Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (42 page)

Humans arriving in Australia/Melanesia “fifty thousand years ago”

Jimmy could be wrong. The best current evidence strongly suggests fifty thousand years at least, and sixty thousand or more is quite possible. (The sea level was so much lower back then that Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea were one landmass, known to geographers as Sahul, and the coastal areas where you’d expect to find the earliest evidence of settlement now lie under the Timor and Arafura Seas.)

“Neanderthals
 . . .
went extinct not much later”

At one point the Neanderthals ranged from east of the Caspian Sea to southern England and southern Spain, and recent evidence puts them at least occasionally as far east as the Altai Mountains in Siberia. By about fifty thousand years ago, their range was shrinking, and, while there’s been some apparent evidence of a remnant population hanging on in southern Europe until twenty-four thousand years ago, recent research is pushing the date of final extinction back in the direction of forty thousand years.

After showing up from Africa,
Homo sapiens
may have lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, but some argue that there was little or no interaction until about forty-two thousand years ago. If that’s right, and the Neanderthals really did die out forty to thirty-eight thousand years ago, the overlap is suspiciously narrow. Did we bring disease to them? Slaughter them? Slaughter them and eat them? A new theory, outlined in Pat Shipman’s book
The Invaders
, suggests rather that we outcompeted them for food resources by showing up ready-armed with a lethal new hunting technology: semi-domesticated dog-wolves. Some clever statistical research on skulls from ancient and modern
Canidae
(wolves and dogs) suggests that our ancestors first domesticated wolves into dogs not seven to ten thousand years ago—or fifteen thousand years ago, which until recently was an “extreme” date—but as long as thirty to forty thousand years ago. And dogs make hunting big game much, much easier. (See also the note “Language: ‘a crazy thing that shouldn’t exist.’”)

Homo floresiensis
and the legend of the
ebu gogo

Remains of the dwarf hominin species
Homo floresiensis
, immediately nicknamed “the hobbit,” were discovered in 2003 in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, about 1,300 miles west of New Guinea.
H. floresiensis
reached the Flores area hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans did and thrived, partly on a diet of now-extinct pygmy elephants, long after the Neanderthals went extinct in Eurasia. (An even more recent discovery, in 2016—stone tools well over one hundred thousand years old on the island of Sulawesi—indicates that yet other groups of early hominins also beat
Homo sapiens
to the area.)

Modern people on Flores tell of the
ebu gogo
, small hairy people who live in caves in the forest and come out to steal pigs and even children. (The names means something like “greedy granny” in the local language.) It’s a similar story to the Orang Pendek (“short person”) legend on Sumatra. The most recent alleged sightings of
ebu gogo
are from the nineteenth century; still, if
H. floresiensis
was the cause of those reports, then the species hung on at least ten thousand years longer than current fossils indicate. And maybe they did—jungles are notoriously bad environments for fossil preservation. Anyway, that’s what gave me the idea for the I’iwa.

“Our biology is a barrier to our nature, because matter is evolving into mind”

That we might evolve from pure matter to pure mind—that that is the whole universe’s trajectory, in fact—is the philosopher Hegel in a nutshell. It’s a fascinating idea; too bad it’s buried in
The
Phenomenology of Spirit
, one of the most unreadable books ever written. But you can say this much for Hegel: at least he took the reality of ideas seriously and accepted that the relationship between things and thoughts was a genuine and deep mystery. In the past century, most cognitive scientists and psychologists, and many philosophers, have managed to persuade themselves that it isn’t a deep mystery. Which is tragic, really: being mistaken, they’ve condemned themselves to playing in the shallows. (See also the note on “Let there be light” and the simulation argument.)

Paleolithic evolution and “idiots” not cooking their food

A trifle harsh, but it’s easy to see where Morag’s impatience is coming from. A lot of pop science gives the impression that we evolved into modern human beings one Wednesday afternoon on the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago—as if some magical change made us anatomically and biologically what we are, now, right then. But evolution is continuous, and while some people claim we’ve evolved little since the mid-Paleolithic, the most recent evidence suggests the opposite: epochal revolutions like the domestication of cattle, the invention of agriculture, mass migration, and industrialization have probably
accelerated
the pace of human genetic change. So there’s little reason to think that what was normal or natural for our ancestors one hundred thousand years ago is an especially good guide to what’s best for us now. As for cooking dinner: our bodies became adapted to this vastly more efficient way of getting calories at least three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and possibly two million years ago. In either case, that’s long before
Homo sapiens
even evolved.

