Did Planetary Cooling Make Dinosaurs Vulnerable?

The ongoing argument over the theories of dinosaur disappearance all too often ignore that dinosaur populations had already been in decline for tens of millions of years before the impact and, or, volcanic events which caused their brutal demise.

The obvious cause for a dinosaur and sea reptile decline would be cooling of the planet, giving an advantage to animals capable of regulating their internal temperature, in particular by staying warm enough where it mattered: birds and mammals, but also some fishes (tuna, sharks, which can keep their major swim muscles as warm as if they were mammals).

This is a very rough picture, but notice the cooling towards the end of the Cretaceous. Whatever happen next, and massive volcanism and a huge impact certainly happened, drastic cooling would have happen (‘nuclear winter”) for weeks, months, or years…

Indeed dinosaurs and their fellow in the air and the seas, although immensely advanced and efficient in many ways, which enabled them to evolve absolutely gigantic forms in the air or on land, had one Achilles’ heel: they were mesotherms, neither too cold nor too warm, depending a lot of the balmy climate which ruled the planet, all the way to the poles. That does not mean the cold killed them directly. The cold, plus the comparative advantage it gave to small hot and nasty mammals would have, as I have argued in my quasi-extinction theory I also use to explain the quasi disappearance of homo Neanderthalis.

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“Our results highlight that dinosaurs showed a marked reduction in their ability to replace extinct species with new ones, making them vulnerable to extinction and unable to respond quickly to and recover from the final catastrophic event 66 Mya.“

– from research article “Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/13/1521478113

It’s a bit as with the decline of Rome: dinosaurs could evolve new species, but not a whole new method of staying warm enough to avoid being eaten! Similarly Rome could not change its entire systems of thought and moods, as they all considered slavery the core of civilization! When you are too far in, being wiped out is the only outcome…

Patrice Ayme

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The paper admits that some herbivore dinosaurs species were not in decline… But I gave the reason above for the overall decline.

“Whether dinosaurs were in a long-term decline or whether they were reigning strong right up to their final disappearance at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 Mya has been debated for decades with no clear resolution. The dispute has continued unresolved because of a lack of statistical rigor and appropriate evolutionary framework. Here, for the first time to our knowledge, we apply a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to model the evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction through time in Mesozoic dinosaurs, properly taking account of previously ignored statistical violations. We find overwhelming support for a long-term decline across all dinosaurs and within all three dinosaurian subclades (Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda), where speciation rate slowed down through time and was ultimately exceeded by extinction rate tens of millions of years before the K-Pg boundary. The only exceptions to this general pattern are the morphologically specialized herbivores, the Hadrosauriformes and Ceratopsidae, which show rapid species proliferations throughout the Late Cretaceous instead. Our results highlight that, despite some heterogeneity in speciation dynamics, dinosaurs showed a marked reduction in their ability to replace extinct species with new ones, making them vulnerable to extinction and unable to respond quickly to and recover from the final catastrophic event.”

Extinction Of Dinosaurs & Demoncrats: A Unified Theory

Obsolete Dinosaurs Extinguished In Anguish by Blossoming Mammals, Newer, Better, More Energized.  Same Fate For Smaller Brained Demoncrats?

[The science in this essay is real (although the thesis proposed is new, as far as I know). However, the science is used to generate a sarcastic analogy in the last few sentences.]

My opinion about the main cause for the disappearance of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, etc. is that what I call “core volcanism”, also known as super Traps. Massive hyper volcanism, with ejecta of the order of 10,000 times that of the proverbial asteroid, changed the climate durably when the Dekkan Traps started to erupt (millions of years before an asteroid hit Yucatan, future base of the Maya). Weirdly, the Dekkan Traps eruption reached its paroxysm around the time of the asteroid strike (the detailed timing of what exactly happened when is ever more refined, every year). However dinosaurs and their cousins were made for a warm Jurassic climate (the sort we, the fossil carbon burners are trying to implement in the next 100 years). Dinosaurs and their ilk had insufficient temperature generation capability, something birds and mammals, being of a much higher metabolism, due to their much greater internal heat generation, had plenty of.

Mammalian reptiles appeared 250 million years ago or so. Full mammals are more than 3% of the age of the Earth old. Large ( meter long or more) carnivorous mammals existed already 150 million years ago, around the time birds diverged from dinosaurs.

Mesozoic Repenomamus, about one meter long were found with dinosaurs in their stomach:

An Early Case of Advanced Types Devouring Demoncrats? Furry Repenomamus Mammals Hunting for Dinosaur Prey during the Early Cretaceous Period of Europe. Mesozoic Era, 122 Million Years Ago.

