whatever I had been taught about how the world really worked
was likely false, and I began seeking alternative sources of information. My first alternative influences on that subject
were the work of Noam Chomsky, Ralph McGehee, Ed Herman, Howard Zinn, and others like them. After years of
studying their work in my radicalized state, I came to realize that the West’s interaction with the developing world had little
benevolent intent behind it, and the situation lasts to this day. If I had not already been radicalized, I wonder how
receptive I would have been to their message. Those men were all among my most gracious correspondents, and I
learned more from their collective efforts than I did from any other body of work.

The training that enabled remote viewings and other psychic feats ruined many scientific careers, as scientists received
direct personal experience that the materialistic paradigm that guides mainstream science is false. Brian and I had our
first remote viewing experiences performing the same exercise in the 1970s. I performed experiments regarding the
human ability to generate a subtle energy that prevents rotting, and was able to generate great heat with my hands, which
others have developed to far higher levels of mastery. Brian performed similar experiments and advocated a scientific
approach to investigating such phenomena. Nearly all of my fellow travelers in the FE field had some kind of experience
like that in their late teens or early twenties. Most were scientists or scientists-in-training. When people have experiences
such as those, they will never accept the materialistic assumptions that dominate mainstream science. The giants of
physics, that hardest of the hard sciences, fully realized the orthodox framework’s limitations and all held “heretical” ideas
that could be called mystical. Many organizations have sought to remedy the affliction of mainstream science that views
consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity. I met Brian at a conference for one such organization. It has
been called bridging the gap between science and religion, and other terms. I see it as bringing science and
consciousness together. Brian was a speaker at that conference, and his talk’s subject was the need for a new
science.889 Until mainstream science allows consciousness into its paradigm and rejects its materialistic assumptions, it
will be playing a small game, as the greatest science of all may be the science of consciousness.

Because the subject needs to be addressed and I have been involved with it, I will describe what I am aware of regarding
the UFO and extraterrestrial (“ET”) issue. The era of UFOs generally began with the Roswell incident of 1947. The CIA
was founded a few months later. In the early 1990s, an emergency room doctor, Steven Greer, mounted an effort called
the Disclosure Project to inform the public about the UFO/ET issue, and Brian was prominently involved, for good reason.
After years of briefing officials from many institutions, including the Vatican, United Nations, White House, Pentagon, and
the USA’s Congress (and he never received a scoffing or disbelieving reaction), secret congressional hearings were held
so that witnesses could testify (and key Disclosure Project members developed strange and fatal cancer cases
immediately afterward). Ed Mitchell, who walked on the Moon, co-chaired the hearings and has been quite vocal about
the ET presence. One Disclosure Project witness was one of the first astronauts, and other astronauts have described
their experiences, at least of those who could talk publicly about them. I am aware of recent astronaut close encounters
that have been classified, as confessed by the astronauts. Brian had no doubt that his brush with death and the UFO-
research “offer” were related.

When I began hearing Disclosure Project witness testimony, some exotic technologies that they described were nearly
exactly what my friend was shown, which I heard about several years before I heard the witnesses describing them. I
have numerous connections to the issue, some of which involve highly public figures but, to me, the important issue is
why there is a cover-up. Eisenhower was the last American president really in the loop on the UFO issue. John Kennedy
was briefed on it, but the situation had largely been privatized by that time. Jimmy Carter had a famous confrontation with
the Director of Central Intelligence soon after becoming president: Carter asked for the CIA’s files on UFOs and was
rebuffed. The CIA’s Director of Central Intelligence was George Bush the First, whom Carter fired soon after Bush
rejected his request. I have also heard credible stories that Carter was threatened into silence. The most prominent
NASA-Nazi was Werner von Braun, who was largely responsible for NASA's hiring Brian; he was picked with von Braun’s
long-dreamed mission to Mars in mind. Dr. von Braun told his spokesperson in his last years that ETs would be portrayed
as the ultimate terrorist threat used to form a one-world dictatorship so that humanity could huddle under its “protection,”
and that the “threat” would be a fabrication created by the GCs, as ETs generally do not have hostile intent. As an
example of anecdotes from those close to me, one friend was close to Allen Hynek’s family and was told that Hynek’s
transformation was indeed how it has been popularly presented, in that Hynek first approached the issue as a disbeliever
and debunker, to eventually become convinced by the evidence that UFOs were a real phenomenon. In my circles are
many who have experienced sightings and close encounters, and few, if any, would be considered members of the tinfoil-
hat crowd. Stories of electrogravitic research going “black” in the 1950s also align with my understanding of the issue.

There is also a three-ring circus of disinformation around the UFO/ET issue, purveyed by numerous parties for various
agendas, including the world’s national security states, especially the USA’s. I take most “insider” revelations with a grain
of salt unless they are well-documented, as the “inside” generates a great deal of disinformation, and even documentation
allegedly from the "inside" is a very mixed bag. Also, attention-seekers pretend to be insiders, and many other
distractions beckon. In the milieu are hyperventilating conspiracists and stalwart establishment defenders; many such
defenders are naïve, dishonest, or both. Serious and often professional investigators are in the mix, as well as an easily
misled public, among other parties to the pandemonium. Consequently, many do not seriously contemplate the situation,
which is understandable. I went to see UFOs for myself and was not disappointed. A similar situation surrounds the FE
milieu. There seems to be a method to the madness, however, and the GCs have helped orchestrate the confusion, to
their benefit. There are a few ways to try avoiding those minefields. One is to obtain direct personal experience with
UFOs/ETs, another is to be close to key players in the field, and another is to spend a great deal of time digesting and
testing the evidence. I have taken all three approaches, and all of the chaos aside, my perception in 2014 is that the
reason for the UFO/ET cover-up has little or nothing to do with fear of a War of the Worlds reaction, which Eisenhower
might have rightly feared in the 1950s, but most Americans today believe that we are not alone in the universe or are
open to the idea. The real reason is to suppress exotic technologies that would end ultra-elite rule on Earth if they
became publicly available. Their rule would end for two reasons, the first of which is that FE and antigravity technologies
would radically transform human civilization in ways that fictional TV shows such as Star Trek partially depict, as humanity
would live in true economic abundance for the first time. People living in scarcity are easily manipulated, but people living
in abundance would not be. The second reason is that few humans would have much obedience to obviously corrupt
Earth-based institutions, particularly draconian and violent ones, when it became accepted that humans are simply one of
many sentient species in our galaxy and that we are not particularly advanced at all; we are more like cavemen than
distinguished members of galactic society.

Although knowledge that we are not alone in the universe will change humanity’s self-image, and NASA was warned
about such a change, changing humanity’s economic and environmental situation is by far the most important upshot of
the UFO/ET issue, which Greer also realized; he has been involved with the FE issue for many years. He spoke at a
conference that I helped organize and fund in 2004, when I learned from him about how large the GCs’ payoffs for
silencing inventors have been, and that was consistent with my experiences.

Almost none of us became “conspiracy theorists,” but we also knew that vastly more was happening on the global level
than was publicly disclosed, and that the wildest conspiracy theories were sometimes close to the truth. We all
understood that ultra-elites controlled the world economy and hence the retail political scene. That organization did not
have a name that we knew of. I have called them the GCs, while others have used different monikers. As this essay will
later discuss, that ultra-elite organization presents potentially fatal problems for anybody trying to develop free FE and
antigravity technologies for public use. I also discovered that the public is its own worst enemy, and those hard lessons
helped me develop my current strategy.

Antigravity technology, combined with FE, may be how some of our ET visitors have arrived, and is probably the primary
reason behind the UFO/ET cover-up. With FE and antigravity technology, the Fifth Epochal Event definitely arrives, and
the human journey will radically change. Ever since Tesla began building his tower, there have been many thousands of
attempts to produce FE. Tesla’s tower was not initially intended to tap the zero-point field, as far as its energy generation
aspects went, but to take advantage of the electric potential between Earth’s upper atmosphere and crust, and other
technologies have accessed that potential energy. Some have tried to “defeat” the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as
our efforts arguably attempted in the 1980s. Some scientists that I respected thought that it was possible. But the zero-
point field is where the abundant and clean energy to initiate the Fifth Epochal Event will come from, and many have
accessed it. When scientists and inventors have extracted energy from the zero-point field, they then received the GCs’
attention, and the suppression of such technologies has become a science during the past century. As this essay's final
chapter explores, I became aware of many avenues that have been attempted, and all have been miserable failures. The
“lucky” aspirants received the “Golden Handcuffs” of being bought out, and their technologies were either shelved or
clandestinely developed. I am constantly made aware of the latest FE aspirants’ efforts, who are almost always inventors
with dreams of greed, delusions of grandeur, potentially fatal naïveté, or strange combinations of all three afflictions, and
“supporters” who will quickly betray them to the highest bidder. But nobody’s pockets are as deep as the GCs’. This
essay’s final chapter will discuss what has not worked, what I no longer have any interest in, and why my intended
approach will be something different from anything tried before, as far as I know. To a great degree, I am standing on the
shoulders of Fuller and my professional ancestors in the FE field, many of whom were genuinely well-intended but were
understandably unaware of how the system really worked. They usually discovered the reality the hard way, as I did.
Probably the primary reason why I am able to do this work is that I was a teenager when my energy dreams began and
somehow survived my adventures so that by age 30 I was a grizzled veteran. When older FE aspirants had their
adventures, for those who survived them, they were usually crippled by their traumas. I was young enough to survive my
traumas, but I will always be recovering from them.

As already discussed, for the previous Epochal Events (1, 2, 3, 4), what the event led to was unimaginable to beings living
before the event. But this time we have some hints, and shows such as Star Trek are probably not all that fictional. My
understanding is that a close cousin to its Prime Directive guides our ET visitors, and humans will not be allowed to
become a space-faring species until we reach a level of maturity where ideas such as the Prime Directive become
standard features of our culture. Although the idea of becoming a space-faring culture has plenty to capture the
imagination, Brian and I were always most interested in the environmental, economic, political, and social changes that a
“free energy revolution” could initiate.

On Star Trek, replicators can make whatever element anybody wants. That technology may also exist in the GCs’
treasure trove, but I am not specifically aware of it. Almost all that I know and feel comfortable reporting regarding those
hoarded technologies are what fellow travelers have described, usually by directly telling me what they witnessed. The
next chapter will present a vision in which manipulation on the nuclear level is not a regular practice, although I realize
that it could well come to pass if it does not already exist, and that would make the next chapter’s vision potentially even
more grand (or perilous). Also, although I have heard rumors of time travel as another sequestered technology, and some
have made public claims of their involvement in time-travel experiments, I have not had any close fellow travelers confirm
that to me from their direct personal experience, so I will also lay aside that possibility in the next chapter.

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 21st 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 that 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 hydrocarbon 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 hydrocarbon
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. Because societies could easily completely recycle all materials used, recycling water used
in all societies would be effortlessly accomplished, so even desalinating ocean water would probably not be
practiced on a large scale for long.
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, with no impact on 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, and dramatically so, not living on the interest. The most
evident 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. Similar “footprint” concepts 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? If everybody on Earth was given a billion dollars, would they
try to steal even more from their neighbors? 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. Spiritual practices will exist, 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 hydrocarbon 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. Giza's acropolis could also be removed intact and placed in
a "museum" on the Moon or anywhere else in the solar system.
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 constructs and
ideologies. Other dramatic changes in humanity, which 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
the variation in humanity's hair, skin, and eye color is superficial. 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 economic 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
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, depressants in the evening, and pray for their lottery numbers to come up. 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 well-being 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 become a truly sentient species,
not the semi-sentient one that it is today.
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.
With the end of the Zero-Sum Game, people can also begin thinking about how they can reduce the harm that 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 FE's possibilities 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 will all be 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 virtually all brief
escapes from misery. Some arguments can be made for so-called "mind-expanding" drugs, but I have seen the toll
that they inflict and I never saw truly happy people regularly take them. In my experience, they 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
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 its 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 our 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, which 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, like it did for
bonobos.

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
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 exist 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 our solar
system is enough challenge for our species for the foreseeable future. I would happily settle for humanity's 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 was sought by the FE activists that I respected. 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 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 such as those 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 that
Roads visited 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 before by any other species. Humanity has greatly altered Earth’s
ecosystems and is 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 Ashkenazi 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 the related incest taboo).890 Also, a great deal 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).891 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 hydrocarbon
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 Fukushima disaster’s wake; but research
has shown that all radiation is harmful, even far below levels that authorities have said is “safe.” The work of an early
nuclear propaganda dissident has unfortunately been vindicated. Some of the very same interests behind the “fluoride is
good for you” propaganda were behind the “radiation is benign or good for you” lies. Those fabrications probably
originated in and were promoted by the corporate/national-interest level, which lies below the GC level.
Industrialized nations nearly finished off the whales and are greatly responsible for deforesting Earth, although nations
such as Japan have been exporting the devastation, as foreign forests are razed and shipped to Japan, while Japan
treats its forests as sacred groves. But also, the poor in former colonial nations have been pushed to ecosystem margins.
The prime arable land is usually owned by local oligarchs or foreign corporations; they often raise crops for export to the
industrialized nations. Guatemala and much of Central America comprise a pertinent example. The peasants farm
marginal lands, often hillsides, which not only devastate the last refuges of species driven into the hills, but it also erodes
the hillsides, leaving behind moonscapes, which happened in the Old World long ago. Those dynamics, particularly
habitat destruction, are largely behind today’s accelerating Sixth Mass Extinction, also called the Holocene Extinction.
This pattern also extends back for perhaps a million years, not just since the ice sheets melted in this latest interglacial
interval. The five other major mass extinctions reached 70% or more of global species going extinct. According to a
recent estimate, 50% may be reached by 2100 for the human-caused extinction. Other estimates have this level being
reached as early as my lifetime, while others think it will be reached in a slightly longer timeframe.892 The current
extinction rate is thought to be higher than those of all previous extinction events other than the one that exterminated the
dinosaurs. Humanity may “achieve” Permian levels of extinction. Biologists and climate scientists are stupefied, and the
global propaganda machine chugs along, making everything seem normal, while “scientists” in their employ work long and
hard to downplay pollution, extinction, health catastrophes, genocide, and the rest, in a kind of Potemkin Earth strategy,
gleaning profits and playing power games until the end.

On numerous fronts, humanity is staring into the abyss, primarily due to our energy practices. The USA's Persian Gulf
War of 1991 and invasion of Iraq in 2003 may be seen by future historians, if there are any, as the first salvos of World
War III, as humanity fights over Earth's last remaining high-EROI energy resources. One of Einstein’s most famous
attributed quotes was, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with
sticks and stones.” Maybe some of us survive that holocaust and the living will envy the dead. Maybe we will avoid
fighting over hydrocarbons, but the oceans will rise as climate changes more dramatically and billions are displaced. That
will trigger global famine and a different kind of World War III, as nations fight over food (and maybe water), not oil.
Merely contemplating such scenarios can drive people to drink and worse. Humanity stands on the chasm’s edge today,
and hardly any people know or care, as their immediate self-interest marks the limit of their awareness. It has always
been this way, when people are just trying to survive and deaden the pain of their existences. The intense denial
reactions that Brian encountered when he played the Paul Revere of FE were standard.
The previous chapter’s vision requires FE to manifest in the public arena and become used by all of humanity, and
quickly. If FE does not manifest, none of those visions are feasible, as FE will necessarily form their foundation, just as
humanity’s energy practices have defined every epoch of the human past. Abundant, harmless energy production has
never been experienced on Earth before, other than in the GCs’ enclaves, and none of the so-called energy solutions
proposed by various parties, from Peak Oilers to environmentalists, have any chance of being both clean and abundant.
The “solutions” that they propose are all based on austerity, which Fuller said has never worked and never will. So-called
environmentalists nearly universally treat FE and abundance as the enemy, and I initially could not believe what I was
seeing. When I later traded notes with fellow travelers, I discovered that to be the universal reaction of environmentalists,
going back to the 1970s. After many years of looking for various groups to ally with, I had to reluctantly conclude that
none exist. There is no group on Earth today, outside of the small FE cottage industry, which gives FE any credence at
all, as those groups all do the GCs’ work for them, unwittingly or not. The greatest triumph of the GCs is making FE and a
healed humanity and planet unimaginable, and humanity has readily acquiesced to the conditioning as we stampede
toward the cliff.

In 1969, Fuller published Utopia or Oblivion, which helped crystallize my personal paradigm when I read it in 2003.
Before reading Fuller, I was a “seat-of-the-britches” comprehensivist who had never heard of comprehensivists. The title
of Fuller’s book could well have been, “The Fifth Epochal Event or the Sixth Mass Extinction (that takes humanity with it).”

So, my fellow humans, will we experience the Sixth Mass Extinction, which might take us with it, or will humanity
experience its Fifth Epochal Event? The choice has always been ours, and we are quickly reaching the point where it will
likely be one or the other, with little feasible middle ground. Fuller stated that if humanity had not achieved the Fifth
Epochal Event by the 1980s, the probability of humanity's surviving its self-made catastrophe would be less than 50%.
Here we are, three decades later, and Fuller may still be right, but time is very short. Impatience is my Achilles heel, and
more than 40 years of this pursuit as of 2015 has been teaching it to me. But the window of opportunity to avert a global
calamity is closing, and if humanity does not begin to embrace the direction of the Fifth Epochal Event in my lifetime, then
Fuller might be accused of being overly optimistic, if there is anybody left to accuse him.

What Has Not Worked So Far and What Might

Chapter summary:
  Problems that free energy efforts encounter
 Levels of free energy awareness
 The similarity of free energy and atomic bombs/energy reactions
 Approaches to bringing free energy to the world that have failed and are unlikely to succeed
 Unsuitability of today's free energy field
 Possibly divine nature of the zero-point field
 Forming my Epochal Event paradigm
 Global Controllers cannot be the focus, but effort must rely on combined positive intention
 Why I am taking this approach, and those whom I seek
 What I plan to ask of those I seek
 What I hope to accomplish and the numbers needed
 Unsuitability of this approach for social circles
 The trap of judgment
 We are on the brink, and the masses will not awaken with talk, but by experience
 Do we choose Utopia or oblivion?

Many thousands of attempts have been made to make energy technology that taps the zero-point field and other sources
of energy currently not exploited (such as the environmental energy of Dennis’s heat pump, or even getting more energy
out of a gallon of gasoline, as my mentor's engine and Dennis's final efforts in the USA did). Few efforts have ever
achieved any success.

After many years of being in the trenches, trading notes, and watching from afar, I noticed that these were the primary
problems that all FE efforts suffered from:
1. The technical effort was underfunded, was often flawed in that it either did not achieve anything that could tap
those sources in a significant way or it succumbed to the vagaries that doom most business efforts, but which were
amplified in the FE pursuit, which included: lack of integrity in the principle member, dishonest/greedy associates,
inexperience, poor decision-making, delusions of grandeur, etc.
2. If the effort reached a certain level of promise, it was then targeted for organized suppression, which could
originate from the local, state, national, or global levels (always at the behest of private interests). Many tactics of
suppression have been used, from subtle sabotage to billion dollar bribes to seizure under national security laws to
media smear campaigns to imprisonment on trumped-up charges to murder; the aspirants' inexperience and
naïveté regarding the field of disruptive energy technology, as well as their human foibles, made those
development and distribution efforts particularly susceptible to organized suppression, which rarely needed to
become overt or severe.
3. There was almost no awareness or support from the public at large, due to:
a. The fact that the vast majority of humanity does not know anything about FE and does not want to know,
with several levels of disinterest and denial, ranging from outright uncaring to sophisticated arguments for
why FE is either impossible or dangerous;
b. Their manipulation by the social managers (media, law enforcement, educators, "experts," etc.);
c. Their inability and unwillingness to understand the stakes of the situation, including both the potential of the
new energy source and the peril of not acting, partly due to their scientific illiteracy, so they were easily
distracted and led astray.
4. For those with some idea of FE’s potential, there were numerous defects in their perspectives that harmed FE
efforts, which included:
a. Their ignorance of how the world’s political-economic dynamics really worked, from how markets are
controlled to how political establishments work to how organized suppression works;
b. Their naïveté as to how their family, friends, and colleagues would react to the idea of FE and abundance;
c. Their inability to understand that scarcity-based ideologies were not aligned with manifesting a situation of
abundance; those ideologies might work for most “activism,” but the perils and temptations of FE, as well as
the organized suppression, have proven too formidable for those kinds of approaches;
 d. They could not relinquish their self-serving orientation to the issue and became seduced by greed, delusions
of grandeur, and other ego-traps;
e. Their inability to understand the truly epochal nature of FE, which probably means that only an epochal
approach might work; the standard methods of the capitalistic, governmental, “philanthropic,” environmental,
and "progressive" organizations will not work for developing and bringing FE to the world;
f. They would get stuck in today’s arrested development in the field, in which it is focused on scientists,
inventors, business opportunities, retail politics, and various New Age and conspiratorial aspects of the
situation.

In order to mount an effort with a chance of success, the effort probably needs these qualities:

 It must be volunteer, non-profit, and transparent, to help prevent the disunities that self-seeking cause;
 It must have the support of a large enough group that understands the stakes of the issue and is not easily
susceptible to organized suppression;
 The key understandings are far more easily achieved if those supporting the effort have some scientific literacy, as
well as familiarity with the role of energy in the human journey; they also need to develop something approaching a
comprehensive perspective of the situation, so that they are not easily distracted and led astray.

Those attributes are far more easily described than achieved, but my essay is about developing them. The rest of this
essay explores those issues in some depth. More than 30 years after I began dreaming of changing the energy industry, I
published a framework to organize the thousands of reactions to the idea of FE that I have witnessed, and I will refer to it
for the remainder of this essay. I have yet to find a reaction during my journey that does not easily fit into that framework’s
categories.

