Paleontology1
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PALEONTOLOGY1 Thoreau’s firm grasp of paleontology laid the groundwork for the climax of WALDEN, which describes the emergence of complexity and beauty from the simple flow of muddy sand at the Deep Cut. It also was the taproot of his lifelong frustration with Christian supernaturalists, who insisted on a fairly brief history of life. Paraphrasing Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, he jested [in A WEEK ON THE C ONCORD AND M ERRIMACK R IVERS]: “It took 100 years to prove that fossils are organic, and 150 more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.” Not everyone believes this, even today. Modern “young Earth” creationists still insist that the Elizabethan-era Mosaic chronology of Archbishop Ussher is the correct one, and that we twenty-first century scientists are in error. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 60-1 1. (“Paleology” would be the study of antiques, how much they might fetch at auction.) HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 23,000 BCE Full glacial world, cold and dry; Stage 2 (includes the latest “Glacial Maximum”). This period includes the two ‘coldest phases’ –Heinrich Events– at something like 21,000 BCE-19,000 BCE and at something like 15,000 BCE-12,500 BCE. Music was produced by humans in what is now France; archaeological evidence includes cave paintings, footprints in caves that seem to be those of dancers, and carved bones that seem to be wind and percussion instruments. People made artifacts with primitive geometrical designs. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Paleontology HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 18,000 BCE On the basis of Carbon-14 measurements, this was the last Glacial Maximum, the coldest period of the most recent Ice Age. People made wall paintings in caves, for example in the cave of Lascaux, France. Rope was in use, according to evidence there. Chauvet cave in France. People living in or visiting caves in what are now Israel and Jordan were putting notches on bones to record sequences of numbers (the devices are thought to have functioned primarily as lunar calendars). By about this point or at least by 13,000 BCE, the spear thrower and the harpoon would have been invented. The first-known artifact with a map on it, made of bone, has been at what is now Mezhirich — it appears to show the region immediately around the site at which it was found. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 15,200 BCE The receding of the glacial ice past Concord, Massachusetts toward the north, creating what has now become Walden Woods (“Historic woodland surrounding Walden Pond, especially to the north. Generally characterized by irregular topography and sterile soils associated with meltdown collapse of the Walden kame delta”) and what has now become Walden Pond. (“Lake in Concord, Massachusetts, created by melting of multiple residual blocks of stagnant ice and maintained by the filling of large voids with groundwater beneath a steady state water table. Its western basin was the site of Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living and the inspiration for his book WALDEN”). THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 13,000 BCE About 15,000 years ago the last age ended with average temperatures rising by several degrees Centigrade. A glacier dumped a boulder that would eventually be freighted with identity-politics significance as “The Plymouth Rock.” The Near East experienced a corresponding northerly migration of monsoon rains, resulting in a kind of “Garden of Eden” in Jordan, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 610 BCE Anaximandros of Miletus. Anaximander is sometimes designated the “father of astronomy,” because he was the first to develop a cosmology by using mathematical proportions to map and interpret the heavens. Anaximander was born in Miletus and could have been a pupil of the philosopher Thales. Anaximander analyzed the origin of the cosmos with the theory of apeiron: • The universe is boundless. • The universe consists of a primary substance. • He wrote influential works of biology, cosmology, and geography. He noted that human embryos initially appear fishlike. • He realized that the most obvious hypothesis to explain the marine fossils he noticed on dry land, was that this dry land was once upon a time at the bottom of the sea. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 600 BCE At about this point the planet experienced a “relatively wet/cold event of unknown duration in many areas.” HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 430 BCE At about this period, in Mesopotamian astronomy, the zodiac of signs was invented for use as a reference point. Herodotus wrote his HISTORIES. He, like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes, realized that the most obvious hypothesis to explain the marine fossils they noticed on dry land, was that this dry land had once upon a time been at the bottom of a sea. Athens was visited by a pestilence, which swept off large numbers of her population. The Book of RUTH, a novel. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 400 BCE Peloponnesian War. Socrates. Thucydides. Aristophanes. Herodotus related the myth of the griffin — which may well have been inspired by discoveries of the remains of Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 58 BCE Marcus Antonius studied in Rhodes and Athens, where he met Aulus Gabinius, the new governor of Syria. He accompanied Gabinius as a cavalry commander for a period of service in Judaea and Egypt. Toward the end of this year, Cato the Younger left Rome to become governor of the island of Cyprus. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus displayed a skeleton of what was described as the “monster of Joppa,” having a 40- foot backbone and ribs taller than elephants. Did this consist of whale bones from Palestine? HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 44 CE There was a Roman victory parade at Camulodunum (Colchester), and a triumph at Rome. The three volumes of Pomponius Mela’s DE SITU ORBIS described what was “known” about the world at large, including travelers’ tales of fabulous creatures and peoples in distant lands. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 50 CE Pedanius Dioscorides, a Roman army surgeon, was author of an ancient compilation of descriptions and medicinal uses for plants DE MATERIA MEDICA, which was the most widely known western botanical text during the middle ages. The earliest herbals were recapitulations of Dioscorides. With an expanding awareness of the natural world in the 16th-century, herbalists would begin to make their own descriptions of plants, and at last Dioscorides’s influence would wane. Dioscorides knew about 650 different species. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 78 CE Pliny the Elder’s 37-volume natural history encyclopedia containing some accurate and some inaccurate information. Roman Governor Cnaeus Julius Agricola began a full-scale pacification of Great Britain. Like the US’s Strategic Air Command under General Curtis LeMay, he was all about peace. IRELAND CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 150 CE Claudius Ptolemeus (we refer to him as Ptolemy), the mapmaker at Alexandria, astronomer: TETRABIBLOS. Ptolemy knew the earth was a sphere and inferred that only a third of the northern hemisphere of this sphere was habitable. During the following decade Ptolemy would be writing his LIBER GEOGRAPHIA (GEOGRAPHY), which would include, based on information collected by the legions in their travels, an atlas of the world known to Rome. Galen journeyed from Turkey to Alexandria to study anatomy. This physician would establish the concept of humors that determine both health and personality. Belief in four humors (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile) would for many centuries be dominating medicine and biology. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 180 CE Nipsus wrote on SURVEYING. Pausanias described what was averred to be the skeleton of the hero Ajax (more likely it was the bones of a rhinoceros, or perhaps the fossil of a mastodon). The Greek physician/anatomist Galen began to edit together all known medical knowledge, into a single compilation; this systematic analysis would remain in use for many centuries. In Egypt, the first writings about alchemy appeared. HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 512 CE Townspeople in a district of Constantinople presented an illuminated manuscript of the 1st-Century DE MATERIA MEDICA of Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus Πεδάνιος Διοσκουρίδης to their patron, Princess Anicia Juliana, daughter of puppet emperor Flavius Anicius Olybrius, as a “coffee-table” book. For a millennium “Juliana’s codex” would be recognized as the best compilation of Western knowledge available about botany — and this illuminated manuscript, slightly the worse for wear in a hospital over the years, happens to be still in existence at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY 713 CE At about this point the Japanese chronicle HITACHI FUDOKI described a shell mound — which is perhaps one of the oldest descriptions of prehistoric remains in medieval writings.