Neo-Pleistocene or Anthropocene: The ideology of the contemporary epoch

There is a bit of rhetoric around the idea that we have emerged into the Anthropocene, the third epoch of the Quaternary period. The time of man. Though some people disagree, it is growing as a popular zeitgeist. I have issue with the term. I think that it is similar to the flurry of contemporary art movements; as the dust of the present settles into the past only the lucky and the circumstantial remain fossilised and revered. The problem with dating or catagorising the present is that it is so visceral. In sensoral schizophrenia of being alive it is impossible to decipher the poignant. In the present, everything is important, everything is the centre, everything is the pinnacle.  The Anthropocene is just one of these contemporary labels; it is not an epoch and cannot be proven in the present. It is safer to suggest that we are still deep within the Holocene and will be for thousands of years to come. Nevertheless, those that will understand are so very far in the future speaking a strange language, counting in foreign numeracy and charting with technology none of us will ever know. 

The other issue is that labeling our era in this way it reorients it to be quite... anthropocentric. Geologists and paleontologists use epochs as a measure of time not a philosophical standpoint but it is almost impossible not to do as such. People read 'Anthropocene' and they hear 'power and influence'. A common misconstruction of the Anthropocene is that we have reached or are heading towards a state of control, that as the most prolific species on the planet we therefore will prosper for a long time. Catastrophic paleontologists, such a Peter Ward, have a more humbled view of our future, that we are a startling young yet to prove our chop, and far from a resilient species that spans geological epochs. Yes, we are the most wide spread. Yes, compared to other animals we can hugely manipulate our environment. Yes, we are the apex species. But none of these facts eschew a state of control or longevity.

Looking back through geological time through the lense of Darwinian evolution isn't it those that have run the longest race that are the winners, those that pass on their immortal genes onto the next generation? Homo sapiens are positively a hare compared to tortoises such as the Nautilus or the scorpion, and we may very well fall soon after leaving the starting blocks. We are a pathetic 200,000 years old compared to the archaic Nautilus at 500 million and the scorpion at 350 million years. Considering, as Ward says, that mass extinctions can occur at 1000 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere (We are currently at 380 ppm and climbing), our legacy may be nothing more than a few hundred thousand years and a peak of carbon in the geological history books. Tellingly, a rapacious extended phenotype and a large energy hungry brain may be seen as an evolutionary mistake compared to the well proven resilience of a thick exoskeleton or a poisonous appendage. I'm not one usually to quote the bible to substantiate my point of view, but throughout evolutions history with great catastrophic change it is the meek that shall inherit the earth. The tiny Megazostrodon, our earliest ancestor, lay in the wings waiting for dinosaurs to fall, to seize the world. So to are there thousands of meek species presently, biding their time, waiting for the fall of man and a global ecological reset.

Megazostrodon, our earliest ancestor

Waiting for an ecological reset

Size has never been an asset when facing a human. Our intelligence trumps size every time. With every invasion of Homo sapiens there has been a corollary wide spread extinction of megafauna. In some cases smaller relatives have lived on but all the largest animals were too delicious to refuse. What is also interesting is what may follow megafaunal extinction is a dramatic ecological fuck up that shifts the evolutionary paradigm, opening up opportunities for new species to take hold. Furthermore these extinction events, tens of thousands of years ago, result in what we recognise now as 'timeless' landscapes. Timeless landscapes that define nationalities, livelihoods, plasted on postcards and commodified in our fossil fuled international tourist habits. Its funny to think that some of our most loved landscapes are products of huge human induced mass extinctions and ecological destruction.  In Australia recent studies have concluded that aboriginal fireburning and hunting practices eventually led to the demise of Australian megafauna and as an unintended consequence changed the Australian landscape into what we know it as today. Though it seems quite obvious that megafauna extinction was caused by humans, being hypothesised by Tim Flannery in the early 1990s, It wasn't until July 2013 that it was scientifically proven. The paper states:

'This transient shift lasted for about 3,000 years and came after the period of human arrival and directly followed megafauna extinction at 48.9–43.6 kyr ago... vegetation change was the consequence of the extinction of large browsers and led to the build-up of fire-prone vegetation in the Australian landscape.' *

Dinner at the Rock, Uluru. The commodified landscape.

