梦想家从山上降下来 - dreamers down from the mountains - part one

Why the secrets to humanity's origins as well as our shared fate can only be found within the myths, fables, and dreams we left behind on the Roof of the World.

The Tibetan Plateau.

“Hold my hand in yours, and we will not fear what hands like ours can do.”

-The Epic of Gilgamesh

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This story is going to take some time.

In fact, it’s going to take more time than you think has ever existed. And then it is going to take that time, chew it up, and spit it back out at you. At which point you’ll take a little nibble - and begin a journey that will change everything you think you know about this world.

But if that sounds a bit intimidating, don’t worry - you won’t be going alone, as Joseph Campbell assured us many years ago in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book which first presented the idea of a cyclical Hero’s Journey that encapsulates everything from the trials, persecution, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the overarching plot of the original Star Wars trilogy:

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread… And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

So take a deep breath, because you’re going to need all you can hold.

And then when you finally resurface from this journey, you’ll rub your eyes and be able to remember the hopes and the dreams and the memories that you share with all humanity. So the world, and your place in it, will never look quite the same ever again.

You are going to realize that True Love has been somewhere you’d never thought to look, waiting for you through a door you’d never even noticed was there at all.

Or don’t worry about any of this, and walk away from these words. As soon as you do, maybe you’ll start feeling better. “You’ll remember you don’t believe in any of this fate crap. You’re in control of your own life, remember?”

Seth Casteel

At some point in the neighborhood of seven-million years ago (7mya) our ancestors began to walk upright, in fits and spurts at first since the transition down from the trees was a gradual one that wasn’t finished until about 3mya. So given how ubiquitous great ape populations were across much of Africa and Eurasia, and considering that at this point - millions of years back - the Earth was in a Hothouse period without a single glacier to be found even around our poles, odds are that for several million years, it was a Planet of the Somewhat Upright Apes.

Waving their hands in the air like they just didn’t care, and which were now able to hold and manipulate tools with greater ease than their cousins, these very ancient ancestors of ours were likely bipedal enough not to be mistaken for chimps or other simians – however everything we know about the genetic changes that indicate our shared homo sapien modernity tells us that becoming human is about a lot more than bipedalism.

And several million years ago the Earth was a much warmer place, with vast stretches of tepid seas and lakes covering much of northern Eurasia’s present-day tundra - from the Caucus Mountains out to the edges of what’s now a very frozen Siberia - abundant vegetation and the concomitant fauna likely made this semi-tropical life fairly bucolic for our bipedal brethren. As they meandered, at least a handful of our proto-hominid ancestors made their way onto what’s today known as the Roof of the World – the Tibetan Plateau. Far and away the most elevated region on Earth, it now has an average elevation of about 4,500 meters above sea-level – roughly half the 9,000 meter height that jetliners typically cruise at.

And so today, jetliners need to be pressurized way down well below their actual cruising height, to the equivalent of just about 2,400 meters above sea-level to make long-distance flight bearable for the humans held inside, since exposure to the actual atmospheric conditions at 9,000 meters would suck the consciousness out of everyone inside, and the 4,500 meters of today’s Tibetan Plateau would create almost unbearable discomfort within a dozen or so minutes due to the lowered oxygen levels. Having the atmospheric conditions inside planes set to about 2,400 meters is bearable but still stressful, since at anywhere above about 1,800 meters, the human body and especially our brains immediately begins to have trouble maintaining enough blood-oxygen saturation to operate optimally.

So although jetlag is awful but inevitable when you spend several hours hundreds of meters above where our bodies are meant to function optimally, it would be far worse if plane cabins weren’t pressurized down to a reasonable level. But oddly enough, “reasonable” turns out to mean an altitude about half as high as the highest place on Earth - planes aren’t decompressed all the way down to sea-level, they’re decompressed to something closer to the height of the Tibetan Plateau as it was roughly two-million years ago, about 2,400 meters - an elevation humans can easily tolerate for several hours at a time, although spending more time than that is another story.

The Tibetan Plateau has always been a place of incredible flux, it’s one of the most geothermically active places on the planet since for tens of millions of years the tectonic plate that India rests on has been getting jammed ever-so-slightly more beneath it, causing its height to increase significantly over the millennia - often in fits and spurts, and not always predictably. So back in time about 2.1mya, it would’ve been much lower than the 4,500 meters it averages now.

