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Media, Culture and Human Violence
From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity
By Jeff Lewis Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 Jeff Lewis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-516-1
CHAPTER 1
The Cultural Animal
THE CALDERA AND ME
I am a frequent visitor to Lake Toba, a caldera sitting high the volcanic ranges of Sumatra, Indonesia. According to local mythology, the spring waters that feed the lake rise from Aek Sipangolu, the Stone of Eternity. It is said that the waters are so pure they will cure illness, repair broken bones and restore youthful vigour to ageing bodies. A resting place for souls on their journey to heaven, Lake Toba has become renowned for its serene, almost ethereal, scenic beauty.
Yet lying within this sleepy vista, there is also a vague and disquieting sense of menace. Stories of walking ghosts and shattering thunder abound. Visitors often speak of restless sleep, and local villagers warn of an angry Earth and demons that creep about in the thickets and reeds that line the Toba shores. They speak of a dark secret that is buried in the deep waters, and sometimes is whispered to the cool morning mists. This secret, they say, is borne in the soft scent of lava and ash that drifts around Sumatra's volcanic ranges.
Lake Toba, in fact, is the world's largest volcanic caldera. Stretching over three hundred square kilometres and reaching depths of up to five hundred metres, the lake represents the afterbirth of the Earth's most powerful volcanic eruption of the past twenty-five million years. The Toba lake lies over one of only several of the planet's 'supervolcanoes'. These are the volcanoes that have ejected over one thousand cubic kilometres (km3) of volcanic material, ash and gases into Earth's biosphere. Supervolcanoes, like Toba and the Huckleberry Ridge Caldera in America's Yellowstone National Park, are thousands of times more powerful than conventional volcanoes, and are usually associated with the extremely unstable impact zones that stretch around the Earth's tectonic plates. Indonesia is one of the hotspots along the tectonic zone that is known as the Ring of Fire.
Toba is the most powerful of these supervolcanoes, releasing over 2,800 km3 of ejecta into the biosphere. Toba is particularly significant because it erupted around 74,000 years Before Present (BP), which is within the twohundred-thousand-year span of anatomically modern human habitation on Earth. The only other supervolcano to have erupted during this time span at 28,000 BP occurred at Lake Taupo in New Zealand's North Island. While still a very powerful eruption, the Taupo ejecta was less than half the volume of the Toba supervolcano.
According to most geologists and palaeobotanists, the density and volume of Toba's ejecta created a dark and noxious sulphuric cloud that covered much of the Earth's surface. The ash and other ejecta blanketed forests and grasslands, disrupting the food chains and destroying whole ecosystems. Waterways were contaminated, and marine life perished. The sulphur cloud blocked the sun and created the conditions of a volcanic winter as insolation levels plummeted and plants were deprived of sunlight for photosynthesis. While the duration and impact of this winter is debated, clear evidence of its presence has been found in alluvial and botanical residues dating to this period.
Many scientists and scholars believe that the volcanic winter brought a range of species — including humans — to the brink of extinction. There is certainly clear genomic evidence that around the time of the Toba eruption the whole human population experienced a radical and rapid decline known as a population 'bottleneck'. The total population of modern humans around this time had declined to around two thousand individuals. The genetic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that these populations were largely confined to areas in East and Northeast Africa, and the areas of the Middle East that are closest to Africa (the Levant). Thus, while earlier hominids like Homo erectus had left Africa and occupied various parts of Eurasia, anatomically modern humans only evolved around 200,000 BP and had not migrated beyond the African doorstep until much later. This 'Out of Africa' theory argues that modern humans didn't journey into Eurasia until some time after the population bottleneck, possibly as recently as sixty thousand years ago.
The circumstantial evidence suggests to many archaeologists and anthropologists that this population bottleneck was caused by the Toba volcanic winter. One archaeologist, Stanley Ambrose, argues that the rapid and dramatic change to climatic conditions precipitated by Toba significantly challenged all species that were accustomed to a warmer and more humid climate. Ambrose claims that the human population bottleneck occurred contemporaneously with a rapid population decline in many of the primates of East Africa and Southeast Asia — including our near species cousins, the chimpanzees. This impact parallels the likely effects of the volcanic winter on humans.
