Recently, I did a quick study on the Ice Age. You know what I refer to, that era when no one needed a freezer to keep their food from spoiling. If anything, it was a period of time where the food froze before you could eat it. If you lived during that fun event, you would soon discover ice cream is your perpetual meal. Except there were no cows to milk.
Deer milk ice cream, anyone?
When researching, one stumbles upon peripheral studies on the subject one is interested in. The one that caught my eye was about how Europeans nearly went extinct during the brutal glacial maximum of 20,000 years back. The dead would include those hated white males. Except that there were no white males, or females, during that time period.
What?
The science of DNA is getting stranger and stranger, meaning, there is a huge mystery here, as to just who and what we humans were, and are. Because the Europeans of the Ice Age included Homo sapiens, Neanderthalensis, Cro-Magnon, Denisovans, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, sapiens, et cetera.
Did I miss anyone?
We know there are others in this mixture, but those scientists haven’t gotten around to everyone yet. Not to worry, they want to include everyone. Especially those that went extinct before the Ice Age hit. Plus, now that China is into the game, big time, they have their own fossils to examine, and I predict, that they will have some new ideas to throw into the humanity mix. Like China’s fossils represent guys, and gals that originated in Asia, not Africa.
That is somewhat of a primate wrench thrown in to stir things up, is it not?
We shall see how that theory pans out. In the meantime, we’ll add it into the overall mystery mix of who and what we are.
To research humanity’s progress makes one respectful of those first humans. The image accompanying this essay is a rendering of some exciting times 450,000 years back. The link, takes you to the story on that event. We are talking a Noah type flood here. And you are looking at the White Cliffs of Dover in the background, and Normandy in the foreground. Or what an artist thought that area looked like all those hundreds of thousands of years back.
And we complain about a little global warming.
The research into those freezing times gave me a couple of things to think about. One, we homo sapiens, sapiens, are a tough lot. No ice age was going to kill us. Not all of us, anyway. And two, these studies about the early humans, proves, once again, that our stories, what we refer to as mythology and/or religious literature, are not wrong. That Biblical story, about the flood, and then the Tower of Babel, is on the money.
Studying geology can be dangerous to your assumptions.
Oh yes, there’s an African story about that sort of thing as well. There’s no flood, but humans begin to kill the animals, and that makes God angry. So he moves out of town. The humans follow him, so God then goes back to his home, in the sky. The humans decided to keep following God. So, they build a tall structure in order to leave Earth, a sort of tower of Babel with steps.
These two stories offer proof of our universality; that what happened in Africa didn’t stay in Africa.
Both stories prescient humanity’s desire to reach for the sky, actually, not only metaphorically. Constructing rocket ships and heading off into space is something we do. It indicates that those who didn’t die off in the Ice Age, those toughies, passed on some good genes. What we inherited from those sapiens, is ideas. Those ideas had been tried out, refined, and then passed on. That is how the sapiens got their moniker: Sapient means wise. That is what helped us figure out how to get closer to the gods.
I wonder if that makes the gods nervous.
In the Hebrew story of the Tower of Babel, God didn’t like the tower concept because he didn’t want humans to be inclusive. He wanted exclusiveness.
Nothing sets people apart like a language barrier. For those of you who don’t know, that’s how God did it, separated the people who built the tower. If you can’t speak French, you cannot be included in their conversations on how to properly mix the cement to build the tower. In the African story, God keeps moving away, up higher and higher. So the people get it, that it is physically impossible to reach God. But God didn’t get it. You cannot say no to humans and get away with it.
I wonder, what will happen now that we can, physically, reach the greatest of all great beyonds?
Not even Michio Kaku or Neil deGrasse Tyson dares to weigh in on that one. Except to say, we have a ways to go.
Stargazers have been with us from the get-go. Because the biggest mystery of all is, what is out there? Rocket ships are just the latest version of the towers humans build to reach their god.
But first, we have to survive.
As I write this, we humans are in another pickle with those death and destruction behaviors we have so often employed. That’s how far humanity has come. We don’t need an Ice Age, or a space rock or five volcanoes going off all at once to kills us off. We can do the job ourselves.
See how godlike we’ve become? That’s why we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, to figure out how to grow enough food for 8 billion people, and, how to do away with 8 billion people. That tree was dichotomous, and so are we.
Some folks wish we would have become extinct. But what fun is there in that? Without humans, there are no challenges. None, whatsoever.
Face the facts. We Europeans made it. Yes, it was brutal. It’s always brutal during an age when food won’t grow, as glaciers take over 25% of the Earth. It’s just no fun to watch your children starve, and your spouse freeze to death whilst he’s out looking for meat on the hoof.
Do you appreciate those way, distant ancestors, that got you here?
Now people make a fuss about global warming. They want to stop it, as if they think we can. The mythologist in me tells you that’s why those Disney films, Frozen and Ice Age, were such big hits.
Frozen was supposedly based on the Hans Christian Anderson’s story, The Snow Queen. Anderson made the Snow Queen the villain, because to love the Queen is to die. The boy she kidnaps is near death when he is rescued. Disney turned that concept on its head, in Frozen, making the ice queen a positive force, instead of a demon. In the context of our times, when we are too hot, it is a virtue, to be able to lower the temperature.
It’s a feminist message, to be the Ice Princess.
The Earth has been through a few of these cycles. I expect more will come. They last for thousands of years, so stock up on flannels. Ice ages are a good time to migrate as the land bridges are available. Dump your EV. It won’t make it over the land bridge. You’ll have to walk it. Buy something fossil fueled, so the ice will melt again.
The Little Ice Age, that began in the 14th century, stuck around for a few hundred years. Our ancestors dealt with starvation, plague and war. The population of Europe struggled with that one as well. About a third of the population died off. The Renaissance was aptly named, for the birthrate ticked up when the 15th century came around. However, it wasn’t until the 16th century that we got back on track, population wise.
The Dressing for the Ages class touches on these events. When the Ice Age waned, and the Earth warmed up, humanity evolved at a faster clip. Forests grew, plants had a field day as they covered over the changes made by all that ice moving around Europe. Humans began to develop agriculture. The most fascinating event was how the people changed. It was the era of the blue eyed, black haired folks with copper colored skin in Britain. And light skinned brown eyed people in the North. That is another mystery scientist ponder.
It is also the era in which we switched, from clothing made from animal skins, to clothing made from plants and hairs.
Climate changes on the good ole Earth are a slow moving target. Will we get another glacial maxima? Not in my lifetime. If we went into such a period today, it will take years to realize, because glaciers are not like ice cubes. They take centuries to build up.
The Earth does its thing, slowly. We do ours, quickly. Now that it looks like we can put a colony on Mars, well, watch out, ye gods. We are coming back to you.
Do you think there could be an ice age on Mars?