We Persist

Humans aren’t going anywhere, at least so far.

A rock pile
ceases to be a rock pile
the moment
a single man contemplates it,
bearing within him the image
of a cathedral.
—Antoine de St. Exupery

You only have to look at this summer’s wild political ride to recognize the truth in this: When things get tough, humans get tougher. We persist. Whether we ought to persist is up for debate, but love us or hate us, we hang in there.

There were harrowing moments in our family tree’s long lineage. Back in the Pleistocene era, 900,000 years ago give or take, we were down to 1,000 or so after 99 percent of us were wiped out during an “extended population bottleneck,” according to Nature. I first learned this from a source that claimed that figure was even lower—only 100-200 people.

I found this idea so intriguing that I started writing a play in which a woman, in despair over trends beyond her control, discovers a portal to the past and decides to go back to that specific time and murder the few survivors so that humans never go on to do all the crappy stuff we’ve done.

You can probably see the problems with this concept.

At any rate, like cockroaches, we are still here, and—as with cockroaches—you have to admire our tenacity. We actually came into being during a cold snap: “Our whole evolution took place during a geological epoch often referred to as the Ice Age that lasted from about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago.” Talk about bad timing.

History tells us that the Last Glacial Period, aka the “last ice age,” reached its peak conditions between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago. The average global temperature was about 46 F (8 C)—11 F cooler (6 C cooler) than today’s average. This was worse than it sounds. Most of North America and Eurasia were covered in ice sheets, the planet was considerably drier, and sea level was significantly lower because most of our water was trapped in those ice sheets.

Homo sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago in Africa, but by this period, Homo sapiens had already spread around the world. During this time, woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats all went extinct.

But not us.

So how did we survive? Scientists can only postulate, but key reasons appear to be adaptability and creativity. (Given that creativity is why our species is still around against all odds, you’d think our leaders would be a little more enthusiastic about supporting the arts. But I digress.)

Through our adaptability and creativity, we built weatherproof shelters, sewed warm clothing, and invented resourceful tools.

We also used language. To keep us alive. Yes! Which I will go into in the next issue of Well Worded.

We didn’t huddle in caves like those folks in New Yorker cartoons. We built sturdy rock shelters that we modified with things like hanging doorways made of big animal hides and heated with fire. When it was briefly warm enough to venture out and hunt for a spell, we used mammoth bones covered with hides to build tents. Caves, like the famous art-studded ones from southern France, were used for rituals, not for living in.

As to our clothing. We didn’t just throw big animal rugs over our shoulders like primitive togas. No, we came up with something much more (in unison, everybody) creative.

Give it up for the humble needle, which anthropologist Brian Fagan called the most important invention in human history. It was carved out of ivory or bone and had a tiny eye cut with a flint drill. Pretty much like today. With it, we sewed fitted tops with sleeves and bottoms with pants.  As an (albeit dated) article in the LA Times noted, “It would have been impossible to chase deer or mammoth through icy winds if one hand had to be free to hold down flapping skins. Human beings could not have survived the glacial climate of ancient Europe so casually dressed.”

Clothes also were often layered for that sleek European fashionable look. And, um, you know: warmer.  

Here’s another fun fact. We like to make fun of Neanderthals, but actually they weren’t so dumb. (And we need to watch who we mock, because even today they contribute anywhere between 1 and 10 percent of modern non-African genomes.) The supposedly superior Homo sapiens borrowed some of the Neanderthal’s tools, taking them a little further with innovations (there’s that creativity again)—notably the burin, a rock chisel that cut notches into materials such as bones and antlers so they could make lightweight spearheads and harpoon tips. The science-y explanation of why the burin was significant is that it is “one of the first instances of detachable and interchangeable technology—known as compound tools.”

It was also the first time that we built tools to make other tools.

Flash forward 22,000 years to Wichita, Kansas. The father-in-law of the author of this newsletter has just moved into the house that we have bought and is setting up his basement workshop from scratch.

He spends the first month or so buying tools.

Then he spends the next month or so building things to put the tools on.

Followed by things to hold his tools.

Eventually he made lovely things like clocks and a beautiful set of bookends that I treasure.

All that prep work, buying tools to build things to hold the tools ... I gotta admit, I chuckled a bit. But the joke was on me. Who knew he was just following the call of his ancient ancestors?

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Lagniappe: Before we get too cocky about how long-lived we are, let us reflect upon the long-lost dinosaur. It’s been extinct for a long time: 65 million years. That’s an amount of time that’s nearly impossible to comprehend, especially for those of us who go around whining about how old we are. But before they went extinct, dinosaurs lived for nearly three times that long: 165 million years.