- ALIENS & CAVEMEN 2 -

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:07 alien garissons
• 3:53 The Minoans in exchange for the Jews?
• 5:59 plagues
• 7:22 grand chaos cyclones
• 8:37 omnivorous civilizations
• 11:53 In our dealings with aliens, three intellectual pitfalls await us
• 14:59 up against monsters
• 22:03 archery versus guns
• 23:36 stone age attrition

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- ALIENS & CAVEMEN (II) -

In a distant past,alien garrisons may have taken their post on various orbital platforms, on a hypothetical planet orbiting beyond Mars (or around it?) that may have been blown to fragments, and on others. 

Astronomers assert that billions of years of gradual meteoric activity caused the random planetary craters we survey by telescope today. On the other hand, extra-solar flotillas might have herded swarms of asteroids and comets both as a shield and as a missile weapon with which to pummel planets. If this bombardment lasted months sandwiched between million-year-long intervals of cosmic serenity, cumulative impact forces could have shattered or displaced planets, topped off or bailed out marine basins, stripped away or thickened atmospheres, shifted continents and drilled the planetary pockmarks we observe today. 

Only recently, geologists concluded that geological layers on Earth they had thought represented millennia of volcanic activity, were laid down during a few brief cataclysms and their erosive aftermath.

Venus is devoid of tectonic features and cratered with absolute randomness. It appears to have undergone a crustal failure so complete that its entire surface liquefied and turned inside out. Mars bears an enormous crater in its Southern Hemisphere, as if a moon-sized chunk had struck it there, and a reciprocal deformation of the planetary surface on the opposite side, lifted along the strike path above the average elevation of such a sphere and sucked lower around its margins. According to a consensus of astrophysicists, the Pacific Basin may have been carved out and the Moon formed by the ejection of a super-lunar mass during a similar collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet. Unforeseen new findings might come to light on the timing of trans-species die-offs and planetary morphology (see De Grazia, 1981). 

A hail of cosmic fragments may have snuffed out the late Bronze Age civilizations of Akkad, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Greece, Israel, India, Afghanistan and Hongchan, China, all at once. A subsequent flurry, the Early Iron Age civilizations of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as the Late Bronze Age Israel and the Shang Dynasty in China. This second kill-off took place a thousand years after the first one. Once again, it smashed all its victims almost simultaneously. Otherwise, could we be talking about a super El Niño? The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, at http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/, is a good source of material on this topic.

It is interesting to picture the interactive effects of a relatively modest asteroid or comet (thus more frequent if natural and less problematic if wielded as a weapon) diving into one of the Earth’s seismic fault lines or volcanic hot spots. Enormous lahar beds in India and Siberia may have formed in this manner, as well as Java's explosive separation from Sumatra. 

Other cosmic collisions may have scored civilization-wrecking Tilts on the terrestrial pinball. Psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovski (Worlds in Collision) speculated that a massive celestial pass-by took place some 3,500 years ago. The planetary turmoil it overshadowed could have included the Exodus. The scientific community dismissed his findings. In like manner, positivist reactionaries (“I’m positive you’re wrong.”) dismissed the first reasonable speculations about plate tectonics, as well as many more scientific hypotheses that turned out to be correct despite their denials. 

One of these days, I may draft a chapter on the official sabotage of scientific truths in favor of a well-funded status quo already confirmed to be wrong. At least those instances I can recover. Chapter? Archives, rather! Check out those decrepit minds described above, who won’t learn anything new and will forbid anyone else from doing  so, as long as they can get away with it. Intellectual psychopaths who ruin the knowledge of their victims rather than their life and happiness.

Of late, speculation has revolved around the idea that the volcanic explosion of Thera or Santorini, and the Bible's Exodus may have been simultaneous events (in 1628, 1400 or 1200 BCE, depending on the source — the preferred date seems to vary with skirt hemlines). The ten Plagues of Egypt, as well as the parting of the “Red Sea,” may have been after-effects of this titanic explosion. Leon Pomerance seems to have spearheaded this idea. 

