How far have we strayed from our original selves?  Do we even know who we are, or were?  

I watched a couple YouTube videos years ago where a self-proclaimed Atlantis "scientist" "discovered" what Atlantis really was.  Atlantis, as far as any theory is concerned, would have existed during the ice ages, and possibly where the Azores plateau is today, in middle of the Atlantic ocean.  Somehow the people of this civilization were very advanced technologically.  They dealt with the extreme weather with aplomb, living not only comfortably, but developed technological innovations that today would seem very advanced.  According to the YouTube "scientist", ancient artifacts with concentric circles painted on them reveal technology from mysterious Atlantis people.  Not only that, the circles depict a wormhole - what else could they be, right?  So, with his expertise, we leap from the rudimentary circles to 'depicting a technology' to 'wormhole'.  This "scientist" said this all with a straight face.  This isn't even fringe science, people.  These are the videos a basement dweller makes after he's smoked large amounts of nutmeg and Salvia too many times and his Atari Jaguar doesn't work anymore because his cats have peed on it every day for a decade, (I am the sucker who watched them, so jokes on me, I guess).

In chapter two,  William J. Burroughs, the author of Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, comments on some of these 'crackpot theories' concerning the nature of climate change.  His goal throughout the book is the emphasis on sound science and the compelling evidence.  His methodical, detailed approach certainly upholds these principles.  The lunatic fringe, to him, has conjured up elaborate 'crackpot theories' which he won't entertain in his treatment of the subject matter.  This deliberate stance on climate change during the ice ages is comforting in view of the many fringe theories in circulation. 

However, not all theories are lunatic fringe, and I think Burroughs overplayed his hand a bit.  In his defense, I think he played the evidence at hand when he wrote the book prior 2005 - the date it was published. Further in his lunatic fringe section of chapter two, he criticizes catastrophic impact theories, namely comets, as instigators for global upheaval and population bottlenecks, writing, "The first thing to get straight is that the wide variety of sources of climatic data constitutes a remarkably consistent picture of past events.  There is no need to invoke additional catastrophes to explain either the climatic record or the possible utter destruction of early civilizations.  There is no evidence whatsoever that there have been cataclysmic cometary impacts, or sudden shifts in the crust across the face of the Earth in the last 100 kya.  So the possibility that major early unidentified civilizations were swept from the planet by an extraterrestrial impact about 10 kya has no support in the standard climate records.  The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets did not collapse in 'a matter of weeks' during some awful catastrophe.  All the data is consistent with a steady, albeit climatically eventful, transition as the massive ice sheets took several thousand years to respond to the warming resulting from the changes in the Earth's orbit.  In some places rising sea levels may have posed dramatic challenges for coastal communities, but as a general observation they are not the stuff of cataclysmic destruction of vast prehistoric and now vanished empires."  In chapter five, he is more specific, "In North America, the rapid extinction of many large mammals around 12 kya - a time of rapid climate change - has been attributed both to climatic and human factors."  Finally, Burroughs thoroughly discusses the effects of known global catastrophes, in particular the Toba eruption on the island of Sumatra about 75,000 years ago.  He describes the ensuing population bottlenecks of human and animal populations from the supervolcano eruption that likely dimmed the amount of solar radiation for many years after.  Proxy reconstructions show a deep cooling after 75,000 years for the next 5000 years.  Could a supervolcano like Toba act as the trigger for a global climate recession?  Burroughs believes so.  In other words, he's no stranger to catastrophism. 
 
Within the last 10 years, in particular, evidence for an impact has accumulated and now looks strong.  Respected science journals haven't been shy about publishing papers disclosing peer-reviewed research on soot, platinum, nano-diamonds, and molten glass uncovered in sediment layers corresponding to the end of the Younger Dryas, roughly 13,000 years ago.  Additionally, ocean water levels began rising sharply, megafauna in North America experienced sharp declines and extinctions, and global average temperature dropped rapidly from near-today levels, all around this same time. 
 