“I make of you nice fat kebab”

That might sound odd, coming from a Russian, but kebabs, or shashlik, have been a popular fast food in Russia ever since they were introduced from Central Asia over a century ago.

Time for Gödel

Gödel was one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century and one of the most important logicians since Aristotle. Like Iona, he was a mathematical Platonist: he believed mathematical objects existed in an independent reality outside the mind, and had to be discovered; they were not mere inventions. His own work contributed strong new reasons for believing so.

Modern physics seems to agree with him on the unreality of time. Einstein called it “a stubbornly persistent illusion.” And when John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt tried to combine general relativity with quantum mechanics by giving a quantum-mechanical description of the universe as a whole, they found that “time” dropped out of the picture. Look up “Wheeler-DeWitt equation” for more on this.

Iona’s “crazy as a loon” comment is a reference to the fact that Gödel was paranoid about being poisoned and would only eat food that had been prepared for him by his wife. When she became too ill to do this, he stopped eating and essentially starved himself to death. He died in 1978.

The underground city at Derinkuyu

In case you think the I’iwa’s home too fanciful, look this up. Derinkuyu once held thousands of people and their cattle, and it’s just one of several dozen underground settlements in Cappadocia, carved out by the Hittites and/or Phrygians. I visited the area many years ago; I was already writing about the I’iwa before I realized it was
those
interiors populating my mind’s eye. The earliest written reference to the Cappadocian rock settlements is already familiar to readers of
The Fire Seekers
: Xenophon visited them during his campaigns with Cyrus the Great and mentions them in
Anabasis
.

Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet

These are the three best-known sites for early cave art. At Altamira, in Spain, the paintings discovered in 1879 were originally dated at twelve to fifteen thousand years old, which seemed astonishing enough—but Lascaux in France was discovered in 1940, with apparently older images, and some of those at Chauvet in France (discovered 1994) were clearly older still. Subsequent research has shown that most of these sites were occupied in waves over tens of thousands of years; at Chauvet, and also another Spanish cave, El Castillo, the oldest images are now believed to be as much as 37,000 to 40,000 years old. That puts them near the time when
H. sapiens
arrived in Europe and the Neanderthals vanished.

The most amazing aspect of the cave paintings isn’t their age but their staggering skill, beauty, and power. When Altamira was discovered, the images were dismissed as fakes on the grounds that “primitive” people could not possibly have produced such things. Funny, but understandable—some of the animals, in particular, take your breath away. For a private tour of Chauvet, see Werner Herzog’s documentary
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
.

S
OME
D
ATES

Let me repeat my warning from
The Fire Seekers
: what follows is mostly accurate, but even then, many of the dates are rough approximations. Some are highly speculative—and I’ve thrown in an outright invention or two just to keep you awake.

600,000 BCE:
Homo heidelbergensis
, the first human species with a roughly modern brain size, has evolved in Africa; some
H. heidelbergensis
leave Africa and enter Eurasia about this time.

400,000–300,000 BCE:
Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other human species are evolving from and alongside
H. heidelbergensis
in Eurasia.

200,000 BCE:
Homo sapiens
is evolving from the African branch of
H. heidelbergensis
.

120,000–75,000 BCE:
Small numbers of
H. sapiens
leave Africa for the Middle East, possibly in multiple waves, and spread north and east into Europe and Asia. Here they encounter their “cousins,” the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others, for the first time. (60,000–40,000 BCE was given as a plausible “out of Africa” date for
H. sapiens
until recently, but now looks too conservative; anything before 75,000 BCE remains controversial, but is supported by some recent genetic and tool evidence.)

72,000 BCE:
Mount Toba, a giant stratovolcano on what is now the island of Sumatra, erupts in probably the largest explosion on Earth in the past twenty-five million years. The eruption ejects 2,500–3,000 cubic kilometers of material—perhaps thirty to forty times as much as Strongyle/Thera (c. 1628 BCE) and Tambora (1815), 150 times as much as Krakatoa (1883), and at least three thousand times as much as Mount Saint Helens (1980). (Lake Toba, which now fills the caldera, is over a thousand square kilometers in area and five hundred meters deep.) The effect on the global climate is catastrophic, and populations of many larger terrestrial species, including both
Homo sapiens
and the Neanderthals, plunge to within a whisker of extinction.