I wonder why records of those Plagues don’t include a Cinemascope portrayal of a tidal wave sweeping in from the Mediterranean into the valley of the Nile, drowning Egyptian civilians by the million and perhaps the Hebrews as well before anyone could get away.

Simcha Jacobovici directed a fascinating documentary film, The Exodus Decoded, in which he merges the Hyksos and the Jews into one historic people, and explains the Ten Plagues of Egypt and the drowning of the Egyptian Army during the Exodus as outcomes of the eruption of Santorini. See http://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Decoded-History-Channel/dp/B000HOJR8A. 

The Minoans in exchange for the Jews?

That would bring into new perspective Arthur C. Clarke's haunting short story, "The Star." It describes a space research expedition that came home from Star of Bethlehem. Its science crew discovered that when the star went nova, it fried the civilization that orbited around it, whose civilization perished so that people on Earth could observe the star of Bethlehem’s flare-up around the day Jesus was born. 

My brother-in-law, Billy Graham (a fine musician and video producer, not the departed preacher of the same name), believes it was the comet that appeared twice to the Magi – once before and once after its orbit around the sun – and directed them toward Jesus' manger in Bethlehem. He commemorated the event with a silver medallion. http://www.swdsilverornaments.com/commemoratives.htm. This interpretation of Matthew 2 is feasible. The star appears to have guided the Magi twice in different directions, before and after their summons to Herod’s court.

There followed the Plague of Justinian in 542. Massive mortality spoilt the Byzantine Empire’s last opportunity to renew itself. A volcanic eruption (or a meteor strike on a tectonic soft spot?) tore the island of Java from Sumatra. Terse local records mention horrific casualties. This titanic explosion caused a nuclear winter whose chill seeped into the tropical headwaters of the Nile. It set off one of the first non-biblical pandemics on the Western record. 

The Plague of Athens comes to mind, prior, as do a few more mentioned in the Bible. Many more local and perhaps regional epidemics must have taken hold, as many more as there were human towns and trade networks: so many used Petrie dishes and  tongue depressors scattered across the planet. 

Around Lake Victoria, fleas became vectors of plague because abnormal frosts activated the bacteria they carried in their guts, otherwise harmless in the muggy tropics. Luxury ivory imports passed this plague on to Constantinople and from there by commercial and military transport to the remainder of the Roman empire. This plague spared peripheral barbarians and struck urban victims instead — it allowed Arab Muslims to overcome Byzantine Orthodox Christians and their Persian Zoroastrian adversaries who had cross-infected each other during prior wars. David Keys presents this fascinating thesis in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World, Ballantine Publishing Group, 2000.

Another conundrum. If Jurassic Earth was uniformly tropical (its oceans ten degrees warmer than ours today), what prevented monstrous hurricanes from wearing down the coastline to bedrock? Could these storms explain the remnants of Paleolithic ecosystems discovered flash-buried under what appear to be tons of storm-tossed sediment? 

We may have to cope with comparable Grand Chaos cyclones, now that we’ve poked the global warming beast awake. It is quite likely that human fertility – with its infinite complexities and subtleties – will crash in response to the environmental variables of Grand Chaos. I would rather we had chosen to reduce our numbers peacefully and in good order as well-informed Learners. Then again, my hope is constantly disappointed that institutional stupidity will loosen its death grip on humankind.

For example, I note the pointy head of collective stupidity raising its pointy head once again to propose – well financed and thus always louder – so-called geo-engineering projects that would mask the world heat-death that our industrial exploitation  brought about, without moderating it in any way. On the contrary. “Let’s just transform the Earth’s atmosphere into that of Venus and see what happens!” I wonder if the same stupidity, nursed so tenderly on Earth, achieved a similar outcome on Venus: all the mighty works of its civilization reduced to slag for quick profit?

Outer space may also hold omnivorous civilizations poised to study, hunt, domesticate and enslave us. In short, they might inflict on us the same indignities we reserve for less well-organized prey. The biblical allegory of the shepherd and his flock troubles me. Sooner or later, the former fleeces and butchers the latter. 