A recent discovery of an impact crater about 19 km across under the Greenland ice sheet offers mores support to this hypothesis.  Although the date of the impact needs to be confirmed, and other possible explanations for the crater need to be ruled out, the evidence so far is compelling.  The crater appears to be within a range of 3 million years old to as recent as 12,000 years ago.  Primary analysis suggests the crater is less than 100,000 years old.  The absence of this kind of evidence for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has spawned many doubters since it's inception.  Secondary evidence is evident in North America, but not conclusive.  To rule other possibilities out, skeptics keep returning to the central question:  Where is the impact crater?  It's possible other impacts hit the Laurentide or Cordilleran ice sheets during the Younger Dryas and no bedrock depression was made - the miles thick ice sheets may have absorbed the impacts.  Now, with the discovery of the impact under the Greenland ice sheet, the theory may have more legs.  Accurate dating of the crater will need an expensive drilling expedition to analyze bedrock core material under the crater and more ice core samples surrounding it.  With time, we will know the date of the impact.  If we find that it corresponds to a date around 12,800 years ago, then catastrophists like Handock and Carlson, and groups like the Comet Research Group will surely feel vindicated by their research.               
 
Another interesting piece of evidence that lends support to some of the more "fringe" theories that Burroughs discredits early on:  in chapter five, Burroughs focuses on an interesting genetic anomaly known as haplogroup X.  This marker is only found in Native Americans and in Europeans, showing up tens of thousands of years ago.  This marker is not in east Asians, thus it can't be from populations migrating over the Bering Strait.  Were there seafarers that sailed across the Atlantic ocean tens of thousands of years ago?  Or, perhaps an ancient seafaring population that lived on the Azores plateau, before the oceans slowly swallowed the land?

I actually tried to contact him about these questions and the more recent evidence to come out after the publication of his book.  Unfortunately he passed away not longer after publication in 2005.  I have no doubt that Burroughs would have changed his tone on catastrophic comet theories, (or even Atlantis?), in view of the more recent evidence of the last decade.  It's clear from his book, that his primary interest was the truth, wherever that may lead.
 
What else is clear about ice age peoples from the evidence he presents?  To start:  Burroughs admits that there are many holes in the story of ice age populations.  The reasons are both self-apparent and surprising.  On the one hand, there was no recorded history.  Before writing, Proto-Indo-European and other ancient language families were the means of communication and history.  Memory and oral traditions - wisdom - were highly valued.  From this vantage point alone, it's difficult to surmise what humans experienced.  There is also the enormous time range of modern humans.  Homo Sapiens, our current mold, evolved on the continent of Africa roughly 200,000 years ago.  Migrations out of Africa may not have happened for another 100,000 years.  Through genetic markers, scientists have traced migrations out of Africa into central Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia, Western Europe, and North and South America.  These migrations were varied in duration and timing over many tens of thousands of years.  Along the way, genetic variations resulted in physical differences that allowed groups different advantages to their local environments.  What is clear from the evidence, is from the last 100,000, leading up to the Holocene period, Homo Sapiens moved a lot, hunted and gathered, and adapted to many different environments.  The ice ages and interstadials of this time period were crucial pinch points and gates for these populations.  During ice ages, the temperate climate regions were attenuated closer to the equator, partly through the action of the North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO, and the northern latitudes, inhospitable cold deserts.  The interstadials, or temporary warming spells, saw cold tundra and steppe land replaced by arboreal forests, and increasing game and flora access farther north.  Sapiens moved during these times - often following coastlines where fish and shellfish were abundant.  Thus, during warmer conditions, there is more evidence of migrations and tools.  During ice age periods, populations likely stayed within refugia, or localized areas where climate was more habitable.  Populations isolated in cold pockets may have been overrun by cold, and lack of fauna and flora, leaving little evidence of their existence.  Some of the ice ages came on fast too, thus some groups may not have had enough time to migrate to warmer areas.  Not to discount their intelligence, but they had no GPS or transportation options beside their feet, and perhaps primitive boats.
 
