Book Review: The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

by Naama Goren Inbar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A readable monograph, which sounds like an oxymoron but is actually a rarity. Lots of scientific detail. I read it to get better insight into this part of Israel during the middle Pleistocene, the time Homo erectus was emigrating from Africa to the world. Yes, I got some of that, though the author refused to draw conclusions from her collected data. This was my personal disappointment, but gave me respect for the type of scientist Dr. Inbar is. I’ve looked for the other books in the series (this one only covers the wood detritus collected at the site), but they either were never written or are unpublished.

View all my reviews

Should You Worry About Asteroids?

During Lyta‘s time (the Plio-Pleistocene, around 1.8 mya), Nature was more violent than today. Africa’s volcanics were more common and more violent. Mt. Ngorongoro was still alive and belching smoke, as were its many neighbors, possibly due to the growing Great African Rift (the same one we predict will eventually tear the continent in two). Thanks to the triptych of faults (East Africa sits at a rare intersection of three tectonic plates), Earthquakes shook her terrain. The land was cooling, shedding the rainforests her ancestors enjoyed and adopting the grassy savannas still prevalent today.

And, unfortunately for Lyta, an asteroid hit Earth at the same moment a monstrous volcano erupted. Modern

Is this the asteroid that will hit earth?

scientists agree there is no imminent threat of Earth being bombarded by an asteroid like the one they suspect killed the dinosaurs 65 mya. They also agree we will eventually be hit. The average: about every 100,000 years, we get a bad one. Scientists also agree we have no reliable method of stopping them. Lasers. Nuclear weapons. Nudging them out of the way. They all have their problems.

Lyta lived 1.8 mya. It was her bad luck it was during that once-in-a-hundred thousand years year, and more bad luck–during a volcanic eruption. This confluence of bad luck challenged her nascient human problem-solving skills: She was separated from her infant son, her mate and on the run from that vicious future human, Homo erectus. You can see why I kept Otto focused on her life. Did mankind have the skills as the earliest of the Homo species to solve this sort of multi-problem?

As background for you, I copied this from NASA, to give you an idea how seriously we take potential asteroid impacts:

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

Volcanic Power

I know from observing Lyta’s life in the Plio-Pleistocene, volcanoes exercised enormous power over the lives of ancient animals. It’s hard to believe that they could globally blot out warmth and light, cause starvation, kill indigenous animal life. I watched Lyta’s life change dramatically after a combination of volcanic eruption and asteroid implosion destroyed her homeland.

Massive volcanic eruption

“NASA caught the eruption of Russia’s Sarychev Peak. “It exploded with such force, the plume actually punched through the atmosphere. Note (in attached picture) how clouds around the volcano parted in a circular ring–that is a result of a shock wave produced by the upward blast.  The plume is a mixture of brown ash and white steam. A ‘dirty thunderstorm’ complete with lightning could be in progress within the roiling cloud.  The smooth white bubble on top of the plume is probably a mass of water condensing from air shoved upward by the rising ash column. If so, it is akin to the iridescent pileus clouds sometimes featured on spaceweather.com.”

Here’s a picture of the eruption caught from a jet high above the Earth. Can you ever doubt the effect multiple eruptions, over and over, could have on life below?

Volcanic Eruption During the Pleistocene

Untapped power, deadly and beautiful

If you read my last post, you experienced the power of volcanoes. Because Lyta and her kin had no understanding of these geologic forces during the Plio-Pleistocene, how long they would last, how they as primates could survive their daunting power, they might well have considered eruptions as the end of their world.

If they understood life and death…

If they had a concept of  ‘me’ (studies are varied on this concept).

Think about this:

Volcanic activity dominated Pliocene Africa. Earliest man, until Thinking Man arrived, had no written or oral history, and retained no concept of the impact these tectonic forces played in their lives. But the rocks and the soil remembered and wrote the history into the land itself. It described the absolute dominance of Nature over all creatures, and man’s steps to mitigate this control.

Although frequent volcanic eruptions shook this unique African triple junction rift, one particular flare-up (the one Otto showed me which tore Lyta from her child and lover) ranked as the most violent in hundreds of thousands of years. Gelatinous rock found in the mantle was heated to temperatures in excess of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit and rushed up the volcano’s pipe at the speed of a freight train. It broke through Earth’s crust (a weak layer of sand and crushed rock and feldspar about five miles thick) and exploded with the force of ten thousand atomic bombs, blowing the top off the mountain and leaving behind the largest caldera in the world atop the tallest volcano of the Pliocene. The smoke, ash, and tephra shot forty miles through the troposphere, surpassing the level of the clouds.