The first level of awareness of FE is no awareness at all. Dennis spoke on hundreds of talk radio shows in the early
1990s between his stints in jail and prison, mounted national ad campaigns, barnstormed the USA repeatedly, and
engaged in many other activities. There have been several national TV shows about Dennis, but they were all parts of
smear campaigns. Nearly all major media coverage featured a “skeptic” who made up lies about Dennis and concocted
new lies when his original ones were exposed. Whether the attention was good or bad, many millions of Americans have
at least heard of FE, in no small measure because of Dennis, but even the movie The Incredibles featured zero-point
energy. It is safe to say that many Americans, maybe even more than half, have at least heard of FE in some way. Some
have simply not heard of it, others would not care even if they heard of it, and even most people who heard of it probably
regard it as a cartoon fantasy, and that is just how the GCs like it. Their goal is to keep as large a fraction of the
population at that level of awareness as possible. If the herd is not even restless or has any idea in what direction
freedom might lie, it is exceedingly easy to manage. Also, some have poor memories; they hear about FE and
immediately forget it, perhaps "ascending" to "higher" levels before they are back where they started.

Then there is the population’s fraction that has heard of FE and consciously considered the idea as a real possibility, and
by far the most common reaction is using their ideologies of choice to quickly deny it. Resorting to dismissals rooted in
nationalism and capitalism are the most common that I have seen, and are reflexive actions in which the idea leaves their
awareness almost as fast as it arrived, like Orwell’s Memory Hole. Those who never heard of FE and those who
immediately dismiss it with reflexive reactions comprise more than 99% of today’s global and Western population.

Some people are more thoughtful. They donate to seemingly worthy causes and genuinely care about what is happening
in the world, at least enough not to dismiss FE reflexively. When they hear of FE, they may ask their scientist relatives
and associates what they know about it, they might contact their favorite environmental organization, and the like. The
reply almost invariably is that FE is “impossible” or would be used to destroy the planet through either warfare or
environmental destruction. They are advised to seek elsewhere for solutions to the world’s problems, and those seekers
obediently drop the subject. They trust those authority figures, FE seemed all-too-fantastic anyway, and such people
generally fall into the political liberal category. If they live in the West, and I know the USA best, they probably listen to
NPR, watch PBS and the BBC, and follow the news on some “progressive” sites.

People at those levels of awareness have either no knowledge or gain only a superficial understanding of the issues
before succumbing to their conditioning and trusting various authorities. The next level of denial is the most sophisticated
one and includes recognized experts in their fields. The awareness of most scientists and academics is at this level, if
they are aware at all. They are often the ones asked by thoughtful progressives for their opinion on FE. Their responses
include invoking the “laws of physics” and other reasons why FE is “impossible,” and they irrationally dismiss evidence of
organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory” to dismiss the entire issue. Many breakthroughs in science and
technology were often called “impossible,” even after they were achieved; the reception afforded the Wright brothers was
actually open-minded compared to how the idea of FE is received today in such circles. I finally realized that such
scientists were trapped by the seductions of their materialistic faith that worships the senses and intellect (scientists are
considered "smart," but that "intelligence" can be a trap). Conscious manipulation of the world economy by the GCs, or
the idea that consciousness is not dependent on material reality (and it may be the other way around), and that the so-
called "laws of physics" might be woefully inadequate ideas of how the universe really operates, is beyond their
willingness and sometimes even their ability to contemplate.

Brian interacted with such scientists and academics, and was extremely dismayed. I also tried for many years, and their
naïveté and circular reasoning were probably the most frustrating aspects of their responses. When I approached one
academic who at least mentioned FE as a possibility, and who cited situations that I had been involved with, his reaction
was stunning. That group, as a whole, might be the last to accept FE’s reality. This reaction is like what the Brookings
Institute warned NASA about regarding the UFO/ET issue. Those with reflexive or sophisticated objections to the idea of
FE are defending the scarcity-based ideologies that they gave their allegiance to, as they provided them with material and
egocentric rewards.

For those who at least admit that FE is possible, probably the most common response is that they want an FE device to
power their home, or one to study in their laboratory. Who would not want a quadrillion dollar technology delivered to their
home? Those were the equivalent of Dennis’s customers under his shared savings programs. Their “skin in the game”
and level of effort was waiting for a miraculous and world-changing technology to be delivered to them, preferably for free.
They are no help at this stage of the effort.

Perhaps the next most common reaction for those not denying that FE is possible is those who fear FE (they may
outnumber those who will gladly accept FE delivered to their homes and labs). Their fears are usually stated to be around
weaponizing FE or using it to destroy Earth’s remaining ecosystems. Both fears seem misplaced, and a close reading of
history does not support them. All wars have been economic in nature, so the scarcity motivation that Fuller noted would
disappear if economic abundance existed. When there was relative economic abundance, people lived in peace in their
golden ages. Raping Earth with FE also makes little sense, because there would not be any good reason to and very
good reasons to not. The solar system could easily meet all of humanity's material needs, food can be raised in artificial
environments, and there would be no need to rape Earth. Psychopaths kill, rape, and plunder for the sheer joy of it, but
everybody else does due to scarcity. Those who fear misuse believe that people will not wake up if the means of
abundance are delivered to them, or that the vast majority who quickly would could not police those slow to understand
(or the psychopaths who might never). That fear reflects a negative view of humanity that I do not share. I doubt that the
masses will wake up until FE is delivered into their lives, but they will wake up when it is. I doubt that humanity is that
stupid, and I am willing to take the chance that humanity can become a truly sentient species. The worst elements of
humanity already possess FE technology, and Earth is still intact. After witnessing that fear reaction many times, it
seemed to me to camouflage other, deeper fears. I have never succeeded in engaging such people in a rational
conversation regarding those fears. I eventually suspected that they really feared abundance and seemed addicted to
scarcity. They built their entire lives around surviving in a world of scarcity and saw abundance as a threat to their
existence. Such reactions are like the GCs’, and for similar reasons. They know that the world as they know it will end
with FE, they are afraid that their role in that new world will be diminished, and prefer the devil they know. In some cases,
they are that devil. I have watched people embrace certain death rather than question their beliefs and indoctrination, and
that phenomenon seems related to that knee-jerk fear that people express when FE is even mentioned.

Those various reactions are not mutually exclusive, as some people react with combinations of them. The fear of FE is
often espoused by those who have sophisticated objections to the idea of FE, and their reactions are along the lines of:
“FE is impossible, thankfully, because if we had it, we would only destroy ourselves and the planet with it.”

Those aforementioned categories encompass the reactions of more than 99.9% of humanity at this time. The next levels
of my framework describe people actually trying to do something about the situation, and they all have my respect, even if
their motivation may be to get rich and famous and other self-serving motivations, or they are naïve. Everybody that I
respect in this field began their journeys naively. Naïveté is no crime, and I greatly respect people who lost their naïveté
honestly, usually by trying to make the world a better place. However, naïveté is potentially fatal in this field, and I am
attempting to mount an effort in which naïveté will be less hazardous for its participants, although it still needs to be shed
as soon as possible.

In the awareness level of people doing something or planning to, a beginner's perspective is thinking that the energy
industry will welcome innovative technology and that organized suppression does not exist. This plays into the capitalist
canard that the world is constantly seeking the better mousetrap. Some are looking, but not to bring them to market.
Instead, their efforts are devoted to ensuring that they never do. Wiping out the competition is the essence of capitalism.
After having his companies stolen many times, surviving Mafia hit attempts (1, 2) and the like, Dennis still believed the
electric companies’ propaganda in Washington State in the wake of the largest municipal bond default in the USA's history
to that time. He devoted great effort toward interesting the electric companies in the kind of energy conservation that their
full-page ads stated that they desperately needed, thinking that he would get a tickertape parade. In the midst of trying to
interest the electric companies, an anonymous party began wrecking Dennis’s business relationships, and just as he
entered into a large deal with a finance company, the electric companies unmasked themselves and went public in their
attacks on Dennis’s company. Among the many attacks that came simultaneously from Washington State’s power
structure, a professional provocateur with fake alternative energy credentials infiltrated Dennis’s company and was
subsequently responsible for the death of one of Dennis’s employees. That was Dennis’s first radicalizing moment in his
energy adventures.

Sparky Sweet, who had a scientific career at General Electric, also believed that the energy industry would welcome his
solid-state FE device. He mailed working prototypes to the big energy institutions, expecting a tickertape parade. The
opposite happened as shadowy interests destroyed his business deals, in a situation like Dennis’s experience. Sparky
did not take the hint and kept trying, which led to death threats. After their final threats, Sparky fled into hiding, where
Brian visited him, and Sparky died the next week of a “heart attack.” Dying that way has been common among FE
contenders who played near Sparky’s level, and Brian nearly did when he began investigating UFOs, and the event
shortened his life. Dennis, Sparky, and many others like them lost their naïveté the hard way, but the field has been filled
with newcomers who deny the reality of organized suppression as they charge forward with visions of riches and fame. It
is perhaps the most common level of awareness where FE newcomers will be found. Most never develop anything worth
suppressing so will never know any differently, and will enter and leave the field with that beginner's level of awareness
intact. However, with enough people trying and either living to tell the tale, or others chronicling their dire fates, which
often included untimely deaths, and the Internet spreading information like never before, few FE newcomers have much
excuse for being unaware of the fates of their professional ancestors. The Internet is like the communication advantages
of cities, or the cultural diffusion that the geography of Eurasia provided, ratcheted up by a few orders of magnitude, and
my website, this essay, and my intended future efforts comprise my attempt to take advantage of its potential.

The next level of awareness might be more dangerous than the previous one. In this one, FE newcomers realize that
organized suppression exists, but they think that they are clever enough, lucky enough, or have some other unique quality
that will allow them to avoid the suppression, usually by playing secrecy games. One fellow traveler, fresh out of college,
invented an FE prototype in a nuclear laboratory and was fired the next day. He then tried the “sneak past them”
approach, to be rudely disabused of his idea. Years later, he talked with fellow travelers and began understanding the
magnitude of what he stumbled into. He finally realized that he was like a kindergartener that ran onto the field during an
NFL game, thinking that he could play with the men. Today’s FE newcomers often begin at this level, and I hear no end
of plans to sneak past the organized suppression, run past it so fast that the suppressors will not know what hit them, and
many other fantasies. I probably see that delusion the most often nowadays, which is like 18-year-old boys pining to
prove their manhood on the battlefield.

The next level of awareness might be the most common among people progressing beyond denial of FE’s possibility or
existence. They believe that the situation is hopeless and that there is no point in even trying. They are often those
building bunkers to survive the coming collapse of global civilization. I have some respect for that position, but it certainly
will not help solve humanity’s problems or help the Fifth Epochal Event manifest. Nobody that I respected in the FE field
ever felt hopeless. We all began our journeys naïvely, but never conceded defeat. When the night was the darkest
during my journey, the miracle happened, so admitting defeat before even beginning does not seem productive or even
realistic, and can lead to dysfunctional coping behaviors and even suicidal tendencies.

The next level of awareness is like those fantasies that organized suppression can be avoided or outmaneuvered. The
people in this category are almost all men, and men comprise more than 90% of the FE field today, which is one of its
pitfalls. The people at this level of awareness believe that they can defeat the GCs in battle, expose them, and other
adolescent ideas. I call them the Young Warriors, and when they arrive with their armor and weapons, the only outcome
that you can guarantee is that when those weapons get used, they will be used on you or the Young Warriors will use
them on each other. The GCs will view the resulting carnage with amusement and marvel at how easy the organized
suppression game is, when their targets do almost all of the GCs’ work for them. The only warriors of any potential
benefit to an FE effort have abandoned coercion and adopted persuasion, usually because they have experienced
enough battles and discovered the complete futility of coercion.

The next level of awareness is where Dennis, Brian, and I spent many years, and Dennis and Brian largely stayed there
although I finally had to admit that it did not work and was unlikely to, which led to my current strategy. That level is the
mass movement mentality. Dennis and Brian drank deeply from the wells of their nationalist indoctrination, as have
others with my great respect. Dennis tried forming movements around Christian ideology early in his journey, and even
tried it again in the 21st century. He also tried the “patriot” approach, and almost all of his efforts either involved risk-free
(to the customer) marketing plans, business opportunities, or both. Dennis appealed to all three of the most prominent
population management ideologies in the USA to attract interest in and involvement with his efforts. I helped Brian found
a non-profit mass movement to raise awareness of FE, and it was the last time that I will ever try the mass movement
approach. Mass movements, by their very nature, appeal to lowest-common-denominator beliefs to form movement (in-
group) “cohesion.” Unfortunately, those beliefs are usually false, as nationalism, capitalism, and organized religion are
built on lies, half-truths, and self-serving myths. Little resembling enlightenment comes from such ideologies. I came to
believe that true enlightenment is the missing ingredient, and the necessary prerequisite for such enlightenment is a
caring heart. Without that caring heart, the rest will not matter.

When I lived with Dennis in Boston during my beginner's days, when I was also mildly susceptible to delusions of
grandeur, Dennis said that “the people” innately cared, but had nothing worth caring about, and that was why they danced
to the tune of the Establishment’s indoctrination and conditioning, often without much enthusiasm. With little other frame
of reference yet, I believed Dennis. My naïveté was harshly purged during the next few years as I received my life’s
primary lesson. A decade later, after several attempts, Dennis finally coaxed me into working with him again. It did not
last long and I nearly went to prison for my trouble, as the GCs raised the game to a new level of sophistication. When I
was with Dennis that time, he admitted that almost nobody really cared, but he was sifting through humanity’s mine
tailings, looking for gold nuggets. He rarely found any.

There is another level worth mentioning: the aspirant is overwhelmed with delusions of grandeur, believing himself to be
the messiah or planning to become the Bill Gates of FE. Even billionaires are susceptible to that delusion, as they play
their games of fake philanthropy and insatiable greed.

Only after many years of carrying spears for Dennis and Brian, and trying my own efforts, did I arrive at my current
strategy, which has not been tried before that I know of. It is the enlightenment route to FE. Few on Earth today are very
enlightened or saintly (if anybody really is), but pursuing those goals is where the key to helping FE manifest in public may
lie. Many inventors have publicly demonstrated working FE prototypes, but they were all quickly silenced or otherwise
removed from the scene, and violence has commonly been applied, although it is less common than it used to be, as the
GCs’ bag of tricks has become more sophisticated. Before discussing my current approach, I will present the state of the
FE field today, which also helps explain why I am taking my approach.

All the low-integrity activities in the FE field aside, it has been in a state of arrested development for longer than I have
been alive. When the GCs wiped us out in 1988, what made us dangerous was not so much the technology we were
working on; we were building a network of businesses that could manufacture and distribute disruptive energy
technologies, and Sparky Sweet lived right down the road from us. If we became too prominent to easily snuff out, plenty
of people like Sparky could have come forward. That was the primary threat that we presented, led by Dennis’s ingenious
methods and unparalleled courage.

Other than Dennis and a few others, the FE field has generally been dominated by inventors and scientists who are stuck
at those early stages (usually levels 6, 7, and 11 – few of them harbor Level 9 delusions, and they would usually love to
be the focus of a Level 10 effort, if it made them rich and famous). It was like the super heat pump “industry” when
Dennis arrived on the scene. The traditional solar industry also attacked Dennis when he sold the world’s best heating
system. Everybody saw Dennis as a threat, not only the energy oligarchy led by the GCs, but also “competitors” in the
alternative energy field and those scientists and inventors who libeled Dennis. In 2015, I cannot currently recommend
anybody’s efforts in the FE field. There are some worthy players in the milieu, some of whom know that they are risking
their lives and have suffered organized suppression activities (including murder attempts), but their approach has never
come close to working. I will now survey some pitfalls that FE aspirants regularly fall into and why stumbling into them
can be life-wrecking or fatal.

The GCs are merely the apex predator in a political-economic jungle filled with predators. If the GCs are Godzilla, then
the jungles are also filled with tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, and the many docile herbivores that they feast on, and some
furtive creatures eke out existences on the margins. Most Americans have no awareness of the issue, but the USA’s
federal government has classified thousands of patents, largely energy-related patents, according to credible sources.
The 1971 guide for classifying patented technologies extended to photovoltaics that had efficiencies of greater than 10%
or any energy conversion technology that achieved greater than 70-80% efficiency. FE devices are often called “over-
unity” because they produce more energy than it takes to run them. Consequently, any over-unity device was subject to
being classified. There are many areas like that, where the rationale for suppression is at least plausible, but it is then
abused by evil-minded people as they protect the rackets, and the theoretical spirit of the law and the realities of its
enforcement are as different as night and day. I saw it many times during my journey with Dennis, and saw it many times
in the medical racket. Protecting the public is the greatest protection racket on Earth, which extends to consumer
"protection" laws and national security.

According to one measure, Sparky Sweet’s device was 100,000,000% "efficient," which was slightly over the threshold for
classifying it. Sparky never patented his device and kept it proprietary, which avoided seizure that way, but that leads to
other problems. Thousands of energy technology inventors have had their patented devices seized under the national
security laws, and that is merely the tip of the iceberg of what has been suppressed. What led to Steven Greer's pursuit
of FE was when he met with a faction of the GCs in the early 1990s. In 2004, I heard Greer report on his conversations
with them; one disclosure was that the GCs had paid $100 billion in bribes and quiet money to sequester disruptive
technologies over the years, and energy technologies above all. When I heard Greer say that, it made perfect sense to
me, as Dennis rejected two offers that I know of, and I even heard of others in casual conversations with corporate co-
workers and plenty of other such tales from people in the field. Greer claimed to have rejected a $2 billion offer to cease
his efforts. That quiet money amount might be $200 billion by now.

Those taking the money have donned the “Golden Handcuffs,” as that money bought their silence and their technology
was usually shelved; the “seller” was usually unaware of the true nature of the “sale.” But even Golden Handcuffs are a
fair ways down the path of organized suppression tactics. The GCs’ bag of tricks is deep, and many low-cost strategies
can be tried before they resort to using Golden Handcuffs; they can also use the patent office to seize technologies and,
in the relatively rare instance, violence. We received the first friendly buyout offer soon after we began pursuing FE, and
the offer escalated by a couple orders of magnitude before they began playing rough. Kangarooing Dennis into prison
and making “mistakes” that put him in with murderers is one of many techniques at their disposal. Such treatment can
often be free-lance malice engaged in by “public servants” and other Establishment figures, without their needing
instruction or compensation by the GCs, or even being aware of the evil interests that their actions serve. They probably
would not even care if they knew, and many would solicit “employment” if they knew how valuable their activities were to
rich and powerful interests, no matter if those activities eventually made Earth uninhabitable (as long as it happened after
they died or were “guaranteed” a berth in the GCs’ survival enclaves).

The GCs are not squeamish, but they rarely resort to violence in the public arena; they know that a string of deaths and
health "events" threaten to focus attention on their efforts. When the GCs’ minions engage in lethal interventions, either
by direct murder or throwing people such as Dennis into a shark tank and letting “nature” take its course, what seems to
be more important than killing the target in any particular attempt is making it appear to be something other than
premeditated murder. I am not at liberty to publicly disclose details of numerous murder attempts that have been
described to me either from the target or secondhand by highly credible associates, but it is not easy to murder somebody
and make it look like something else (suicides, heart attacks, strange cancer cases, random crimes, accidents, and the
like), and if an attempt initially fails, the assassins will not “double tap” them like more mundane assassins will, such as
Mafia hit men, as it removes any doubt that it was premeditated murder. If the target survives the initial attempt, the
assassins will withdraw and try again another time, since making it look like something else is more important than
achieving success with any one attempt. That is probably why some FE activists have survived numerous murder
attempts. Also, a failed attempt can often have the desired effect, as it can frighten or incapacitate the target to the extent
that he (almost always a man, not a woman) is no longer a threat in the disruptive technology field, FE most of all, and
further action is unnecessary.

Dennis should have died dozens of times over. He has survived several outright murder attempts, and few were likely GC
attempts, but from other interests. I do not like hearing the stories, and neither did Brian. Brian had firsthand experience
with violent suppression and those who experience suppression usually do not make it a point to collect suppression
stories as others have, but Brian knew about 25 dead inventor stories. It is primarily in the realm of disruptive
technologies, especially energy technologies, that such organized suppression strategies are used. Such activities are
unremarkable in that milieu, although it blows the minds of average people and newcomers to the field. The GCs have
developed their organized suppression of disruptive technologies into a science, and that scene from the end of Raiders
of the Lost Ark is not altogether fictional.

