Amborella Day

1 galactic revolution ago

The Triassic ends 201 million years ago with another major mass extinction (the fourth, by the usual count, after the end-Ordovician, end-Devonian, and end-Permian). Not quite as bad as the end-Permian (“only” 75% of species go extinct). This coincides with the formation of the Central Atlantic LIP (Large Igneous Province), which now includes a lot of eastern North America, northeast Amazonia, and western North Africa. So the end Triassic mass extinction may be the result of volcanoes spewing lava and carbon dioxide as Pangaea splits into Laurasia (North America, most of Eurasia) and Gondwanaland (South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, Australia).

The succeeding Jurassic Period will be when dinosaurs become the dominant vertebrates on land. The mammals around are mostly shrew-sized and nocturnal.

Not as conspicuous is another evolutionary innovation: the ancestors of Amborella, a rare shrub found in the wild only on New Caledonia, split off from the other angiosperms, ancestors of all other flowering plants, 200 million years ago. (This was suspected for a while, and confirmed in 2012 with the sequencing of the Amborella genome.) We can call this the origin of flowers. Amborella has clusters of small white flowers, with male and female separate.

Spring is gearing up in the Northern hemisphere; some dwarf irises are in flower in my front yard, and the daffodils, celebrating global warming, are about to let loose. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to smell the flowers on Amborella Day, and take your mind off catastrophes past and present.

The world in 1600

World population, about 545 million

Pangaea reunited. In the century after 1492, West Europeans mastered the winds and currents of the world’s oceans. The shock to the rest of the world would be comparable in some ways to the earlier shock resulting from the spread of nomadism on the Eurasian steppes. In the Americas, the immediate results were devastating, with the loss of most of the population to introduced diseases, helped along by conquest and enslavement. But the spread of new crops and animals in both directions also helped fuel a population boom in the Old World.

Mega-empires. In Eastern Europe and Asia, the results of West European expansion by 1600 were less dramatic. There the landscape was dominated by huge empires: Russia, the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, Ming China. These have sometimes been called “gunpowder empires,” emphasizing the role of cannon in establishing centralized power. But they could also be considered the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, either arising from the overthrow of Mongol rule (Russia, China) or claiming direct Mongol descent (Mughal India). In other words, these empires developed in centrifugal fashion, with power collapsing at the old Mongol center, and new states arising along the Mongol marches.

Charlemagne + 800. Another centrifugal episode of state formation took place in Western and Central Europe, on a smaller scale, over a longer period of time. As the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, new states arose along its marches, in Iberia, in France, England and Scandinavia, and in eastern Germany and neighboring, mostly Slavic territory. Meanwhile the core of the former empire, including western Germany and northern Italy, remained fragmented. By earlier Roman or Asian standards, medieval states in Europe, even when they controlled large areas, were feeble things. The state’s power to collect taxes had more or less collapsed, and Medieval monarchs were forced to concede substantial privileges to their subjects in exchange for their support. By 1600, however, military competition had produced more powerful absolutist states. Medieval liberties survived best in lands where military threats had been less intense, on islands (England and Scotland), on an isolated peninsula (Scandinavia), in the mountains (Switzerland) or soggy lowlands (Holland), or just far from the madding crowd (Poland).

Mythopoeia

Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History. But human beings have been speculating for far longer than that on the origins of the universe, and we’ll have plenty of occasions here to pay tribute to earlier prescientific cosmologies. (The early chapters of the book of Genesis are probably most familiar to Western readers, but there are lots of others.)

Strikingly, it may be possible to reconstruct a very early interconnected set of myths concerning the world’s origin, which date back to long before the invention of writing (or farming, for that matter). This is the argument of Michael Witzel and some of his associates, set forth at length in Witzel’s ambitious recent book, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Witzel is an expert on the Vedas (Hindu sacred texts)* who has grown interested in wider comparisons. He argues that there are striking parallels in myths told in traditional societies across a wide expanse of the Earth. These parallels are not the product ancient archetypes welling out of the collective unconscious, but are survivals of a coherent narrative of the origins and destiny of the universe, the gods, and humans, which was told tens of thousands of years ago. This mythological narrative includes the following:

In the beginning: primordial waters / darkness / chaos / ‘nonbeing’

A primordial egg / giant

A primordial hill / island / floating earth

Father Sky and Mother Earth and their children, for four generations, defining Four Ages of creation

The Sky is raised up and severed from the Earth

The Sky and his daughter commit incest, and the hidden sun’s light is revealed

The current generation of gods defeat or kill their predecessors.