So picture this: climate cools, dinosaurs, which were spread from the poles to the equator, have increasing difficulties, the number of their species go down. How come dinosaurs could not adapt? Probably because mammals and birds ate them, or their young.

Mammals and birds may well have been a complicating factor in the change of fauna at the end of the Cretaceous. Mammals and birds, capable of sustaining higher metabolism in cooler climes turned a near-extinction into a full extinction. They were a catalyst accelerating the reaction. This is supported by direct scientific evidence, not just philosophy. Some Cretaceous mammals fed on juvenile dinosaurs. It does not require much imagination to figure out that massive carnivorous mammals, whose fossils have been found, had been into that habit for already 100 million years when dinosaurs croaked terminally.

Some may sneer: they don’t know enough. Mammaliaformes are actually 225 million years old. They had evolved from large brained ancestors descending from mammalian reptiles which, themselves, evolved from Synapsids. Synapsids were the largest terrestrial vertebrates in the Permian period, 299 to 251 million years ago. (Large Synapsids were annihilated by the Siberian Traps eruption… however those among synapsids which had become bigger brained, and more prone to make burrows did survive… Thus big braininess in mammalian ancestors was established 251 million years ago…)

In the Jurassic, mammals tended to occupy the niche of smallness. Not that they were terrified by the dinosaurs and tried to make themselves as small as possible, like Trump voters terrified of rampaging demonocrats. More simply, I guess, dinosaurs could not make themselves very small, as they would lose too much heat. So anything smaller than a chicken was a mammal, or the soon to evolve birds.

What sort of philosophy to extract from all of this? Brains and higher metabolism, higher energy lifestyle, can overwhelm the more primitive forms. Extinction itself is multicausal: maybe if neither birds nor mammals (nor sharks or sea-going crocs) had been around, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and mosasaurs would have survived the considerable climate cooling at the end of the Cretaceous.

Demoncrats and plutocrats are whining all over as they (correctly) fear going extinct. Asteroid Trump has landed, the climate was changing already anyway, disaster looms for these primitive forms. Flushed with new notions, more clever monsters are roaming the land, devouring the very environment which sustained demoncratic, even plutocratic life, not to say lies. This is how dinosaurs disappeared: global change, and the death-blow given by better equipped, given the new circumstances, opportunistic predators.

Please stay tuned.

Patrice Ayme’

Could Veganism Cause Extinctions?

For millions of years, hominids evolved as ever more efficient killer apes. This allowed entire human races or subspecies to live off meat. Such as the Homo Sapiens Sapiens variant Cro-Magnon, or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis. Meat was a hyper concentrated energy source. just ask seals, dolphins, killer whales, humpback whales, polar bears and walruses.

East Africans, tall and lean, evolved to run down exhausted preys in the mid-day sun, they became ancestral to many people today (most of all of them, according to the “Out of Africa” theory). Cro-Magnon looked like ancestral Scandinavians, tall and strong, ready to fight the fiercest lions, wolves and bears. They are ancestral to many people today. They long lived in present day France, when France was landlocked by enormous glaciers on towering mountains, all around, or the giant ice sheets form the north, and the icy seas, west and south. Then non-glaciated Europe was a land of tundra, and enormous herds of often gigantic beasts.

Hunting is our past, how we evolve, and so was war. Vegans want to change all this. They claim that the future is not to touch adversely the smallest hair or feather. Thus they suggest to not use any animal product whatsoever. Instead, one should go fully agricultural. Agri-cultural means to cultivate the ager, the field. Hence the question: Vegans say they are friendly to beasts, they want to live off fields they cultivate, but are fields friendly to beasts?   

Pure Veganism Would Lead To The Extermination Of This Species

This is the paradox: is one friendly with others, when one exclude others? (The question is not just for Brexiters) When vegans exclude all animal species, are they friendly to animals?

Nature is good and evil. Gods stand above nature (supernatural), they don’t exclude it. Could it be that, when vegan want to exclude evil, they want to exclude nature?

How so? Very simple. Contemplate the world we have. Look at the Auroch. The last auroch died in a royal preserve in Poland in the Seventeenth Century. Europeans domesticated aurochs perhaps 25,000 years ago. Through a careful mix of natural and artificial selection, over 10,000 generations, Europeans created the European domestic cattle (meanwhile Indians and Africans were doing the same with their own breeds; the African zebu was probably evolved in India first; it resists well to African diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria…)

Or consider sheep and goats: millions live today. They are descendants of their wild ancestors.