Nobody has ever mounted more auspicious or persistent attempts at the businessman’s route to alternative and free
energy than Dennis has. If Dennis could not do it, I do not know who can. But today’s FE field is filled with inventors with
dreams of fame and fortune, who think that they are the messiah, who apply for patents, who try to raise money, and so
forth. I have never seen one of them with a prayer of success and I try to ignore them, but I am bombarded with news of
the inventor-of-the-hour by various FE enthusiasts. During the month that I drafted this essay’s chapter, I was informed of
the activities of no less than a half-dozen aspirants and their technologies. FE was the usual technology, but the “news”
can also include high-MPG cars. They were all on the same paths to disaster that I have survived, witnessed, heard of,
and read of more times than I care to recall. A famous quote attributed to Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, is
that insanity is performing the same act repeatedly and expecting a different outcome each time. The entire FE and
alternative energy field is in that state of arrested development, as people have tried the same approaches literally
thousands of times, and each time the aspirants think that they will succeed. What makes that situation slightly more
justified is that few survive the first failure to try again, so the field is “weeded out” that way. Also, the organized
suppression is often so subtle that its targets do not even realize that they were suppressed, and even if they do, they are
dismissed as paranoid if they speak up, as the suppression activities have "plausible deniability." Those donning the
Golden Handcuffs also had their silence purchased, and all of those untimely deaths of FE aspirants rarely look like what
they probably are to the casual observer, and can be reasonably denied as being the result of murder, if the larger pattern
is ignored. However, it is long past time for a different approach and, refreshingly, there have been baby steps in the
direction that I will advocate, made by various members of the field.
After I first published this essay in September 2014, I read Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, which surveyed the
reactions of Americans to dropping atom bombs on Japan. I read it in relation to my studies regarding the decision to
drop atom bombs on Japan, but what struck me was how similar the reactions to the bombs were to how people view FE
today. The primary difference, of course, is that everybody acknowledges that nuclear bombs exist and have been used,
while almost nobody acknowledges today that FE technology exists, through ignorance, denial, or fear. Another obvious
difference is that the first use of atomic energy was vaporizing a couple of cities. While the initial American reaction was
celebratory and euphoric, it quickly became evident that the USA would not hold a monopoly on nuclear weapons forever,
and fears of nuclear attack became part of the fabric of American consciousness, and by 1946, nearly half of Americans
were amenable to the idea of a world government that could prevent a nuclear holocaust. 893

There were few dissenting voices in the USA to dropping the atom bombs on Japan, and when luminaries such as Albert
Einstein voiced negative opinions on dropping those bombs, the USA's government went to great lengths to justify the
bombings. Also, the day after Hiroshima's bombing, American newspapers began rhapsodizing over the potential of
nuclear energy, and although euphoria over nuclear energy's potential quickly faded, nuclear energy promotion was
doggedly upbeat.894 Einstein dismissed nuclear energy as "one hell of a way to boil water," but by the 1950s, the nuclear
establishment hired a death camp Nazi to write a children's book on the wonders of nuclear energy among its many
promotional activities. The propaganda is alive and well, as I never heard more pro-nuclear propaganda in my life as I
heard in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and that is saying something.

I have to give 1940s commentators credit; they understood the relationship between energy and economics, and better
than I often see it today. They understood that if there was an abundant source of energy, Utopia was possible.
Socialists quickly understood that the "free energy" that nuclear energy could make possible would undermine capitalism,
as the profit motive would be a poor one for denying prosperity to all of Earth's people, and would not be tolerated. One
socialist tract argued that the soaring standard of living that abundant energy would make possible could ensure that no
child on Earth would "carry the grime of poverty on his face and soul."895 Socialists also realized that atomic energy would
be a disaster if controlled by military and capitalist interests. Other commentators disparaged the prosperity that nuclear
energy would bring, as people would simply have too much time on their hands, which could "doom" civilization. 896

There are ironic contrasts and parallels of the atomic bomb/energy reactions of the 1940s with the state of the FE
situation today. Making the atomic bombs is the greatest secret project ever, and almost nobody on Earth, even most of
the Manhattan Project's workers, had any idea that there was an atomic bomb project until the USA bombed Hiroshima.
The development of FE technology has likewise been performed in great secrecy. FE technology was likely developed to
a commercial level by the 1950s, but that program has been privatized and has never been officially acknowledged. The
GCs represent capitalism on steroids, and their influence has plenty do with why all independent efforts to develop FE
technology for public use have failed to date.

In summary, here are some approaches that have never come close to working and likely never will, and why:

1. Patenting an FE invention:
a. For FE devices, patents are generally denied on the “laws of physics” objection (usually by citing "perpetual
motion"), even though it is an a priori way to reject a patent application, declaring it impossible as a starting
point, so that until establishment science blesses FE as even possible, it cannot be patented, in a classic
Catch-22 situation; with that logic, the Wright brothers would have never been able to patent their airplanes;
b. The applicants have announced their self-serving intentions, and organized suppression almost effortlessly
defeats the self-interested;
c. Patents can be granted and then seized using national security laws, and inventors can go to prison if they
continue pursuing their inventions, in an Orwellian twist;
2. Not patenting an FE invention and keeping it proprietary:
a. Keeping technology secret is the same game that the GCs play; Western “medicine” went through a
proprietary medicine craze in which snake oil and other secret-ingredient “medicines” were sold, and there
are unscrupulous people in the FE field who sell the snake-oil equivalent of FE;
b. Genuine FE inventors who really have something and play the proprietary technology game are often tarred
with the same brush as the charlatans;
c. The only people in the dark when FE inventors play the proprietary technology game are the public;
whatever the FE inventor built, the GCs developed to a commercial level at least 50 years ago, and they
have the 35th generation of the technology of what the FE inventor built in his garage; such inventors are
either oblivious to that reality or they think that somehow they will be allowed to succeed, and often harbor
the rest of those 18-year-old fantasies; people such as Sparky Sweet took their “secret sauce” proprietary
 information to their graves with them, unwittingly making the GCs’ job pretty easy, as they self-suppressed
their technology;
d. As with those applying for patents, those playing the proprietary technology game have announced their
self-interest and are easily defeated by the GCs’ bag of tricks;
3. Raising money from capitalistic sources (venture capital, stock sales, and other kinds of investors, including
customers):
a. Receiving money from investors, customers, and the like is a quick way to go to prison on trumped up
charges (1, 2);
b. If inventors try that route, they will eventually lose the rights to their technologies to their investors; even for
normal inventing, inventors rarely profit from their inventions, and for FE inventing, it is virtually impossible;
c. If the invention has promise for making FE, some investors will undoubtedly be agents of organized
suppression or garden-variety organized crime;
d. With capitalistic efforts, members of the effort regularly become seduced by the immensity of FE’s potential;
then the Treasure of the Sierra Madre effect arises and the effort collapses in a frenzy of self-destructive
greed;
4. Finding rich philanthropists:
a. “Rich philanthropist” is an oxymoron; there are probably no truly “rich philanthropists” active on Earth today;
b. For the few that may have wanted to help fund FE efforts, the GCs quickly dissuaded them (they do not offer
carrots, but go straight to the stick, as it is hard to bribe rich people, and there are subtle ways to misdirect
their efforts); that avenue has rarely been successfully navigated that I know of, and never at a level that will
make a difference for making FE happen;
5. Sneaking past the GCs:
a. They have global surveillance capabilities second to none, and cannot be snuck past;
b. The very idea of sneaking past them is rooted in an adolescent fantasy that usually leads to paranoia and
other foibles, and the effort’s self-destruction;
6. A guerilla revolution led by garage inventors possessing blueprints for building FE prototypes:
a. Making a viable FE prototype is far harder than it might seem – relatively few garage tinkerers ever develop
anything worth suppressing – and even then they usually wreck their lives in the process (go broke, get
divorced, are injured in laboratory/shop mishaps, etc.), before any suppression techniques need to be
applied;
b. Many inventors have demonstrated FE prototypes (Dennis, Moray, Gray, Reed, Sweet, Trombly, etc.), but
for those not immediately subjected to suppression activity (often the violent kind), the gulf between a
working prototype and something for public use is more than $100 million of development897; money only
buys somebody’s effort, and when FE efforts have been starved of money, as they all have been, it is a tacit
admission that not enough people will be involved because they understand the issue’s importance and
care, but they must be bribed to become involved;
c. Contrary to rumors that abound and related myths, there is no army of garage tinkerers waiting for the
blueprints to go build one, or are capable of building them, which will organize into an effective effort;
7. Mounting a mass movement, especially around ideologies such as nationalism, capitalism, and organized religion:
a. Those ideologies are seated in scarcity-based, self-serving, and fearful assumptions, and the GCs have
masterfully used those ideologies to control the masses; out-maneuvering the master shepherd with his own
tools is very unlikely;
b. Because all such ideologies cater to self-interest, the effort attracts those of corrupt motivation from the
outset and is easily defeated by organized suppression, if it does not internally collapse before then;
c. Scarcity-based ideologies, and efforts with allegiance to them, are old skins that will not hold the new wine;
d. Members of the general public are usually only interested in FE if they can immediately profit from it; they
want it delivered to their homes for free, or FE presents a business opportunity, and the like, and their self-
serving and usually scientifically illiterate orientation is easily distracted; they are often more harm than help,
and are easily seduced/dissuaded by the agents of organized suppression; the naïve, idly curious, greedy,
and others are little or no help at this stage;
8. Trying to conquer the organized suppression:
 a. Only extremely foolish men in thrall to adolescent fantasies consider this approach, and its battle-oriented
perspective will defeat the effort before it begins;
b. The only casualties will be those Young Warriors and those they are allegedly trying to help; the GCs are not
threatened by such approaches;
9. Media campaigns:
a. The media is a key part of the global power structure, and it again is their tool, not the activists’;
b. For every dollar an activist spends on media campaigns, the power structure can spend a hundred times as
much to overwhelm the effort with negative coverage, not to mention unleashing the legal system and other
assets against the media effort (I lived through a few of those situations, and witnessed others);
10. The hero’s or messiah’s journey:
a. It is an archetypal role that almost nobody on Earth is qualified to play, and many are easily seduced into
thinking that they are the messiah or world’s hero; it again appeals to men, especially young ones;
megalomania is a hazard for that approach;
b. For the few qualified for such a role/task, one hero/messiah against the GCs does not stand a chance;
11. Hosting conferences to raise awareness:
a. Such conferences are crawling with agents of various interests, including the CIA and other intelligence
organizations; and local, state, and federal law enforcement act on behalf of various interests, including the
GCs, and none of whom are allies and all are usually intent on destroying the effort;
b. Attempted murder of key conference figures before, during, or immediately after the conference is all too
common;
c. Those attending the conferences rarely have agendas in alignment with the conference organizers’
intention; groupies and other celebrity chasers attend, many come for the show or to fill their social needs,
and many unwary and gullible participants easily fall under the spell of psychopathic agents infiltrating the
effort to help take it down from the inside, who usually strike when the attacks come from the outside, and
many attend to survey the effort, to see how they can dominate/steal it;
12. Beseeching the world’s governments for assistance, particularly their military arms:
 a. They are usually among those sending their agents to conferences;
b. They all answer, at some level, to the GCs, although few in those organizations are aware of the GCs in the
slightest;
c. Washington, D.C. activists often end up dead (1, 2, 3, 4), and others have “enjoyed” somewhat less dire
fates (Brian and Dennis were run out of the USA for their efforts), but I have never heard of D.C. activism in
these areas with a happy ending;
13. Beseeching corporate, environmental, charitable, scientific, academic, or "progressive" institutions:
a. They all have ideological commitments to their scarcity-based frames of reference, and they almost always
view FE either as the enemy or impossible because of the “laws of physics” or they dismiss evidence of
organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory,” and they have other reactions of denial; they are the groups
often most resistant to the very idea of FE;
b. In summary, there are not any organizations not already devoted to FE that have allied with FE efforts or are
likely to; those doors have been banged on thousands of times, and nobody is home; in the rare instance
when the door opens and the beseecher is let in, it is usually to impede/eliminate him, not to help; I have
never seen genuine help given.

The gullibility and naïveté of those in the FE field, combined with libelers and other criminals in the ranks, are partly why,
soon before he died, Brian said that if anybody brings FE to the world, it will not be people in the field today. I have either
participated in, witnessed, or heard from fellow travelers all of the above approaches numerous times, and there are far
more written accounts of such approaches readily available. As I watched them play out many times, it became
disheartening to watch the same paths to failure doggedly pursued, often by the aspirant-of-the-hour, usually an inventor,
who always thought that he had some magic formula that would work even though many thousands of his professional
ancestors failed. All of those methods are ways to give our power away to someone or something else, pour the new
wine into old skins, and generally act from a scarcity-based and victim-oriented perspective. None of those approaches
have come close to working or are likely to. Newcomers invariably advocate some kind of shortcut, an easy path to the
finish line. There are not any. The Fifth Epochal Event is not something that can be initiated in an afternoon, a month, or
a year of effort, and I have watched many lifetimes expended in the pursuit, including mine. Nothing about this is easy,
and I have helped the best of the best spend their lives trying. With a sufficient nucleus of enlightened people, it could be
an easy task, but achieving that nucleus is the hard part.
For several years before writing this essay, I have stated that the only inventor-oriented approach with a prayer is for an
inventor with the goods (a viable prototype undoubtedly generating FE) to give it to a worthy group so that they can take it
the rest of the way, past humanity’s inertia and any organized suppression activities that might be inflicted on the effort. I
have never heard of the inventor with the goods willing to give it away, and that worthy group does not yet exist; my efforts
could be seen as trying to help form it. Criticizing the inventor with the goods who is unwilling to give it away, when there
is nobody worth giving it to, is unproductive.

Many years ago, after surviving my FE adventures, beginning to understand the milieu, and trading notes with fellow
travelers, I began to suspect that what I had experienced on the mundane level of discovering that personal integrity is the
world’s scarcest commodity was only a hint of something far more vast, even putting aside my numerous paranormal
experiences. I received the impression that the zero-point field was divine in nature, and that if a sentient species did not
approach the issue with sufficient divine intention, then it could not access the field or access it for long. The GCs might
be doing humanity a favor by acting as some kind of integrity threshold that humanity must clear before the path to FE will
open. Ten like Dennis or a hundred like Brian combining their efforts and humanity would have had FE by now, but there
are probably not that many like them on Earth. I began to suspect that the problem was really a lack of integrity and
enlightenment, in ways that go far beyond practical notions of those issues. I have consequently been trying to walk and
advocate the enlightenment route. Mine is more from an activist/academic perspective, not a messianic or mystical
master approach, or the hero’s journey. But the masters’ teachings, at least those that the priesthoods have not distorted,
I believe can be highly relevant. Some kind of spiritual grounding is probably necessary to pursue FE, but I would not
advocate receiving it through organized religions. If love is understood as the best of all possible feelings, and acts from
the heart are recognized as the most powerful that we can achieve, that is probably sufficient spiritual understanding, and
achieving some mystical experiences may be critical for awakening the aspirant. Anything less than a divinely intended
approach toward FE may not work, for reasons that go far beyond organized suppression or the public’s inertia. That is
just something that slowly dawned on me, which I cannot prove to anybody, but it guides my thinking and efforts. Also,
sources that I respect have stated that the means become the ends, which is consistent with what I learned during my
adventures, has guided me from the beginning, and is likely why I survived my journey as long as I have.

Several years before writing this essay, as I began studying for this essay in earnest, I happened upon a book published
by an oil company, believe it or not, which helped me crystallize this essay’s epochal approach. The Second Epochal
Event was missing from the author’s account, as well as the Fifth, of course, but in a discussion of socio-technical
development, the author listed four different “vectors” of technological development, which he described as: Discovery,
Invention, Innovation, and Diffusion.898 They corresponded to scientific discoveries, creating inventions, marketing them,
and people using them. I have witnessed organized suppression in each vector.

The GCs are actively mischievous and vigilant, but any FE effort that makes them the central focus will almost certainly
fail. They need to be treated as a force of nature, and respected and avoided when possible, but a storm or earthquake
can always appear from nowhere, we are vulnerable to them and can only, at best, try to reduce our risk to them. If
Godzilla comes to dinner, you are the dinner. The GCs very likely cannot be fought, negotiated with, sneaked past, or
outsmarted, and anybody who tries is playing an insanely dangerous game. The GCs probably can only be made
obsolete, and a world based on abundance will do that, and even they can be redeemed, which would be my ideal
outcome. Brian might have said it best when he said that a successful FE effort will rely on “combined positive intention,”
not the “complaint-based” orientation of protestors, the conflict-orientation of Young Warriors, and the like.899 We need to
begin by aiming high and doing our best to maintain that high level, and avoid being drawn into the mire. A creator’s
mindset, not a victim’s, is the key.

In light of all those paths that have led to nowhere, why do I think that my attempt will not be another dead end? It could
well be, but it is at least a new route and it should be harmless, which I highly value; I have seen enough carnage in this
lifetime and do not want to be responsible for any more wrecked or prematurely ended lives.

What follows is whom I seek and what I plan to ask them to help me with; I am looking for people who:

 Deeply care about healing humanity and the planet (they are far less common than mainstream society believes);
 Do not abdicate their responsibility and think that someplace in the world is an organization that cares and can
save the day, and that their contribution is not needed; if you deeply care, you are greatly needed;
 Have had some kind of awakening (also called "radicalizing") experience, which usually showed them that their
conditioning was an indoctrination into ways of thinking so that they could be controlled; once they can see through
one of them, the others are easier to recognize; perhaps the hardest one to see through, particularly for “smart”
people, is the rationalist-materialist paradigm usually taught to scientists (also called logical positivism); having the
direct personal experience of a mystical awakening usually breaks through that indoctrination, but there is also
professional peril, as those awakening in that way no longer “drink the Kool-Aid” of mainstream science, and their
 careers can end due to their disenchantment or through ostracism, outright firing, and professional blackballing if
they do not remain quiet about their expanded orientation;
 Possess the mental horsepower necessary to think in complex enough terms so that they understand the
rudiments presented in this essay and can preferably master aspects of it; understanding the scientific arguments
and evidence presented in this essay is about the level that I think is needed, which is far less rigorous training
than professional scientists receive, but should be sufficient to begin thinking in comprehensive terms;
 Possess some kind of experience in the real world that helped them shed the naïveté that usually accompanies the
indoctrinated state noted above; naïveté is a potentially fatal affliction in this field, and the ability to recognize the
psychopaths who will be attracted to efforts that I will mount will be a critical faculty; such people will either be
opportunists or on the payroll of organized suppression, and there will also be functional psychopaths who believe
that they are saving the world by wiping out FE and will use any means they deem necessary to achieve their
goals.

What I plan to ask of those that I attract to my work includes:

 Reading this essay and diving deeply into as many areas as possible in order to begin developing comprehensive
perspectives, particularly the roles of energy and consciousness;
 Doing enough homework and investigation to satisfy themselves that FE technology is at least possible, usually
without laying their hands on a working FE prototype or watching it in action; this is one of the more difficult tasks
and usually awakening experiences are necessary to begin to understand how organized suppression works, how
much chaff there is for every grain of wheat on the fringes (so much that the wheat is hard to find), and other issues
in which people usually have to dive deeply and get their hands dirty, and even be misled on an issue or two before
they get to the bottom of it, in order to understand the process; but they usually have to get to the bottom of at least
one issue and find that it is valid, even though it may be marginalized and pilloried by the Establishment;
 Beginning to understand, in as comprehensive terms as possible, what FE’s potential is;
 Because my work is freely available to the public, people can digest it anonymously and quietly, and that is good
work, too; however, for those whom I will ask to be in the “choir,” they will not be anonymous, and I am going to ask
 them to “sing” the song of abundance in cyberspace, and I seek to have the abundance song sung in a chorus of
thousands, which has never happened on Earth before;
 That song will attract people who have longed for it for their entire lives and if it can attract tens of thousands of
people, preferably about 100,000 of them, then it will be time to take action and support a technical effort to
develop FE technology for public use;
 That development effort will be non-profit, virtually all of the work will be performed by volunteers, and whatever is
developed will be open-sourced and given away, not sold; only a few will need to be given away before the Fifth
Epochal Event will manifest.

Once a mass-production-ready FE device is developed, with 100,000 people maintaining their focus on the issue (and
probably contributing financially; but with that many, nobody will contribute at levels where they suffer financially – and this
stage only happens far down the path, probably at least several years into the future, if not more), the Fifth Epochal Event
will be here, and that group’s “heroics” will no longer be needed and the fun can begin. Making a production-ready
prototype and then giving it away is like Tesla's original dream, but is more like Dennis's marketing plans with the Internet
culture of open-sourcing and crowdfunding grafted onto it. Then Dennis's and Brian's Utopian ideas could begin coming
to fruition. As discerning readers can tell, developing the technology is near the end of the process that I envision, not the
beginning. The key ingredients for manifesting the Fifth Epochal Event are integrity and sentience, not technology.

As with the previous Epochal Events, the appearance of new energy technology that could harness the new energy
source always was the event, which tapped around an order of magnitude above that previously achieved. It will likely be
no different this time, and as with the other Epochal Events, a tiny fraction of humanity will initiate the event, it will be
copied by the rest of humanity, and it will transform the human journey in ways that were unimaginable before the Epochal
Event (1, 2, 3, 4).

For today’s global civilization, 100,000 people amounts to about 0.001% of humanity, or 1-in-70,000 people. For the
5,000-7,000 people that I hope can form the “choir,” they only have to be one-in-a-million. Can one-in-a-million muster the
integrity and complex awareness to understand abundance and sing the song? I think so. I think that those people I seek
might be as high as one-in-five-thousand, which means that there are 200 times as many potential singers on Earth as
might be needed. I will take those odds. I am virtually certain that if I can find and train 5,000-7,000 singers that can
attract an audience with the right stuff of 100,000 or so (that 100,000 will also develop enough of a comprehensive,
abundance-based perspective, that they will understand the issue’s importance and keep their focus and will not be
distracted, but nobody needs to be a hero). Meetings outside of cyberspace will eventually happen, but far later than
many will think or likely want. The “let’s have a conference” mentality can be fatal for the effort in its early stages.900

Perhaps the majority of the GCs are quietly hoping that efforts like mine are successful, while the dark heart of that
organization has dismissed the potential of what I am trying. I can only hope that potential suppressors underestimate the
power of love. I am planning to survive this attempt. So far, I have not seen or heard of people in the West merely writing
about these issues who suffered untimely deaths and other dire fates. I have had my own Internet stalkers (1, 2), some of
whom were professionals; they may be only a first line of defense for a strategy that can turn violent, but I am gambling
that it will not. I am likely only risking my life, however, and nobody else’s, although I will probably have to rudely
dissuade gung-ho newcomers and others who rush toward the pitfalls with their “bright ideas,” like those 18-year-old boys
seeking glory on the battlefield. Gung-hoers and those who follow them will probably present the greatest threat to my
efforts, not organized suppression. Outlets exist for that newcomer mentality, and they can go see Dennis and the others
trying “do something” approaches. Such newcomers will only put my efforts at risk, usually by putting themselves and
those around them in harm’s way, and probably quite unwittingly. Those gung-hoers are almost exclusively men, and
their dominance of today's FE field is partly why it is in a state of arrested development. As I have already written, women
need to step up to help end the situation of violent male gangs dominating humanity, and they are also needed to help FE
manifest. The "Boys' Club" approach to FE has not worked and is not likely to. Those in the choir will not have to worry
much about organized suppression, other than affable, silver-tongued psychopaths trying to seduce them, and I will try to
limit their opportunities and help people recognize them.