A dragon is slain by a culture hero

The Sun becomes the father of humans (later on, of chieftains), and establishes their rituals

The first humans, whose evil deeds lead to the origin of death and the great Flood

A generation of heroes and the bringing of fire / food / culture by a culture hero

The spread of humans / emergence of local nobility: local history begins

In the future: final destruction of humans, the world, the gods

A new heaven and a new earth / eternal bliss

Some elements of the myth seem to have an astronomical significance. The revelation of the sun seems to be especially associated with the winter solstice, and the slaying of a dragon, bringing rain, with the summer solstice. The Greek version of the Four Ages (and its Near Eastern antecedents) is clearly related to the movements of stars and planets.

Witzel labels the resulting mythic narrative “Laurasian mythology,” because its major elements are found mostly in Eurasia, the Pacific, and the New World. It contrasts with a Gondwanan mythology found Africa, New Guinea and Australia. (These two mythologies happen, by chance, to correspond roughly to the ancient supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana.) Laurasian and Gondwanan mythology overlap to some extent. Stories of a great Flood sent to punish unruly or sinful mankind, leaving only scattered mountaintop survivors to repopulate the world, are found in both.**

Witzel proposes that Laurasian mythology dates all the way back to an Out Of Africa expansion 40 thousand years ago. I have chosen fairly arbitrarily to introduce it instead at a later date. But it can’t date any later than the main settlement of the Americas by the ancestors of Amerindians.

* Witzel’s work on the Vedas has led to his being dogged by a lot of Hindu nationalists who are outraged that he thinks Indo-European languages came from outside India, an occupational hazard for the Indo-Europeanist scholar.

** When I did fieldwork several decades ago among the Ache Indians in Paraguay, they were curious about the way the story of Noah seemed to fit with their own flood story.

The worst of times

260 million years ago: the Capitanian mass extinction

A capsule summary of the evolution of life on Earth goes like this: There is steady progress in adaptation, driven especially by arms races, sometimes involving competitors, sometimes predators and prey. But this progress is interrupted from time to time by catastrophes – mass extinctions resulting from extrinsic causes, sometimes astronomical, but more often geological. (We’ll see much later in the year that a similar summary of human history goes like this: steady progress in the scale of cooperation driven by arms races, with occasional catastrophic interruptions, often associated with the spread of epidemic diseases.)

The geological causes of mass extinctions have been coming into focus lately. Many mass extinctions co-occur with the formation of Large Igneous Provinces (LIPS), regions where vast amounts of lava have flowed out of the earth, triggering a whole cascade of changes: the destruction of the ozone layer by halogen gases, global warming induced by CO2 and methane, and anoxic seas.

Large Igneous Provinces aren’t always associated with mass extinctions. What makes some episodes of massive lava flow particularly destructive is that they produce short circuits in the “planetary fuel cell.” The development of complex life has depended on the separation between an oxygen-rich, electron-hungry atmosphere and a reducing, electron-stuffed planetary interior. Some of the biggest setbacks to complex life have happened when  lava flows from deep in the Earth’s interior punch through carbon deposits on their way up, and bridge this chemical gap between surface and interior.

The mass extinction 260 million years ago, the Capitanian, is not one of the classic five greatest mass extinctions, and has been overshadowed by the mother of all mass extinctions, the end-Permian, which happened just 8 million years later. But it took a major toll on living things, from marine organisms to dinocephalians. (The dinocephalians – more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs, ranging up to hippo sized, and including both herbivores and carnivores – went entirely extinct with the Capitanian. See picture.) The Capitanian extinctions coincide with, and were probably caused by, the formation of the Emeishan LIP, now in southwest China.

A book published recently, The Worst of Times, pulls together the latest evidence that the Capitanian was the beginning of an 80 million year period in which mass extinctions were exceptionally common. Apparently the formation of the supercontinent of Pangaea and the Panthalassic superocean made living things particularly vulnerable to volcanically induced extinctions. Once Pangaea breaks up, mass extinctions are less frequent, and generally have different causes.  The death of the dinosaurs had an extra-terrestrial cause, and the mass extinction we’re in the middle of results from the activities of one very unusual species.

The world in 1600

World population, about 545 million

Pangaea reunited. In the century after 1492, West Europeans mastered the winds and currents of the world’s oceans. The shock to the rest of the world would be comparable in some ways to the earlier shock resulting from the spread of nomadism on the Eurasian steppes. In the Americas, the immediate results were devastating, with the loss of most of the population to introduced diseases, helped along by conquest and enslavement. But the spread of new crops and animals in both directions also helped fuel a population boom in the Old World.