What do vegans want to do with all those animals? Through these millions of these domesticated animals survive the ancient species which graced the Earth for tens of millions of years.

This is not an idle question. Take chicken. The rooster was made by the Romans into the symbol of Celtic lands (which they called “Gallia”, the land of chicks…) In the wild, chickens, initially from South East Asia, are basically extinct. By refusing the presence of chicken inside plates, and in the fields, vegans condemn the species to terminal extinction.

Does hard core veganism allows to ride on horses and run dogs?

Conclusion: hard core veganism would lead to the terminal extinction of the most megafauna. They claim to be friendly to the individuals, but they will kill the species.

Solution: keep on using animal species, but do it in what is, ironically enough, called a “humane” way. If a rooster has a beautiful, easy, comfortable life, and then loses by surprise its head in a laser explosion, is it so bad? Would this sudden death be worse than enjoying life prior to this impromptu, sudden, unforeseen and painless demise?

Is veganism, pushed to extreme, the psychological equivalent of a brat who declares to his mom that he will refuse to breathe, rather than to eat its vegetables? Mummy here, being nature herself?

There is an extremely powerful metapsychological objection to veganism: we have seen that story, the story of renouncing life, many times before. Periodically, a slave religion arises, and recommends to us to lay prone, refuse life, reject even self-defense, accept to live small, barely eating, afraid to bother others in all and any way. This apparently bizarre cult is only natural, and is an evolutionary selected mode of operation: that of the prey which surrenders to those red in fang and claw.

When an animal of one of these species which get preyed upon, is surrounded, and death is unavoidable, it is often seen surrendering to its fate: this is part of the co-evolution of ecological systems (something not well-known, but still a fact). Not the evolution of the fittest individual as the naive evolutionists of the 19 C had it, but the evolution of entire ecological systems, as individuals made of multitudes. Is the vegan is a beast which wants to die and disguises this as a lofty language, while dragging hundreds of large species in its hateful discourse? Hateful of what? Hateful of life itself. Life is about living, thus suffering and dying. Not that the latter activities are necessarily something to look for, just the opposite. But mitigating and escaping them, is the spice of life.

Thus it is not excluded that the rise of veganism corresponds to surrender to mighty plutocrats: instead of tearing and shredding plutocratic substance, vegans decide that broccoli is all the protein they need. ‘They are starving? Let them eat grass!’ Say these new Marie-Antoinettes of the abysmal age.

Thus we have seen that story before. Whenever great plutocrats rise, We The People tends to roll on its back, presents its belly, and waits for horror, persuading themselves that horror is all what they ever wanted. Buddhism preaches that it is better to give up on life in full, rather than indulge into giving and receiving suffering. After its creation by a Princeling (not a coincidence), Buddhism took over most of India. But the predators laid in wait. They re-took all of India.

Vegans can preach. The only way what they preach can not lead to mass extinction, is by reserving around half of the land mass to total wilderness, in all and any ecological zone. That could, even should, be done. However, refusing the essence of life, preferring non-existence to death, is another matter entirely.

Patrice Ayme’

Extinctions

American Megafauna Gone Extinct In the Last 20,000 Years. Arctodus Primus, Megatherium, Smilodon. For the scale, the whitish American Lion is 30% larger than today’s African lions.

A characteristic of today’s biosphere is that most wild megafauna has gone extinct. The culprit is Homo Sapiens in general, and civilization made the situation worse. However, 40 years ago, if one suggested human beings had annihilated the megafauna, one was viewed as unbalanced, unscientific, a conspiracy theorist, grandiloquent, megalomaniac, etc.

Nowadays, though, detailed chronologies have shown that, indeed Homo Sapiens caused many extinctions. I hold that Homo Sapiens caused directly most extinctions of the last 100,000 years. And, indirectly, the rest.

Some have held out against this global extinction theory. They brandish the case of Africa, where the megafauna had survived until recently.

I will presently extinguish this effrontery. Africa is extremely hard to penetrate. The African tropical forest is much darker than the darkest cathedral. The sahelian and subsahelian zone are crisscrossed by “forest gallery”, along the countless streams. Forest gallery is extremely dark, thick, full of dangers, from nasty predators to tsetse flies. Thus, to go ten kilometers in Africa is extremely hard. The streams, when any, are dangerous to navigate, from mosquitoes, to crocodiles, to man-eating, blinding worms. Forest galleries provided shelter to predators, including lions.