The volcanic debris migrated on the high-speed stratospheric winds around the world three times. It passed over the ancient North American landscape, crossed the sunken land bridge to Asia, and moved on to what would be called Europe, greeted only by confused mammals. It returned to the African continent where the earliest of the genus Homo pondered the disappearance of Sun, and Cousin Chimp wondered why evening came so early.

And it started its circumnavigation again. A residual band of volcanic particles encircled Earth for months afterward and lowered the mean temperature one degree Centigrade. The sun reappeared to a fiery red sunset complemented by an unusual blue moon, an atmospheric reaction to the abnormal amount of sulfuric particles suspended in the troposphere. It would be several years before Earth’s substratosphere recovered.

The sound emitted from the explosion ranked as the greatest ever picked up by a hominid ear. So loud, it caused Boah (an Australopithecine) to cover his ears with his furred hands, and forced the sabertooth cat to fling his head side to side as he tried to rid itself of the abysmal din. The resultant tsunamis rose as high as today’s tallest skyscrapers and sped along at a speed in excess of the fastest cheetah. They crashed into the East African coastline, as well as the beaches of what would be India.

Two million years ago, one of the modern world’s greatest rifts could be characterized as a common geologic gorge, without the breadth and depth for which it is now famous. It responded to the constant destructive pressure of buried hotspots, fed by the frequent volcanic eruptions and bigger-than-life earthquakes, until it became hundreds of feet wide and high by Lyta’s time. What would become known as the Great Rift Valley changed from a simple fracture in the landscape to a geographic formation that transformed the adaptive radiation of man.

Book Review: The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

by Naama Goren Inbar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A readable monograph, which sounds like an oxymoron but is actually a rarity. Lots of scientific detail. I read it to get better insight into this part of Israel during the middle Pleistocene, the time Homo erectus was emigrating from Africa to the world. Yes, I got some of that, though the author refused to draw conclusions from her collected data. This was my personal disappointment, but gave me respect for the type of scientist Dr. Inbar is. I’ve looked for the other books in the series (this one only covers the wood detritus collected at the site), but they either were never written or are unpublished.

View all my reviews

Book Review: The Unfolding of Language

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention

by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dr. Deutscher has done a scholarly, thorough discussion on the roots of language, but I believe he started too late in time. I’m of the persuasion that language involves more than the spoken word. I find body language (which proponents argue communicate half of what we speak), facial expressions (think FACS, FBI, microexpressions), movement to be as telling of a person’s intentions as words. Sometimes more so.

Book Review: Evolution of Homo Erectus

Across the planet

Evolution of Homo erectus by G. Philip Rightmire is a scholarly discussion of Homo Erectus’ evolution through time, across the planet, through his diverse global locations–China, Africa, Indonesia, Spain, Europe, including Trinil, Sangiran, Zhoukoudian, Ternifine, Sale, Turkana, Olduvai Gorge.  Rightmire has studied the major artifacts and provides a rigorous overview of each, including sketches, dimensions, various views, discussion and analysis. Dimensions include not only the major measurements, but breadth, height, diameter, of the parts of each artifact. On Page 6, he includes two tables that inventory the body parts of samples found in the principal Indonesian and Chinese localities, as well as Africa (northwest, east and south). I found those tables fascinating.

Understanding Early Man

Some twenty years ago, I began a quest to understand man. Why are we the way we are? Can we be a kind and caring species that voluntarily takes care of our brother without asking for

anything in exchange, or is that contrary to our nature, to survival? Were those traits bread in to us so we as the small creature on the savanna without thick skin, without claws and tearing fangs, without the speed of a leopard, could work as a group to out-size, out-muscle the predators that controlled our environ? Did it require the violence that has dogged our existence since modern man emerged, our seemed inability to be kind just for the sake of kindness?

I have no answers, but my curiosity drives me to study our earliest ancestors, starting with the first creatures we considered to be predecessor–Australopithecines. To date, I’ve reached Homo erectus. Along the way, I’ve read a slew of wonderful books by brilliant scientists:

• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (actually, all of Johanson’s books)
• The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey (and all of all of the Leakeys’ books)
• Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution by Carl Swisher III, Garniss Curtis and Roger Lewin
• Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-age Saga of Homo erectus by Noel T. Boaz and Russell Ciochon
• Evolution of Homo erectus by G. Philip Rightmire
• Meeting Pre-historic Man by G.H.R. von Koenigswald
• Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form by Michael Sims
• The Acheulian Site of Gesher Beno Ya-aqov by Naama Goren-Inbar et al

Book Review: Meeting Prehistoric Man

Meeting Prehistoric Manby GHR Von Koenigswald is a journey throughout the world in discovery of early man as paleoanthropologists understood him during VonKoenigswald’s time, circa 1950′s (the book

was written in 1956). Because the early iterations of man’s genus, Homo, was widely spread throughout the world, Koenigswald took his research to those disparate locations, in search of what our progenitors were truly like.