Then again, these alien omnivores may resemble Federation emissaries like those portrayed in the Star Trek television show: stuffy interstellar bureaucrats intent on some contrarian ideal of meddlesome non-interference. In that case, immediate contact with aliens would be with roving bandits while more ethical beings hid themselves more or less effectively from view. 

We may be under cosmic quarantine: a fitting penalty for our rabid behavior. Sun-hopping civilizations might adhere to pure peace mentality. Contact with yammering humanity would seem like pouring boiling water on one’s skin, a painful gesture carefully avoided at least until the liquid had cooled to tolerable levels. “For the time being, sink or swim alone; we’ll take this up with you once again after you’ve matured a little.”

Another alternative? Our governments were notified that if a majority of humans convince themselves that aliens really exist, those aliens will simply sterilize this planet, in the same offhand manner we would fumigate a home  infested with insects. Problem solved, if not very peacefully from our point of view. It might be a question of politics: Democratic aliens in favor of treating humanity like an interesting ecology, versus Republicans who’d rather exterminate us like wolves threatening their livestock. This might explain why world leaders distort the truth on this topic  so shamelessly.

In any case, the worst way to greet aliens, friendly or otherwise, is divided among ourselves. Over and over, history teaches that internal discord is the quickest route to disaster when alien cultures collide. First, massive injustice and civil war wear down the victim from within, then manipulative outsiders take over with relative ease after they let enraged locals do most of the killing for them.

Let’s expand on this subject for clarification’s sake. Imperialist invaders find it easier to knock off a centralized power rather than a conglomeration of smaller, independent power hubs that have to be subdued one by one. So an alien invader would rather its planetary target were ruled by one totalitarian and therefore vulnerable government rather than many independent ones. Knock out the corrupt central power and take over its control system to finance your own: that’s the most successful formula for takeover of a senescent empire by imperialistic outsiders.

Learner Laocracy would foil such a plot indefinitely. While a one-world empire would be vulnerable to foreign subversion and military conquest (in proportion to its corruption and injustice), the Learner World Militia will remain under local control and independent of centralized command, thus even more intractable than two hundred competing nation-states. Regional control hubs will claim their own ethnic and cultural loyalties, above and beyond mere national one; they will be just as devoted to honesty and justice as the central Learner core would be.

Few other systems of planetary governance would provide a better defense against planetary piracy, whether by hypothetical aliens or the next, inevitably human conspiracies of greed. Not to mention our problems of planetary ecology and poverty that the leaders of our nation-states refuse to address.

In our dealings with aliens, three intellectual pitfalls await us. 

1.    We might treat them like ourselves and ignore their unique aspirations, desires and fears. 

2.    We may demonize them. In refusing to recognize their valid motives, we may try to cause them harm. That would force them to isolate us or make war against us in self-defense. This may be the current reality, driven on our side by government paranoia and reflexive suppression of relevant facts; and on theirs by unknown technologies that hide them from our view.

3.    The third interaction, deification. It has rarely been practiced with respect to fellow humans (always fatally), but could be carried out indiscriminately with respect to interstellar contacts. Endowed with acute technologies and inscrutable motives, they might seem godlike to us. We might view enslavement at their hands as fair punishment for our sins instead of plain bad luck in the cosmic lottery. We could accept everything they told us as divine inspiration. In short, their shit might not stink in our nostrils; it might even be addictive to us. In addition, they might prove conclusively that they or their predecessors were responsible for historical interventions we always assumed were “divine.” Awkward! Millennial cults predispose their adherents to such self-delusion, as when the Spaniards exterminated the gullible Aztecs. If your goal is to take over a newly discovered civilization, you would do everything in your power to impersonate its most revered deities.

The USA’s weapon dominance tempts us to control the world of the poor. The Aztecs fell into a similar trap. Supremely confident on their own turf, they oppressed their neighbors with the delicate brutality of their Flower Wars. This kind of warfare entailed wounding and capturing adversaries for cannibal butchery later on. It optimized the use of hard wood and razor-sharp obsidian weapons, as opposed to our weapons and tactics of fire and steel, good for nothing but immediate mass murder. 

