I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I don’t think this finding suggests that humans are innately negative forces in ecosystems, but rather that becoming indigenous to a place is a process. As people spread out to new areas, they didn’t have cultural practices that maintained historical ecological relations, and upended some of the ecology in the new places. But over time, it’s in everyone’s best interest to maintain relatively sustainable and cyclical ecological relations for long term survivalship, and that becomes part of the culture and stories, and then you get indigeneity. I think there’s no coincidence that the megafauna that still exists is primarily in the area where humans evolved (subsaharan africa). This is where people have been indigenous to the longest, perhaps before people had the means to extirpate megafauna. And once the cultural indigeneity was in place, there were reasons to not destroy megafauna populations (until the modern colonial era, at least)
Until a people develop science its pretty silly to me to assign a value judgment to things like this. Invasive species wipe out other species all the time, and did so before humans to boot. Mitigating that is ideal, but you don’t even really conceive of a problem until you have a society which can conceive of the harms and alternatives anyway.
Yeah i think you have a point but I also think humans were moral agents and ascribed value to each other and their environment long long before the advent of science
In the book Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari proposes that one of the problems with humans is that we lept to the top of the foodchain too quickly. Other alpha predators like lions got there by slowly evolving over millions of years, giving themselves time to adjust to their new position and giving nature time to delevope checks and balances. For example, antelope getting faster over time.
Neither we nor nature has adjusted to the new hierarchy. We are unable and unwilling to create enough checks and balances on ourselves so we rape the environment and set whole species to extinction.
When the first humans arrived in Australia almost immediately all the large mammals were wiped out. They didn’t have time to learn to fear the tiny little apes newly arrived on their shores.
An interesting point he made is that genetically we are still scavengers. The earliest tools were likely for smashing apart bones to get at the marrow, after other animals had taken their share. We still feel hunted, and it could be that a large part of anxiety and depression we see could be attributed to our insecurity at our place in the world.
If you once again look at a lion, they are full of confidence and power and all the things we expect to see in an alpha predator. Who knows how long it might take humanity to become comfortable with our place in the world. Who knows if we and the planet will be able to adapt together well enough for that to come to fruition, rather than just becoming another extinct species ourselves.
The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the handiwork of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis. Paleoanthropologists believe H. heidelbergensis was highly mobile. Thus, it is surprising that the hominins would have invested labor in building a semipermanent structure. “We haven’t seen archaic humans manipulating their environment on such a large scale before,” says Barham. “It suggests an attachment to a single point on the landscape.”
What an interesting article. Love to see this town recreated in VR or even better AR/MR so you can go to this spot and see what it may have looked like mapped to the actual foundations.
I wondered what the heck a “true” saddle was supposed to be, but it looks like they roughly defined it as a treed (wooden frame) saddle with stirrups attached.
I can’t seem to parse whether the tree came before the stirrup – it’s implied but not stated – but it looks like a single mounting stirrup was invented before paired riding stirrups. I’ve seen a Native American (Cherokee? IIRC dated about Removal Time) saddle that was basically just a tree, presumably used with blankets above and beneath for comfort, without any indication of rings for girth or stirrup attachment, but that doesn’t rule out looping them through the gap between the tree bars (where the spine floats underneath).
It was/is a trend within the last decade or so to use a treeless saddle for more “natural” horsemanship (whatever that means), and I’m sitting here wondering what that means for stirrup attachment. Layered on top of the girth, I hope, for stability. Gonna go fall down the google-hole.
In the interest of horse-girl infodumping, I recall seeing some at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK, and luckily they have some pics for their online collection, thank you Gilcrease.
This one actually has stirrups, looks like the girth attachments are more sophicated than my Dunning-Kruger ass imagined, but the stirrup leathers are, in fact, looped over each of the wooden bars: collections.gilcrease.org/object/84985
As the article states. Slavery is an aspect of Roman society that is so often hand waved away or basically ignored by pretty much every historical discussion or documentary.
When you hear about Julius Caesar in Gaul: one third of the entire population was sold into slavery over the course of a few years.
The entire roman economy ran on slavery.
Spartacus is a staple of modern media thanks to Giovagnoli's novel and its translation into English but the brutality with which it and the other two "Slave wars" were put down in the space of 60 years are rarely touched on.
Isn’t “may have been used for ritual practice” thrown onto anything that is found without 100% clear documentation of what it was used for? The article didn’t even mention anything about being found by human remains or a possible ritual site, so it’s just getting added to the article to make it more mysterious and “sexy” for readers.
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