And although the Tibetan Plateau is thought to rise about 3 millimeters annually, this rate is a rather inexact estimate and is known to be highly variable across timeframes and regions of the Plateau, especially when erosion is factored in to the actual increase in height over time. So although it’s hard to say for sure exactly what elevation a given region of the Roof of the World was back over two million years ago, significant portions - like the Zanda Basin, the apparent cradle of Ice Age megafauna - were much lower than their current height of about 4,000 meters above sea level, and were somewhere around jetliners’ cruising altitude of 2,400 meters. And in other places the Plateau was a bit lower, closer to the elevation of today’s United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, roughly 1,800 meters.

Stressful for the modern homo sapien, but at an altitude that’s thought to super-charge athletic performance back down at sea-level after acclimation occurs.

Some kid about to get second place wrestling at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and then go on to forget all the lessons he learned from that.

Since humans, like all mammals, are extraordinarily finely-tuned organisms, the most complex Gaia has ever seen – as we encounter differences in elevation, our entire physiology is immediately challenged. And our brains can serve as wrinkly crystal balls to examine the nature of these challenges, since it’s an almost preposterously complex organ, as delicate as it is complex. For instance, a surprisingly small amount of force can cause someone to lose consciousness, just 5psi, or roughly the same force required to crack an egg.

Quickly look to the side. Now look back to this screen. Now look to the side again.

That’s all the force it takes to cause you to lose consciousness if contact occurs unexpectedly, or if you’re Ben Askren. Plenty of metaphors about trillions of stars and sand-grains have attempted to explain the genomic and physical complexity of the human brain, but perhaps the most salient thing to understand is that the same force that can crack and egg can kill us, and simply having to go up a really tall hill begins to change absolutely everything about our brain’s metabolism as our blood-oxygen concentration begins to decrease.

The principle underlying this observation, that genomic complexity and often physical fragility become increasingly fine-tuned and delicate the more advanced an organism becomes, is Maximum Genetic Diversity (MGD), which starts from the observation that regions of the genome mutate at different rates, and then goes on to challenge an enormous amount of assumed genetic dogma.

Regardless of how much of MGD makes sense to you though, the reality is that the changes in air pressure and oxygen concentration that come with increasing altitude are a very predictable stressor on all mammalian brains, and elicit a predictable set of metabolic responses and epigenetic adjustments. Which likely helps explain why “in less than 4 million years, a relatively short time in evolutionary terms, the hominid brain thus grew to three times the size it had achieved in 60 million years of primate evolution” - since our brains were racing to adapt to the increasing altitude and swelling like rising balloons as the Tibetan Plateau was pushed up into the sky, braincases burgeoning as they expanded to make room for the increasing complexity within.

And it turns out, just about all of these changes are also regulated by the dive reflex, which is also known as the Master Switch of Life, which turns on the moment our face-holes are submerged in any water at all. 

Then after we descend past just about a dozen meters, we go through the Doorway to the Deep, and reach a state of almost fetal stasis where neutral buoyancy allows us to simply float without being pulled in either direction. Here the Master Switch of Life will have been thrown all the way open, and decreasing oxygen concentrations and increasing carbon-dioxide accelerate the changes that were started as soon as your face was submerged. A cascade of physiological changes begins, echoed by fact that the only rapid increase in the relative brain size of the common ancestor to dolphins and whales happened back when it first became fully aquatic, forcing their brains to operate continually while breath-holding - a similar stress as the constant lower-oxygen found at high altitude.   

Dive enough and spend enough time through the Doorway to the Deep, and in time this Master Switch will have earned its moniker by turning on the series of epigenetic changes that allows someone to handle continued deep-diving underwater. So with training, humans can acclimate to spend more and more time through the Doorway to the Deep, eventually swimming alongside the dolphins and whales who learned to do it many millions of years ago.