The path to developing FE technology for public use outlined above I believe can work, but there are also other ways that
the Fifth Epochal Event can manifest. If I had to bet on how it will manifest, I would put my money on the struggle
between the darkest faction of the GCs losing to the saner members, and on their beginning to release some of their
sequestered technologies. The reason why their organized suppression efforts have been so successful is that they know
if any of it makes it to the public, it will only be a matter of time before the dam breaks, which would probably include ETs
openly interacting with humanity. The GCs know that if any of that happens, their days of ruling humanity will quickly end.
That is partly why this hump has been so hard to get over. But I am not going to wait for something to happen at that level
to save us all, and what I am attempting will also help form a nucleus of awareness that can greatly help with an
enlightened and harmless implementation of FE. If FE makes its appearance, its implementation will need to be led by as
many enlightened and informed people as possible. Some need to be ahead of the curve to lead the way, if only by
promoting an enlightened awareness. Once people can see FE with their own eyes, preferably by having it delivered to
their home (anything less, and they will not awaken; they will not be talked into an abundance-based mentality; they must
experience it901), the awakening process should be pretty rapid, especially if there is already a choir singing the song of
abundance.

I found that if people are candidates for the choir, they are so rare that there will not be anybody in their daily lives who
also is. The maximum social circle that most people can manage is a few hundred people, but I am looking for something
like 1-in-5,000 (it might be as auspicious as 1-in-1,000, but I have my doubts, and it might be a far smaller proportion) so
the odds are that those prospective choir members will not have anybody among their families, friends, and colleagues
who can also learn the song and sing it. That is just the reality of the numbers, which took me years of harsh learning to
understand. The social-circle approach will not work for what I have in mind, but I am using a new technology with a
global reach to find those needles in haystacks. Also, a primary purpose of this essay is to improve those odds. Make no
mistake, it is also about the numbers, but it is as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that he would rather march with one person
who understood why they were marching than a hundred who did not. Essentially, Dennis always amassed “armies” that
did not really understand or were not aligned with the goal, and mutiny attempts came early and often.

I developed my current approach by trial and error that was extremely hazardous and painful, and took most of a lifetime
to achieve. I hope that this essay can help shorten the learning curve for those whom I seek. Many readers of this essay
will get bogged down early on and skip to the end, and they will get out of the experience what they put into it. Such
people are not in my target audience, unless they have already mastered this essay’s material, but I have never met even
one such person. I will continue studying this subject matter for the remainder of my life, and have a ways to go before I
can consider my grasp of it firm. This essay is largely intended to help readers develop a comprehensive awareness of
life’s journey on Earth and see when humanity enters the play. When readers can do that and come to appreciate it, they
will have an easier time avoiding the egocentric levels of FE awareness (1-to-11), and reach something that might be
called soul-centric. It should help them shed not only those scarcity-based ideologies and their insidious, scarcity-based
assumptions, but they should also begin to understand why approaches rooted in such ideologies are doomed to failure
for this task. We cannot drag our scarcity-based baggage with us for establishing a world of abundance. The GCs are
masters of using people’s allegiance to those ideologies to enslave their minds and spirits. What I will be asking of my
target audience will be anything but easy, and can actually be quite dangerous if caution is not exercised. But for those
who use this material properly, it can improve their understanding in important ways.
A great potential pitfall is judging the 99.9+% of humanity that cannot or will refuse to comprehend this essay’s message,
and it is almost always their victim-oriented mindset that is their barrier to comprehension. People cannot be talked out of
thinking like victims; only experience can shatter their paradigm. Brian’s question regarding whether humanity is a
sentient species is fair. I consider humanity a semi-sentient species; the potential for sentience is there, but is rarely
realized, as people traded their sentience for the promise of security in a world of scarcity.

Every Epochal Event was a new method that tapped a level of energy that was around an order of magnitude greater than
the previous energy regime, and the world that it led to was unimaginable to those living immediately before the event.
Berating and judging almost the entirety of humanity because they cannot imagine a world based on FE would be like
judging those australopiths before their “Tesla” invented the first stone tool. Were all of those pre-stone-tool australopiths
“stupid,” or was that Australo-Tesla brilliant? For each Epochal Event, the trends that led to the event, when one pioneer,
or a relative handful of them, achieved the social organization and technological prowess to tap the previously unexploited
energy source, were evident in hindsight. Although those achieving the feat were extraordinary for their time, they stood
on the shoulders of their ancestors and enjoyed the benefits of the culture that allowed their invention to appear. Those
many arguments of denial that attend the introduction of the FE concept are normal, just like pre-fire protohumans
reacting to the idea of a campfire with fear. Not until those protohumans could see a tended fire with their own eyes could
they begin to comprehend it and its soon-evident benefits. Those who invented the new way were extraordinary for their
time, not that those who could not see or imagine it were irredeemably stupid; they were simply trapped in the prevailing
paradigm. When the new energy regime appeared, everybody climbed aboard and their burgeoning sentience reached
new levels, and they soon lived in a world that was previously unimaginable to everybody, even the inventor(s).

We are simply living in the pre-Epochal-Event stage and are right at its brink. This time is different, however, in that the
technical achievements have already been made, but those running the planet are actively preventing the Epochal Event
from manifesting. They live in fear, just as virtually all humans do. They see their role in the world disappearing when FE
makes its appearance, and are doing what they can to prevent it, just like virtually all humans would. What makes this
event different is also the fact that with each Epochal Event the ecosystems were further pushed to the brink, as a side-
effect of the energy regime, and humanity has been causing the Sixth Mass Extinction ever since that founder group left
Africa. That trend is quickly reaching levels that threaten all complex life on Earth, including humanity. I sympathize with
the dismay that awake and awakening people can have toward the unawakened, who do not care what the future holds
and are only interested in pursuing their immediate self-interest and surviving in a world of scarcity. They are largely
impediments to FE's manifesting, not allies, but they comprise nearly 100% of humanity today. It is simply how humanity
has been for all time, although many wish it were different. As Machiavelli noted, people will not begin to awaken until FE
becomes a part of their lives, and nobody but the founders will awaken to the new energy regime until they can
experience it. I seek founders: those extraordinary people who can imagine the new energy regime before they can
experience it. I do not seek to persuade those who deny FE with their many arguments, think it dangerous beyond all
reason, believe that the situation is hopeless, or are stuck in the FE field’s current state of arrested development. The
people whom I seek are needles in haystacks, but this new technology called the Internet can help me find and coach
them. The transition from a world based on scarcity and fear, to one of abundance and love, which is the greatest one
that humanity will ever make, initially needs people who can just imagine that world, keep their attention on it, and refuse
to be distracted, while innumerable distractions beckon. The Fifth Epochal Event will probably not be humanity’s final
such event, and there have been many hints of what that could look like (1, 2), which is an advantage that no previous
Epochal Event had going for it.

Those people trying out all the doomed approaches to manifesting FE are to be commended, but they do not have a
chance in today’s world. A new approach is needed that is aligned with the kind of world that it can help manifest. The
effort needs to aim high. Concepts such as open-sourcing and crowdfunding have come from the Internet culture, and
are steps in the right direction. Even high-tech potentates such as Bill Gates live relatively humbly. The Internet is a
precursor to the kind of communication system that will be enjoyed in the Fifth Epochal Phase of the human journey, and I
plan to use it for this new approach of manifesting FE. When love and abundance reign instead of fear and scarcity, a
creator’s orientation toward life will probably replace the victim’s orientation. Making that future at least partly imaginable
has become my life’s work, and time will tell if it makes a significant impact. As the great Bucky Fuller said, we are facing
Utopia or oblivion. Which one will we choose?

Footnotes
1
I am not happy about the Israeli produce and will not buy it. Palestinians probably lived on that farm land before they were forcibly evicted for
Jewish “settlers” and the store only began trading with Chinese farms after a healthy debate among the cooperative’s members and its board, and
a compromise was met, in that the cooperative would only do business with Chinese firms that adhered to the cooperative’s environmental,
animal, and worker treatment standards. I have never heard of that kind of debate ever happening at another American business, which is why I
always shop for my food there, even though in many ways it is still mired in scarcity-based practices.
2
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 208, for Oldowan tools, which were the oldest known
st
stone tools until discoveries in the early 21 century.
3
See The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 115-120.
4
For instance, many islands and mountain chains have been formed by volcanic activity, and the mountain chain that formed the Hawaiian Islands
is very evident on the Pacific Ocean’s floor. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s satellite technologies can measure the rate and direction in which the tectonic plates move (about the rate that fingernails grow), and
rocks in the volcanoes of the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain have been dated, with the oldest volcanoes determined to be more than 80
million years old. Those radioactive ages conform to the rates of movement, as well as the eroded states of the older volcanoes.