A more surprising realization about these populations, that also leaves researchers with a lack of evidence, is the amount of coastline exposed during the ice ages.  For many thousands of years, the area known as modern Spain and France was connected by land bridge to the British Isles.  There is evidence that ancient Atlantic populations around southern France and northern Spain migrated northbound and settled on the British Isles.  About 90% of Basque, Welsh, and Irish share a specific genetic haplogroup - M173.  This connection suggests that after populations migrated from northern Spain and southern France to the British Isles across a land bridge, subsequent sea level rise after the Younger Dryas isolated these populations.  In this sense, the original British populations were genetically isolated from mainland mixing for many thousands of years until Romans, and later Anglo-Saxons, crossed the English Channel.  Another intriguing aspect of these Basque populations of northern Spain, in particular, is their genetic connection with the Saami people of nothern Finland.  It's possible that northern Spain and southern France was an ice age refugia, or region of Europe with ample food like reindeer herds, and more temperate weather.  The most dedicated reindeer hunters may have followed the herds northeast into areas around modern day Finland as the weather warmed, whereas other populations followed the west coast north into the British Isles. 
 
The land bridge across the English Channel and western Europe wasn't the only area exposed by low sea levels.  Much of southeast Asia, particularly around Indonesia and Australia were connected by land.  Also, Alaska was connected to Russia by a region known as Beringia.  During the coldest ice age periods the ocean level may have been nearly 400 feet lower than today exposing tens of thousands of square miles.  The lower elevation exposed land, close to sea, may have been the preferred areas for food access, warmer temperatures, geographic orientation/migration, and safety.  It's possible that the evidence uncovered more inland is but a small sample of the technology and lifestyle developed by these ancient people.  This leaves the possibility of an enormous amount of evidence from early ice age populations "lost to sea" so-to-speak.
 
Though much of the evidence for paleolithic societies is likely lost, the implications of the evidence at hand, combined with the time frame of the hunter-gatherer migrations in general, instructs us on the roles men and women played during the ice age.  Raising and bearing children without modern medicine came with great costs.  Women on average, lived to 32 during the paleolithic period - the relative young mortality attributed, in part, to complications from childbirth.  Raising children would have been difficult as well, putting pressure on groups to work together in protecting and providing for them.  Paleolithic people were on top of the food chain, but they were still a hearty meal for sabre-tooth cats, leopards, and cave lions of the day.  Women likely developed heightened communication and cooperation abilities as the environmental pressures dictated.  Empathy, sharing, and local problem solving were at a premium.  Burroughs elaborates these points, "Leaving aside the obvious demand of raising families and the cooperative nature of this activity among women, there was the continual work involved in all aspects of the life.  Not for the women the long hours of waiting for their quarry to turn up at a chosen spot, hours filled with idle or nervous banter.  Instead talk was part of the process of handling the endless drudgery of much of the work.  This would have involved much more personalized discussion of life and a more caring response to the mutual problems they all faced: what we now call gossip.  In the highly skilled tasks of locating and collecting food, subtle abilities to recognize patterns and faint changes in shades that provide evidence of hidden resources would have been at a premium.  This activity  was also enhanced by more communicative forms of talking.  Brute physical strength would have counted for less, but there is no reason to think the physical stamina was any less important to one or another gender in surviving the ice age."  Burroughs also discusses the genetic implications of the differences.  Women, genetically, are less likely to be color-blind than men.  This may be an evolutionary byproduct of environmental pressure whereby women developed better color differentiation to deduce edible fruits and foliage.   On the other hand, there is some evidence that color blindness in men assists with vision in shaded temperate forests, especially at twilight.  This implication for men has no research evidence to support it, however. 
 