Members of the Bajau, sea nomads who people Southeast Asia’s inlets and oceans, or anyone lucky enough to have their common mutation which grants them their diving-enhancing enlarged spleens, will do it faster than the rest of us – but in general any human can hold their breath for several minutes, once enough practice forces the concomitant epigenetic adjustments. Perhaps its also a good time to point out that the genes which grant the Bajau this underwater oxygen-rationing adaptation can be traced back to the Roof of the World, since they are strongly associated with our ancient extinct high-altitude cousins, the Denisovans, who left bones high up in the Altai Mountains to the north of the Tibetan Plateau and on the Plateau itself. And who tellingly left genes that both help modern Tibetans adapt to less oxygen at high altitude, and other similar genes thousands of miles away that help the Bajau quickly adapt to prolonged diving and the subsequent oxygen efficiency that’s required.

Seems kinda important that one of only a handful of extinct hominid ancestors left a genetic legacy that can only be found in two places today, both of which point to going through the Doorway to the Deep and the Master Switch of Life, and requiring the most efficient oxygen metabolism possible: Either within humans dwelling at high altitudes, and those who habitually dive underwater for prolonged periods and are subject to that low-oxygen environment.

And although the human brain didn’t evolve underwater, it will always be subject to the Master Switch, as all vertebral animals are thought to be. So as our ancestors made their way onto the then much stumpier Tibetan Plateau about 7mya, it was filled with geothermic lakes and hot springs, making it plenty inviting. Then over the next five-million years, the Roof of the World would really earn its name. Unusually hot from the tectonic activity beneath it, it would steadily rise just a few millimeters a year. However five-million years is quite the hefty epoch, enough time for parts of the Roof of the World to slowly rise to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,400 meters above sea level, back some 2.1mya.

So the Somewhat Upright Apes who had originally made their way onto the Roof of the World roughly 7mya, drawn up into its hills by the heated springs and vast sacred lakes, would’ve had to slowly acclimate to life at higher altitudes over the next five-million years of almost imperceptible rise. And so these hominids, our High-Altitude Most Recent Common Ancestors (Hamrcas), would’ve become uniquely attuned to life at higher elevations compared to the simian and hominid cousins we left below. Since modern humans generally have to spend a few days acclimating to the altitude found at the Olympic Training Center before they can function normally, that means there’s an invisible ceiling somewhere above 1,800 meters that humans run into, where we can still function but begin to suffer headaches and other indications that our metabolism isn’t working quite right, especially while trying to sleep at night.

Göbekli Tepe

And so as the Tibetan Plateau rose bit-by-bit, but in geologic terms absolutely flying up into the sky, the local flora would’ve done what it always does after going through the rabbit-hole of high altitude, and shrunken. So millimeter by millimeter and year by year, with trees turning into bushes, the Hamrcas would’ve slowly adjusted to the lack of habitable trees by becoming more-and-more acclimated to walking-around upright, and spent far less time climbing in the now vertically-challenged trees - finally becoming fully bipedal about 3mya when all that was left to climb on the Roof of the World was basically shrubbery.

And right about the same time, one final accidental adaptation gave us our own distinguishing moniker, as we only became the Hairless Ape about 3mya, after the Roof of the World finally pushed its way up through enough elevation to mimic the low-oxygen environment found down in the waters past the Doorway to the Deep, accidentally converging on the same epigenetic switch that causes deep-diving aquatic mammals to lose their fur. But because we weren’t actually submerged, humanity was pushed through another more esoteric doorway as well - one you’ve already walked through without even realizing it.

And so after we’d been hairless for about one-million years, right about when significant portions of the Roof of the World had risen to somewhere a bit under 1,800 meters above sea-level - roughly the highest elevation humans can tolerate without too much acclimation today - it was about 2.1mya and this bucolic dream came to a sudden and cataclysmic end when over in North America the gargantuan Yellowstone Caldera detonated somewhere in the neighborhood of a New Jersey’s worth of fiery molten debris up into the atmosphere.

This volcanic cataclysm created a pitch-black global winter that lasted at least 50 years, and accelerated the ongoing Icehouse era that we’re technically still in - although glaciation around the poles had begun at the start of the Pleistocene about 2.6mya, it wasn’t until after 2mya that the icecaps would fully re-form around both our poles, weighting the world into its predictable off-kilter wobble beneath the stars throughout the Pleistocene Ice Age, which formally began about 1.8mya.