(Once I walked next to a lion, 2 or 3 meters away in a very thick thicket, when approaching, precisely, a river, in a sandy, open area; because of the openness, we did not pay attention to the thicket. What was a lion, we guessed, because we did not really see it, jumped away to great sound and fury; the point is that nobody in my party suspect a lion was indulging in a siesta in such a place.)

Moreover, in Africa, animals were in contact with men, for millions of years. So they evolved their own cultures, transmitting it to their children. It’s not just a matter of fearing man and running away (because a fleeing animal could run into other animals, or other men). A culture to live alongside human beings required mutual respect.

Lions, hyenas and even leopards know very well who men and their children are. They act accordingly, in general, except in exceptional cases.

I have given sugar to enormous jumping wild African dogs; I would throw the sugar up in the air, and the dogs would catch it at an extravagant height, with an impressive metallic snapping of jaws. Any other animals, those dogs would take down. Wild hyenas have also accepted to be hand fed by human beings. Hyenas’ relations with other animals are extremely adverse. Their jaws are feared by lions and dogs alike. The same is true with cheetahs: they readily domesticate. I have sat, as a ten-year old, in the back of cars with cheetahs larger than me. Cheetahs can take down a huge impala in a second, but they don’t attack people.

So this is something I noticed in the wilds of Africa, again and again: the most ferocious representatives of the megafauna there , know very well who human beings are. They will not just think twice before attacking a human child: generally, they will not do it. One does not attack the gods, if one is a well-educated, normally behaved member of the African megafauna.

In the Americas, as human beings swept in, fast, lethally, and suddenly, mutual respect cultures could not evolve: archeology shows that it would take at most 300 years for human beings to kill the entire megafauna of a region. In Eurasia, there are giant killing grounds of horses, mammoths, etc: this means human beings killed animals there, for thousands of years. There are no such places in the Americas.

So human beings did it: they exterminated the megafauna. That’s not just a fact, it’s a warning. First the megafauna, now the rest of the biosphere?

Patrice Ayme’

 

Think Or Sink

Economy is the management of the house (oikos in Greek), ecology is the study, or logic, of the house. They are closely related. We are presently engaged in the sixth large mass extinction event since animal life appeared on Earth. It is, potentially the most dangerous, because hypoxia (so far undocumented in previous mass extinctions, but likely) threatens (my trademark worry).

Yet, this extinction event is driven by the behavior of Homo Sapiens, thus, it could be prevented (as long as the extinction does not develop too much inertia). Thus we should use more logic to manage the house.

Worst Extinction Coming? Lest We Intervene Creatively

Horizontally: million of years before present. Both the P-T (Permian-Trias) and K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinctions coincide with Earth core eruptions (according to me, they acidified the seas). Vertically: percentage of fossilized marine genera that went extinct.

Thus the nature of economic policy, not just economic performance, is in question. Here is Krugman in “Cheese-eating Job Creators”

People are pretty down on European economic performance these days, with good reason. But mainly what we’re looking at is bad macroeconomic policy…That’s a very different story from the old version of Eurotrashing, which focused on Eurosclerosis — persistent low employment allegedly caused by excessive welfare states.

…John Schmitt and Dean Baker began pointing out a long time ago that this story was out of date. If you looked at Europe in general and France in particular, you saw that yes, people retired earlier than in America, and also that fewer young people worked — in part because they didn’t have to work their way through college…

Well, I hadn’t looked at this data for a while; and where we are now is quite stunning:

France & USA EMPLOYMENT Rate [NOT Unemployment U2]

Many of the French would be indignant about that graph, as they are focused on the Unemployment Rate known as U2 (which is above 10% in France).

And Krugman to conclude: “Since the late 1990s we have completely traded places: prime-age French adults are now much more likely than their US counterparts to have jobs.

Strange how amid the incessant bad-mouthing of French performance this fact never gets mentioned.”

Krugman knows well that this is not strange. Wall Street centered plutocracy has control of American propaganda, and admitting any sort of French superiority in economics would be equivalent to anathema.Financiers hate France most, as she is full of counterexamples to the plutocratic paradigm, so they use the biggest, ugliest lies against her.

Employing people of prime employment age is a deliberate policy of the state in France. Early (and sufficient!) retirement is part of it. So is free university education (as Krugman hints at above).

And yet, comparing an enormous country-continent such as the USA and a European country, is always fraught. European countries are automatically small, and crowded. Most have long exhausted natural resources.

Besides, God is American (just listen to Barack Obama if you doubt it). So, when American companies (Chevron, etc.) tried fracking in Poland, it did not work, as God had not blessed Poland (or not been blessed by Obama, whatever). The geology was uncooperative.