In a nutshell humans moved into Australia about 45,000 years ago. There was 3,000 years of bountiful harvest; eating and catching the megafauna easily. Either during or after this 3,000 period people started using fire for a variety of reasons, burning huge parts of the Australian landscape. Because of the fewer megafauna and the increased burning the vegetation moved from mixed forest/savannah to the hardier, fire loving, sclerophyllous bush we now know today. The landscape changed from forests and large grasslands dominated by large herbivores that maintained 'vegetation openness and patchiness, removing material that would otherwise fuel landscape fire, dispersing seeds and physically disturbing soil and recycling nutrients'* to denser scrubby bush prone to fires and undisturbed by the much smaller soft footed marsupials that survived. The key here is that the decrease in megafauna (from human hunting) caused the vegetational change. The new ecological paradigm, of sclerophyllous plants, was reliant on human rather than megafaunal influence to be maintained.

These studies are good steps towards understanding how the first Australian adapted to their new found land. The arresting hypothetical is that the aborigines initially for 3,000 years knew little about how the landscape worked. After the easy meals of megafauna they changed methods to fire-stick farming, maybe for hunting kangaroos, maybe for propogating more grassland, or the bush potato. The untintended consequence of this was a massive ecological shift that has been in place for the last 40,000 years. Though it is a bit of an extreme analogy, these first few years of large scale burning, must have been the equivalent of dynamite fishing, devastating large swathes of mixed forest landscape. Maybe if we too keep dynamite fishing for 40,000 years we will reach a new ecologically rich sea scape, reliant on the necessary disturbance of T.N.T.

A 40,000 year history of burning the landscape

A 40 year history of bombing the seascape

I'm being provocative but the point I'm trying to make is that maybe the mentality of the first Australians in those early periods was not one of deep understanding, conservation or symbiosis with the plentiful lands that they found. They hunted unsustainably for thousands of years and burned the place to the ground, pushing the environment to its limits and forcing a new anthropocentric ecological paradigm.

It was only after this initial 3,000 year shift, with the emergence of the new Australian landscape that the aboriginal people began to understand and work with the land they created. The large beast were relegated to myth and Australia became a place where tales megafauna was passed down through song lines and stories to scare the children into behaving. One that still survives today is the Australian Bunyip. A large swamp dwelling man eater maybe based on the giant wombat or the marsupial lion. Stories are all that is left of Australia’s megafaunal history but environmental scientist like Tim Flannery, in his book The Future Eaters, and other movements such as Rewilding Europe are hypothesizing and experimenting on reintroducing large species into degraded environments. Flannery for example proposes to reintroduce the Komodo dragon as a replacement to the ancient Megalania as an apex predator, something the Australian landscape doesn’t have. The global trend is the continuing extinction of megafauna and this drastic conservation strategy is both exciting and daunting. The idea to re-orient our fears of megafauna and to reinstate them into environments they have been absent for millennia may be just as ecologically influential as those that decimated them all those years ago.

The Bunyip

The real bunyip?

Komodo dragons (1) are a potential replacement for the Megalania (3) as a apex predator, of which Australia hasn't had for 40,000 years.

What is fascinating for me is that this conservation idea, to bring back a megafaunal ecology to Australia and other parts of the world, has come about at this point in time when people have been talking about the Anthropocene. As the populist dialogue looks to the anthropogenic elements of our world to define the zeitgeist the cutting edge ecological debate is looking to the pre-human world, the Pleistocene (2.588 million to 11,700 years) for solutions to our environmental problems. This 'Neo-Pleistocene' mentaility may be a psychological trope, or antidote, to our current over exposure to human dominated environments. As the world population grows and the great exodus from the country side into the city unfolds the duality between the all to human urban environment will be emotionally offset by a more intensified Neo-Pleistocenic mentality, a yearning for the pre-human landscape.

From megafaunal extinctions to potential reintroductions defining our present age of ecological crisis is a bizarre contradiction of 3 potential epochs. We exist in the Holocene or even the Anthropocene and look nostalgically back to the Pleistocene. As I said in the beginning, those in the present cannot explain their place in history and maybe the best we can hope for is poetic hypotheses. Therefore I entertain, looking back through time this may be less a start of a new epoch and more an end of a very old one. We may be at the end of a long history of megafaunal influence on the planet and we are looking at a future where only the small and the nimble may survive. Over the past 200,000 years, a time spanning both the Pleistocene and Holocene, with the proliferation of homo sapiens there has been a continual decline in megafaunal species. As megafauna can be liberally categorised at more than 45 kg I include humans in the category. Following this trend, maybe in the foreseeable future, only humans and the few domesticated species (cows, horses) will remain. From a whole world of super species to just a hand full. We may become the last megafaunal species, the end of an epoch.


* Abrupt vegetation change after the Late Quaternary megafaunal extinction in southeastern Australia, Raquel A. Lopes dos Santos et al. 1 July 2013, Nature Geoscience.