So, making the Horoscope look like an amateur, over the past roughly two-million years, the Earth has been steadily rotating through multiple worldwide ecological cycles, one a 41,000 year rolling rotation in the angle of the planet’s tilt like a dancing dreidel getting ready to fall which changes the intensity of our seasons and tropical rainfall, and another longer 100,000 year cycle of the Earth’s orbit, bringing us closer then farther from the Sun and the concomitant changes in sunlight exposure and glacial formation. All of which get punctuated by volcanic cataclysms with well-established relationships to periods of extinction and speciation all across the Earth.

And so, watching the rotations of our little blue marble from space, the volcanic event that rippled away from the Yellowstone Caldera was so cataclysmic that it helped lock us in these rhythmic worldwide ecological cycles, and accelerated the transition between Hothouse and Icehouse phases of global temperatures that either erases or replaces the glaciers at our poles - blocking out the sun for several decades following the blast. As all of this happened, the temperature instantly dropped about four degrees Fahrenheit across the entire face of the Earth for at least 20 years - completely shattering every extant ecological cycle.

The carnivorous fossil record bears witness to this climatic apocalypse, as right around 2mya there’s a massive dispersal of large predators all across Eurasia and Africa starting from the Roof of the World, which was characterized by “climatic deterioration for Eurasian fauna.” This phenomenon is known as the “Wolf Event,” since their canine remains track the Ice Age megafauna that appear to have simultaneously emerged with our most ancient wolfs from the Tibetan Plateau’s Zanda Basin, beginning a pursuit of predator and prey across veldts and mountains - a hungry, fanged refugee crisis that stretched all the way into Africa and across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas.

And so our ancestors, the Hamrcas, would’ve watched astonished from the Roof of the World with furry friends gathered close around us, as from the distant east a darkness was snaking its ancient tendrils out across the horizon to coil itself around the heavens - slowly stretching out to strangle all the light from the skies, and intertwine itself forever with all of our fates.    

Not Yellowstone, but who cares AMIRITE?!

Chinese mythology was first chronicled in The Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), a mythic compendium of beasts and legends thought to date back to the beginning of time. And like all legendary collections, a creation myth of the Chinese people features prominently among these pages, along with other stories such as the Golden Silkworm and a Great Flood.

And so of course to fight back against the interminable forces of heaven and earth, humanity has always needed its heroes.

First among the Chinese pantheon are Nüwa, the Chinese mother-goddess who was both sister and wife to Fuxi, the Emperor-God. If that’s rolling tide a bit too hard for your taste, keep in mind that these were mythical beings with the faces of humans but the bodies of snakes. Another recounting of this origin story makes it a directly incestual Adam and Eve creation myth, and the lovers hide their kindred shame with a fan held up between them - a practice still alluded today, and which is similar to how couples in Alabama often utilize cans of Miller Lite.

So keep in mind that this creation myth involved demigods, meaning mores around incest don’t exactly have much of a place. And yet, also keep in mind that this myth also revolves around an era when Heaven and Earth were thrown entirely off-kilter since the pillars holding up the sky had collapsed:

Going back to more ancient times, the four pillars were broken, the nine provinces were in tatters. Heaven did not completely cover the ground, Earth did not hold up the sky all the way around its circumference.

Fires blazed out of control and could not be extinguished, water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferocious animals ate blameless people; predatory birds snatched the elderly and the weak.

Thereupon, Nüwa smelted together five-colored stones in order to patch up the azure sky, cut off the legs of the great turtle to set them up as the four pillars, killed the black dragon to provide relief for Ji Province, and piled up reeds and cinders to stop the surging waters. The azure sky was patched, the four pillars were set up, the surging waters were drained, the province of Ji was tranquil, crafty vermin died off, blameless people preserved their lives.

Doesn’t seem too far off from how we’d expect the Hamrcas to report surviving the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera and the subsequent exodus off of it, does it? Especially considering that prior to 2.1mya and Yellowstone popping-off, the Hamrca population on top of the Roof of the World would’ve been relatively homogenous due to the lack of cold winters, abundant water, and eventually most importantly of all – nearly ubiquitous geothermal vents.

