A Conjecture On Human Development

A Conjecture On Human Evolution

The weather lately has been dry and sunny but most often with the cold Mistral blowing. When it stops we have 14-15 degrees but the Mistral cuts that in half. So I’ve not been doing a lot outside, more reading and writing indoors. So here’s a conjecture on human evolution.

A friend of mine here has spent a large part of his life in the East, which means there is at least one person here I can enjoy a chilli-laden curry with, and he has acquainted me with some eastern thinking; which leads to the following conjecture.

Hindous believe that human development has not been linearly progressive, as is thought in the West, but cyclic: cycles of development ending in catastrophe followed by renewed development. I find the possibility intriguing.

The first evidence of Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years ago, humans with intelligence if not a lot of education. Agriculture, on currently available evidence, is estimated to have started around 14,000 years ago. So it took humans with intelligence, even very basic intelligence, 286,000 years to think that planting a few seeds might be a good idea? It’s possible of course but is it probable? Hindous don’t think so.

There’s another interesting calculation. If a global catastrophe were to happen today, a global nuclear war, a large asteroid hitting the Earth or some such, it is estimated that it would take only about 300 years for all evidence of our current civilisation other than that in stone or pottery to disappear, except perhaps for a few chance exceptions.

So…..let’s allow for some margin of error on the estimates. Suppose agriculture started 1000 years earlier than estimated and suppose it takes 1000 years for evidence (other than stone, pottery) to disappear, that gives a possible cycle of around 18,000 years. Eighteen thousand goes into 300,000 rather a lot of times.

All this is just conjecture of course and there is one overriding problem: one of scale.

When discussing the distant past it is common to talk in terms of estimates of “within a few thousand years, ten or twenty thousand years” because we know so little about it. But it is quite possible for a hell of a lot to happen in a few thousand years, as we do know today and, as I hope I have shown. Did it, in the distant past? The possible eradication of all evidence within a thousand years doesn’t help.We’ll probably never know but you could think about it if the Mistral or other factor is keeping you indoors.