Aztec weapons elites wound up feeding their core population thousands of human sacrifices per week. In the same way, transglobal managers humiliate and victimize entire nations to exploit their mineral, forest and fisheries reserves and cash crops, while suffering minimal casualties among their mercenaries and none at all among themselves. 

The outcome of this institutional shadism? A few hundred European freebooters, armed to the teeth, led a horde of disgruntled Indian allies against the Aztecs. Together, they invaded the Aztec capital, seized and executed its ruler. A ferocious counterattack sent them reeling. Then they returned to exploit this New World civilization melting away from Old World epidemics. 

A few extraterrestrial freebooters might deal with us with equal savagery: recruit our bitterest enemies abroad and disenfranchised minorities at home, and return us the favor of our prior abuse. American Conspirators of Greed would find such a twist of fate hard to accept, given their arrogant past. They might collaborate with the invaders, no matter the cost to their subordinates. For the same reason, some Silk Road monarchs collaborated with the Mongols, some Europeans with the Nazis, and some African chieftains with slavers. Ah, the glorious legacy of profit-motive psychopaths!

Another weapon myth is the notion that human spear teams crossed the Bering Straits dry-shod about ten thousand years ago, exterminating dominant fauna across the Americas. They wielded stone-tipped spears: chipped obsidian Clovis and later, stemmed spearheads cunningly grooved into wooden shafts to detach upon impact and remain stuck in the body. Their prey was said to have included twenty-foot imperial mammoth, sixteen-foot ground sloth, one-ton beaver, saber tooth tigers smaller than a lion but twice as heavy, packs of dire wolves weighing hundreds of pounds each, and short-faced bears six feet tall at the shoulder on four legs, that could gut a bison with ease. Our tank-like grizzly bears would have been middleweight predators in this pumped-up ecology. 

Even further back in time, our ancestor Australopithecus afarensis had to face the same problem in spades. These child-sized human precursors occupied African savannas swarming with gorilla-sized baboons, double-sized rhinos, hippo-sized wild pigs and equally monstrous predators. I’ve asked myself how huge and nasty snakes must have grown in those days. Twenty-foot mambas? Foot-wide rock vipers?

Barbara Ehrenreich raises the same point in her book, Blood Rites (Metropolitan Books, New York, 1997). She concludes that our devotion – whether to bloodthirsty gods, insane ideologies or warfare in general – is based on psychic traumas endured during hundreds of thousands of years. Back then, humans were easy prey for saber tooth tigers: sluggish, tasty cat food on the hoof, soft and chewy on the outside, pleasantly crunchy and juicy within. 

This ceaseless torment of predation-fear awoke a spirit of self-sacrifice in our ancestors, that served them well at first. It drove suicide commandos of berserker human teenagers into banzai charges against an unstoppable predator dismembering the human tribe at leisure. 

We honor those martial talents. For example, adrenaline-induced strength enhancement and time dilation; intense physical training by means of hazing, humiliation and terror; cold-blooded, microscopic battle planning; group success through individual sacrifice; mystical defiance of danger, fear, pain and suffering, not to mention cancelling the will to live: these attributes promoted human survival despite ferocious conditions. 

But these large cats eventually disappeared. By what mysterious means? Such fearsome predators would have thrived against the banzai charges of their kibble-beasts. 

The tribal domestication of saber tooth kittens (other first tier predator cubs) may have solved this problem.

The latest theory proposes that a big rock fell out of space onto an Earth glacier (thus no trace of the impact remains) about ten thousand years ago and sterilized the Western Hemisphere of Clovis man (named for his signature spear points) as well as all those big beasts all at once. It was recolonized by the first American-Indians and the wildlife found in contemporary zoos. All the first-tier predators and herbivores died on two continents North and South; it preserved some of the second-tier, and left a second wave of humans after wiping out the first. That was very micro-surgical selectivity for such a planetary hammer blow! Just like other recorded extinction events and the miraculous selection of their survivors. Smells fishy! 