Or maybe Poland cannot be as thoroughly destructed as Texas (largest state of the USA), Wyoming (very large, and less populated USA state), or the Dakotas (what’s that?).

Much of the wealth of the USA comes from recently conquering a gigantic, wealthy continent, after having disposed of the preceding occupants (thus acquiring title and attending riches).

In a way, the USA is an ode to the exploitative paradigm: We Came, We Saw, We Destroyed, We Thrive.

No wonder well paid economists and other propagandists from the world’s richest universities prefer to change conversation, and explain to use why slavery is so superior to economy, the French way. (Americans get two weeks vacations; the French, who invented mandatory paid vacations in 1936, get 5; a reform all of Europe has copied. )

All this sudden American wealth was not because of a mysterious American genius in matters economic, but for the one found at the end of a saber. Proof? The USA was mostly created by Europeans. What those Europeans could do in the New World, they could never have done in the Old One.

Parts of Europe are still suffering from Roman ecological devastation.

The European Union (four million square kilometers) is less than half the area of the USA (ten million square kilometers). Europe (even without Putin’s Grosse Reich) has twice the population of the USA.

France exploited coal for 73,000 years, but, surprise, surprise, has run out of it. France had insignificant gas, now exhausted, and only a few barrels of oil.

This general paucity of resources forces Europeans to exchange high added value products (aerospace, cars, machine tools) against the natural resources they need (even Spain is selling trains to Saudi Arabia).

In other words, Europeans have to be more brainy, but for countries such as Norway (oil, gas) or Britain (oil, gas, Russian money).

In a sense the archetype  European country is wealthy Switzerland. First source of Swiss income? Pharmaceuticals.  Where does the better Swiss economic management come from? Direct democracy.

The strategies used in France and Germany are slightly different, with more emphasis on university education in France (which is free) and thus more of a scientific axis, and more on apprenticeship in Germany (thus a more active high tech Mittelstand). They are both trying to adopt the other’s advantage (Germany is doing a huge teaching-scientific effort, and has just adopted a French like minimum wage… while France is talking about how great Germany is).

The advantage of the Silicon Valley seems, and is, incontrovertible. Yet, it has to a great extent to do with the size of the market of the USA, & the discrete fact that the most important actor in the economy is the state. Silicon Valley was basically founded by the defense establishment of the USA (the basic tech was often invented in… France. But the smaller French market, and the lack of an empire of awe and conspiracies, put the French at a disadvantage.)

In any case, the better French success with employment (especially its quality, that the graph above does not exhibit) demonstrates, to some extent, the superiority of governmentalism.

See:  https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/synthesis-found-governmentalism/

Not to say that government policies in France are, and have been perfect (France has a new Prime Minister, the young, Catalan-Swiss-French Emanuel Wals). Far from it. They are actually often laughable, while gritting one’s teeth. To quit laughing, though, one has to just consider the USA, where, in spite of obvious natural riches, much of the plundering by the higher ups negatively impact economic performance.

The social inequality in San Francisco is on a par with Rwanda (that makes more sense than it looks, as both depends upon Coltan, plundered in Congo).

We are going to need lots of correct governmentalism, if we are going to be spared a sixth, and most terrible, mass extinction.

Speaking of extinction, in apparently unrelated news, the thirty billion dollar woman, Helene Pastor, just died from her wounds from an (unknown commando) attack. Flags have been lowered all over the Principality of Monaco. When people die, the pain of the state is apparently proportional to wealth.

Cap Wealth, Decapitate Critter Power

There are warning flags fluttering in the air.

Patrice Aymé

MATH “EXTINGUISHED” NEANDERTHALS, Mostly.

HOW & WHY (SOME) NEANDERTHAL TRAITS WERE OUTBRED:

Abstract: Considering what is known about Neanderthals’ physiology, especially their mass, and brain development, they were at a reproductive disadvantage relative to the more gracile and less energy demanding Homo Sapiens they met. In combination with quasi-extinction events, and exponential demographic recovery, the dilution of Neanderthals’ genetic traits, except when vastly superior, was thus ineluctable, as observed.

So it’s not the fittest traits which survived Neanderthal-Sapiens interbreeding, but the most easily reproduced traits. This generalizes to other evolutionary situations, and provides with a new mechanism for the machinery of evolution.