Overall, men did not have it easier than women.  Without the costly burden of bearing children, or giving birth, men had to provide food, shelter, and security for the group.  Burroughs explains, "where men were pursuing megafauna there was a premium on strength, notably the ability to throw missiles, explosive bursts of speed and capacity to overcome fear with bouts of extreme aggression, combined with either the ability to wait a lengthy periods for opportunities to ambush their quarry or the patience to track animals over great distances, and the essential need to work as a team.  In addition their whole approach to the world around them was governed by understanding the behavior of the animals they pursued.  This involved the anthropomorphization of their thinking about the behavior of their quarry.  Only by putting themselves into the mind of the animal were they able to anticipate its behavior.  Moreover, in a world of immense climatic variability, the whole process of successfully intercepting passing herds of animals would involve great patience.  Conversely, genetically related hyperactive forms of behavior now considered socially unacceptable, which involve rapidly shifting attention and impulsivity, may well have been of great value in handling the extreme demands of hunting."  Without their efforts, the tribes perished - by predation, lack of resources, or simply from seasonal or climate change induced exposure.  Indeed, men only lived a little longer than women - 35 on average. 
 
The roles differed over the millenniums, and no doubt have implications for the differences in interests and temperament in men and women today.  Be that as it may, life during the ice ages was extremely difficult for both sexes, thus men likely gathered when necessary, and women hunted when needed.  Both sexes had to be adaptable to unforgiving environments, otherwise we wouldn't be here today!
 
Following the ice ages and their large climate variability, the advent of the Holocene brought with it climate stability no seen for hundreds of thousands of years.  Graphs presented by Burroughs show the striking difference, clearly.  We are currently enjoying the same stable climate our ancestors did 10,000 years ago.  Not surprisingly, the first evidence of farming emerges around the middle east during the early Holocene.  These middle eastern farmers migrated west into Europe in different waves during the ensuing climate stability.  The genetic evidence supports this notion.  Populations in southern and eastern Europe have more ancient genetic markers with middle eastern populations.  These genetic markers appear less and less with populations further west. 
 
How could paleolithic hunters settle in one area and farm when extreme cold, weather and climate fluctuations were the norm?  The answer is, they couldn't.  Farming was likely a byproduct of warmer and more stable conditions.  Was it out of necessity, or merely convenience?  It is difficult to say for certain; it's possible fauna in the middle east was sparse as the climate warmed and groups in the region were forced to grow food.  It's also possible that they already knew the secrets in seeds, but the weather wasn't adequate until the Holocene.  With stable climate, ancient tribes could settle in one place and produce an abundance of calories through agriculture.
 
The type of calories, however, were of lesser quality.  Human health declined with greater subsistence on grain.  Beyond overall health, the changing diet also effected appearance.  For Burroughs, the agricultural diet brought narrower jaws and crowded teeth - from lack of chewing hard food, "There is one interesting physiological consequence of the shift in diet associated with adoption of agriculture.  This development has the rather ugly  description of 'cranial gracilization' to describe the fact that we have became prettier.  Our jaws have got smaller and or mouths have become more crowded as a result of chewing less hard food and preparing soft foods that have been cooked for lengthy periods."  Again here, I think that Burroughs missed the mark.  There is evidence to support the notion that fully formed jaws and teeth are not the result of chewing hard foods, but rather develop through proper nutrition - namely fat soluble vitamins found in animal fats and organ meats.  Hunter-gatherers certainly had adequate nutrition, when it was available, and didn't waste any part of animals they harvested.  Organ meats, bone marrow, and connective tissue provided rich protein, fat, vitamins and minerals optimizing their physical structure, and in my opinion, developed their fully formed facial structures.  

Regardless of (important) details of our history that are still up in the air, or theories beset with controversy and dismissal, there is no doubt life during the ice ages was much different than it is today.  We've come a long way as a species, and by some estimates are lucky to have survived the harshest periods of ice age cold or natural disasters that blighted the Earth.  Today, our natural instincts and intuitions, molded by hundreds of thousands of years - or longer - searching unforgiving land for shelter and the next meal, still guide our thoughts and actions.  Yet, also today, they are blunted by years of abundance, temperate weather, and peaceful city life.  Do we still have what it takes to live similar to our paleolithic ancestors, not only when it's needed, but also because it may be the best version of ourselves, despite the myths we've created to convince ourselves of the contrary?               
 
 
 
Summary:  Despite missing crucial evidence on certain topics, Climate Change in Prehistory is a meticulous and critical treatment of a fascinating subject.  A surprising gem.      
 
Rating:  8.5

-E.B.
2018-11-27