Another example is the fossil record and how its relative ages were established long before radioactivity was discovered. When radioactive dating
th
was developed, it not only confirmed the relative dates, but it also established that the estimated absolute dates developed in the 19 century
were not that far off. In Chapter IX of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, he estimated that the latter part of the Mesozoic Era may have been
more than 300 mya. It was more like 100 mya, or well within an order of magnitude of what it is considered to be today, which is far more precise
than the 6,000 years of “begats” in the Book of Genesis.
5
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 34-35, and 89-92.
6
For example, on sulfur see Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 42-43, and 67-68, and for nitrogen see “Stable isotopes as indicators of change in the food
procurement and food preference of Viking Age and Early Christian populations on Gotland (Sweden), by Steven B. Kosiba, et al., in Journal of
Anthropological Anthropology, 26 (2007), pp. 394-411, and “Use of Nitrogen-15 natural abundance method to identify nitrate sources in Kansas
groundwater”, by M.A. Townsend, et al., Proceedings of Waste Research Technology Conference, 2002.
7
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 235-237.
8
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, pp. 135-140.
9
See, The Beginning of the World as We Know It, edited by John P. Rafferty, pp. 79-155.
10
See Jared Diamond’s Collapse, pp. 136-156. During my studies, I came upon challenges to the version of Anasazi collapse in Diamond’s work,
and the book Questioning Collapse, edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, was a direct challenge to Diamond’s hypothesis. Although I
have never entirely agreed with Diamond’s work, Questioning Collapse was arguably libelous. It literally turned Diamond’s views on the Australian
megafaunal extinctions upside down. In his Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, Diamond “credited” humans with that mass extinction,
while a contributing author of Questioning Collapse, on the same page where he mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel, rather snidely wrote that
Diamond argued for the opposite: that humans had nothing to do with the extinctions. That means that the author did not even read Guns, Germs,
and Steel or that he expected his audience to be uninformed or lazy. That was also by no means a new opinion of Diamond’s, as his earlier The
Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992, has a chapter titled, “The Golden Age that Never Was”, wherein Diamond discussed a number of mass
extinctions likely caused by humans, including Australia. Although Diamond’s theses deserved to be challenged, as all hypotheses do, efforts
such as Questioning Collapse reflect the sloppy scholarship that can abound regarding these subjects.
11
See Mary H. Schweitzer’s “Blood from Stone”, in Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived;
Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 104-11.
12
This essay links many times to Wikipedia. Readers should be cautioned, however. I performed an experiment with a friend in 2008, and the
results showed a rather pronounced imperial, Eurocentric bias. On controversial “fringe” subjects, particularly ones that threaten the global power
structure, such as free energy suppression, Wikipedia can be worse than worthless (although that article has marginally improved over the years),
with Wikipedia articles dominated by trolls, and some of them were professionals. I use Wikipedia with caution, and I suggest that readers of this
essay use similar caution. In several places at Wikipedia where this essay links to, I have seen errors and mainstream biases, which will probably
always plague Wikipedia. In general, as I wrote this essay, the closer the story of life on Earth got to the human chapters, the more “vandalism”
was evident in Wikipedia's articles, where people promoted their theories. When the story finally started dealing with Homo sapiens, the
vandalism was so great at times that I hesitated to link to the articles, as they were so badly marred. Readers should be aware of that bias, which
is consistent with how the massacre article was distorted and vandalized. If this essay becomes popular, I will suggest that readers might think of
donating to Wikipedia. I respect their goal, and the work of millions has made it a valuable resource, even with its obvious limitations.
13
See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap, pp. 4-5.
14
See, for instance, Douglas Futuyma’s Evolution, pp. 13-14, or Stephen Marshak’s Essentials of Geology, pp. 6-7.
15
See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, chapter 5. See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 34-35.
16
See Henry Gee’s The Accidental Species, p. xiii.
17
See Donald Prothero’s The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, pp. 130-136. Prothero argued that studying mass extinctions became a fad. But
studying them was taboo for more than a century, too. Was the “fad” partly an overreaction to suppression? Prothero’s observation about how
scientists interact all too often is on page 130, which states: “Scientific meetings can degenerate into shouting matches and name-calling, although
the preferred method of attack is to demolish one’s opponent with a witty riposte.”
18
The tale of the Big Bang and the physics of stars and solar systems can be found in numerous places on the Internet. A brief summary of the
Big Bang and its immediate aftermath can be found in A.C. Phillips’s The Physics of Stars, pp. 1-3, and a less technical account is in Mark Foster
Mortimer’s Civilization’s Future, How Energy Defines and Constrains our Progress, pp. 5-8.
19
See also Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, chapter 3.
20
Many examples can be provided, such as the initially ridiculed light bulb and powered flight; demonstrations of those technologies were made in
public, but mainstream scientists ignored the demonstrations as if they were never made. For a less famous example, the great linguist Joseph
Greenberg ruffled many specialist feathers with his generalist synthesis for cataloging the world’s languages by seeking universal similarities. His
generalist synthesis, while having errors in the details, is widely accepted today as largely accurate. See an account of the controversy in
Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 218-232. The taboo against studying mass extinctions prevailed for more than a century and was broken
by a team led by a Nobel Laureate working outside of his field of expertise.
21
See, for instance, Frans B. M. de Wall and Pier Francesco Ferrari, eds., The Primate Mind, for a bottom-up approach, which is a departure from
the top-down approaches. In that instance, the top-down approach compared non-human primates with humans, seeing how close their cognitive
processes came to human processes. The bottom-up approach explored the foundations of non-human primate cognition, not how they
compared to human cognition.
22
The inventors of the heat pump that my partner sold cut their published performance data in half so that engineers would not ridicule that
“impossible” data. The microscopes of Royal Rife and Gaston Naessens are older than I am, and those microscopes attain optical resolutions
considered “impossible” by today’s optical theory, some of which hails all the way back to Isaac Newton. When Naessens tried patenting his
microscope, with its “impossible” optical resolutions, he was unable to explain its resolutions in terms of orthodox optical theory and had to
abandon the patent process. Rife earlier invented a microscope that attained similar “impossible” resolutions, and while the medical establishment
did its best to crush Rife’s work, surviving micrographs prove that it indeed attained such resolutions. Brown’s Gas has long been an enigma, with
its exact composition unknown. It is made of the hydrogen and oxygen resulting from splitting water, but seems to be unusually bonded. The
transmutation experiment with Brown’s Gas has been performed a hundred times or more, including by national governments, and orthodox
theory cannot explain the results. While scientists were stumped over just exactly what Brown’s Gas was and how it produced “impossible”
results, Yull Brown was not too interested in the theories; he was more interested in what Brown’s Gas could do. Sparky Sweet’s free energy
device, which produced a million times the energy that went into it, and also produced antigravity effects, was baffling even to Sparky. He and his
partner wrote a book to explain how it worked, but there was still plenty of mystery regarding how it worked. When Sparky demonstrated it to a
close colleague, Sparky himself shrugged in amazement, saying that it indeed defied electric theory, but there it was, working. The free energy,
antigravity, and other exotic technologies that were demonstrated to my friend blew his mind, and almost any scientist viewing that demonstration
would have been stunned into bewilderment.
23
See David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, pp. 240-245, which refers to Bohm’s original calculation in his Causality and Chance in
Modern Physics, p. 163. Bohm’s calculation is summarized as follows: “If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic
centimeter of space…it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all the matter in the known universe.” See discussion of Bohm’s theory
and the evidence for it in Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, pp. 51-55, and Bohm’s opinions on the relationship between consciousness
and quantum phenomena in Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, pp. 213-215.
24 th
In Einstein’s “Sidelights on Relativity”, a speech delivered on May 5 , 1920, at the University of Leyden, Einstein finished with: “Recapitulating,
we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical properties; in this sense, therefore, there exists an
ether.”
25
See Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon’s Breakthrough Power, p. 123 for thirty of the names that Jeane has collected over the years for the field
that is tapped by so-called free energy technology.
26
A recent example is Nassim Haramein’s “Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass”, Physical Review & Research International, volume 3,
issue 4, October - December 2013, pp. 270-292, and related press release.
27
“Black projects” are efforts that the public is not officially aware of, engaged in by various “national security” organizations, some large
“aerospace” companies and other private interests, many of whose names have never been publicly revealed.
28
The tales of Rife’s and Naessens’s microscopes are some of the best that I know of to demonstrate the literal blindness of establishment
science. Naessens is still active in 2014, and his microscopes are available to any scientist with the courage to look through the lens. If attaining
such “impossible” resolutions were all that those microscopes did, that would be plenty, but those microscopes were the primary instruments used
by their inventors to investigate life processes at greater resolutions than any electron microscope or other establishment microscope can attain.
They both independently confirmed the general findings of one of Louis Pasteur’s contemporaries, Antoine Béchamp, whose research pointed to a
very different dynamic of life processes than Pasteur’s germ theory, which may have been a poorly understood plagiarism of Béchamp’s work.
The findings of those microscopes led to, among other things, cancer treatments that are harmless, cheap, and effective, but Morris Fishbein and
the American Medical Association wiped Rife out, and Naessens has been treated similarly. They may have even discovered the boundary
between inanimate matter and life, which exists in the sub-cellular milieu. That situation is one of the more stunning and public examples of
vested economic interests suppressing scientific advances.
29
Two works that come to mind as I write this were See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, but I do not want to
pick on them unnecessarily. Many orthodox works that I saw took that easy way out when dealing with phenomena that falsified the materialist
models of consciousness.
30
For instance, numerous psi experiments have produced highly consistent results over many years, such as Ganzfeld experiments, receiving
information in dreams, and other tests, including influencing the decay rate of radioactive elements. Those thousands of experiments were also
subjected to professional meta-analysis, and the experimental results demonstrated high correlation and the odds of their being chance results are
less than one in trillions, and even smaller probabilities. See Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds, chapter six, and Chris Carter’s Science and Psychic
Phenomena, pp. 60-104. Carter’s book and Robert McLuhan’s Randi’s Prize analyze the reactions of a politically active arm of the scientific
establishment known as organized skepticism. After a scandal, when the leading “skeptical” organization tried performing original research and
seemingly manipulated the data to conform to their conclusion (see Chris Carter’s Science and Psychic Phenomena, pp. 24-37, and here), they
never performed original research again, but challenge experimental results that call into question the materialist assumptions of mainstream
science. Their challenges are generally ad hoc hypotheses that often beg the question, and their objections have become more logically strained
over the years. My encounters with members of that organization were shocking, as they proved themselves to be deeply dishonest. For
scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena, Randi’s Prize and Michael E. Flynn’s The Articulate Dead are good introductions to the kinds of
findings that have been adduced.
31
See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, pp. 237-255. See Nick Herbert’s Elemental Mind, pp. 140-162.
32
Regarding the foundation of physics, Einstein wrote: “It is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of
perception – but this we do not know.” See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, p. 166. See Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science
Delusion for a discussion of the faith-based assumptions that gird mainstream science, which include: ever since the Big Bang, when everything
came from nothing, all matter and energy has been at the same total amount; the so-called “laws” of nature are invariable; nature has no purpose,
and evolution has no goal; all consciousness is an illusory and ephemeral byproduct of the operation of brains; all biological inheritance is
material, there is no such thing as psychic phenomena – all evidence adduced so far for it is due to error, wishful thinking, and fraud; mechanistic
medicine is the only kind that works. None of those assumptions have been subjected to falsification, and several cannot be falsified, which is the
acid test of science. Also, there is a great deal of evidence that those assumptions may be false.
33
See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, p. 101.
34
In Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, pp. 3-5, Rosenblum described a visit to Einstein’s home in the 1950s, when
Rosenblum was a graduate student in physics. Einstein wanted to discuss the implications of quantum theory. In Rosenblum’s quantum physics
class, the professor skipped over that part of the book (which Einstein’s protégé David Bohm wrote), to get into the math. It was not until many
years later that Rosenblum began to understand what Einstein was concerned about. Late in his life, Einstein “reproached” Heisenberg for the
randomness introduced by quantum theory. Einstein was upset by quantum theory’s creation of reality by the observer, which would theoretically
make the entire universe subjective, not objective. His greatest disquiet was particularly reserved for “spooky action at a distance,” now termed
“quantum entanglement,” in which separate objects instantly interact with each other, no matter how far apart they are.
35
See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, p. 186.
36
See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma, chapter 10.
37
In The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman said, “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge
what energy is.” Werner Heisenberg voiced the same caution.
38
See, for instance, Johannes Wirz’s “Progress towards complementarity in genetics.” Also, molecular clock data, whose timing is based on an
assumption of macro-predictable random mutations of DNA, has been shown to be inaccurate, and the early exuberance toward genetic science
has been sobered by the reality. Scientists can see what mutated, but have had to become more modest on asserting when it happened. See
Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 221-223. See Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion, chapter 6.
39
See T. Langen, et al.'s "Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system", Nature Physics, volume 9, issue
10, pp. 640-643, October 2013.
40
See A.C. Phillips’s The Physics of Stars, p. 23. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s The Life and Death of Planet Earth, p. 103.
41
See Sean A. Crowe, et al.’s “Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago”, Nature, September 26, 2013, issue 201, pp. 535-538.
42
The only other plausible explanation for the Great Oxygenation Event is ultraviolet light's splitting water and, as the hydrogen escaped to space,
the oxygen was left behind. But early on, atmospheric oxygen would have created the ozone layer and provided a “negative feedback” to
ultraviolet light’s impact. See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 25-26.
43
A relatively recent and spectacular event to demonstrate that dynamic is the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. The next year was called the
“Year Without a Summer,” as the volcanic ash caused a brief global cooling.
44
See Peter Ward’s “Impact from the Deep” in Scientific American, October, 2006.
45
See Nigel Harris's "The elevation history of the Tibetan Plateau and its implications for the Asian monsoon", Palaeogeography,
Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, volume 241, Issue 1, November 2006, pp. 4-15. See Chengshan Wang, et al.'s "Constraints on the early uplift
history of the Tibetan Plateau", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 1, 2008, volume 105,
number 13, pp. 4987–4992.
46
See Douglas S. Wilson, et al.’s “Initiation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and estimates of total Antarctic ice volume in the earliest Oligocene”,
Geophysical Research Letters, volume 40, issue 16, pp. 4305-4309, August 2013. The research put the initial formation of the West Antarctic ice
sheet at the same time as the East Antarctic ice sheet, about 34 mya.
47
The shorter light’s wavelength is, the more energy its photons possess, and visible light is ineffective in breaking water into hydrogen and
oxygen. Today, scientists are using catalysts and other methods so that visible light can power the process of splitting water into hydrogen and
oxygen, to use the hydrogen as fuel. Photosynthesis also uses light to split water, but does so with catalytic enzymes.
48
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 6.
49
See a discussion of that hydrogen-oxygen dynamic in Nick Lane’s Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World, especially pp. 319-320, and
Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 3.
50
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World, pp. 208-209.
51
It is also theorized that the size of the atoms determined where they largely ended up in Earth’s layers, with iron largely sinking to Earth’s core,
while lighter elements such as the alkali and alkaline metals migrated toward the surface. See discussion in Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, pp. 124-
127.
52
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, p. 205.
53
The paper “Biotic vs. abiotic Earth: A model for mantle hydration and continental coverage”, in Planetary and Space Science, was first
electronically published on October 25, 2013, by Dennis Höning, et al., and had media coverage, as this essay was being written, and is part of a
general trend of seeing life processes as key terraforming processes.
54
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, pp. 200-209.
55
See Jun Korenaga's "Plate tectonics, flood basalts and the evolution of Earth’s oceans", Terra Nova, December 2008, volume 20, issue 6, pp.
419-439.
56
See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 96-99. Also see Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 231, which in
turn refers to the PALEOMAP Project.
57
A similar version of the table below, as far as the human body is concerned, is here.
Description Proportion of
Earth's
Atmospheric The Human
Earth's Atoms Earth's Mass Atoms Body's Atoms
Oxygen 50% 30% 21% 24%
Iron 16% 32% 0.00067%
Silicon 14% 15%
Magnesium 15% 14% 0.007%
Sulfur 1.6% 3% 0.04%
Aluminum 1.2% 1.4%
 Nickel 1.0% 1.8%
Calcium 0.88% 1.5% 0.24%
Chromium 0.21%
Hydrogen 0.020% 63%
Sodium 0.013% 0.04%
Potassium 0.0073% 0.03%
Titanium 0.0040%
Fluorine 0.0013%
Carbon 0.00050% 12%
Phosphorous 0.00043% 0.22%
Chlorine 1-in-2.1 million 0.03%
Nitrogen 1-in-4.1 million 78% 0.58%
Cobalt 1-in-22 million 0.000003%
Argon 1-in-2.5 billion 0.9%
Uranium 1-in-4.5 billion
Gold 1-in-1.5 trillion
Carbon Dioxide 0.04%
Oceans 1-in-4,400
Atmosphere 1-in-1.2 million
Biosphere 1-in-3.2 billion
58
See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s Rare Earth, for a discussion of those dynamics that may be rare in the universe.
59
See Bernard Marty, et al.'s "Nitrogen Isotopic Composition and Density of the Archean Atmosphere", Science, October 4, 2013, volume 342,
number 6154, pp. 101-104. See Norman Sleep's "The Hadean-Archaean Environment", Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, June 2010,
volume 2, number 6, a002527. The Hadean atmospheric pressure may have been more than 100 times today’s, but declined as plate tectonics
subducted the carbon captured by weathering. See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, p. 171.
60
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 1, and his Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 6. Another hypothesis is that life evolved in some freshwater
pond on land. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 12-13.
61
Andrew Knoll wrote on page 245 of his Life on a Young Planet that scientists see the ancient religious texts as parables, and that, “Science’s
creation story accounts for process and history, not intent.” On science and religion, Knoll wrote, “That these two ways of comprehending should
be confused in either form or purpose strikes me as both absurd and unfortunate.” But arch-materialists such as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins,
and Stephen Hawking, and “skeptics” such as Michael Shermer are the face of science that the public sees. The genuine giants of physics, such
as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, are immensely better examples of how scientists approach those issues.
62
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, chapter 8.
63
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 231-233.
64
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, pp. 169-176. See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s The Life and Death of Planet Earth, pp. 57-67, and 105-115.
65
See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s The Life and Death of Planet Earth, chapters 6 and 7.
66
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 4.
67
See Nick Lane’s “The Evolution of Oxidative Stress”, p. 4, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M.
Schipper, editors.
68
See Stefan Bengtson’s “Origins and Early Evolution of Predation”, Paleontological Society Papers, volume 8, 2002.
69
See Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun, pp. 168-174.
70
Chemosynthesis relies on the potential energy of chemicals, as does all life, and the only way that the potential energy exists on Earth is
because the Sun’s energy keeps the oceans and atmosphere in chemical disequilibrium with Earth’s crust. See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide,
p. 100. See Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun, p. 173.
71
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, p. 25.
72
Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun surveys the days of unraveling the details of photosynthesis and the chase for Nobel Prizes that attended the
pursuit. As recounted on page 45, when Morton asked Andrew Benson if Melvin Calvin deserved his Nobel Prize (for discovering what is called
the Calvin Cycle, also known as the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle), Benson replied that he deserved it more than Calvin did.
73
See Nick Lane’s “The Evolution of Oxidative Stress”, chapter 1 in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M.
Schipper, editors.
74
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, pp. 37-38.
75
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 3.
76
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, pp. 161-163.
77
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 9.
78
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, chapter 5.
79
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, pp. 91-94.
80
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 116.
81
Another hypothesis is that purple photosynthesizing bacteria oxidized iron in its photosynthesis process. Two non-life-based hypotheses for
forming at least some BIFs are: ultraviolet light's oxidizing the iron before the ozone layer formed, and the chemistry of hydrothermal vents in the
oceans creating BIFs. See a discussion of the BIF formation controversy in Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 37-49. See Jelte P. Harnmeijer’s “Banded
Iron-Formation: A Continuing Enigma of Geology”.
82
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 156.
83
The methanogen population may have been severely reduced due to a nickel famine.
84
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 113.
85
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, pp. 105-106. See Andrey Bekker, et al.'s, "Fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon during the
Lomagundi (2.22– 2.1 Ga) carbon isotope excursion", Earth and Planetary Science Letters, volume 271, issues 1–4, July 15, 2008, pp. 278–291.
86
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 156. See Donald E. Canfield, et al.'s "Oxygen dynamics in the aftermath of the Great Oxidation of Earth’s
atmosphere", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 15, 2013, volume 110, number, 42, pp.
16736–16741.
87
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, p. 73.
88
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, p. 118. See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, p. 73. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 24-25.
89
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 3.
90
There was some chemical evidence of eukaryotes existing as early as 2.7 bya, announced in 1999. See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet,
p. 94, and Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 35-36. However, the leader of the team that produced the evidence was part of an effort to investigate the
situation further, and in 2008 that effort determined that the evidence was not as old as originally thought. This is an example of how the evidence
regarding findings of early Earth is tentative and subject to revision to the point of completely discarding the evidence.
91
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 12.
92
See discussion in Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide regarding the controversy regarding the pedigree of mitochondria. On the purple bacterium
origin, see Thomas Cavalier-Smith's "Origin of mitochondria by intracellular enslavement of a photosynthetic purple bacterium", Proceedings of the
Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences, August 2006, volume 273, number 1596, pp. 1943-1952, and Elizabeth T. N. Bui, et al.'s "A Common
Evolutionary Origin for Mitochondria and Hydrogenosomes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
September 3, 1996, volume 93, issue 18, pp. 9651-9656. According to the hydrogen hypothesis, hydrogenosomes and mitochondria descended
from the same ancestor. Some scientists believe that mitochondria descended from a bacterium in the Rickettsia genus. Whatever the true
ancestor was, all hypotheses agree that it was purple.
93 2 3
The formula for surface area is four-times-pi-times-the-radius-squared (4πr ), and the formula for volume is 4/3πr . See discussion in Nick
Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 121-123.
94
See discussion in Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, p. 130.
95
A man’s body contains around 100 trillion cells, and each cell contains, on average, 200 mitochondria, and there are about 10,000 ATP
Synthase motors per mitochondria, which totals 200 quintillion ATP Synthase molecules. ATP Synthase rotates at up to 700 times per second.
96
See Nick Lane’s “The Evolution of Oxidative Stress”, p. 10, in Principles of Free Radical Biomedicine, volume 1, K. Pantopoulos and H. M.
Schipper, editors. See discussion in Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 8.
97
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, pp. 139-141.
98
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, p. 72.
99
See Miklós Müller, et al.'s "Biochemistry and Evolution of Anaerobic Energy Metabolism in Eukaryotes", Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Reviews, June 2012, volume 76, number 2, pp. 444-495.
100
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, pp. 163-165 for a delightful description of the workings of complex cells.
101
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 6.
102
See Peter Ward’s and Donald Brownlee’s Rare Earth, pp. 222-226. See abstract of Jacques Laskar, et al.’s “Stabilization of the Earth's
obliquity by the Moon”, Nature, February 18, 1993, volume 361, pp. 615-617.
103
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth, p. 205.
104
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 16-28. See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, pp. 106-107.
105
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, p. 24.
106
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, pp. 157-159. See these links (1, 2, 3).
107
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, p. 154.
108
Andrew Knoll, in his Life on a Young Planet, on page 150, estimates that the event that led to plants happened at least 1.2 bya.
109
See Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun, p. 206.
110
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, pp. 149-150.
111
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, chapter 6.
112
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, chapters 9 and 10.
113
This concept is used in The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, p. 181, to explain the rise of the Proto-Indo-
Europeans, as they genetically adapted to digesting lactose, making raising cattle for their milk feasible, which produces five times the calories per
acre of raising cattle for meat.
114
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 107-147.
115
Even the Frankensteinian experiments that may well be happening in the above-top-secret world are not likely to give a tree a brain, or allow
humans to get their energy via photosynthetic skin.
116
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
117
Some cyanobacterial colonies eventually developed filaments with specialized cells. See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, p. 112.
118
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, p. 12.
119
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, pp. 4, 34.
120
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, p. 66.
121
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, p. 87.
122
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, p. 128.
123
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, pp. 144-147. See Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth, pp. 74-78, 131-132.
124
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, pp. 169-174.
125
See, for instance, Jeffrey T. Kiehl and Christine A. Shields’s “Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction”,
Geology, September 2005, pp. 757-760. See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 121-128. Ward made a video on this subject on PBS, here.
126
See Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth, pp. 91-92.
127
See Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth, pp. 83-100.
128
Hoffman’s journey is told in great detail in Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth.
129
See Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth, pp. 4-49, for the early days of ice age discoveries and theory, and the role of erratics.
130
See Hoffman, el at., “A Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth”, Science, August 28, 1998, volume 281.
131
See D.E. Canfield’s “A new model for Proterozoic ocean chemistry”, in Nature, December 3, 1998, volume 396.
132
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 60-65.
133
See Don E. Canfield, et al.’s “Late-Neoproterozoic Deep-Ocean Oxygenation and the Rise of Animal Life”, Science, January 5, 2007, volume
315. This is a controversial area. See G. J. Retallack’s “Ediacaran Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered”, Journal of the Geological
Society 2013, volume 170, pp. 19-36.
134
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 39-44.
135
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p. 128.
136
See Daniel H. Rothman, et al.’s “Dynamics of the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, July 8, 2003, volume 100, number 14, pp. 8124-8129. See Andy Ridgwell’s “Evolution of the ocean's “biological pump”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 4, 2011, volume 108, number 40, pp. 16485–16486.
The model proposed by Rothman and associates has been generally dismissed, partly because there would not have been enough fecal pellets
for the job. See discussion in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 54-55. Nick Butterfield’s hypothesis is
that larger organisms in the nascent “arms race” sank instead of floated in the water column, achieving a similar effect.
137
See John P. Grotzinger, et al.’s “Enigmatic origin of the largest-known carbon isotope excursion in Earth’s history”, Nature Geoscience, volume
4, pp. 285–292 (2011). See Cal Tech’s article on their investigations here.
138
See Grant Young’s “Evolution of Earth’s climatic system: Evidence from ice ages, isotopes, and impacts”, GSA Today, October 2013.
139
See Christian J. Bjerrum and Donald E. Canfield’s “Towards a quantitative understanding of the late Neoproterozoic carbon cycle”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 5, 2011, volume 108, number 14, pp. 5542–5547 (also
here).
140
This glaciation is called the Gaskiers glaciation, but it is currently questioned as being a global glaciation. See G. J. Retallack’s “Ediacaran
Gaskiers Glaciation of Newfoundland reconsidered”, Journal of the Geological Society 2013, v.170, pp. 19-36. However, see data showing the
Gaskiers glaciation discontinuity in carbon ratio data in See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p. 41.
141
See evidence of repeated excursions in Charles Verdel et al.’s “The Shuram and subsequent Ediacaran carbon isotope excursions from
southwest Laurentia, and implications for environmental stability during the metazoan radiation”, Geological Society of America Bulletin,
July/August 2011. Although the authors of that paper do not state the hypothesis directly, those kinds of papers are used by a school of thought,
of which Nick Butterfield is a prominent representative, which sees life as the protagonist and geology/environment as the scenery.
142
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 67-68.
143
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 65-67.
144
See Geoffrey Wray, et al.’s “Molecular Evidence for Deep Precambrian Divergences Among Metazoan Phyla”, Science, October 25, 1996,
volume 274. See another of Wray’s papers here, on the subject.
145
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, pp. 200-205. See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 57-58.
146
The most beautiful fossil book I have yet encountered is Prehistoric Life, published by Dorling Kindersley.
147
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, color plates 4 and 6.
148
See C.K. Brain, et al.'s "The first animals: ca. 760-million-year-old sponge-like fossils from Namibia", South African Journal of Science, January
2012, volume 108, numbers 1-2, pp. 83-90. See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, p. 151.
149
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 47.
150
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 2.
151
Before the 1700s, fossils were not universally recognized as being the mineralized remains of life forms. There were influential schools of
thought that presented arguments that fossils were either some kind of faith-testing deceptions placed there by the Creator, or were somehow
illusions that were fabricated by some geological “plastic force.” It was not until about 1750 that most naturalists accepted the idea that fossils
were made from life forms, but they still denied the idea of extinction, as it conflicted with Christian notions of God’s inerrancy. See Michael J.
Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 25-26.
152
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, chapter 9.
153
The arguments and evidence regarding the Ediacaran biota are presented in some detail in Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The
Cambrian Explosion, pp. 128-145.
154
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, pp. 134-135.
155
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 138-139. See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, pp. 174-
177.
156
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 26-29.
157
See Nicholas Eyles and Nicole Januszczak’s “‘Zipper-rift’: a tectonic model for Neoproterozoic glaciations during the breakup of Rodinia after
750 Ma”, Earth-Science Reviews 65 (2004) 1 –73.
158
The paper that supports that view was co-authored by scientist who actually coined “Snowball Earth.” See Joseph Kirschvink et al.’s “Evidence
for a Large-Scale Reorganization of Early Cambrian Continental Masses by Inertial Interchange True Polar Wander”, Science, July 25, 1997,
volume 277, number 5325, pp. 541-545. See a response and rebuttal here.
159
See Eli Tziperman, et al.’s “Biologically induced initiation of Neoproterozoic snowball-Earth events”, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America, July 20, 2011, volume 108, number 37, pp. 15091-15096. See N. J. Butterfield’s “Inventing the
Phanerozoic biological pump - and inducing Snowball Earth”, Goldschmidt 2013 Conference Abstracts. See Gordon D. Love et al.’s “Fossil
steroids record the appearance of Demospongiae during the Cryogenian period”, Nature, February 5, 2009, volume 457. For the land plant
hypothesis, see Daniel S. Heckman, et al.’s “Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants”, Science, August 10,
2001, volume 293.
160
See Nick Butterfield’s “Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view”, Geobiology, January 2009, volume 7, issue 1, pp. 1– 7.
161
This is Nick Butterfield’s view, and it has sympathy among Precambrian specialists. Butterfield’s hypothesis of a stratified, anoxic, turbid,
cyanobacterial water column giving way to an algae-dominated, clear water column is the preferred scenario in Douglas H. Erwin and James W.
Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion (pp. 52-53).
162
See Graham E. Budd’s “The earliest fossil record of the animals and its significance”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, April 27, 2008, volume 363, issue 1496, pp. 1425-1434. See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och’s “The case for a
Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological consequences”, GSA Today, March 2011.
163
See Graham Shields-Zhou and Lawrence Och’s “The case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event: Geochemical evidence and biological
consequences”, GSA Today, March 2011. See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, pp. 153-158.
164
See L. Paul Knauth’s “Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution”,
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219 (2005), pp. 53– 69.
165
See N. J. Butterfield’s “Oxygen, animals and oceanic ventilation: an alternative view”, Geobiology, January 2009, volume 7, issue 1, pp. 1-7.
166
This is a general theme in works such as Butterfield’s.
167
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 126-129.
168
See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, chapters 3 to 6.
169
See George R. McGhee and et al.’s “Ecological ranking of Phanerozoic biodiversity crises: The Serpukhovian (early Carboniferous) crisis had a
greater ecological impact than the end-Ordovician”, Geology, February 2002, volume 40, number 2, pp. 147-150. On the issue of ranking
extinctions, see A. M. Celâl Şengör, et al.’s “A scale of greatness and causal classification of mass extinctions: Implications for mechanisms”, in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, September 16, 2008, volume 105, number 37, pp. 13736-
13740.
170
See Douglas Futuyma’s Evolution, chapter 18.
171
A joke in selfish-gene circles is that a chicken is just a way for an egg to reproduce itself. The author of the selfish-gene theory is the arch-
materialist Richard Dawkins. Although a materialist and atheist, while promoting his theories Dawkins engages in anthropomorphic flourishes in
attributing volition to genes. See Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion, chapter 6, for a discussion of genetic theories of inheritance and
Dawkins’s advocacy.
172
The light-colored hair, skin, and eyes of northern Europeans are all likely related to adaptions to climates with less sunlight. See Gregory
Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion, pp. 90-94, 148-153.
173
Such creatures are called facultative anaerobes. LUCA may have been able to respire by using oxygen. See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 31-32.
174
See Douglas Futuyma’s Evolution, p. 168.
175
See Douglas Futuyma’s Evolution, p. 171.
176
See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, p. 77.
177
See David J. Beerling, et al.'s "The stability of the stratospheric ozone layer during the end-Permian eruption of the Siberian Traps",
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, July 2007, volume 365, issue 1856, pp. 1843-1866. See
Peter D. Ward's "Impact from the Deep", Scientific American, October 2006, pp. 64-71.
178
See Peter Ward’s The Medea Hypothesis, pp. 70-71, 77-78. See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 114-121.
179
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 199-203.
180
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 107-14. Ward was a nautilus specialist. See his account of the nautiloid and ammonoid similarities
and differences in his On Methuselah’s Trail, chapters 4 and 5. In 2013, he disputed whether nautiloids are truly a living fossil. See his
"Ingenious: Nautilis and Me", Nautilus, Issue 0, April 29, 2013.
181
See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 226-227.
182
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 4-12.
183
See Donald Prothero’s The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, pp. 212-213.
184
See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 85-91.
185
See John Terborgh and James E. Estes, eds., Trophic Cascades.
186
On the coelacanth’s journey, see Peter Ward’s On Methuselah’s Trail, chapter 8.
187
See Douglas Futuyma’s Evolution, p. 549. See Richard C. Moore and Michael D. Purugganan’s “The early stages of duplicate gene evolution”,
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, December 23, 2003, volume 100, number 26, pp.
15682–15687.
188
See Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet, chapters 11 and 12. See Douglas Erwin H. and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion,
pp. 337-342.
189
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 42-49.
190
See Chapter IX, “On the imperfection of the geological record”, in Darwin’s Origin of Species. See Andrew Knoll’s Nick Life on a Young Planet,
chapter 1, and Nick Lane’s Oxygen, chapter 4.
191
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 223-226.
192
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, chapter 4, and Douglas Erwin H. and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 6-9.
193
See, for instance, Werner von Bloh, et al.’s “Cambrian explosion triggered by geosphere-biosphere feedbacks”, in Geophysical Research
Letters, volume 30, number 18, September 27, 2003.
194
See Stefan Bengtson’s “Origins and Early Evolution of Predation”, Paleontological Society Papers, volume 8, 2002.
195
See Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen, which was a favored read of corporate raiders in the 1990s.
196
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 9-10.
197
See the appendix of Douglas Erwin H. and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion for a table of the “First Appearances of Major
Metazoan Clades in the Fossil Record”, compiled by Sarah Tweedt. The vast majority first appeared in the Cambrian period.
198
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 330-333.
199
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p. 104.
200
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 56-57.
201
See Douglas Erwin H. and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p. 9.
202
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 69-70. Again, the school of thought in which Nick Butterfield is prominent hypothesizes that different dynamics
were responsible for removing carbon from the oceans.
203
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 149-152, 215.
204
See Chapter VI, “Difficulties on Theory”, in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species
205
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, chapter 7.
206
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, pp. 176-179.
207
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, p. 183.
208
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, pp. 197-200.
209
See Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion, chapter 4.
210
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 72-73, 183-184.
211
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 58-63.
212
See Peter Ward’s On Methuselah’s Trail, pp. 43-60.
213
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 68-70.
214
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 85. See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 70-75.
215
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 75-78.
216
See a correction of GEOSCARBSULF’s carbon dioxide model in Benjamin J. Fletcher, et. al.’s “Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked
with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change”, Letter in Nature Geoscience, January 2008, volume 1, pp. 43 - 48, which reduces the peak
Cretaceous carbon dioxide levels to about three times today’s, from about today’s levels in the end-Triassic.
217
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 47.
218
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p. 39.
219
See Matthew R. Saltzman, et al.’s “Pulse of atmospheric oxygen during the late Cambrian”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America, March 3, 2011, volume 108, number 10, pp. 3876–3881.
220
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 293-317.
221
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 34-35.
222
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 163-164.
223
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 34-38.
224
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, p 58.
225
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 78-79.
226
See Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun, p. 91.
227
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, pp. 225-234.
228
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, p. 229.
229
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 243-244.
230
See Discontinuities in Ecosystems and other Complex Systems, edited by Craig R. Allen and C. S. Holling (and they authored the cited
passage), pp. 224-226.
231
See Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine’s The Cambrian Explosion, pp. 337-342.
232
See Gauthier Chapelle and Lloyd S. Peck’s “Polar gigantism dictated by oxygen availability”, Nature, May 13, 1999, 399, 114-115. See Nick
Lane’s Oxygen, pp. 101-104, on the study.
233
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 9.
234
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 14-15, 67.
235
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 85.
236
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 31.
237
See Peter M. Sheehan’s “The Late Ordovician Mass Extinction”, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, May 2001, volume Vol. 29:
331-364. Again, there is dispute and controversy regarding the magnitude of the extinction.
238
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, p. 55.
239
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 39-61 for that mass extinction in general.
240
See Kenneth Deffeyes’s Hubbert’s Peak, chapter 2. For how Cretaceous anoxic sediments were formed, see João Trabucho Alexandre, et
al.’s “The mid-Cretaceous North Atlantic nutrient trap: Black shales and OAEs”, Paleoceanography, volume 25, PA4201, December 2010.
241
See Geoffrey P. Glasby's "Abiogenic Origin of Hydrocarbons: An Historical Overview", Resource Geology, volume 56, number 1, pp. 85–98,
March 2006.
242
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, p. 203.
243
See Donald Canfield's Oxygen, chapter 11.
244
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 101.
245
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 266.
246
See Tais W. Dahl, et al.’s “Devonian rise in atmospheric oxygen correlated to the radiations of terrestrial plants and large predatory fish”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, October 19, 2010, volume 107, number 42, pp. 7911–17915.
See response by N.J. Butterfield in his “Was the Devonian radiation of large predatory fish a consequence of rising atmospheric oxygen
concentration?”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, March 1, 2011, volume 108, number 9, p.
E28.
247
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 92-97.
248
See John A. Long, et al.’s “Live birth in the Devonian period”, Nature, May 28, 2008, 453, 650-652.
249
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 98-111.
250
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 104-105.
251
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 97.
252
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 108.
253
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 109. See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 168-177.
254
See Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun, p. 223. See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 40-45.
255
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 103.
256
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 104.
257
See Dimitrios Floudas, et al.’s “The Paleozoic Origin of Enzymatic Lignin Decomposition Reconstructed from 31 Fungal Genomes”, Science
June 29, 2012, volume 336, number 6089, pp. 1715-1719.
258
See David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet, p. 33.
259
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 101.
260
See Eneas Salati and Peter B. Vose’s “Amazon Basin: A System in Equilibrium”, Science, July 13, 1984, volume 225, Number 4658. See y E.
A. B. Eltahir and R. L. Bras’s “Precipitation recycling in the Amazon basin”, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, (1994), 120, pp.
861-880.
261
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, p. 78.
262
See George W. Koch, et al.’s “The limits to tree height”, Nature, April 22, 2004, volume 428, pp. 851-854.
263
See Kaare H. Jensen and Maciej A. Zwieniecki’s “Physical Limits to Leaf Size in Tall Trees”, Physical Review Letters, January 4, 2013.
264
Forests use between 50% and 80% of their gross primary production for respiration. See David A. Perry’s Forest Ecosystems, p. 317.
265
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 137-154.
266
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 85-86.
267
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 107-110.
268
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 118-132.
269
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 101, 264.
270
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 99-107.
271
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 110-111.
272
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 141.
273
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 49-51.
274
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 106, 161.
275
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 188-199.
276
On the Devonian extinction in general, see A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 62-91. See George R.
McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 179-184.
277
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 266-273.
278
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 184-188.
279
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, pp. 187-188.
280
See Peter Ward, et al.’s “Confirmation of Romer's Gap as a low oxygen interval constraining the timing of initial arthropod and vertebrate
terrestrialization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, November 7, 2006, volume 103, number 45,
pp. 16818-16822. See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 104-109.
281
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 166-167.
282
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 167-169.
283
I can imagine a scene with Roy Scheider reprising his Jaws scene, but in a rubber raft on a lake, with a fisherman’s hat, watching that apex
predator swim by, maybe bumping the raft, and Scheider saying to himself, “I need a bigger raft.”
284
See Jon F. Harrison, et al.’s “Atmospheric oxygen level and the evolution of insect body size”, Proceedings of the Royal Society, B: Biological
Sciences, July 7, 2010, volume 277, number 1690, pp. 1937–1946.
285
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 62.
286
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 113.
287
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 118-120.
288
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 94.
289
See George R. McGhee’s When the Invasion of Land Failed, p. 266.
290
See George R. McGhee, Jr., et al.'s "Ecological ranking of Phanerozoic biodiversity crises: The Serpukhovian (early Carboniferous) crisis had a
greater ecological impact than the end-Ordovician", Geology, February 2012, volume 40, number 2, pp. 147-150. See George R. McGhee, Jr., et
al.'s "A new ecological-severity ranking of major Phanerozoic biodiversity crises", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume
370, January 15, 2013, pp. 260–270. See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 92-93.
291
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 191-197.
292
See Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, p. 209.
293
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 138-139.
294
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 140.
295
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 130-131.
296
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 144-150.
297
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 110-111. See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 219,
252.
298
See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, p. 75. See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 125-126, 132-133.
299
See Graeme Eagles and Alan P. M. Vaughan's "Gondwana breakup and plate kinematics: Business as usual," Geophysical Research Letters,
May 2009, volume 36, Issue 10.
300
See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, pp. 51-54.
301 13
See Paul B. Wignall, et al.’s “Capitanian (middle Permian) mass extinction and recovery in western Tethys: A fossil, facies, and δ C study from
Hungary and Hydra Island (Greece)”, Palaios, 2012, v. 27, number 2, pp. 78-89. See David P.G. Bond, et al.’s “The Middle Permian (Capitanian)
mass extinction on land and in the oceans”, Earth-Science Reviews, September 2010, volume 102, issues 1–2, pp. 100–116.
302
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 133, 248.
303
See Seth D. Burgess, et al.'s "High-precision timeline for Earth’s most severe extinction", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America, March 4, 2014, volume 111, number 9, pp. 3316–3321. See articles here (1, 2).
304
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, chapter 3. See Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 259-262.
305
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 77-80. See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 94-141. See
Michael J. Benton’s When Life Nearly Died, pp. 180-283.
306
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, p. 115.
307
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 79.
308
See Matthew E. Clapham and Jonathan L. Payne’s “Acidification, anoxia, and extinction: A multiple logistic regression analysis of extinction
selectivity during the Middle and Late Permian”, Geology, November 2011, volume 39, number 11, pp. 1059-1062. See this New York Times
article.
309
See Sandra C. Jasinoski, et al.’s, “Comparative Feeding Biomechanics of Lystrosaurus and the Generalized Dicynodont Oudenodon”, The
Anatomical Record, June 2009, volume 292, issue 6, pp. 862–874.
310
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 200-201.
311
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 200-201.
312
See J. Peckmann, et al.’s “Mass Occurrences of the Brachiopod Halorella in Late Triassic Methane-Seep Deposits, Eastern Oregon”, The
Journal of Geology, 2011, volume 119, pp. 207–220.
313
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 214-216.
314
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 188-191.
315
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 164.
316
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 140.
317
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, pp. 3-6.
318
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 69-70.
319
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 255-256. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life,
pp. 158-159.
320
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 146-147.
321
See Sterling J. Nesbitt, et al.'s "The oldest dinosaur? A Middle Triassic dinosauriform from Tanzania", Biology Letters, February 23, 2013,
volume 9, number 1.
322
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 168.
323
See Joel Achenbach's When Dinosaurs Ruled, National Geographic special edition, 2014, p. 61.
324
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 142-147.
325
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, chapter 12. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 137-143.
326
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 129-130.
327
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 94-95.
328
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, pp. 183-184.
329
See John R. Horner, et al.’s “How Dinosaurs Grew so Large and so Small”, in Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on dinosaurs,
titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 4-11.
330
See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur Odyssey, chapter 11. See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural
History, chapter 12.
331
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 171-183.
332
See Patrick M. O’Connor and Leon P. A. M. Claessens’s “Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod
dinosaurs”, July 14, 2005, Nature, volume 436, pp. 253-256.
333
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 199-213.
334
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 76-83.
335
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 168, 256.
336
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 158-160.
337
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 158. See Richard A. Thulborn's Lark "Quarry revisited: a critique of methods used to identify a large
dinosaurian track-maker in the Winton Formation (Albian–Cenomanian), western Queensland, Australia", Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of
Palaeontology, 2013, volume 37, issue 3, pp. 312-330.
338
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 64-69.
339
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 313. See Scott D. Sampson’s Dinosaur
Odyssey, chapter 12. See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 142-147.
340
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 201-204.
341
See Caroline M.B. Jaraula, et al.’s “Elevated pCO2 leading to Late Triassic extinction, persistent photic zone euxinia, and rising sea levels”,
Geology, published online July 11, 2013.
342
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 152.
343
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 195-197.
344
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 285. See Kristina A. Curry Rogers and Michael
D. D’Emic’s “Triumph of the Titans”, in Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they
Died, Summer 2014, pp. 12-19.
345
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 171-173.
346
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 168-174.
347
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 284-285.
348
See Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants, pp. 35-64.
349
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 191-197.
350
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 285.
351
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 286-287.
352
See Richard O. Prum and Alan H. Brush’s “Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird?”, in Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on
dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 76-85.
353
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, chapters 10 and 11. See Richard Cowen’s History
of Life, pp. 173-179.
354
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, chapter 9.
355
See Nick Lane’s Oxygen, p. 255.
356
See Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide, pp. 269-273, 304-307.
357
See Bas van de Schootbrugge, et al.’s “Microbes, mud and methane: cause and consequence of recurrent Early Jurassic anoxia following the
end-Triassic mass extinction”, Paleontology, July 2013, volume 56, issue 4, pp. 685-709.
358
About the only exceptions are oil deposits formed along the coast of California in the Miocene Epoch, about 20 mya, with a formation near
Ventura, where I was raised, with one of the youngest, of Pleistocene age, about a kilometer or two away from the house where I grew up.
359
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 161-166.
360
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 216-218.
361
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, p. 219.
362
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 166-168. See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, p. 139.
363
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 285.
364
Recent discoveries on Madagascar throw doubt on some of the assumptions of Northern Hemisphere origins for some mammals, reptiles, and
dinosaurs, as well as when certain features evolved. See John Flynn and André R. Wyss’s “Madagascar’s Mesozoic Secrets”, in Scientific
American’s special collector’s edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 28-37.
365
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 282.
366
See Patricia Vickers-Rocha and Thomas Hewitt Richs’s “Dinosaurs of Polar Australia”, in Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on
dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 46-53. See Anthony R. Fiorillo’s “Dinosaurs of Arctic Alaska”, in
Scientific American’s special collector’s edition on dinosaurs, titled, Dinosaurs! How they lived; Why they Died, Summer 2014, pp. 54-61.
367
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 219-221.
368
See Peter Ward’s Out of Thin Air, pp. 214-216.
369
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 171-183.
370
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 282-288. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life,
pp. 191-197.
371
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, p. 287.
372
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 298-299.
373
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, chapter 1.
374
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, pp. 107-114.
375
See David E. Fastovsky and David B. Weishampel’s Dinosaurs, A Concise Natural History, pp. 322-343. See a more uncertain assessment in
Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 212-219.
376
See Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky, chapter 3.
377
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 50.
378
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 55.
379
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 201-202.
380
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 200-201.
381
See Leslie C. Aiello and Peter Wheeler’s “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis”, Current Anthropology, volume 36, number 2, April 1995, pp. 199-
221.
382
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 200-201.
383
See Edward L. Simpson et al.'s "Predatory digging behavior by dinosaurs", Geology, volume 38, number 8, pp. 699-702. See also this
Smithsonian article.
384
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 203-204.
385
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 140.
386
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 207-210.
387
See Stephen B. Vander Wall’s “The Evolutionary Ecology of Nut Dispersal”, The Botanical Review, January-March 2001, volume 67, issue 1.
388
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 57. See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 221-224.
389
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 226-227.
390
See Felisa A. Smith, et al.’s “The Evolution of Maximum Body Size of Terrestrial Mammals”, Science, November 26, 2010, volume 330,
Number 6008, pp. 1216-1219
391
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 228.
392
See Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, pp. 55-56.
393
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 67-70.
394
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 230-231.
395
See David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet, chapter 6.
396
See David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet, p. 148.
397
See David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet, chapter 7, titled “Paradise Lost.” The subtitle of Donald Prothero’s The Eocene-Oligocene Transition
is “Paradise Lost.”
398
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 87.
399
See Hans Thewissen's The Walking Whales, p. 202.
400
In Hans Thewissen's The Walking Whales, he put an eight million year estimate on the transition from land to water, and has fully aquatic
whales appearing by 41 mya.
401
See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, pp. 259-264.
402
See Donald Prothero’s The Eocene-Oligocene Transition, p. 76.
403
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 115.
404
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 227-234.
405
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 143-145.
406
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 145-147.
407
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 150.
408
See A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall’s Mass Extinction and their Aftermath, pp. 233-234.
409
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 163-164.
410
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 167.
411
See, for instance, Jonathan P. LaRiviere, et al.’s “Late Miocene decoupling of oceanic warmth and atmospheric carbon dioxide forcing”, Nature,
volume 486, pp. 97-100, June 7, 2012. See Mark Pagani, et al.’s “High Earth-system climate sensitivity determined from Pliocene carbon dioxide
concentrations”, Nature Geoscience, volume 3, published online December 20, 2009. It can also be particularly instructive to see how the climate
change “skeptics” react to such findings, such as here. Note a defense of the fossil fuel industry at the end of that response. That kind of
response is typical of those who openly defend the fossil fuel industry (and usually funded by them, as that “skeptical” organization is) by their
“business as usual” climate change “skepticism.”
412
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 181, 211-214.
413
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 188-191.
414
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 230.
415
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 247.
416
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 244-246. See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 199-200.
417
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 204.
418
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 212.
419
See Peter Ward and David Brownlee’s The Life and Death of Planet Earth for an exploration of those ideas, and see this presentation for some
of the ideas in their work.
420
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 214-223.
421
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 214-218.
422
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 230.
423
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 231.
424
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 247.
425
See Dorrik Stow’s Vanished Ocean, pp. 259-264. See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 225-230.
426
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 229-230.
427
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, p. 253.
428
On the Great American Biotic Interchange, see Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 241-244, and Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp.
250-256. See Michael O. Woodburn's ""The Great American Biotic Interchange: Dispersals, Tectonics, Climate, Sea Level and Holding Pens",
Journal of Mammalian Evolution, December 2010, volume 17, issue 4, pp. 245-264.
429
See Donald Prothero’s After the Dinosaurs, pp. 247-250.
430
There is a pronounced resistance in anthropological circles toward the idea of culture among great apes. One chimpanzee researcher, Victoria
Horner, said in frustration: “In anthropological terms culture is the human niche…These things are so exclusive from the get-go. If we want to
understand our place in the animal kingdom, we need to understand that the chimp/human border is so slim. Culture is just the next step. At what
point are people going to give in and say, ‘Yes, we are apes?’ And be able to handle that? Darwin’s famous quote is that it’s a difference of
degree, not of kind. People are just hell-bent on it being a difference in kind.” That quote is from Jon Cohen’s Almost Chimpanzee, p. 175.
431
See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree for an account of the history of Proconsul research, from the first fossil discoveries to
st
21 century research and findings.
432
See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree, pp. 37-42.
433
See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree, pp. 186-187.
434
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 90-91.
435
See Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, pp. 20-21.
436
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 255.
437
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 96-97. See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The
Ape in the Tree, p. 163.
438
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 255-256. See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree, pp. 167, 196-199.
439
See Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, p. 9.
440
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 100-103.
441
See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree, p. 194. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, p. 2.
442
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 103.
443
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 103. See Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who
Went Extinct, pp. 10-11.
444
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 104-105.
445
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 110-113.
446
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 41.
447
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 14-16.
448
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 114-115.
449
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, chapter 3.
450
See, for instance, the human evolutionary tree in Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 42.
451
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 98-102.
452
See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap, chapter 3.
453
This is a prominent theme in Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap.
454
See abstract of P.M. Kappeler’s “Patterns of sexual dimorphism in body weight among prosimian primates”, Folia Primatol (Basel), 1991, issue
3, volume 57, pp. 132-146.
455
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, p. 44.
456
See Richard C. Francis’s Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions. See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, chapter 6.
457
See Richard W. Young’s “Evolution of the human hand: the role of throwing and clubbing”, Journal of Anatomy, January 2003, volume 2, issue
1, pp. 165-174.
458
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 114, 126.
459
See Peter B. deMenocal's "Climate Shocks", in Scientific American's special evolution issue titled, Evolution, The Human Saga, pp. 48-53,
September 2014. See also his "Climate and Human Evolution", Science, volume 331, February 4, 2011, pp. 540-542. See also "A grassy trend in
human ancestors' diets", ScienceDaily, June 3, 2013. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, chapter 3.
460
See Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Ape in the Tree, pp. 109-112. See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of
Human Evolution, p. 125.
461
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 128. See Ian Tattersall’s The World from
Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 47.
462
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 47. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, pp. 57-61.
463
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, pp. 46-47.
464
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, pp. 55-60.
465
See Stanley H. Ambrose’s “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution”, Science, March 2, 2001, volume 291, number 5509, pp. 1748-1753.
466
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 13-14.
467
See Dario Maestripieri’s Machiavellian Intelligence, p. 61.
468
See Dario Maestripieri’s Machiavellian Intelligence, p. 144.
469
See Elisabetta Visalberghi and Dorothy Fragaszy’s “Learning how to Forage: Socially Biased Individual Learning and ‘Niche Construction’ in
Wild Capuchin Monkeys”, chapter six of Frans B. M. de Wall and Pier Francesco Ferrari, eds., The Primate Mind.
470
See Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson’s Manipulative monkeys; The Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, chapter 9.
471
See Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson’s Manipulative monkeys; The Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, chapter 8.
472
See Carel van Schaik’s “Why are some animals so smart?”, in Scientific American, special edition titled “Becoming Human”, September 2006.
473
See Thomas Suddendorf's The Gap, chapter 9.
474
See Marco Iacoboni’s “The Human Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in Imitation and Empathy”, chapter three of Frans B. M. de Wall and Pier
Francesco Ferrari, eds., The Primate Mind.
475
See Gary Stix's The "It" Factor", in Scientific American's special evolution issue titled, Evolution, The Human Saga, pp. 72-79, September 2014.
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, chapter 4. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, pp. 213-216.
476
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, p. 42.
477
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, pp. 56-57.
478
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 208.
479
See Kimberley J. Hockings, et al.’s “Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit”, PLoS ONE, Published online September 12, 2007.
480
Suzana Herculano-Houzel and Jon H. Kaas’s “Gorilla and Orangutan Brains Conform to the Primate Cellular Scaling Rules: Implications for
Human Evolution”, Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, February 2011, volume 7, number 1, pp. 33–44.
481
See Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s “Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain
neurons in human evolution”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, November 6, 2012, volume 109,
number 45, pp. 18571–18576.
482
R.I.M Dunbar and Susanne Shultz’s “Understanding primate brain evolution”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, April 29, 2007, volume 362, number 1480, pp. 649-658.
483
See M. Dworak et al.’s “Sleep and Brain Energy Levels: ATP changes during sleep”, The Journal of Neuroscience, June 30, 2010, volume 30,
number 26, pp. 9007-9016.
484
See Karin Isler and Carel van Schaik’s “Metabolic costs of brain size evolution”, Biology Letters, 2006 December 22, 2006, volume 2, number 4,
pp. 557–560.
485
See Michael D. Sockol, et al.’s “Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism”, Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America, July 24, 2007, volume 104, number 30, pp. 12265–12269. See Herman Pontzera, et al.’s “The
metabolic cost of walking in humans, chimpanzees, and early hominins”, Journal of Human Evolution, volume 56, issue 1, January 2009, pp. 43–
54. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, pp. 15-16.
486
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, p. 17.
487
See Leslie C. Aiello and Peter Wheeler’s “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis”, Current Anthropology, volume 36, number 2, April 1995, pp. 199-
221.
488
See Leslie C. Aiello and Peter Wheeler’s “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis”, Current Anthropology, volume 36, number 2, April 1995, pp. 199-
221.
489
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 117-118.
490
See Dario Maestripieri’s Machiavellian Intelligence, pp. 38-42, 72-73.
491
See Ana Navarrete et al.’s “Energetics and the evolution of human brain size”, Nature, December 1, 2011, volume 480, pp. 91-94.
492
See R.I.M. Dunbar and Susanne Shultz's "Understanding primate brain evolution ", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, April 2007, volume 362, issue 1480, pp. 649-658.
493
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 100-102.
494
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 118-119.
495
See Richard Wrangham’s “Evolution of Coalitionary Killing”, Yearbook Of Physical Anthropology, volume 110, Issue Supplement 29, pp. 1–30.
1999. See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males for an examination of male-inflicted violence in great apes.
496
See Richard Wrangham’s “Evolution of Coalitionary Killing”, Yearbook Of Physical Anthropology, volume 110, Issue Supplement 29, pp. 1–30.
497
See Nicolas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 22-27. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, pp. 109-110.
498
See, for instance, Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, pp. 64, 68. In Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, he
strenuously argues that modern humans had nothing to do with the disappearance of Neanderthals, but the notions that modern humans drove
Neanderthals to extinction, as well as Homo erectus in Asia, are constantly debated today.
499
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 42; he calls the human family tree depicted there “highly speculative.” Or see
all the question marks in this human family tree.
500
See Tracy L. Kivell, et al.’s “Australopithecus sediba Hand Demonstrates Mosaic Evolution of Locomotor and Manipulative Abilities”, Science,
September 9, 2011, volume 333, number 6048, pp. 1411-1417.
501
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 64.
502
See Johan Goudsblom’s Fire and Civilization, p. 19.
503
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 190-191.
504
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 190-194.
505
See Frederick L Coolidge and Thomas Wynn’s “The effects of the tree-to-ground sleep transition in the evolution of cognition in early Homo”,
Before Farming: the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers, 2006, issue 4, article 11.
506
See Jon Cohen’s Almost Chimpanzee, pp. 277-284.
507
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, p. 90.
508
See Chris Organ, et al.’s “Phylogenetic rate shifts in feeding time during the evolution of Homo”, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America, August 30, 2011, volume 108, number 35, pp. 14555–14559.
509
See Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s “Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain
neurons in human evolution”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, November 6, 2012, volume 109,
number 45, pp. 18571–18576.
510
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 92-93.
511
See Francesco Berna, et al.’s “Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province,
South Africa”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, May 15, 2012, volume 109, number 20, pp.
7593–7594. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, p. 112.
512
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 47-48.
513
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, p. 225.
514
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 17-19.
515
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, pp. 47-48.
516
See Ian Tattersall's If I Had a Hammer", in Scientific American's special evolution issue titled, Evolution, The Human Saga, pp. 55-59,
September 2014. See Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet, chapter 9.
517
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, p. 100.
518
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 141-146.
519
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, p. 224.
520
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, p. 148.
521
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, p. 159.
522
See Jon Cohen’s Almost Chimpanzee, p. 260.
523
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 144-145.
524
See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males, pp. 146-151, 166.
525
See Tommaso Paoli’s “The Absence of Sexual Coercion in Bonobos”, chapter 16 of Martin Muller and Richard Wrangham, eds., Sexual
Coercion in Primates and Humans.
526
See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution, pp. 144-147.
527
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 154-158. See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 103-106. See Ian Tattersall's
Masters of the Planet, pp. 152-154, 172-173.
528
See Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire, p. 93.
529
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, p. 268.
530
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 51.
531
See Chris Stringer’s Lone Survivors, pp. 199-201.
532
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, chapter 3.
533
See Henry Gee's The Accidental Species, chapters 4 and 5.
534
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, chapters 4 and 5.
535
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, pp. 119-123.
536
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, p. 16.
537
The source for the below list is from an anthropology course. See another summary in the appendix of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