Mega-empires. In Eastern Europe and Asia, the results of West European expansion by 1600 were less dramatic. There the landscape was dominated by huge empires: Russia, the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, Ming China. These have sometimes been called “gunpowder empires,” emphasizing the role of cannon in establishing centralized power. But they could also be considered the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, either arising from the overthrow of Mongol rule (Russia, China) or claiming direct Mongol descent (Mughal India). In other words, these empires developed in centrifugal fashion, with power collapsing at the old Mongol center, and new states arising along the Mongol marches.

Charlemagne + 800. Another centrifugal episode of state formation took place in Western and Central Europe, on a smaller scale, over a longer period of time. As the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, new states arose along its marches, in Iberia, in France, England and Scandinavia, and in eastern Germany and neighboring, mostly Slavic territory. Meanwhile the core of the former empire, including western Germany and northern Italy, remained fragmented. By earlier Roman or Asian standards, medieval states in Europe, even when they controlled large areas, were feeble things. The state’s power to collect taxes had more or less collapsed, and Medieval monarchs were forced to concede substantial privileges to their subjects in exchange for their support. By 1600, however, military competition had produced more powerful absolutist states. Medieval liberties survived best in lands where military threats had been less intense, on islands (England and Scotland), on an isolated peninsula (Scandinavia), in the mountains (Switzerland) or soggy lowlands (Holland), or just far from the madding crowd (Poland).

Mythopoeia

Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History. But human beings have been speculating for far longer than that on the origins of the universe, and we’ll have plenty of occasions here to pay tribute to earlier prescientific cosmologies. (The early chapters of the book of Genesis are probably most familiar to Western readers, but there are lots of others.)

Strikingly, it may be possible to reconstruct a very early interconnected set of myths concerning the world’s origin, which date back to long before the invention of writing (or farming, for that matter). This is the argument of Michael Witzel and some of his associates, set forth at length in Witzel’s ambitious recent book, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Witzel is an expert on the Vedas (Hindu sacred texts)* who has grown interested in wider comparisons. He argues that there are striking parallels in myths told in traditional societies across a wide expanse of the Earth. These parallels are not the product ancient archetypes welling out of the collective unconscious, but are survivals of a coherent narrative of the origins and destiny of the universe, the gods, and humans, which was told tens of thousands of years ago. This mythological narrative includes the following:

In the beginning: primordial waters / darkness / chaos / ‘nonbeing’

A primordial egg / giant

A primordial hill / island / floating earth

Father Sky and Mother Earth and their children, for four generations, defining Four Ages of creation

The Sky is raised up and severed from the Earth

The Sky and his daughter commit incest, and the hidden sun’s light is revealed

The current generation of gods defeat or kill their predecessors.

A dragon is slain by a culture hero

The Sun becomes the father of humans (later on, of chieftains), and establishes their rituals

The first humans, whose evil deeds lead to the origin of death and the great Flood

A generation of heroes and the bringing of fire / food / culture by a culture hero

The spread of humans / emergence of local nobility: local history begins

In the future: final destruction of humans, the world, the gods

A new heaven and a new earth / eternal bliss

Some elements of the myth seem to have an astronomical significance. The revelation of the sun seems to be especially associated with the winter solstice, and the slaying of a dragon, bringing rain, with the summer solstice. The Greek version of the Four Ages (and its Near Eastern antecedents) is clearly related to the movements of stars and planets.

Witzel labels the resulting mythic narrative “Laurasian mythology,” because its major elements are found mostly in Eurasia, the Pacific, and the New World. It contrasts with a Gondwanan mythology found Africa, New Guinea and Australia. (These two mythologies happen, by chance, to correspond roughly to the ancient supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana.) Laurasian and Gondwanan mythology overlap to some extent. Stories of a great Flood sent to punish unruly or sinful mankind, leaving only scattered mountaintop survivors to repopulate the world, are found in both.**

Witzel proposes that Laurasian mythology dates all the way back to an Out Of Africa expansion 40 thousand years ago. I have chosen fairly arbitrarily to introduce it instead at a later date. But it can’t date any later than the main settlement of the Americas by the ancestors of Amerindians.

* Witzel’s work on the Vedas has led to his being dogged by a lot of Hindu nationalists who are outraged that he thinks Indo-European languages came from outside India, an occupational hazard for the Indo-Europeanist scholar.

