Tracing threads of intellectual thought in the tapestry of history.
Twelve thousand nine hundred years
ago (about 11,000 BC) there was a massive die-off of the great fauna of the
Pleistocene era— the wooly mammoths and giant bison and saber-toothed tigers
and great bears and giant sloths and such-like, as well as vast teeming herds
of other things, the ancestors of deer and elk and caribou and all the other
smaller animals that co-existed at that time. In North America, these were the great animals
that the migrating hunters from across the Bering land bridge depended upon for
their living, and they all died off in a relatively short space of time, all
together.
In the 1980s, archeologists
speculated that the migrating humans killed them all off, since everybody knows
human beings are the rapacious ones who destroy their own environment, pollute
the atmosphere, cause entire species to become extinct, and create global
warming.
Could this be right? Or was this just political correctness in
academe?
The fields of archaeology and
paleontology (not to mention history) seem to suffer more than their share of
political correctness. For example,
there was a period of time during the 1970s and ‘80s when
archaeo-paleontologists claimed the evidence demonstrated that human cultures
had once been matriarchal and consequently peaceful, and that at certain times
and places identifiable by archeological debris human societies became
patriarchal, and at the same time became violent towards themselves and others,
and toward the environment. This
field-wide assumption lasted for over a generation, nearly the entire academic careers
of some of its advocates. It is no
coincidence that this interpretation came at the flowering of the feminist
movement in this country. If modern men
were under assault from feminists, ancient men were, too.
Finally, the practice of peer
review revealed the error, and there was a great deal of denial, gnashing of
teeth, bitter recrimination and upheaval within the universities among these scholars
but finally as time went on the error was left behind and it was replaced with
a more rational set of assumptions and a more informative and intellectually
viable analysis regarding patriarchies and matriarchies and social
relationships among cultures.
What had happened was that a
generation of paleontologists had grown up, been educated, and took their
degrees in an era of American culture that placed social responsibility above
rational thought; that found ultimate value in an ideal concept of human
society—and this ideal was not only something toward which a society might
strive in the here and now, but it was also something from which the human
family had once strayed (or so these academics wished to think).
It replicated, if you think about
it, the Biblical myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of
Eden. One does not have to be a
Christian or to believe in the Bible to recognize that this story when taken at
face value describes the greatest catastrophe of all human history. Never mind the putative threat to the human
soul; the Garden myth describes two things: first, it describes Mankind’s
natural and proper state as existing blissfully in a condition of innocent
non-violence; and second, it describes Mankind’s separation from that state.
There has developed in European
culture since the Enlightenment and in American culture since the end of World
War Two an intellectual following that describes and seeks Utopia as a secular
version of The Garden. Lately, this
trend blames either human beings generally, or Western Civilization itself, or
even more specifically the United States of America as the wretched culprit
that is to blame for either causing this separation from innocence, or for
keeping all of humankind from achieving that desired state here and now.
The influence this general utopian
view has on contemporary thought processes can be traced easily--from PETA to
Fritjof Capra’s movie version of his book The Turning Point to Al Gore’s
championing of Global Warming. And it was
demonstrably found among the practitioners of the scholarly fields of
Paleontology and Archaeology. It should
be of interest to us how long this influence lasted in a field allegedly partaking
of scholarly rigor, and how long it took for that very same rigor in the form
of peer review to overcome the error.
We should, I suppose, be grateful
that the error was overcome at all. The
persistence of such an egregious error in a scholarly field attests to the
strength and power of its underlying cause—political correctness and a general
loathing of American culture by American academe—but more to the point for us
here and now is just to have an awareness that such things can actually
happen. One must be a bit more alert than
usual in order to spot it, however.
Academics tend to be convinced of the rightness of their analyses, to
write persuasively about them, and to defend them vigorously among their
colleagues. When these ideas emerge into
the popular culture, they take on the appearance of something that Always Has
Been True.
Let us return now to our original
thesis regarding the die-off of the Pleistocene-era fauna. This group of animals was terrifically
varied, included some very large, vigorous and dangerous animals. They populated the North American Continent
in much the same way that the buffalo did in later centuries—in unbelievably
vast numbers. Paleolithic humans hunted
them in the same way the pre-Columbian Indians hunted the buffalo—on foot. Modern scholars of this field felt they could
prove that the ancient humans hunted those animals—all of them—into
extinction. It never occurred to them to
wonder why, then, if mankind was so rapacious, that the Native American Indians
in their turn had not hunted the buffalo (American Bison) into extinction. The answer to that, if you think about it
from a practical standpoint, is that primitive cultures could not
exterminate entire species let alone all the fauna on an entire continent. They simply did not have the numbers or the
mechanisms with which to accomplish such a feat, even if they had wished
to. Of course, the scholars never quite
made that claim—that the Pleistocene humans wanted to wipe out their source of
food. No, they just did it [so the
argument went] because that’s the way they were—rapacious and thoughtless, the
ultimate conspicuous consumers of the Earth’s bounty, the ultimate mindless
killing machine.
As it turns out, this thesis was
wrong and eventually the error was corrected.
But it was neither common sense nor peer-review that brought the field
around to an evidence-based reality. It
was another science entirely. Just a few
years ago, geologists discovered a peculiar layer of dirt sandwiched within the
innumerable layers of dirt interleaved one upon the other all over the
planet. Such curious planet-wide layers
are not unknown. There is another, more
famous layer which is found everywhere, and wherever it is found is reliably
dated to about 60 million years ago—the time the dinosaurs disappeared. That thin layer contains iridium, and is now
seen as evidence of the impact of a great meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs in
a meteoric equivalent of a nuclear winter.
The younger, similar layer just
recently found consistently corresponds to the time frame we associate with the
great Pleistocene die-off—about 12,900 years ago. Research into the composition of this layer now
indicates that it records an event of terrestrial volcanic origin, and it is
clear that the event was of sufficient magnitude that it very likely caused the
die-off of the great mammals, rather than over-hunting by primitive tribes of
humans. A big volcanic gush filled the
atmosphere with ash, dimmed the sun, brought on a sudden planet-wide cooling
event which killed the animals.
Yet, paleontology had insisted for
years that it was the rapacious cave-man that was the culprit. Once again, paleontology led us astray, and
the rigor of other sciences has forced the peer review process to bring us
around to the right path.
Careful thought here will suggest
that the description of ancient man as a rapacious predator is actually a
contemporary commentary on present man.
It ceased to be archaeo-paleontology and became modern social
commentary. That it wrongly describes
ancient man should also help us to entertain the possibility that it also
wrongly describes present man, although the jury is still out on that one.
That conception of mankind was part
of an intellectual thread which is found first in the 19th century Utopians’
analysis. Now we’ve traced this thread
to other fields of study. Now that you
know what it looks like, you can look for it elsewhere as you study the
tapestry of your own world, if you wish.