UP (the Universal People) have mastered language, and UP’s languages all have universal traits, such as:
Have nouns, verbs, and possessives;
 Have a number of grammatical and semantic rules that are identical across all UP’s languages, when there was no known reason for them
to independently converge; there were other equally valid ways to structure sentences and grammar;
Have dualistic traits, when it is not required, such as no UP’s language has single words for these three: good, not good, and bad; or bad,
not bad, and good; UP’s languages do not have single words with those intermediate meanings, but related to the poles instead; their
languages also describe the middles between the extremes, and can grade them;
Have male and female terms;
Have time-related terms, in both linear and circular terms;
Newborns can be put into any culture on Earth and will grow up mastering the languages they were raised with.
UP all use their languages for similar purposes, such as:
Use special forms of speech, including poems and oratory, and they have structural similarities;
Tell stories and myths, and their cultures have creation myths to explain how the world, and UP’s role in it, came to be, and until the
explanations of modern science appeared, all explanations had supernatural aspects to them;
Gossip;
Use humor and insults;
Use language to deceive, and others try to detect deceptive language, partly by inspecting non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions,
posture, and gestures.
UP have universally understood facial expressions, such as smiles and frowns.
UP’s infants have a fear of loud noises, and by nearly one year of age, they fear all strangers.
UP have a natural fear of snakes.
UP are seen by their societies as individuals who commit acts intentionally and have a sense of personal responsibility for their actions.
UP have a similar conception of age, which is not the only way to think about age.
The primary social unit of UP is mothers and their children.
UP have a sexual division of labor, with women doing most childrearing and men usually performing strenuous/dangerous labor to economically
provide for the society and/or social unit, or protect it.
UP have institutions that grant males preferential sexual access to females; and all have standards of appropriate potential mates – the incest
taboo is not quite universal, but standards of appropriate unions are.
UP have standards of sexual attractiveness which usually relate to a woman’s ability to bear healthy offspring and a man’s ability to economically
provide for and protect the primary social unit.
UP have hygiene standards.
UP’s men commit most violence and men dominate all societies.
UP’s fathers and young sons compete for the mother’s attention, which creates a tension that has been called the Oedipus complex.
UP’s senior kin are partly responsible for socializing offspring, and UP recognize kin relationships.
UP’s children learn partly via mimicry, and play and fight; their activities help develop adult skills.
UP dance and make music, with those activities often conjoined, and UP have music for children.
UP’s societies control fire and make tools and shelter.
UP are territorial and judge others by their own standards.
UP societies have complex political scheming.
UP engage in reciprocal economic exchanges, and can retaliate when exchanges are unequal or other personal inequalities are not addressed.
UP plan for the future.
UP distinguish right from wrong, and regulate their public affairs.
UP groups have leaders, whom the group members want to be generous.
UP societies are never democratic or autocratic, so all are oligarchic.
UP make promises and can empathize.
Envy is common among UP, and all societies try to minimize it.
UP think that they are more objective than they really are.
UP have laws, particularly against murder and rape, although in warfare those strictures are often relaxed.
People who offend the laws are punished.
Conflict is common, and UP’s societies try to reduce it, and conflicts are structured around in-group versus out-group dynamics, with different
ethical standards for dealing with in-group and out-group people.
UP have etiquette and hospitality as ideals.
UP’s societies have customary behaviors.
UP’s societies have standard eating times and other daily routines, and occasions for feasts.
UP’s sexual activities and bodily excretion are conducted in private.
UP have fashion and style their hair.
UP have taboos on certain foods and utterances.
UP’s societies anthropomorphize phenomena and have beliefs that are demonstrably false.
UP practiced magic to protect life and attract the opposite sex, and have theories of luck.
UP have rituals, and some are regarding status changes, such as rites of passage and marriage; they mourn their dead.
UP have supernatural beliefs and believe in extra-physical activities.
UP are still materialists, and value property and how it transfers to others, including descendants
UP dream and attempt to interpret the dreams.
UP try to explain sickness and death, and know that they are connected. They try to heal the sick and use medicines.
UP practice divination and try to control the weather.
538
See David Cogswell’s Chomsky for Beginners, p. 44.
539
See Randy Allen Harris’s The Linguistics Wars.
540
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 37-40.
541
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, chapter 3.
542
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, chapter 5.
543
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, chapter 9.
544
See Steven L. Kuhn’s and Mary C. Steiner’s “The antiquity of hunter-gatherers”, p. 102 in chapter 5 of Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective, Catherine Panter-Brick, et al., eds.
545
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, p. 47.
546
See Shepard Krech III’s, The Ecological Indian, chapter 5.
547
See Richard Cowen’s History of Life, pp. 286-287. See Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants, pp. 79-105. See Jared Diamond’s Guns,
Germs, and Steel, pp. 42-44. See Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters, pp. 180-194. See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, p. 47. See William
F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, chapter 6. See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 44.
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 81.
548
Paul L. Koch and Anthony D. Barnosky’s “Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate”, The Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and
Systematics, 2006, volume 37, pp. 215-250. A few months after this chapter was first drafted, a new paper confirmed my views. The authors
cited some of the very same papers that I thought were seriously flawed, which concluded that climate change killed off the Australian and South
American megafauna, for instance. See Christopher Sandom, et al.'s "Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not
climate change", Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, July 2014, volume 281, number 1787, 20133254. The paper was first
published on June 4, 2014.
549
See Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, chapter 4.
550
The loyal opposition to the idea of human agency in the megafauna extinctions is led by Donald Grayson, who has challenged Paul Martin’s
overkill hypothesis from the early days. See Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants, chapter 1. A recent paper that Grayson coauthored is
Stephen Wroe, et al.’s “Climate change frames debate over the extinction of megafauna in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea)”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, May 28, 2013, volume 10, number 22, pp. 8777–8781. Wroe
has long challenged the notion of human-caused megafauna extinctions. See, for instance, Stephen Wroe’s “Would the Australian megafauna be
extinct had there been no climate change?” Quaternary Science Reviews, 2007, volume 26, pp. 565–567. See Wroe’s paper coauthored with
Judith Field, “A review of the evidence for a human role in the extinction of Australian megafauna and an alternative interpretation”, Quaternary
Science Reviews, 2006, volume 25, pp. 2692–2703. They have made careers out of challenging the notion of human agency in Australian
megafauna extinctions.
551
See Gavin J. Prideaux, et al.’s “An arid-adapted middle Pleistocene vertebrate fauna from south-central Australia”, Nature, January 25, 2007,
volume 445, pp. 422-425. See Richard G. Roberts, et al.’s “New Ages for the Last Australian Megafauna: Continent-Wide Extinction About 46,000
Years Ago”, Science, June 8, 2001, volume 292, pp. 1888-1892. See Susan Rule, et al.’s “The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem
Transformation in Pleistocene Australia”, Science, March 23, 2012, volume 335, number 6075, pp. 1483-1486. See David Biello’s “Big Kill, Not Big
Chill, Finished Off Giant Kangaroos”, Scientific American, March 22, 2012.
552
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 5-15.
553
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. vii-24.
554
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 60-63.
555
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 113-121. See Irina Pugach, et al.’s “Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to
Australia”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, January 29, 2013, volume 110, number 5, pp. 1803-
1808.
556
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 83-85.
557
See Raymond C. Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War, chapter 3.
558
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, chapter 5.
559
See Robert Boyd, et al.’s “Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare”, Science, April 30,
2010, Volume 328, number 5978, pp. 617-620. See also this article. Controlled experiments have shown that people are vigilant of cheaters and
will punish them if they can, even at significant cost to themselves.
560
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 67.
561
See Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters, pp. 189-190, relating an anecdote in which Charles Darwin watched a boy kill his dinner in the
Galapagos Islands by killing birds that came to a well to drink. The area had been settled for several years, and the boy had already made it a
regular practice to kill his meals that way in the same place.
562
See Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters, pp. 187-194.
563
See Michael F. Hammer, et. al.’s “Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, September 13, 2011, volume 108, number 37, pp. 15123-15128.
564
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 67. See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 94-95.
565
See Ian Tattersall’s The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE, pp. 96-105. See Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct, chapters 6
and 7. See Brian Fagan’s Cro-Magnon, pp. 130-131. See Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews’s The Complete World of Human Evolution,
pp. 164-165.
566
See S. Péan’s “Mammoth and subsistence practices during the Mid Upper Palaeolithic of Central Europe (Moravia, Czech Republic)”, The
Proceedings of The World of Elephants - International Congress, Rome 2001. See Brian Fagan’s Cro-Magnon, chapter 9. See abstract of Jiřı́
Svoboda, et al.’s “Mammoth bone deposits and subsistence practices during Mid-Upper Palaeolithic in Central Europe: three cases from Moravia
and Poland”, Quaternary International, 2005, Volumes 126-128, 2005, pp. 209-221.
567
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, pp. 27-33.
568
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, p. 50.
569
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War for many photographs of such artifacts and wounds.
570
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, pp. 49-60.
571
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, pp. 67-72.
572
See Peter Ward’s The Call of Distant Mammoths, p. 138.
573
Deloria was a prominent member of the debate. See Paul Martin’s Twilight of the Mammoths, p. 146. Velikovsky was a Jewish Biblical
catastrophist who proposed a hypothesis that storied events such as parting the Red Sea and manna from heaven were historical events caused
by Earth’s near misses with Venus and Mars. I stumbled into the Velikovsky issue in the 1990s while investigating Carl Sagan’s debunking career,
and I am still on the controversy’s fringes. There is no astronomical evidence to support Velikovsky’s ideas of wandering and young planets, and
the common catastrophist idea that the megafauna extinctions were due to celestial events is less tenable than the climate-change hypotheses.
Although some in the scientific establishment acted scandalously regarding the reception of Velikovsky’s work (Einstein was one of the few
gracious ones), very little data supports Velikovsky’s hypothesis, and the data falsifies it in numerous aspects, such as his idea that Venus erupted
from Jupiter several thousand years ago. Catastrophism and uniformitarianism have been two poles of geophysical debate for two centuries, but
basing scientific arguments on literal interpretations of ancient myths is a dubious approach. Deloria himself became persona non grata in various
catastrophic circles when he dismissed the Saturn Myth, which was an even more involved version of the wandering planets scenario. There is
little evidence in support of those highly speculative ideas, other than novel interpretations of mythical texts, and a great deal of geophysical and
astronomical evidence falsifies them.
574
See Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, pp. 90, 154.
575
See, for instance, chapter 9 of Richard Fariña, et al.’s Megafauna; Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America. Donald Prothero has similarly
“nuanced” extinction explanations in his After the Dinosaurs.
576
Most of my career has been spent producing and analyzing financial data and designing, implementing, and maintaining information systems. I
reviewed highly complex analyses by employees that I supervised, some of which was running models that I designed. Modeling and analysis
results are only as good as the algorithms and inputs. Use flawed inputs, or models that do not reflect reality, and the results can be bizarre. In
reviewing my subordinates’ work, I had to dive deeply into the details to ensure that the models still functioned how I designed them and that the
data was valid, and I would then pull back to the high levels and see if the results made sense. When they did not, I would closely examine the
data and algorithms, find the problems, fix them or direct my employees to, and then direct my employees to try again. Sometimes unusual results
were genuine, but that was rare.