** When I did fieldwork several decades ago among the Ache Indians in Paraguay, they were curious about the way the story of Noah seemed to fit with their own flood story.

Amborella Day

205-194 million years ago

1 galactic revolution ago

The Triassic ends 201 million years ago with another major mass extinction (the fourth, by the usual count, after the end-Ordovician, end-Devonian, and end-Permian). Not quite as bad as the end-Permian (“only” 75% of species go extinct). This coincides with the formation of the Central Atlantic LIP (Large Igneous Province), which now includes a lot of eastern North America, northeast Amazonia, and western North Africa. So the end Triassic mass extinction may be the result of volcanoes spewing lava and carbon dioxide as Pangaea splits into Laurasia (North America, most of Eurasia) and Gondwanaland (South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, Australia).

The succeeding Jurassic Period will be when dinosaurs become the dominant vertebrates on land. The mammals around are mostly shrew-sized and nocturnal.

Not as conspicuous is another evolutionary innovation: the ancestors of Amborella, a rare shrub found in the wild only on New Caledonia, split off from the other angiosperms, ancestors of all other flowering plants, 200 million years ago. (This was suspected for a while, and confirmed in 2012 with the sequencing of the Amborella genome.) We can call this the origin of flowers. Amborella has clusters of small white flowers, with male and female separate.

Spring is gearing up in the Northern hemisphere; some dwarf irises are in flower in front yard, and the daffodils, celebrating global warming, are about to let loose. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to smell the flowers on Amborella Day, and take your mind off catastrophes past and present.

The worst of times

260 million years ago: the Capitanian mass extinction

A capsule summary of the evolution of life on Earth goes like this: There is steady progress in adaptation, driven especially by arms races, sometimes involving competitors, sometimes predators and prey. But this progress is interrupted from time to time by catastrophes – mass extinctions resulting from extrinsic causes, sometimes astronomical, but more often geological. (We’ll see much later in the year that a similar summary of human history goes like this: steady progress in the scale of cooperation driven by arms races, with occasional catastrophic interruptions, often associated with the spread of epidemic diseases.)

The geological causes of mass extinctions have been coming into focus lately. Many mass extinctions co-occur with the formation of Large Igneous Provinces (LIPS), regions where vast amounts of lava have flowed out of the earth, triggering a whole cascade of changes: the destruction of the ozone layer by halogen gases, global warming induced by CO2 and methane, and anoxic seas.

Large Igneous Provinces aren’t always associated with mass extinctions. What makes some episodes of massive lava flow particularly destructive is that they produce short circuits in the “planetary fuel cell.” The development of complex life has depended on the separation between an oxygen-rich, electron-hungry atmosphere and a reducing, electron-stuffed planetary interior. Some of the biggest setbacks to complex life have happened when  lava flows from deep in the Earth’s interior punch through carbon deposits on their way up, and bridge this chemical gap between surface and interior.

The mass extinction 260 million years ago, the Capitanian, is not one of the classic five greatest mass extinctions, and has been overshadowed by the mother of all mass extinctions, the end-Permian, which happened just 8 million years later. But it took a major toll on living things, from marine organisms to dinocephalians. (The dinocephalians – more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs, ranging up to hippo sized, and including both herbivores and carnivores – went entirely extinct with the Capitanian. See picture.) The Capitanian extinctions coincide with, and were probably caused by, the formation of the Emeishan LIP, now in southwest China.

A book published recently, The Worst of Times, pulls together the latest evidence that the Capitanian was the beginning of an 80 million year period in which mass extinctions were exceptionally common. Apparently the formation of the supercontinent of Pangaea and the Panthalassic superocean made living things particularly vulnerable to volcanically induced extinctions. Once Pangaea breaks up, mass extinctions are less frequent, and generally have different causes.  The death of the dinosaurs had an extra-terrestrial cause, and the mass extinction we’re in the middle of results from the activities of one very unusual species.

The world in 1600

World population, about 545 million

Pangaea reunited. In the century after 1492, West Europeans mastered the winds and currents of the world’s oceans. The shock to the rest of the world would be comparable in some ways to the earlier shock resulting from the spread of nomadism on the Eurasian steppes. In the Americas, the immediate results were devastating, with the loss of most of the population to introduced diseases, helped along by conquest and enslavement. But the spread of new crops and animals in both directions also helped fuel a population boom in the Old World.