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Many racist theories fester around the “disappearance” of Neanderthals. The latest one, from Oxford University, claims that Neanderthals’ big, beautiful eyes, and their big muscles caused their demise: Neanderthals were too busy looking at things, while flexing their muscles. The “idea” is that larger eyes would have crowded the Neanderthal brain out, making them relatively stupid. How stupid can Oxford get? In particular eyes made them incapable of having social groups as large as those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Big Eyes Do Not Kill

Sapiens girl on the left, Neanderthal girl on the right (reconstitution published in Science Magazine a few years ago).

I have long argued that the strength of democracy came from having many brains working in parallel. There is little doubt that larger social groups bring a higher cultural intelligence, hence higher individual intelligence. So I agree about that bit of logic. Yet, ironically, to reach the conclusion that Neanderthals’ social group were less numerous, the simple fact that Neanderthals were bigger, is enough. There is no need for hazardous demeaning allegations about Neanderthals’ brains.

That big eyes made Neanderthals stupid contradicts some facts that were thought to be established:

1) Sapiens Neanderthalis’ brains were significantly larger to start with. See Wikipedia.

2) Many very clever Homo Sapiens Sapiens have small brains. Famously Anatole France, an intellectual, had only a 1,000 cubic centimeters brain. Homo Floresiensis, the “hobbit” species living on the island of Flores, Indonesia, until it was wiped out recently, was extremely intellectually capable, although it had really small (and completely different) brains.

3) In the Middle East, Neanderthals and Sapiens went back and forth through the same large caves over 50,000 years. So whatever happened, it was not in evidence for 50,000 years.

So, of course, I have my own theory. That’s what philosophy is all about: trying to guess what really matters most, and how that most significant data logically articulate. Then scientists, politicians and writers can swoop, figure out the details, and attribute themselves the glory.

What could have happened by around 28,000 years ago that caused the demise of Neanderthals? At the time, the last fierce glaciation was gaining ground. (It reached its maximum 25,000 years ago.) Some have argued, absurdly, that the Neanderthals could not take it. That’s beyond silly, as Neanderthals had evolved, from half a million years ago, precisely to handle extreme cold.

Neanderthals were stocky, powerful, and they had thrived through hundreds thousands years of glaciation, mostly on a meat diet, hunting big game. But they also knew how to cook plants, and eat them.

27,800 years ago, Cave Bears were exterminated. That huge animal who lived in caves, primed real estate Sapiens Sapiens and Neanderthals craved for. Could the disappearance of Cave Bears be logically linked to the disappearance of Neanderthals? Yes. That’s a consequence of my theory. More advanced technology played a direct role. So did size: Cave Bears disappeared, because they were larger than European Brown Bears (called Grizzlies in America), according to the mechanism below, differential exponentiation.

How did men kill Cave Bears? With technology. We do not know exactly what weapons men had at their disposal. However, technology had improved, and kept improving. Recently it was found that Sapiens Sapiens (Homo SS; I hope one gets the joke) in Africa had invented bows and arrows 80,000 Before Present (BP).  (About 60,000 years earlier than previously thought!) Before bows and arrows, the propeller had been invented, and was used in Europe. The propeller took advantage of angular momentum to send a sort of mini lance further and stronger than by hand.

Why did the Neanderthals and Denisovans (another human species from Central Eurasia) lose their edge? Advancing technology is the obvious answer. When technology of clothing and weapons was sufficiently advanced, the physiological advantage that the Neanderthals genetically had, disappeared. Homo Sapiens Sapiens could thrive just as well through winter.

At that point, Homo Sapiens Sapiens from Africa could be as successful as the Neanderthals through the freezing wastelands of Europe. OK.

But the Homo SS outbred the Neanderthals, so they became genetically more successful. How do I explain that?

Simple. However, the explanation involves the exponential function, the same function found all over, and that the mathematician Rudin called “the most important function in mathematics”. The exponential also explains the plutocratic phenomenon, and that is why it’s so dangerous. The exponential always rules extinction events, that’s why one day a species is all over, like the American Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger, and the next day, it’s gone.

So visualize this. Neanderthals were bigger than Homo SS, just like the Polar Bear is bigger than the Black Bear. Bigness is an adaptation to cold. Southern Europe’s Brown Bears are smaller than those found in Kamchatka, or Alaska (also known as Grizzlies: the Grizzly is an emigrated European Brown Bear!) Bigger makes warmer inside. That’s why the most massive animal that ever was, the Blue Rorqual, at up to 180 tons, is nearly twice the mass of the largest dinosaur (it’s not just that it’s floating, but also that water is cooler than Jurassic air, I hold).