Human-agency skeptics publish papers with data, graphs, and minutia, with hypotheses for why various climate dynamics impacted mass
extinctions, but their answers do not make sense. How does a continental ecosystem that evolved in splendid isolation for more than forty million
years, and readily adapted to the vagaries of the current ice age, suddenly lose its entire guild of large herbivores and related predators, during a
climatically unremarkable period, and climate change somehow did it? At the same climatically unremarkable time, the greatest predator in
Earth’s history coincidentally arrived, which would have been highly motivated to exterminate the herbivores that formed that guild, and very likely
would have found it an effortless task, at least until the easy meat was gone.

History's most successful land mammal not only survived invasions that exterminated most of its neighbors but flourished like no other land
mammal ever did, and did well everywhere that it could migrate to, and had nearly 20 million years of unprecedented success. Suddenly, all of
those highly successful animals that did not evolve near that super-predator went extinct when first encountering it. Those with some familiarity
took longer to drive to extinction, and those with the longest experience survived, but those with no experience quickly went extinct, and an entire
hemisphere of them, from tundra to grasslands to mountains to rainforests, both tropical and temperate. Likewise, a mammal that was even larger
and was one of the few survivors of an invasion three million years earlier, and had 30 million years of success, suddenly went extinct, just when
that super-predator arrived, and would have found that animal among the world’s easiest to kill. In two other instances, some of humanity’s most
prized domestic animals, one of which lived in its homeland for 50 million years and the other for 40 million years, and succeeded on the
continents where that super-predator hunted them and eventually domesticated them, suddenly went extinct in their homeland, right when that
super-predator arrived. I have not seen any human-agency skeptics deal satisfactorily with those rapid extinctions of highly successful mammals.
I rarely even see them mentioned, as they sell climate-change stories. Their stories make no sense.