The extent of the volcanic cloud has been confirmed by a number of archaeologists examining botanical and ash residues in East Africa. Studying the mud residues in Lake Malawi in East Africa, one group of researchers found an extraordinary density of volcanic shards associated with the Toba eruption some seven thousand kilometers from the lake. Other researchers have found evidence of significant climate and botanical effects of the Toba eruption in India. While the duration and full impact of the Toba eruption continues to be researched and debated, there can be no doubting the circumstantial connection between the supervolcano and the severe bottleneck in the human population around seventy-three thousand to seventy-four thousand years ago.
PHEW: OUR NEAR EXTINCTION
Some scientists argue that Toba was not the only contributor to the population bottleneck of 74,000 years BP. These scientists suggest that disease, or some other environmental catastrophe, may have already weakened the human population. In these circumstances the volcanic winter may have been the final contributing factor to the survival crisis. Whatever factors conspired against our species, it is very clear that this near extinction event decimated the modern human clans of Africa, unravelling their economic and social fabric.
It may be that the force and allure of Lake Toba is underscored by this cataclysm, this apocalyptic moment in our human history. While science works to reveal the ecological and biogenetic impact of the event, we can only imagine the cultural and personal horror that the survivors must have experienced. These people, who had essentially the same brains, bodies, emotions, needs and desires as you and I, must have witnessed the dramatic withering away of their families and communities. They would have watched in a state of abject sorrow as all the people who had enriched their lives and given meaning to their emotions and pleasures began to perish — parents, partners, siblings, friends and children.
In the aftermath of the horror, the survivors no doubt would have wondered about the vacuity and mystery of it all. Bearing their own deep emotional and psychological wounds, they would have faced the terrible prospect of rebuilding their lives, economy, social bonds and cultures. With the meanings and loves that had held their social group together now in ruins, the survivors might have gazed anew at the evening skies and contemplated an immensity that had stripped bare their world and reduced them to a condition of fear and grief that could not be exorcised by words nor the consoling ideals of enlightened knowing.
Even so, these isolated and scattered bands were the fount of a new beginning, a new hope for the species. These new humans, agents of the apocalypse, would take us forward into a new future, a new phase of being human.
AGENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE
As a scattered group of individuals and clans, the surviving humans weren't able to meet and adopt a systematic response to the catastrophe. They would not have conceived of themselves as part of a species under threat, though of course they would have felt the imperatives of survival and a need for creative solutions to their immediate plight. Either way, the groups gradually recovered, developing new relationships and mechanisms for repopulation. Like other species that had faced a bottleneck and extinction threat, the surviving humans sought new opportunities for prosperity and enjoyment in life.
While they were genetically the same, these 'new' humans were somehow different from their predisaster antecedents. In many respects, these new humans laid the foundations for all that is to follow, leading up to the present and the humans we have become. If we are to understand ourselves, and our present plights and pleasures, then we need to look to this critical moment, this new beginning, when our human origins made a major shift in direction, much of which can be attributed to the near extinction event.
This shift has been generally well understood by archaeologists who define the period from around 70,000 to 10,000 years BP as the Upper Palaeolithic, or Late Stone Age. Again, however, the dating is crucial as it overlaps with the period in which the survivors of the near extinction event undergo phenomenal changes in their cultural, economic, technological and social practices. So complete and far reaching are these changes that we might risk describing this period as the true origin of our humanness, the period in which humans invented culture and, in some ways, invented themselves.
The near extinction event, therefore, is directly related to the following changes.
1. Reduction in Genetic Variability: The Founder Effect
One of the major effects of the near extinction event was to significantly reduce the gene variability in the human population. Geneticists have demonstrated that humans today have very little genetic variation. Examining the genomes of different ethnic and regional groups, scientists have concluded that all humans are 99.5 percent identical with variations on particular gene alleles providing the biological variability that distinguishes each individual human. Other than some very minor genetic differences associated with familial traits and mutations on these alleles, humans across the planet share a very narrow range of genes. This similarity suggests a very small and quite recent gene source. Humans, in fact, have a much narrower genetic diversity than most other animal species, including chimpanzees.
This limited gene variation is more clearly evident in particular human groups. Homo sapiens who remained in Africa after the near extinction event, for example, have slightly more genetic diversity than non-Africans. The non-African groups are the descendants of those human clans who migrated out of Africa and the African Near East some time after the near extinction event. Geneticists suggest that their lower level of diversity is most likely due to the small size of the clans and groups who immigrated into new terrains. Having lost a great deal of genetic diversity through the population bottleneck, these migratory clans moved away from the founder populations, leaving the migrants with considerably reduced breeding choices — and hence a very limited gene pool. In what is called the 'founder effect', this means that these very small populations of immigrants experienced a 'genetic drift': that is, particular genes simply disappeared because of the small breeding options.