• to Java where a 1.8 million year old skullcap of a young boy was discovered in 1936 (Mojokerto child). The youngster suffered a violent death—the hind part of the skull was crushed by a mighty blow and in places the bones were not broken, but telescoped one over the other as is only possible with fresh bone. The upper jaw was also broken. Scientists speculate he might have been killed by Gigantopithecus (a pre-human species). This was followed up by Eugene Du Bois’ discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus, or Java Man, what DuBois considered the missing link but turned out to be a wonderful representation of Homo erectus.

How Google Earth Helps Paloeanthropologists

Google Earth played a role in the discovery of a new hominid fossil at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. The discovery is one of the most significant paleoanthropological discoveries in recent times, revealing at least two partial hominid skeletons in remarkable condition, dating to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years.

Dog Evolutionary Tree–More Like a Bush

There’s not a lot written about a dog’s evolution. Trust me. I spent many along hour researching it for a book I’m writing. I wanted earliest man–circa 1 million years ago–to enjoy the comfort and camaraderie we evolved members of the Homo sapiens species enjoy from a dog. But, the best I could find was maybe–maybe–they were around 30,000 years ago.

What did our ancestors do without dogs in their lives? Who made them feel worthwhile when their entire world was ending?

How Man Communicated Before He Had Words

Comic credit: UserFriendly.org

There is much debate over when early man began to speak–with words, that is. Paleoanthropologists discuss the development of the brain and the throat–when was it evolved enough to support the formation of words and the thought that goes into syntax.

Me, I think when man was clever enough to live in groups, he had to come up with a way to communicate with each other. This isn’t a leap. Chimpanzees do it, pretty much communicating all of their basic needs. The difference is, we presume Man the Thinker must have had deep thoughts, plans, ideas, symbolic representations for his world. This, we will never know. What we do know is that there was no reason that Early Man couldn’t communicate to his group about what was important to his life. As more became important, I’m sure language adapted.

Here’s a primer, from chimpanzees:

The Importance of Running to Man

Man seems an unlikely survivor of the primal world. We don’t have claws like Dinofelis, deadly teeth like Sabertooth, thick skin like early rhinos, or the huge size of a mammoth. How did we escape becoming the favorite snack to all these better-equipped predators?

One way is we learned to run. Not the sprint of a gazelle who can take off and flee at an outrageous pace. Like her, many Pliocene animals relied on quickness and speed to escape predators or catch prey. Few had resources beyond that initial sprint.

We weren’t as swift as our four-legged competitors, but when the gazelle quickly tired and had to stop to regenerate, we kept running. In fact, even then, we could run great distances which enabled us to chase down prey when they tired and overheated.

How Homo Erectus Made His Tools

Ever wonder how those scrawny protohumans without claws, sharp teeth or thick skin survived the likes of Sabertooth? Me too, so I researched it and ended up with a dashing tale, full of suspense, drama, and the appealing characters that we moderns can relate to. What didn’t kill them made them stronger, and isn’t that what Darwin predicted when he labeled evolution ‘survival of the fittest’?

Early man, especially by 1.6 million years ago when Homo erectus first arrived on the planet, learned that they couldn’t survive without weapons to balance the odds. Prior to H. erectus, it was a simple primitive rock, sharpened at one end for cutting and chopping. By the time of  Erect Man, he used stone tools to break, crush, split and cut up difficult vegetable and animal foods. His tools replaced his flimsy fingernails, his small dull teeth, and allowed him to cut through thick animal skins. They took the place of the Sabertooth’s powerful jaws and enabled Man to crush long bones and extract the nutritious marrow.

We know something more about Homo erectus from the stone tools–the handaxes, picks, scrapers, awls and cleavers–he left behind: He was highly intelligent. Not only did it require good eye-hand coordination and a precision grip to strike core with hammer stone and create these tools, but their three-dimensional symmetry reflects a Euclidean sense of space and an ability to follow a plan over a prolonged period of time to create the beautiful, well-knapped handaxes they created by the thousands.