Humanity got trapped in a sacred species mutation from prey to first rank predator. Lacking locus for its mortal anxieties, we found no better nemesis to worship and stalk than ourselves. 

Dr. Ehrenreich describes the bond that battle elites (my term) share with their victims/hosts. Depending on social complexity, they are either predators and prey (Learner’sLevel Two) or parasites and hosts (Levels Three and Four). Learner concludes that the ultimate relationship would be as co-equal symbionts peacefully integrated (Level Five). 

Once upon a time, I saw a striking television documentary. During this gloomy show, a pride of lions stalked a herd of Cape buffalo. Enraged, the bulls counter-attacked the big cats, chased them up some thorn trees and besieged them there until dark. The humbled pride fled from its tormentors and beat a nighttime retreat across a flat, desert plain. In the early morning gloom – as we watched by starlight scope – more buffalo crossed their path and routed them once again. The angry cattle trampled two lion cubs despite their mother’s desperate attempts at diversion. Under similar circumstances, a human spear team – slow moving, more vulnerable and requiring much more time to mature – would have been summarily blotted out. 

It is one thing to sit in a soft armchair (as I am doing now) and talk about chasing a mammoth over a cliff edge and into a convenient crevasse over and over again. It would be another to face these oversized specimens 24/7 across clear terrain without big rifles and high-power ammo, jeeps and plenty of clean water. 

Exactly how were we supposed to dispatch these creatures, with bare hands and brittle stone flakes glued to a stick? We are talking about fifteen-foot cave bears and packs of super-wolves as massive as lions and ferocious as the monsters that haunt our nightmares.

Intimately familiar with their territory and the habits of none-too-bright buffalo, well-established Amerindian tribes got away with something like that at much better odds; even though they never really succeeded until they got hold of horses and guns from the Western world — and then all too briefly afterwards.

Stampeding a herd of shy herbivores over a cliff edge, that might work for a few territorial hunters intimately familiar with their prey. But it would be implausible for footloose nomads crossing unknown territory and facing unfamiliar species. The problem remains: how to stampede herds over cliff-edges and not over your vulnerable campsite and squishy, slow moving troops.

Africans, the intimate neighbors of elephants, have an expression for them: “They don’t think like animals, but like enemies.”  Besides, elephants have always been a massive meat on the hoof resource for protein-starved natives. 

Humans weren’t the only pack predators who employed such ambush tactics. They probably learned them from feral dogs that hunt in relays. Besides, primitive man could cover long distances for days on end, tracking down his prey faster than it could flee. Animals are good at short bursts of speed but slower than men during daylong plods.

With good reason, migratory animals instinctively shunned such geological traps. Their primeval grazing corridors would have turned them away from these precipices. That type of optimal hunting zone, constantly revisited by stupid herds, would not have been frequent and dependable enough to serve as way stations for human migrants. 

African Pygmies thrust spears into the underbelly of elephants – according to Paul Lackman – exploiting the thick concealment and neurotoxins that jungle vegetation provided. Nonetheless, even once they had equipped themselves with steel assegais, Masai tribesmen took heroic casualties to protect beloved cattle from smaller, modern hunting cats. 

But newcomers, armed with nothing more than sticks and precious stones, confronting endless hordes of monsters across featureless terrain, much of it flat and barren? No way, not without prohibitive casualties. Go ahead, invoke any atlacatl (spear thrower) technology you fancy. In the long run, casualties would outpace your human pack’s ability to replace them with much slower-growing, more vulnerable and far more precious children. 

Renaissance soldiers traded deadly crossbows and compound reflex bows for expensive firearms that were unreliable and unsafe to use. They turned out to be slower to reload and harder to shoot. In skilled hands, a military bow was more accurate, had a faster rate of fire and a longer effective range. A big unit of archers could mow down its equivalent of harquebusiers long before the latter could fire on them. 

I’ve learned, since, from le Cajun on YouTube, that massed French artillery mowed down English archers and armored knights during the endgame of the Hundred Years War; newly mobile French cavalry ran down the former from behind, and regular armored infantry, raised from companies of village-pillaging “skinners” (écorcheurs), massacred what remained of the latter by pole-axe.