Mega-empires. In Eastern Europe and Asia, the results of West European expansion by 1600 were less dramatic. There the landscape was dominated by huge empires: Russia, the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, Ming China. These have sometimes been called “gunpowder empires,” emphasizing the role of cannon in establishing centralized power. But they could also be considered the aftermath of the Mongol conquests, either arising from the overthrow of Mongol rule (Russia, China) or claiming direct Mongol descent (Mughal India). In other words, these empires developed in centrifugal fashion, with power collapsing at the old Mongol center, and new states arising along the Mongol marches.

Charlemagne + 800. Another centrifugal episode of state formation took place in Western and Central Europe, on a smaller scale, over a longer period of time. As the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, new states arose along its marches, in Iberia, in France, England and Scandinavia, and in eastern Germany and neighboring, mostly Slavic territory. Meanwhile the core of the former empire, including western Germany and northern Italy, remained fragmented. By earlier Roman or Asian standards, medieval states in Europe, even when they controlled large areas, were feeble things. The state’s power to collect taxes had more or less collapsed, and Medieval monarchs were forced to concede substantial privileges to their subjects in exchange for their support. By 1600, however, military competition had produced more powerful absolutist states. Medieval liberties survived best in lands where military threats had been less intense, on islands (England and Scotland), on an isolated peninsula (Scandinavia), in the mountains (Switzerland) or soggy lowlands (Holland), or just far from the madding crowd (Poland).

Mythopoeia

Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History. But human beings have been speculating for far longer than that on the origins of the universe, and we’ll have plenty of occasions here to pay tribute to earlier prescientific cosmologies. (The early chapters of the book of Genesis are probably most familiar to modern readers, but there are lots of others.)

Strikingly, it may be possible to reconstruct a very early interconnected set of myths concerning the world’s origin, which date back to long before the invention of writing (or farming, for that matter). This is the argument of Michael Witzel and some of his associates, set forth at length in Witzel’s ambitious recent book, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Witzel is an expert on the Vedas (Hindu sacred texts)* who has grown interested in wider comparisons. He argues that there are striking parallels in myths told in traditional societies across a wide expanse of the Earth. These parallels are not the product ancient archetypes welling out of the collective unconscious, but are survivals of a coherent narrative of the origins and destiny of the universe, the gods, and humans, which was told tens of thousands of years ago. This mythological narrative includes the following:

In the beginning: primordial waters / darkness / chaos / ‘nonbeing’

A primordial egg / giant

A primordial hill / island / floating earth

Father Sky and Mother Earth and their children, for four generations, defining Four Ages of creation

The Sky is raised up and severed from the Earth

The Sky and his daughter commit incest, and the hidden sun’s light is revealed

The current generation of gods defeat or kill their predecessors.

A dragon is slain by a culture hero

The Sun becomes the father of humans (later on, of chieftains), and establishes their rituals

The first humans, whose evil deeds lead to the origin of death and the great Flood

A generation of heroes and the bringing of fire / food / culture by a culture hero

The spread of humans / emergence of local nobility: local history begins

In the future: final destruction of humans, the world, the gods

A new heaven and a new earth / eternal bliss

Some elements of the myth seem to have an astronomical significance. The revelation of the sun seems to be especially associated with the winter solstice, and the slaying of a dragon, bringing rain, with the summer solstice. The Greek version of the Four Ages (and its Near Eastern antecedents) is clearly related to the movements of stars and planets.

Witzel labels the resulting mythic narrative “Laurasian mythology,” because its major elements are found mostly in Eurasia, the Pacific, and the New World. It contrasts with a Gondwanan mythology found Africa, New Guinea and Australia. (These two mythologies happen, by chance, to correspond roughly to the ancient supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana.) Laurasian and Gondwanan mythology overlap to some extent. Stories of a great Flood sent to punish unruly or sinful mankind, leaving only scattered mountaintop survivors to repopulate the world, are found in both.**

Witzel proposes that Laurasian mythology dates all the way back to an Out Of Africa expansion 40 thousand years ago. I have chosen fairly arbitrarily to introduce it instead at a later date. But it can’t date any later than the main settlement of the Americas by the ancestors of Amerindians.

* Witzel’s work on the Vedas has led to his being dogged by a lot of Hindu nationalists who are outraged that he thinks Indo-European languages came from outside India, an occupational hazard for the Indo-Europeanist scholar.

** When I did fieldwork several decades ago among the Ache Indians in Paraguay, they were curious about the way the story of Noah seemed to fit with their own flood story.