To simplify, let’s use a bit of exaggeration (that’s reasoning by exaggeration, one of my preferred tactic of thought; the one humor exploits, and why joking helps thinking). Let’s assume Neanderthals were twice more massive than Homo SS (certainly, in the average, Cave Bears were twice the mass of Brown Bears).

Now let’s consider an habitat where Homo SS and Neanderthal bands roamed. They will tend not to mix, for obvious racist reasons. The racial hatred between Neanderthals and Homo SS has got to have been colossal. People who look too different are not even sexually attracted to each other (and where Neanderthals and Homo SS were in contact in the Middle East, for 50,000 years, there is no evolution of an interbred species, an indirect proof that there was no love lost there!)

The density of human mass is going to be roughly the same all over, because that density depends only upon the resources available (mostly meat on the hoof, and fur in burrows in glaciating conditions).

Thus, there would have been apartheid. But the Homo SS would have been twice more numerous, where they reigned (from my assumption of twice the mass). So now graft on this a catastrophe; a drought, a flood, a very tough winter, a volcanic super disaster, whatever. The climate was highly variable, starting about 40,000 years ago, just when Homo SS appeared. Some have stupidly argued that Neanderthals were too stupid to adapt to this changing circumstances. Like this paralyzing stupidity struck them just when Homo SS were around. My explanation is more subtle.

After a catastrophe in said habitat, say one of these numerous habitat in Europe isolated by glacial mountain ranges, or seas and lakes, most of the human population would be wiped out, Homo SS, just as Neanderthals. There would tend to be always a small remaining population, because the greatest limit on man is man himself: as a population gets wiped out, resources rebound, and life of the survivors tend to get much easier (that’s what happened in Europe after the Black Death of 1348 CE; if nothing else, survivors could ask for higher salaries from their plutocratic masters, and they did).

So say 90% of the population of the habitat was wiped out. As suddenly resources are no limited, the human population will rebound exponentially. The equation is: N(t) = N(0) exp(Rt). “R” is the “Malthusian” parameter, the rate of growth. Now it’s going to require twice the resources to feed a Neanderthal to sexual maturation (under our outrageously simplifying assumption that Neanderthals are twice the mass). Thus one may assume that R(Homo SS)/R(Neanderthal) is 2. The end result is that the quotient:

Number Homo SS/ Number Neanderthal = A exp(2t). (Where A is the ratio of the populations H SS/Neanderthal after the catastrophe.)

Thus the population of H SS would exponentially grow relative to that of the Neanderthals, resulting in a quick extinction. And in no way this is happening because Homo SS were superior. Just because they were more gracile.

Another factor is that Sapiens had a larger reservoir of population to the south of Europe and the south of North Africa, in sub-tropical Africa, so Sapiens could come up from the south in great numbers, especially when the climate was cool enough for the deserts, including the Sahara to be covered with savannah-park… an environment for which more gracile Sapiens was more suited, and in which the preceding argument about mass of the body would apply.

It is known that the climate fluctuated violently where Neanderthals lived and had evolved for. The consequence was potentially lower population expansion when exposed to invasion by Sapiens whose genetic reservoir (the South) was mostly a refuge from said wild temperature fluctuations (so, although the climate would massacre the Neanderthals in the north, the Homo SS in the south would be ready to expand much more, from a larger population, and thus expand into the north; this is a question of comparing two exponentials again, the one starting from a larger population grows faster) .

When the temperature fluctuated up, Sapiens populations could invade relatively
recently more sparse Neanderthal habitat, which had brought Neanderthals to a near-extinction event. This, accentuated by interbreeding, would have led to quick Neanderthal gene replacement (replacement, because of interbreeding).

Why didn’t the replacement of most Neanderthal genes by Homo SS genes happen before? Because the advancement of technology. That was partly led by Neanderthals, but whatever Neanderthals invented was transmitted to the larger Homo SS population, and made Neanderthal genetic advantage redundant. Moreover, the relatively smaller Neanderthal population, all other mental things being equal, would have been exposed to the Tasmanian Effect (See my enormous essay, the Tasmanian Effect, which considers various traps small populations can fall into, among other mental, and thus demographic disasters).

On top of that, technological advances insured that life was becoming possible for Sapiens in Eurasia. As Sapiens encroached, Neanderthals kept on living in more difficult, fluctuating places, thus propagating the extinction.

Hence the mystery of the evolution of contemporary man is smoothly explained. Just a bit of math. QED.

Europeans & Asians: Not Just African

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: what of the mentally deliquescent and racist article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society? First, they sank so low as to “using orbit size as a proxy, that Neanderthals had larger visual systems than contemporary AMH [Anatomically Modern Humans]“. That’s about as intelligent as saying that, because special forces use night vision goggles, they have got to have bigger visual systems.