60,000–30,000 BCE:
The “Great Leap Forward” is characterized by an apparently sudden acceleration in the sophistication of human culture, including carving, cave art, ritual burial, and flutes made from vulture and mammoth bones. Humans also cross from Southeast Asia to populate Australasia during this time; due to lower sea levels, Australia and New Guinea are one landmass, Sahul.

40,000 BCE:
Extinction of the Neanderthals, probably because they are outcompeted for resources by
H. sapiens
; the date of the extinction of the Denisovans is unknown.

24,000 BCE:
Controversial later date for a remnant population of Neanderthals in southern Europe.

13,000 BCE:
Toomba lava flow at what is now the Great Basalt Wall, Queensland, Australia.

17,000–12,000 BCE:
Last known survival of
H. floresiensis
(“the hobbits”) on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The date is disputed, and some evidence suggests that a local volcanic eruption around 10,000 BCE was the final cause of their destruction.

8,000 BCE:
Rising seas separate Sahul into Australia, New Guinea, and other islands.

7,000 BCE:
A new civilization emerges in the eastern Mediterranean on the island known as Strongyle (later Thera). Strict social hierarchies emerge for the first time, along with city-building, written language, and the very idea of organized religion. For at least a thousand years, the civilization develops in isolation; then a powerful priestly caste begins exporting its language, and its revolutionary new religious and cultural ideas, across the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

5000–4000 BCE:
First wave of city-building in the ancient world.

4000–3200 BCE:
True writing emerges almost simultaneously in Sumer, the Indus Valley, early Minoan Crete, and Egypt.

2800–2500 BCE:
Explosive growth in the number of languages in the region, including Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Minoan, and others. During the middle of this period, Gilgamesh is king of Uruk, in Mesopotamia.

1628 BCE:
A massive volcanic eruption, perhaps four or five times the scale of Krakatoa, destroys the island of Strongyle/Thera.

1300 BCE or earlier:
The original Great Ziggurat at Babylon is built.

1250–1150 BCE:
The Bronze Age Collapse begins with a series of devastating library fires and culminates in the mysterious, violent destruction of whole cities and civilizations throughout the Mediterranean; many “myths” about violent, angry gods returning to commit acts of retribution, for instance the Nineveh “Deluge Tablets” in
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, date from this time.

600 BCE:
The Great Ziggurat at Babylon, repeatedly destroyed and reconstructed, is rebuilt for the last time.

560–550 BCE:
Authorship of the book of Genesis by Jewish scholars during their exile in Babylon; the Roman statesman Solon visits Egypt, where he hears the story of Atlantis—an echo of the destruction of Strongyle/Thera.

399 BCE:
The Athenian soldier, historian, and philosopher Xenophon takes part in the epic retreat from Mesopotamia of the army of the Ten Thousand, and describes his experiences in the original
Anabasis
; back in Athens, the philosopher Socrates, a relentless critic of Athenian society, is executed for “corrupting the youth” and “atheism” (teaching false views about the gods).

1829 CE:
The first Neanderthal bones are discovered; the specimens that gave the species its name, from the Neander Valley in Germany, are discovered in 1856; the species name,
Homo neanderthalensis
, is given in 1864.

1900 CE:
The last reports from Flores, Indonesia, of the
ebu gogo
, a hairy, one-and-a-half-meter-tall possible hominin reportedly seen in the jungle by the Nage people of Flores.

1979 CE:
Hominin remains discovered at Red Deer Cave in Guangxi Zhuangzu, southern China; they may or may not be a distinct human species surviving until as recently as 11,500 years ago.

2003 CE:
Discovery of
Homo floresiensis
on the island of Flores, in Indonesia
; H. floresiensis is
apparently another new human species that survived until 50,000 years ago or less (from direct skeletal evidence), may have continued to exist until between thirteen thousand and eleven thousand years ago (from indirect evidence such as tool fragments), and may even have existed much more recently, if the legendary
ebu gogo
was a remnant population.

2008 CE:
First hominin bone discovered in Denisova Cave, Russia, later identified as another new human species,
Homo sp.
Altai (the Denisovan).

2013 CE:
The unearthing of bones by recreational cavers in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa led to paleoanthropologist Lee Berger identifying a new hominin species,
Homo naledi
.