New soldiers relied on the fearsome flash, bang and smoke that guns produced and the horrific wounds fat bullets caused. Bows are noiseless, as are atlacatl spear throwers. Were expert bowyers replaced by gunsmiths who found that trade more profitable? Each weapon system requires a different set of fabrication skills. Did archers disappear in a few generations, KIA or too old, replaced by young sons who favored the new weapon?

Some historians assert that gunplay is easier than shooting a bow and arrow. Keeping a primitive gun clean and in good working condition, the powder dry and using it effectively under fire without harm to yourself and your fellows, juggling a slow-burning match and an open flask of loose gunpowder, all the while standing out in the open under preferential enemy fire and cold steel assault (Kill the gunmen first!): those skills would have called for just as much hard-earned experience. 

 Archeologists have retrieved a few stone blades from dug-up mammoth carcasses. However, those tiny blades could not have brought down onrushing monsters before they flattened their puny, human tormentors. Those shards may have served as appetizer knives lost during a frenzied butchery, used to tease the flesh from carcasses deceased from other causes. What other causes? Now there’s an interesting question. 

Imagine you were the leader of a fifty-forager Neolithic band. Actually, that would be too large a group to feed dependably. During one bad season, it would starve out, cannibalize itself into extinction or fly apart. Let’s keep it that big in any case and say that several independent groups merged during the seasonal hunt for big game. 

How would you react if each new hunt cost you additional human casualties? Make a diligent count of your human assets and their replacement rate. 

The reek of human kills and shit would attract scavenger packs and large rogue predators. As circling buzzards drew them irresistibly, a steep price would have to be paid to kill them off or merely hold them at bay. Guarding its kills, your exhausted spear team would have to confront every predator from miles downwind, day-in and day-out, for as long as you could hold out. These New World predators would have no fear of man; humans would have to teach it to them the hard way, at the cost of precious human lives. 

Carnivores and big grazers would threaten elders left behind in camp and children sent out to forage. These people would need additional guards taken from the hunting party. Let’s see: guards for the workers of the hearth, mothers and babes; more guards for scattered berry pickers and mouse hunters. You’d be down to half of your people for a long-range hunt. Factor out the sick and the lame and you’d be down to a half-dozen or so of your strongest people for long and arduous hunts. No sense bringing dead weight along. 

Now, let’s see you stampede a herd of mammoths (or a rogue charger) with a half-dozen people brandishing pointy sticks. Fire might offer temporary refuge around a fixed point, but none during big moves or long hunts. 

Figure it out for yourself, or go ask a real hunter, as I have. They just shrug their shoulders. Only an desk-bound academic could contemplate such a thing. 

One thoughtful anthropologist, Professor Bruce Huckle, conducted a test. Problem: butcher a circus elephant dead from old age. Method: gather a few grad students, stone tools and some leather cord. The carcass turned out to be so heavy, Bruce’s team couldn’t roll it over to get at the bottom half. It began to rot within hours. In olden times, swarming with vermin and inaccessible to human butchers, it would have attracted every carnivore from miles downwind. Kill the closest one and the next closest would come sniffing around, and so on.

It’s too easy to talk about immobilizing prey in bogs; that would just worsen the problem. Could there be a less sanitary butcher shop than a shallow bog used time and again as an ambush site, slaughter pen and offal sump? Accessible water holes already attract big predators. Now, let’s fill it with large, rotting carcasses and see whose curiosity gets aroused. 

Not to mention fatal pandemics these human super hunters would have unleashed upon themselves during such ecocidal treks. The annihilation of established species would have discharged their toughest microbes into humans: Neolithic Ebola! Catastrophes of this kind would have befallen expanding waves of migrants in touch with camps established earlier: a gradualist response to the above objection, unsupported by archaeological evidence. 

Disease would have thrived just as readily among scattered hunter-gatherers as among dense-packed townies. Birds, insects and rodents would have spread them just as quickly.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- ALIENS & CAVEMEN (3) -