Interglacials

For a couple million years the earth has been alternating between long ice ages, often tens of thousands of years long, if not longer, and shorter interglacials, periods where the earth warmed considerably.  We live in such an interglacial.  Somewhere between 11,500 and 13,000 years ago, the earth entered the current  interglacial cycle known as the Holocene.  All of human history is presumably contained within this period.  Doesn't that seem like a bit of hubris?  Are modern humans really so unique -- so special?  Are we really the end-all and be-all of all  human development on earth?

Some years ago I read a book by a paleoclimatologist.  Much of it was directed at the contemporary issue of carbon in the atmosphere and how long it might stay there.  The climatologist wasn't terribly concerned and stated that he and his like had a longer view on things.  He thought we might miss the next ice age, which he surmised was due in about 30,000 years.  However, during this discussion of carbon and global warming, the climatologist mentioned that the earth was actually -- if memory serves me -- 4 degrees warmer during the last interglacial, which was from around 130,000 years ago to 117,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years.

When I read that, what first struck me was that this is almost the exact length of our contemporary interglacial.  You know, the one which supposedly contains all of human history.  So I found myself wondering -- did humanity advance into forms of organized civilization during the previous interglacial?  Probably any archeologist would dismiss that idea out of hand.  "Where's the evidence?" they might say.

But the subsequent 100,000 years of ice scouring the planet might have dispensed with much of the evidence.  Even so, a few ideas have popped up which don't support this hypothesis so much as raise other questions.  For instance, there was a dig along a highway in southern California in 1992 which produced a mastodon skeleton whose bones, which were situated in what had been river silt, appeared to have been smashed by boulders which were small enough to have been hand-held, and which otherwise wouldn't have been deposited in river silt by ordinary geological processes, and there were smaller, sharpened rocks which seemed to match sharp broken edges of other mastodon bones on the site.  The skeleton was dated at 130,000 years.

All of that is to say, it suggests a human presence in America roughly 100,000 years earlier than any archeologist would even remotely countenance, and -- the salient point -- would have occurred during the last interglacial period.  

All of this, of course, is simply the view of science based upon European perpectives.  North American native, indigenous, or First Peoples state matter-of-factly that their own oral histories say nothing of crossing a land bridge across the Bering Strait.  Their own oral histories state that they've always been here.

I'm not going anywhere else with this idea today, but I find it poses much food for thought about human origins upon the northern American continent, or the development of human organization, if not civilization, on other parts of the globe during the last interglacial.  I'm just always keeping my eyes and ears open for more information upon these topics.  This is what I refer to as "recreational thinking."  It's just for fun.