Global Warming: Nature vs. Nurture

Is global warming the result of man’s activities, or natural occurrences? It’s possible, that powerful force that’s melting the glaciers and driving polar bears to extinction is simply an example of ‘what goes around, comes around’. The average life span of a mammalian species is two million years. Maybe, like the dinosaur (who lasted longer than 150 million years), polar bears are just running out of time.

Scientists have hypothesized since the early 1900′s that one of the causes of the ice ages is the changing tilt of the Earth and its elliptical path around the Sun. This was originally called Croll’s theory, fine-tuned by Milankovich, and can be summarized as:

Disturbances of the Earth as a planet by the Moon and the Sun cause a periodic shift in the position of perihelion. The shift has a precessional period of about 21,000 years. The shift affects the distribution of solar heat received by the Earth. The result will be that any given point at a high latitude in the northern hemisphere will be affected accordingly.

When the Earth’s orbit and tilt change, Ice Ages happen. Milankovich drew an involved relationship that is accepted (with some discussion) even today:

The following article suggests it might be a chicken-or-egg problem: Are the Ice Ages caused by changes in the elliptical orbit, or does the orbit change because the Earth is cooling? Ice melts, fills the oceans (the article suggests that Earth’s increasing temperature results in warmer oceans, despite the cooling effect of ice cubes in the ocean… A discussion for another day), earth tilts.

See what you think.

Warming Oceans May Cause the Earth to Tilt

Global warming and expanding oceans may even cause the earth’s axis to shift

By Molika Ashford

Human activity has widely affected our planet, reshaping surfaces, moving or extinguishing species, and warming the air and water. Now scientists say our reach has been extended even further — warming oceans may even start to shift the Earth’s axis of rotation.

Previously, the effect of warmer water temperatures was thought to be negligible and not strong enough to tilt the earth. But in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers have found that global warming and the resultant expansion of the oceans could actually shift our rotational axis significantly.

Warming causes our axis to shift because warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, and actually expanding upward and outward as it warms. Increased water volume pushes up onto shallow continental shelves, redistributing weight on the planet and causing the Earth to tilt. According to the report, the north pole of our rotational axis will travel around 1.5 centimeters a year in the direction of Alaska.

That’s not much, in the context of other forces and movement. (The earth wobbles around as much if not more under other influences, including seasonal changes, melting glaciers, and retreating ice sheets.) But it is significant enough that the effect of warming should be taken into account when monitoring the way our axis moves in the future, the researchers report. Moreover, it represents just how strong the effects of human caused global warming can be — even moving the planet itself.

[via New Scientist and Discovery News]

What Everyone Ought to Know about PhD Research

You don’t always get what you want. ‘Research’ is the ‘systematic investigation to establish facts’. You don’t know them when you start. You pick them up like breadcrumbs along the path to the Dissertation.

Because mine involves an AI I seem to have lost control over, mankind’s past which is poorly documented by million-year-old artificacts, and a prodigious lack of money, I have often ended up places I had no intent to be, but must some how be connected to my thesis. How do I know they’re connected? Because that’s what Otto does. He takes a collection of facts and finds connections. Here’s an example Otto found and played for me. Why I don’t know. We know man’s past is violent, dangerous. What’s Otto’s point in throwing this into Lyta‘s search for her family?

What I do know is it’s connected to my research, because that’s how I programmed Otto.

Should You Worry About Asteroids?

During Lyta’s time (the Plio-Pleistocene, around 1.8 mya), Nature was more violent than today. Africa’s volcanics were more common and more violent. Mt. Ngorongoro was still alive and belching smoke, as were its many neighbors, possibly due to the growing Great African Rift (the same one we predict will eventually tear the continent in two). Thanks to the triptych of faults (East Africa sits at a rare intersection of three tectonic plates), Earthquakes shook her terrain. The land was cooling, shedding the rainforests her ancestors enjoyed and adopting the grassy savannas still prevalent today.

Volcanic Eruption During the Pleistocene

Untapped power, deadly and beautiful

If you read my last post, you experienced the power of volcanoes. Because Lyta and her kin had no understanding of these geologic forces during the Plio-Pleistocene, how long they would last, how they as primates could survive their daunting power, they might well have considered eruptions as the end of their world.

If they understood life and death…

If they had a concept of  ‘me’ (studies are varied on this concept).

Think about this:

Volcanic activity dominated Pliocene Africa. Earliest man, until Thinking Man arrived, had no written or oral history, and retained no concept of the impact these tectonic forces played in their lives. But the rocks and the soil remembered and wrote the history into the land itself. It described the absolute dominance of Nature over all creatures, and man’s steps to mitigate this control.