This founder effect has been identified in other human population bottlenecks when small breakaway groups of humans colonize new terrains and then become isolated or have limited breeding (and hence genetic) options. As well as genetic drift and disappearance, the founder effect can also influence the frequency of other genes associated with physical traits (height, skin pigment, eye colour) and susceptibility to particular disease. The Dutch Afrikaner people who colonized South Africa, for example, have an unusually high rate of Huntington's disease. This is most likely because the early settlers carried the gene, and with limited breeding options, the gene became amplified across the community.
2. Population Rebound
Human population rebounded significantly following the near extinction disaster. This rebound may simply be the result of the original threat — disease, environmental hazard, loss of habitat — subsiding or exhausting itself. With the threat removed, the species is then able to return to its previous survival, economic and reproductive practices.
Humans, of course, have a greater capacity than most other species for deliberation and strategic thinking. In the course of the Upper Palaeolithic period, following the near extinction disaster, some human groups may have deliberately expanded their population numbers, believing in a principle of populate or perish. Such strategies may have evolved for defensive reasons — not only as a defence against the violent attacks of other groups but also as a buffer to prevent devastation of the clan's population from other threats.
This strategy was by no means a simple one as increased numbers also involved increased pressure on resources. The combination of inherited trauma, population increase and related resource requirements perhaps contributed to the human migration and territorial expansion. As we will discuss in later chapters, this trajectory of population increase and territorialism are also linked to increases in intergroup tensions and sporadic forms of conflict. Demography, in fact, becomes a primary survival issue for these new humans during the course of the Upper Palaeolithic period. This issue is also critical to the closure of the period, beginning around eleven thousand years ago and escalating through to the present population crises.
3. Migration and New Resources
Migration and the further dispersal of the species was certainly part of the new humans' survival strategy. It has become increasingly clear that modern humans began a significant migratory journey out of Africa some time around the era of the population bottleneck and release. The precise dates of these migrations remain a matter of debate, but most archaeologists are convinced that it began around seventy-five to fifty thousand years ago.
These dates are now based on a combination of genetic and archaeological evidence. As noted, non-Africans have slightly less genetic diversity than Africans. The timing of the genetic separation of the two groups coincides with the presence of modern humans in Europe around 45,000 years Before Present, and in Australia around fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand years ago.
Like population increase, these patterns of migration and mobility remain a significant feature of human practices into the present global conditions. Clearly, these migratory practices represent a significant survival strategy, as well as a potential source of human pleasure and conflict.
4. Language, Self-Consciousness and the Shock of Knowing
The trauma of the near extinction event may well have driven some human groups into new geographic regions with new economic opportunities. It may be, therefore, that the near extinction crisis propelled the new humans into a great leap forward, which also carried them into new cultural and technological horizons. Certainly, the migrations that bore these modern human groups into Asia, Europe and Australia required innovative ways of thinking, new strategies of social organization and powerful new technological systems.
As we have noted, archaeologists distinguish this period of experimentation and cultural change, dividing the Palaeolithic period (Stone Age) into two distinct phases — Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. While more of a cultural than chronological category, the Middle Palaeolithic (200,000 to 70,000 BP) is distinguished by the rise of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) as a separate hominid species. During the Middle Palaeolithic, before the near extinction event, anatomically modern humans were culturally very similar to archaic humans such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals. They used similar tools, roughly shaped from stone, and they lived in similar social and organizational systems. For over one hundred thousand years, therefore, modern humans' lifestyles, community organization and basic technologies were largely indistinguishable from their larger and more robust human cousins.
The Upper Palaeolithic is usually dated between 70,000 to 10,000 years Before Present, and it is characterized by dramatic changes in human cultures. According to most archaeologists, this is the period when anatomically modern humans also became culturally modern. It is when Homo sapiens sapiens (wise wise man) became culturally as well as biologically different from archaic humans, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.
While we can't say for certain that the near extinction experience caused these changes, it is clear that the experience contributed to the range of dramatic cultural changes that occurred during the Upper Palaeolithic period. These changes set the trajectory that would also lead humans out of the Palaeolithic into agriculture, mass urbanization, industrialization and the global present.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Media, Culture and Human Violence by Jeff Lewis. Copyright © 2016 Jeff Lewis. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc..
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