If my employees produced the analyses that human-agency skeptics have for the megafauna extinctions, I would have told them to start over, and
further informed them that they had wasted our valuable time. They came up with answers that only made sense if they obsessively focused on
the model’s minutia without ever subjecting their results to the “sniff test.” Getting “lost in the weeds” like that is common among young analysts,
and that is what supervisors are for, and human-agency skeptics could probably use some. Even worse is when such models are used to
hoodwink the naïve and unwary, which I have seen happen often enough. That is one way that financial and accounting fraud is committed.
In summary, the vanished megafauna displayed many attributes and an incredibly long history which present virtually insurmountable hurdles for a
climate-change explanation, particularly when the global and staggered nature of the extinctions are considered, and human agency is the only
plausible alternative. Human-agency skeptics remind me of defense attorneys conjuring fantastic scenarios to lodge a sliver of doubt in the minds
of jury members. Humans had the means, motive, and opportunity to go on their first global energy spree, and they had no motive or awareness
to ameliorate their practices before they began mining the dregs in the spree’s aftermath and fighting over scraps in a classic resource depletion
scenario, which humans have inflicted many times, including today's depletion of hydrocarbon deposits. Climate change may have helped make
the job quicker and easier, but the frenzy’s conclusion was foregone when it began.
577
See Raymond C. Kelly’s “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, October 25, 2005, volume 102, number 43, pp. 15,294-15,298.
578
The term “primitive” was used by anthropologists to describe how nonliterate peoples conducted war. Today, it is called “nonliterate” or “native”
warfare. See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, p. 2.
579
See Jonathan Lunine’s Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World, p. 299.
580
My family home in Ventura, California was on about a third of an acre, or 0.13 hectares, or 130% of what that Japanese rice farmer needs to
feed his family.
581
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 89, 93.
582
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, chapter 3.
583
See Raymond C. Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War, pp. 132-133.
584
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, chapter 8. See Raymond C. Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War, pp. 132-133.
585
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, pp. 45-52. On the enforced egalitarianism, see Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,
Catherine Panter-Brick, et al., eds., pp. 30-31.
586
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 108-121.
587
See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 123.
588
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, pp. 24-28.
589
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, pp. 77-82.
590
See Raymond C. Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War, p. 36. See Kelly’s book in general, and also Lawrence H. Keeley’s War
Before Civilization, and Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males for more background.
591
See Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer, pp. 82-85.
592
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 49. See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 210.
593
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, pp. 76-82.
594
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, chapter 1.
595
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 6-7.
596
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 132.
597
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 6-7.
598
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 165, 233.
599
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 246.
600
Data from National Geographic's Genographic Project, in 2014.
601
See Robert H. Layton’s “Hunter-gatherers, their neighbours and the Nation-State”, chapter 1 of Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective, Catherine Panter-Brick, et al., eds.
602
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, chapter 5. See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 156-158.
603
See Earl Cook’s Man, Energy, Society, pp. 174-175, 421-422.
604
See Joyce Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds., The Ancient City, pp. 30-31.
605
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, p. 68. See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 143-145.
606
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, chapter 5.
607
See Jessica Pearson, et al.’s “Food and social complexity at Çayönü Tepesi, southeastern Anatolia: Stable isotope evidence of differentiation
in diet according to burial practice and sex in the early Neolithic”, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, June 2013, volume 32, issue 2, pp.
180–189.
608
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 70-71.
609
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, p. 75.
610
See William Bond’s “Consumer Control by Megafauna and Fire”, chapter 16 of John Terborgh and James E. Estes, eds., Trophic Cascades, p.
276.
611
See Ross Hassig’s Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, p. 151.
612
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 60.
613
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A human History, p. 22.
614
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 11-12.
615
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 376-378.
616
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 8-9.
617
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, p. 55.
618
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 48.
619
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, pp. 254-258. See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, pp. 56-59.
620
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, pp. 257-258.
621
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, pp. 130-139.
622
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, chapter 6.
623
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, chapter 10. See K. Anne Pyburn’s “Pomp and Circumstance before Belize”, in chapter 13 of Joyce
Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds., The Ancient City, pp. 250-252, 266-272, for a survey of how it worked with the classic Maya.
624
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, chapter 7.
625
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, pp. 77-82.
626
See Keith F. Otterbein’s The Anthropology of War, p. 82.
627
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, pp. 124-127.
628
See J.N. Postgate’s Early Mesopotamia, pp. 200-204.
629
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 35-39.
630
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 39.
631
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 40-42.
632
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 42.
633
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 43. See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, pp. 69-72. See Charles L. Redman’s
Human Impact on Ancient Environments, pp. 133-139.
634
See Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep, pp. 60-77.
635
See Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and Tainter’s review of Diamond’s Collapse in “Collapse,
Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed”, Reviews in Anthropology, volume 37, number 4, pp. 342-371.
636
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down for his arguments and analyses. He writes on his primary issues at this link, among many
others.
637
See Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming for an account of how droughts that visited societies across Earth collapsed numerous civilizations
during Europe’s Medieval Warm Period, between about 950 CE and 1250 CE.
638
See Michael T. Klare’s Resource Wars for a survey of modern resource issues and resultant conflicts.
639
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, pp. 57-60, 245-250.
640
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, chapter 5.
641
See Tainter's critiques of Diamond's work, for instance.
642
See Anthony N. Penna’s The Human Footprint, pp. 117-121.
643
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, chapter 14 and p. 505
644
See Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood’s “Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions”, Science, April 25, 2003, volume 300, number
5619, pp. 597-603. See Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, chapter 10. See Bruce D. Smith’s “Eastern North America as an independent
center of plant domestication”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 15, 2006, volume 133,
number 33, pp. 12223–12228.
645
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, p. 133.
646
If viewed through the “Soul Age” model of human development, those hunter-gatherers that conquered the world were largely Infant Souls,
members of early civilizations were mostly Baby Souls, today’s materialists (atheists, etc., or the greedy ones on Wall Street) are Young Souls,
progressives are mainly Mature Souls, and Old Souls are trying to help humanity turn the corner, and manifestations of the Infinite Soul, such as
Jesus, Ra, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, and Krishna, sought to help humanity remember its true roots beyond the physical plane and our purpose for being
here. Nobody needs to “believe” that framework, but many have found it helpful, including me, and there are plenty of similar frameworks, which
likely all have at least some validity. I think that high quality reports of afterlife realms are valid; I have known people who have journeyed there
and returned. While mainstream science ignores or derides those aspects of existence it plays a small game, for the greatest science of all is
probably the science of consciousness.
647
See Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, pp. 33-37.
648
See Bruce Trigger’s “Craft Workers, Kings, and Controlling the Supernatural”, chapter 3 of Joyce Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds., The
Ancient City, p. 56.
649
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, chapter 6.
650
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, pp. 36-45.
651
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, p. 108.
652
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, chapter 8 and p. 108.
653
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 13-15.
654
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, p. 69.
655
See Arther Ferrill’s The Origins of War, chapter 6.
656
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, chapter 7.
657
See William G. Dever’s Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did the Come From?, chapter 12.
658
See Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, pp. 154-155.
659
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, pp. 82-86.
660
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 40-41.
661
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 53-54.
662
See Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines, and Emperors, chapter 6.
663
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, p. 42.
664
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 67.
665
See Adam Wasserman’s Two Sides of the Coin: A History of Gold, pp. 43-55.
666
See Adam Wasserman’s Two Sides of the Coin: A History of Gold, pp. 55-62.
667
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 46-47.
668
See William A. Parkinson and Michael L. Galaty's "Secondary states in perspective: An integrated approach to state formation in the prehistoric
Aegean", American Anthropologist, Volume 109, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 113-129.
669
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 55.
670
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, pp. 22-27.
671
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 72.
672
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 73.
673
See John Keegan's A History of Warfare, chapter 4.
674
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 61.
675
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 62.
676
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 64-65.
677
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 68.
678
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 75-81.
679
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 72-80.
680
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 82-84.
681
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 88.
682
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, p. 2.
683
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 93-94.
684
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 82-85.
685
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 4, 64-65, 85.
686
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 104.
687
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 81-87.
688
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 100-103.
689
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 105-108.
690
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 116.
691
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, p. 85.
692
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 118-119.
693
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 120-121.
694
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, pp. 115.
695
See Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller’s The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture, chapter 3.
696
See Adam Wasserman’s Two Sides of the Coin: A History of Gold, pp. 63-86.
697
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 124-125.
698
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 119-120.
699
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, p. 76.
700
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 124-125, 135.
701
See Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, pp. 76-77.
702
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 128.
703
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, p. 125.
704
That image is from the inside cover of Carl Roebuck’s The World of Ancient Times, published in 1966, and reproduced here under Fair use law.
705
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, p. 243.
706
See J. Donald’s Hughes’s Pan’s Travail, p. 74.
707
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, p. 59.
708
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, p. 92.
709
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, chapters 7 and 8.
710
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, p. 128.
711
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, pp. 107-117.
712
See Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp. 411-417.
713
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 9-10, 181-183
714
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, pp. 103-104.
715
See Lothar von Falkenhausen's "Stages in the Development of 'Cities' in pre-Imperial China", in The Ancient City, edited by Joyce Marcus and
Jeremy A. Sabloff, chapter 11.
716
See Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, chapter 2.
717
See Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion, pp. 175-186.
718
See Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion, pp. 91-94.
719
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, p. 65.
720
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, pp. 86-91.
721
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, chapter 3.
722
See Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit’s The Origins of War, chapters 4 and 5.
723
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, p. 152.
724
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 215-218.
725
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 215, 225.
726
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 137, 191.
727
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 164-168.
728
See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 154-158. See Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization, pp. 103-106.
729
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 222-223.
730
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 223.
731
See Craig Morris's "Links in the Chain of Inka cities: Communication, Alliance, and the Cultural Production of Status, Value, and Power", in The
Ancient City, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy A. Sabloff, chapter 15.
732
Brian Fagan’s Before California explores that issue.
733
Charles C. Mann’s 1491 surveys those native practices.
734
See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, p. 236.
735
The definitive account of the Soto expedition as of 2015 is Charles Hudson's Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun. On the entrada's
aftermath, see chapter 19.
736
See Charles Hudson's Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, pp. 436-437.
737
See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, chapter 10. See Peter Bellwood’s First Migrants, pp. 238-239.
738
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, pp. 68-69
739
See Elizabeth Stone's "A Tale of Two Cities: Lowland Mesopotamia and Highland Anatolia", in The Ancient City, edited by Joyce Marcus and
Jeremy A. Sabloff, chapter 8.
740
See Richard E. Blanton, et al.'s "Agency, ideology, and power in archaeological theory", Current Anthropology, Volume 37, Number 1, February
I996, pp. 1-14.
741
Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming surveys the great droughts and other effects of the Medieval Warming Period.
742
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, p. 72.
743
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, pp. 38-39.
744
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, pp. 58-59.
745
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, pp. 74-77.
746
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, p. 91.
747
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, pp. 78.
748
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, pp. 75-77.
749
See abstract of Julia Pongratz, et al.’s “Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric
CO2 between ad 800 and 1850”, The Holocene, August 2011, volume 21, number 5, pp. 843-851. Many articles were published in the study’s
wake, such as at these links (1, 2, 3). A more recent paper is Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira's "Attribution of atmospheric CO2 and temperature
increases to regions: importance of preindustrial land use change", Environmental Research Letters, September 2012, volume 7, number 3,
034001.
750
See David Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 188-189.
751
See Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, chapter 11.
752
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, p. 158. See Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, chapter 2.
753
See Jean-Claude Debeir, et al.’s In the Servitude of Power, p. 91.
754
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 18.
755
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, pp. 90-91.
756
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History, p. 24.
757
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History, p. 25-26.
758
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History, p. 30-31.
759
See Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, pp. 31-38.
760
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 164-165.
761
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 165-166.
762
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 167-170.
763
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 197-201, 213-214.
764
The quintessential example of that phenomenon was Daniel Boone, the "pioneer" of Kentucky. Boone originally filed claims on more than 60
square miles (more than 15,000 hectares) of Kentucky's land. The rigged legal system, largely in the Virginian gentry's control, saw Boone lose all
of his Kentucky land, and Boone moved on to Missouri. By age 75, Boone owned no land at all. By the 1790s, less than half of Kentucky's white
families owned any land. See David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly's Bound Away, p. 164.
765
The late Joe Bageant wrote about the modern state of poor rural whites, growing up as one himself in West Virginia, but who escaped during
the USA’s postwar boom, and his writings about his people can particularly be found in his Deer Hunting with Jesus and Rainbow Pie. On the
origins of those pejorative terms and the borderers in general, see David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, especially pp. 754-782.
766
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History, pp. 44-46. See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, p. 249.
767
See Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History, pp. 44-56.
768
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 281-282.
769
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 63.
770
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 281-282.
771
See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, chapter 3.
772
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, chapter 15.
773
See Joachim Radkau’s Nature and Power, pp. 149, 191.
774
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 238-240.
775
See Rondo Cameron’s A Concise Economic History of the World, pp. 175-176.
776
See Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures: 1700-1820, pp. 37, 46.
777
See Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures: 1700-1820, p. 45.
778
See Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures: 1700-1820, p. 95.
779
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 200.
780
See Vaclav Smil’s Harvesting the Biosphere, p. 225.
781
See T.K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams’s A Short History of Technology, pp. 123-124.
782
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 103-104.
783
See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, pp. 132-133.
784
See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, chapter 7.
785
See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, pp. 22-24.
786
Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism thoroughly reviews those classical economists and their predecessors.
787
See Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism, chapter 13.
788
See Karl Marx’s Capital, chapter 26, titled, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.”
789
See Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 459-476.
790
See Noam Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New, pp. 114-115.
791
See Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over, pp. 68-69.
792
See Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, part 3.
793
See Godfrey Hodgson’s A Great and Godly Adventure, chapters 3 and 4.
794
See David Stannard’s American Holocaust, the last sentence of chapter 4.
795
See David Stannard’s Before the Horror, p. 48.
796
See Daniel R. Hedrick’s The Tools of Empire, chapter 3.
797
This is a common theme in Noam Chomsky’s political writings. See, for instance, his Year 501, pp. 17-18.
798
See the second book on “economic hit men,” which Perkin’s work inspired, titled, A Game as Old as Empire, edited by Steven Hiatt.
799
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 21.
800
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 21.
801
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 22.
802
See Walter Licht’s Industrializing America, p. 1.
803
See Walter Licht’s Industrializing America, p. 23.
804
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, pp. 71-72.
805
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, p. 44.
806
See William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, p. 121.
807
See John Perlin’s A Forest Journey, pp. 286-324.
808
See William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, pp. 122-123.
809
See David E. Nye’s Consuming Power, pp. 74-75.
810
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 99, 199.
811
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.
812
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 330.
813
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 369.
814
See Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, chapter 12.
815
See Crosbie Smith’s The Science of Energy, chapter 5.
816
Crosbie Smith’s The Science of Energy surveys those early days of the development of the science of energy.
817
See Douwe G. Van Der Meer, et al.'s "Plate tectonic controls on atmospheric CO2 levels since the Triassic", Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, March 10, 2014, volume 111, number 12, pp. 4380-4385.
818
See Eric Rignot, et al.'s "Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise", Geophysical Research
Letters, volume 38, issue 5, March 16, 2011. See M. E. Weber, et al.'s "Millennial-scale variability in Antarctic ice-sheet discharge during the last
deglaciation", Nature Letter, volume 510, issue 7503, June 5, 2014, pp. 134-138. See B. Wouters, et al.'s "Limits in detecting acceleration of ice
sheet mass loss due to climate variability", Nature Geoscience Letter, published online July 14, 2013 for a cautionary paper on extrapolating
trends. See Ian Joughin, et al.'s "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica", Science,
May 16, 2014, volume 344, number 6185, pp. 735-738. See M. Morlighem, et al.'s "Deeply incised submarine glacial valleys beneath the
Greenland ice sheet", Nature Geoscience Letter, volume 41, issue 7, pp. 418-422. See J. Mouginot, et al.'s "Sustained increase in ice discharge
from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013", Geophysical Research Letters, volume 41, issue 5, pp. 1576–1584,
March 16, 2014.
819
See William F. Ruddiman’s Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, chapter 18.
820
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.
821
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 202.
822
Robert Kennedy, Jr. enthusiastically endorsed James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable. See pages 370-373 of that work, which argue
that Robert's murder was committed by the same people who murdered John, and they would kill any Kennedy in position to become president
(such speculation is prominent concerning John Jr.'s untimely death), and who could expose the conspiracy.
823
See Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s The Rockefellers, pp. 18-19.
824
See Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s The Rockefellers, p. 56.
825
See Mark Seifer’s Wizard, p. 272.
826
See Mark Seifer’s Wizard, pp. 300-301.
827
See Mark Seifer’s Wizard, pp. 423-425.
828
See F. David Peat’s In Search of Nikola Tesla.
829
See Mark Seifer’s Wizard, pp. 457-461.
830
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, chapters 4 to 6.
831
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 140.
832
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 7.
833
See Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s The Rockefellers, p. 50.
834
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 104-105.
835
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, chapter 12.
836
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, chapters 5, 12, 13, and 16.
837
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 6.
838
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 218-219.
839
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 304.
840
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 206-209.
841
See David Stannard’s American Holocaust, p. 153. See also Norman Rich's Hitler's War Aims, pp. 8-9. Hitler believed the that "Nordic"
imperial model was the best for Germany, of invading and exterminating the inhabitants, to make way for "settlers" who kept their blood pure,
unlike the Spanish experience in its imperial lands, or the British method of empire.
842
See Michael Adams's The Best War Ever, p. 30.
843
See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 209-215, 307.
844
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 297.
845
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 311.
846
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 266.
847
See Gregory Cochran, et al.’s “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”, Journal of Biosocial Science, September 17, 2006, volume 38,
number 5, pp. 659-693.
848
See Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s The Rockefellers, pp. 225-226.
849
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, p. 157.
850
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, p. 157.
851
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 224.
852
Since 1980, Americans have been using about 334 million BTUs per person per year. At 2,500 calories per day (which is around the American
average, and various organizations developed different numbers, from 2,000 to 3,700), American energy amounts to 92 times their dietary
calories. At 3,700 dietary calories, it “only” amounts to 62 times.
853
My calculation is 85 million barrels per day, and each barrel provides ten man-years of work, and oil provides about a third of global energy
consumption. That equals about 1.2 trillion energy slaves. If we discount half of those barrels, as they are burned to provide heat, then it would
be "only" 600 billion energy slaves.
854
See Stephen C. Webster's "Earth’s supercomputing power surpasses human brain three times over", The Raw Story, June 18, 2012.
855
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 270-273.
856
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 215-216.
857
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 200.
858
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 20.
859
The priest Sahagún recorded the Aztec perception of the Spanish gold craze thusly, after they were given some gold artifacts, “The Spaniards’
faces grinned: they were delighted, they were overjoyed. They snatched up the gold like monkeys…They were swollen with greed; they were
ravenous; they hungered for that gold like wild pigs.” See Ronald Wright’s Stolen Continents, p. 26.
860
See Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, p. 142.
861
Attributed to an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve near Montreal. See this research on attribution.
862
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, chapter 2.
863
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 72-74.
864
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 72.
865
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 247.
866
See Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 43-49.
867
See Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 306-309.
868
Readers may note that the vast majority of references are to fairly orthodox sources, but there are important exceptions, and I have various
reasons for them. One is that for the estimate of India’s excess deaths under British rule, I have never even seen an orthodox estimate. Also, the
scientist making the estimate I believe is Jewish, and there has been a vociferous strain of genocide scholarship that has obsessively focused on
the Jewish Holocaust to the exclusions of all other genocides, so it is refreshing and even inspiring to see a Jewish scientist toting up the imperial
damage inflicted on the world’s peoples.
869
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, p. 238.
870
See Bruce Trigger’s Understanding Early Civilizations, p. 125.
871
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, chapter 14, and p. 342.
872
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, p. 235.
873
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, p. 125.
874
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, p. 211.
875
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, pp. 484-486.
876
See Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, p. 463.
877
See James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 16.
878
See Gary Wean’s There’s a Fish in the Courthouse, pp. 591-592.
879
See James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, chapter 1.
880
See Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, p. 52.
881
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 319.
882
See Charles A.S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard’s Energy and the Wealth of Nations, p. 313.
883
Those amounts are derived from data as of about 2010.
884
See Earl Cook’s Man, Energy, Society, pp. 70-71.
885
See Brian O’Leary’s The Energy Solution Revolution, appendix 1, pp. 251-266.
886
See Will Steffen, et al.'s "Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet", Science, February 13, 2015, volume 347,
number 6223, p. 736. Numerous articles accompanied the paper, including a TED presentation.
887
See Roger Annis's "Tar Sands, Natural Gas Fracking, Pipelines: The Fossil Fuel Wars in British Columbia and Canada", Global Research,
December 23, 2013.
888
In 2013, I visited Mr. Professor's grave, and his funeral eleven years earlier is when that voice spoke to me for the last time so far, and I was
not happy to hear from it. However, in the 2013, as I approached Mr. Professor's grave, a sudden and highly unexpected feeling of joy overcame
me. Instead of a somber visit to his grave, it was a happy experience. I soon realized that it was likely Mr. Professor coming through, letting me
know once again that he was doing fine, and was happy to be involved with us. Since then, I think happier thoughts when I think of him, which I
am sure was his intent.
889
The need for a new science was the theme of Brian’s The Second Coming of Science, published in 1993, which covers the time when I met
him.
890
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, chapters 3-5, 18.
891
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, chapter 19.
892
See Anthony D Barnosky, et al.’s “Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?”, Nature, March 3, 2011, volume 471, pp. 51–57.
893
See Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, p. 37.
894
See Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, p. 109.
895
See Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, p. 162.
896
See Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light, pp. 142, 153.
897
Brian O’Leary discussed that gulf in his books, and put a price tag of at least $100 million to develop a production-ready FE device from a
working prototype, and later upped it to $200 million. See his Re-Inheriting the Earth, pp. 76-78, 286-288, and his Miracle in the Void, p. 251.
Others such as Tom Bearden have made similar estimates. My guess is about $200 million today, or about one-thousandth of what has been
spent to buy out such technologies.
898
See Frank Niele’s Energy: Engine of Evolution, published by Shell Global Solutions, pp. 106-108.
899
See Brian O’Leary’s The Energy Solution Revolution, chapter 21.
900
I do not know how long it was the case or if it still is today, but FE conferences in the 1990s were attended by CIA personnel, many of them,
who had to identify their employers when asked (they even wore badges, according to regulations, but hid them under their lapels and the like), as
they fulfilled the letter of the law, if not its spirit. Worldly FE inventors with the goods avoided such conferences, as they were crawling with not
only CIA personnel, but those from other agencies, private interests, opportunists, and the other predators (the GCs’ agents definitely attended).
Those conferences were seen as not only a waste of time by those inventors, but potentially fatal. The day that I met Dennis, I heard him speak to
several hundred people at the Seattle Center, and several news crews recorded his talk (only a Canadian TV station broadcast coverage of the
event, which is the only time that I ever saw positive TV media coverage of Dennis’s efforts), but the local media did not report on his talk, and
smeared him not long after that event with their usual lies. In the audience that night was a heckler, sitting directly in front of me, who was Bill the
BPA Hit Man’s lawyer, challenging Dennis about the phony bankruptcy suit that Bill had filed, with that attorney’s help. Bill was responsible for the
death of one of Dennis’s employees several months earlier, so it was astounding chutzpah for that attorney to heckle Dennis as he did. After
Dennis was released from jail in 1989, and left Ventura County under the judge’s approval to speak at a conference, Bill arrived to heckle him and
destroy his efforts there.

In Ventura in 1988, a pair of elderly European brothers told me of attending one of Max Gerson’s conferences when he was poisoned with arsenic,
which ended the conference. Brian O’Leary told me that the medical racket secret teams are more ruthless than those in the energy racket, and in
my circles I heard more than one tale of sudden deaths of key people at alternative medicine conferences that were likely murder.

When we held FE shows in 1987-1988, we later heard about luminaries in the audiences, and some identified themselves at the shows, such as
the head of the Department of Energy for the New England region. At a show in early 1988, Mr. Deputy was in the audience, and he obtained a
search warrant for our facilities the next day, to strike the day after that, which began my life’s worst year. When I received a standing ovation at
one conference in 1988, the man leading the ovation led the effort to steal our company a few months later. In 1992, soon before Dennis was
kangarooed into prison, where prison officials repeatedly set him up to be murdered, Dennis flew me to a conference around his national ad
campaign for FE. During my flight home, I was improbably sitting behind a conference speaker, and his assistant sitting next to him crafted a plan
to steal Dennis’s company during that flight, which he inadvertently showed me soon before I disembarked, in one of my life’s more bizarre
synchronicities.
When Dennis held his Philadelphia show in 1996, with 5,000 people in attendance, we discovered that federal officials were in the audience to
arrest Dennis (who was still on parole at the time) and Yull Brown (who spent 12 years in Soviet gulags and Turkish prisons), if they staged a
transmutation experiment with radioactive materials at that show, after the federal government initially approved the demonstration and then
withdrew it soon before the show. Yull was prepared for the demonstration, but Dennis decided to not have them risk more prison time. Mr.
Skeptic was also in the audience, and the next day began his “skeptical” career. We were also subjected to a highly sophisticated sting operation
immediately after that show.

The week that we began planning our 2004 New Energy Movement conference, and a few days after Eugene Mallove agreed to be our first
speaker, he was murdered. Brian then became the conference’s keynote speaker, and immediately after the conference he understandably
moved to South America, where he lived for the rest of his life. Those are just some events that I saw and heard of regarding staging conferences
on such subject matter, and there were other kinds of problems besides those.
901
From the early 1990s to about 2004, I spent significant time and effort reaching out to various “progressives.” I could not play at the level that
Brian did, but tried what I could. About all that Brian and I experienced were permanent hairstyle changes from the wind of all the doors slammed
in our faces. But some reactions stand out; I clearly recall them many years later, and one was by a progressive, “organic” environmental activist
who evidenced some political savvy. His response was almost literally, “Wake me up when you deliver an FE device to my home.” That pretty
much sums up the public’s perspective, too, but his response was memorable for two reasons germane to this essay:

1. He will not wake up until FE is delivered to his home;

2. He will wake up, however, if it is delivered.

That response reinforces Machiavelli’s perspective, and also shows what will be needed to awaken the masses, even the “progressives,” maybe
especially the “progressives” and the educated. The masses will not be talked into helping the Fifth Epochal Event manifest; it will need to be
delivered to them before they will begin to understand and their world will be transformed, just as with the previous Epochal Events. It is simply
the nature of the event; it will be initiated by a relative few.