If they are right about the date now, why were they wrong in 1967? * It would be interesting to know what new dating method of the volcano deposit or what new interpretation of dating of the skulls themselves had led to the press release today.
But on the assumption that they did good science, several musements came to my mind...
The Skull People* 200,000 years ago when the two skulls were buried in the volcanic ash , their species were 15,000 years into the penultimate Ice Age that gripped the Earth at the time and they had about 85,000 years of extreme conditions to endure before the Earth warmed back up again.
Very likely the People of the Skulls lived in isolated packs like dogs, and in gangs like gorillas, with an operative language of a about a hundred words or so that allowed them a functional transfer of information and smoothed interaction with other human packs that they would often encounter. A hundred words is not much verbal ammunition with which to chit-chat but they probably didn’t have that much to say as they were ignorant about far reaching things. They apparently didn’t know how to make a fire, and they likely couldn’t properly chip a flint.
But even in equatorial Ethiopia life is hard during an Ice Age; glaciers cover the high mountains and rainfall is greatly diminished and at night it gets bitter cold in the winter.
And the People of the Skulls’ gave a “ Hobson’s choice” answer to the harsh Age of Ice.
And that answer was to huddle around the Equator like the animals they were and wait it out.
Recent Ice Ages * Recently, one billion years ago,
the Earth was frozen completely. Almost. The seas were frozen solid to a depth over a mile and all lands were glaciated over by thousands of feet of ice and snow.
We don’t know how this came about, and worse, we don’t know how Earth warmed up, but we do have a name for this, we call it “Snowball Earth”. Snowball Earth was discovered by deep-time geologists only ten years ago. One day one of the rock chipping boys woke up and said “Hey ! All these rocks from one billion years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian Period have been glaciated. This, duh, means that the entire Earth was an ice ball for 400 million years!”
“Ha!” said his colleagues, “ Well then, Mister Smarty Pants, where did all the teaming billions of strange plants and animals come ? Where were they hiding during the time of ice?”
No one knew. Known as the “Cambrian Explosion”suddenly, 600 million years ago, without preamble, complex creatures suddenly appeared by the millions in the warm Cambrian seas and today we wonder from whence they came.
( I know, but that’s another story,)
After the Cambrian Event the world continued to get hotter. There were a few temperature regressions during the Ordovician indicating that the Ice caps were growing and sea level was falling but world temperatures quickly flopped back and sea levels rose and the Earth continued getting warmer and warmer. In the Devonian Period bugs and men followed the plants onto the dry continents and explored the land and munched on the plants and each other. Most of the bugs looked somewhat like the bugs we see today but the men back the didn’t much look like men they looked like lizards.
And the world kept getting warmer.
The Carboniferous period saw sea levels rise and fall often but with little evidence of cold weather to interrupt or advance the ever-so-slow march of evolution.
And except for a little episode at the end of Paleozoic called the “Big Kill” where 75% of all
Families of plants and animals on the land and in the sea were dropped from the social register of the extant and the uncaring World just kept on getting hotter and hotter.
Until the end of the Cretaceous - the day the dinosaurs died; after theif unpleasant funeral the Earth has since gotten colder and colder with occasional interruptions interupting, continues this Earth destroying cooling trend to this very day.
Recent Ice Ages * Yeah, I know I already said “Recent Ice Ages” but this time I mean it.
About 2 million yeas ago, some 500,000 yeas after the closing of the isthmus of Panama by the thoughtless actions of plate tectonics , the modern series of Ice Ages began. The first Glacial/Interglacial sequence was divided evenly in time; about 50/50 between periods of hot and periods of cold. Afterwards the cold periods sneakedly extended until about one million years ago a ten-to-one ratio had been reached between cold and hot, and this has become the pattern that we all live under now.
HumanoidsSometime less than 5 million years ago, animals that can rightly be called “humanoids” (as opposed to apes) made a slight appearance in the fossil record. One of these humanoids begot us, we don’t know which. Well, to the devil with those distant relatives of ours who didn’t have the right stuff to make it through the trials and tribulations of the Ice ages... instead let’s talk about you and me.
Islands of Warmth within Vast Icy Seas and Physical Evolution and Social Evolution * Two million ago years five varieties of humanoids set out from the first Interglacial to reach today. The hard road took its toll and soon (a million and a half years later ) there were only two groups left to try to complete the arduous journey - the cro-magnons and the neanderthals.
Of course these were not the same groups that started out - they were changlings.- creatures who had evolved beyond what they had been when they first set out. (Hey wait a minute...five groups started out and four groups died out and two are left...that makes six. Damn, that makes the Cro-magnons and the Neanderthals brothers. What a strange World.) The point here is that the pressures of the glacial periods force biological and cultural changes to evolve at faster rate than in the Garden of Eden state of the Interglacials . Interglacials are for manifesting that which the harshness of the Glacials imposed on social a
