-Poul Anderson, Planet Of No Return, Chapter 5, p. 37.
We know:
"The hunting is good in Europe twenty thousand years ago and the winter sports are unexcelled anywhen. So the Time Patrol, always solicitous for its highly trained personnel, maintains a lodge in the Pleistocene Pyrenees."
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 173-228 AT p. 173.
Manse Everard, on leave, has shot a mammoth, skied, mountain-climbed and watched natives dance.
"'...and it wasn't till hunting got worse when the glaciers receded that man was forced to develop agriculture and become civilised.'"
-Planet Of No Return, p. 37.
The human turning point is summarized in part of a single sentence and suggests an alternative history narrative set on an Earth where the glaciers never receded.
"'Anyway, those glaciers are on the way out; I've seen distinct moraines in the photographs.'" (ibid.)
We learn some geology.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And of course the Rogaviki of THE WINTER OF THE WORLD became genetically hard wired to be, psychologically (and actually so for many), big game hunters with an urgent need to have plenty of open space around them.
And I have seen speculations in Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn's book FALLEN ANGELS, that we are overdue to have another Ice Age. That what is preventing that, so far, is the technological activities of human beings.
Sean
Grasslands produce the optimum environment for large animals. Forests lock much of the vegetable mass up in treetrunks, and shade the surface; deserts are just sparse. Prairies and steppes -- like the glacial steppes that were so common during the last glacial -- are a "Goldilocks" ecosystem in between, which is why the evolution of grass was so important.
(Herbivorous dinosaurs had very robust digestive systems -- a triceratops could eat the trunks of oak trees.)
Prairies are also optimum for rain-fed farming.
The biggest single difference between the "recent" and the Pleistocene is that the climate has been very, very stable for about the last 8000 years, relatively speaking, much more so than in the past. We have no idea whether the natural fluctuations will resume, and recent research indicates that climates in the past swung between glacial and interglacial periods -very quickly-, in a century or less.
That sort of swing now would kill at least half the human race, by making farming impossible throughout extensive areas within a few years.
Incidentally, it's possible (in fact, probable) that humans exterminated the Pleistocene mega-fauna by overhunting.
Previous interglacial periods had produced extinctions, but not nearly on the scale of the most recent one; the new factor is the existence of human beings.
Specialist big-game hunting humans -- and if the prey is abundant, that's the most efficient hunter-gatherer adaptation -- can put extreme pressure on large animals. It only takes a few percentage points of additional predation to put a species into a death spiral downwards.
If you knock off a few keystone species, whole ecologies can collapse; that certainly seems to have been the case when Australia was colonized by humans, and in several other instances.
The animals that survive tend to be medium-sized to small and able to hide or otherwise evade humans.
The big exception (until recently) is Africa; that's where the other animals co-evolved with us.
There's no such thing as a "balance of nature" -- balances are dynamic, resulting from pushback, predator-prey interactions and so forth. Every species is continually wrestling to get the maximum amount of biological energy and biomass translated into copies of itself.
Africa also has the worst disease environment from a human standpoint, too, which is a major reason why its population increase was so gradual until recently. Our parasites evolved there with us; when humans left Africa, they left a lot of them behind. Particularly when they moved out of the tropics, where the diseases and their vectors are most common.
This is all so exotic that it reads like an alternative history but it is OUR history.
Let us hope that it will continue and not be cut off too soon. We need a defense against asteroid strikes and self-sustaining habitats off Earth.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
All the more reason, as Paul said, for the human race to get OFF this rock as soon as possible. To found colonies and self sustaining bases on planets or O'Neill habitats. Simply to hedge our bets!
Sean
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