The main woman author also found the same physiological feature, bigger eyes, in the past, about people presently living at high latitude. She contentedly asserted that, because light levels are lower in the north, people living in the north (40,000 years at least for Homo SS) have bigger eyes. Amusingly, she did not draw, in that case the conclusion that Norwegians and the English are therefore more stupid. Somehow, though, in her lack of smarts, she applies that controversial reasoning to Neanderthals. Does she have giant eyes?

Seriously the Oxford study rests on a central fact that contradicts one of established facts about Neanderthals. Indeed it claims Neanderthals’ brains were not any larger than Homo SS.

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Note 2; what catastrophes am I talking about? Well the climate fluctuated wildly, to start with. Second, A Campanian ignimbrite volcanic super-eruption around 40,000 years ago, followed by a second one a few thousand years later, certainly crashed Neanderthal populations (based on logic, and evidence from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus. Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a specimen there is C14 dated 29,000 years BP, one of the latest living pure Neanderthals). After such a catastrophe, the exponential rebounds of populations would have advantaged Homo SS, as explained above.

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Note 3: OK, I exaggerated with the mass ratio. (Mathematicians often do this, considering an exaggerated case to understand the mean, through the tails.) But the real mass ratio would be aggravated because, Neanderthal was built in such a way, relative to gracile Homo SS, that they consumed more calories per day (some paleontologists have come up with 300). So there is no doubt that the effect above will play a role, even if the mass ratios were not as bad. Notice the mechanism above would tend to extinguish the Neanderthal traits that were most characteristic of the subspecies.

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Note 4: A preferred trick of Neanderthals’ haters is to exhibit Archaic Neanderthals‘skulls, and compare them to those of modern men. The skull of an Archaic Neanderthal of 400,000 years ago should not be compared to a modern human, less than 40,000 year old! All the more since Neanderthals’ brain size augmented faster than the brain size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

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Note 5: NEAR-EXTINCTION THEORY: WHY DINOSAURS DISAPPEARED: SAME MATHEMATICS! Part of the mechanism above generalizes for other species in competition. It provides with a disappearance mechanism after ecological turbulence, according to species’ ecological footprint. The reasoning can be generalized to other species’ extinctions. Let’s recapitulate the preceding, while generalizing it:

1) it is hard to transform a near extinction event into total eradication (see the Black Plague of 1348 CE). Indeed, the more the extinction, the easier it gets for the survivors, as resources rebound (this is similar to the famous lynx-rabbit oscillation).

2) However, larger animals (Neanderthals, DINOSAURS), or animals with a higher metabolic load (Neanderthals) are going to be to be left behind exponentially, during the rebound phase.

In the case of Neanderthals the periodic catastrophes could have been of climatic origins (waves of cooling, warming and unstable climate as the earth underwent various tipping points, one way or another, into the occasionally severely glaciated period between 60 K and 11 K BP. A severe volcanic catastrophe or two would have added near extinctions episodes.

In the case of dinosaurs, the massive Deccan eruptions, over millions of years, culminated with the most acute episode, more or less contemporaneously with a massive asteroid impact (!). According to the exponential extinction theory above, the back and forth of near extinctions would have put a severe extinction pressure on the dinosaurs and the like, as smaller, more efficiently active mammals and birds would have put huge pressure on dinosaurs and flying reptiles (same in the sea).

T Rexes had to grow by three kilograms a day, for years (same for Triceratops, etc.). A huge energetic demand on the land… While smaller mammals could go through generations, adapting to changing circumstances…

By eating dinosaurs’ eggs to start with, mammal and bird population would have exploded very fast back up at any relief in the hyper volcanism catastrophe. And the more they rebounded, the greater the pressure on dinosaurs (This would have happened in addition to other extinction pressures, such as cooling.)

See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/trapped-by-super-traps/

Note 6: A first reading of the ideas above may lead one to wonder why it is that small species do not overwhelm big ones, when they are in competition. But, in normal circumstances, one has an equilibrium ecology, the equivalent of equilibrium thermodynamics. the effect above does not apply. The effect above, exponential extinction, occurs only during non equlibrium ecological dynamics, as found during near-extinction events (hence the importance of near-extinctions). It’s the equivalent of non equilibrium thermodynamics (when Prigogine suggested the latter, he was viewed as nuts; until he got the Nobel Prize). An example of this situation would be a proximal super-nova eruption showering Earth with radiation.