Although frequent volcanic eruptions shook this unique African triple junction rift, one particular flare-up (the one Otto showed me which tore Lyta from her child and lover) ranked as the most violent in hundreds of thousands of years. Gelatinous rock found in the mantle was heated to temperatures in excess of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit and rushed up the volcano’s pipe at the speed of a freight train. It broke through Earth’s crust (a weak layer of sand and crushed rock and feldspar about five miles thick) and exploded with the force of ten thousand atomic bombs, blowing the top off the mountain and leaving behind the largest caldera in the world atop the tallest volcano of the Pliocene. The smoke, ash, and tephra shot forty miles through the troposphere, surpassing the level of the clouds.

The volcanic debris migrated on the high-speed stratospheric winds around the world three times. It passed over the ancient North American landscape, crossed the sunken land bridge to Asia, and moved on to what would be called Europe, greeted only by confused mammals. It returned to the African continent where the earliest of the genus Homo pondered the disappearance of Sun, and Cousin Chimp wondered why evening came so early.

And it started its circumnavigation again. A residual band of volcanic particles encircled Earth for months afterward and lowered the mean temperature one degree Centigrade. The sun reappeared to a fiery red sunset complemented by an unusual blue moon, an atmospheric reaction to the abnormal amount of sulfuric particles suspended in the troposphere. It would be several years before Earth’s substratosphere recovered.

The sound emitted from the explosion ranked as the greatest ever picked up by a hominid ear. So loud, it caused Boah (an Australopithecine) to cover his ears with his furred hands, and forced the sabertooth cat to fling his head side to side as he tried to rid itself of the abysmal din. The resultant tsunamis rose as high as today’s tallest skyscrapers and sped along at a speed in excess of the fastest cheetah. They crashed into the East African coastline, as well as the beaches of what would be India.

Two million years ago, one of the modern world’s greatest rifts could be characterized as a common geologic gorge, without the breadth and depth for which it is now famous. It responded to the constant destructive pressure of buried hotspots, fed by the frequent volcanic eruptions and bigger-than-life earthquakes, until it became hundreds of feet wide and high by Lyta’s time. What would become known as the Great Rift Valley changed from a simple fracture in the landscape to a geographic formation that transformed the adaptive radiation of man.

Such was Nature’s strangle-hold on life during these times.

Thanks to Otto, I’m able to share with you how Lyta’s life changed due to Nature’s dominance.

These are things I think about. Am I boring? I’m a single mom, thirty something, and I obsess over volcanoes. Thank God for dogs…

Volcanic Power

I know from observing Lyta’s life in the Plio-Pleistocene, volcanoes exercised enormous power over the lives of ancient animals. It’s hard to believe that they could globally blot out warmth and light, cause starvation, kill indigenous animal life. I watched Lyta’s life change dramatically after a combination of volcanic eruption and asteroid implosion destroyed her homeland.

 

Massive volcanic eruption

“NASA caught the eruption of Russia’s Sarychev Peak. “It exploded with such force, the plume actually punched through the atmosphere. Note (in attached picture) how clouds around the volcano parted in a circular ring–that is a result of a shock wave produced by the upward blast.  The plume is a mixture of brown ash and white steam. A ‘dirty thunderstorm’ complete with lightning could be in progress within the roiling cloud.  The smooth white bubble on top of the plume is probably a mass of water condensing from air shoved upward by the rising ash column. If so, it is akin to the iridescent pileus clouds sometimes featured on spaceweather.com.”

Here’s a picture of the eruption caught from a jet high above the Earth. Can you ever doubt the effect multiple eruptions, over and over, could have on life below?

Moving On

I can’t find Lyta anymore. I log into Otto’s Lyta Scenario, but she doesn’t appear. I’ve plugged her algorithm and her DNA signature into his search functions, but he doesn’t find her. I don’t know what that means. Has she died? Last time I saw her she was walking north, away from her group, with her mate Garv and their son, her adopted son Boah and their ‘dog’ (a loose term for a Plio-Pleisticene version of dogs) Ump.

I miss her. She’s curious, friendly, with a sophisticated style of communication I wouldn’t have dreamt existed when mankind was new. At first I thought Otto intended to answer my research thesis–why did Homo habilis prosper and prior hominids like Australopithecus became extinct. But when I couldn’t get my grant renewed (they wanted me in the field, not talking to an AI), I applied for a DARPA grant. That got sticky and off the track, but into the real world where realpeople were affected by my work.

It’s how I met Zeke. More on him later.

I know Otto could find her. His programming allows me to enter a DNA profile into a space-time location. Maybe he doesn’t want to expose her. Maybe she’s hiding.

I miss her.