And luckily for us, some did in fact survive, however the population bottleneck created by a roughly 50-year winter would’ve been extreme, and certainly deleterious mutations due to incest would’ve been something a geneticist would’ve been worried about in the survivors, as most human populations have adopted the same stigma against step-bros, even on the Asian steppe, though. However it’s notable that cousin marriage is a far more flexible concept, especially if a bunch of your cousins are super hot, and genetically-speaking, simply a matter of degree.

So let’s say for argument’s sake that perhaps this seminal Chinese creation myth has some bearing in reality. If it’s true, then there should be evidence somewhere. If the Hamrcas who became the East Asian population – today represented in the greatest numbers in China – then we’d expect to find some kind of ecological niche perhaps just a bit to the east of Tibetan Plateau which might have cradled this refugee population fleeing the Roof of the World, keeping it safe from the massive blackened serpent that seemed to be trying to consume the entire sky.  

It might be pretty hard to find though, so while you’re off consulting a map. I’m gonna be right here with Snoop and Martha, taking care a little bidness.

Elevation map of the Roof of the World

Humans have a rather unique relationship with our languages, squiggles turn into letters that turn into concepts which turn into meanings, that can become intent and eventually we have a Constitution. Because when it’s all said and done, that is in fact all America is – a collection of words. No one takes an oath to preserve and protect any borders, or any one life - we take an oath to preserve and protect a set of ideals. After all, as Tyler Durden put it:

“The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives.

And that's the only lasting thing you can create.”

So our language is both nothing and everything all at once, collections of vibrating air and visible marks can be totally meaningless, or they can unlock the keys to everything that makes us who we are. And so a shared relationship between words and peoples almost always reflects genetic descent, language was quite literally the first shibboleth for culture, and linguistic relationships oftentimes hint at some kind of ancient shared historical reality.

However one that most of us take for granted, is that all across the entire globe, for the scoundrels who imbibe the Devil’s lettuce, no matter what language they’re speaking the sensation reportedly involves a feeling of lightness, or flying, or simply… getting high. And curiously, this scourge of modern civilizations and all decent, civilized, societies is thought to have originally emerged – you might wanna take a hit first here – on the Tibetan Plateau, back on our ancestral home back up on the Roof of the World.

But to be fair to our most recent common ancestors (MRCAs), the protohominids who hadn’t yet acclimated to the altitude of the Roof of the World, the sticky-icky of 7mya would’ve been neither particularly sticky nor icky. As any old stoner will tell you, even the weed of just a few decades ago was far tamer than today’s bespoke hydroponic strains that can send you straight up a giraffe’s ass faster than you blink. Reportedly.

Plus the cannabis plant isn’t just a leaf, its fibers are still used today to make hemp – a fiber that’s superior to cotton and wool and many others when it comes to weathering and pliability. And it has extraordinarily nutritious seeds as well, as the raw cannabis plant is arguably a superfood that contains all of the carbs, fat, protein, fiber, and even omega-3s, as well as minerals.

Everything, as they say, the body needs.  

However of course it also contains THC, a relatively tame psychoactive compound that can hijack the body’s endogenous endocannabinoid system to create time distortions and sensory illusions, but mostly makes you really tired and ready to fucking crush some Doritos. And the good news is that our bodies seem to be so well-acclimated to THC that it’s literally impossible to lethally overdose on - but despite this it’s been one of the most controlled substances in modern human history, and America banned any scientific research with it at all until very recently.

Which is all the more preposterous when you consider how easy it is to die overdosing on alcohol, regardless of all the other social effects, and how horrifically damaging smoking tobacco is to everyone anywhere near it. Seems like there’s something about marijuana’s effects that’s historically absolutely terrified the men in charge of our societies.

Luckily for us, our MRCAs didn’t need copious amounts of delectable Funyuns to appreciate the relatively tame but very tasty and nutritious cannabis of 7mya. And when they found the Roof of the World way back then, it would’ve been more of a gentle sloping hill than a roof in many places. Of course that average is a big deal, since all of its great peaks are as old as the entire Tibetan Plateau is, and its hard to imagine that the first MRCAs who first strolled up to it were able to just meander easily up the peaks we today call Mount Everest and K2, older mountains formed more due to geographic plates than geothermic push.

But as they attempted to ascend at all, and encountered higher altitudes and lower oxygen concentrations than they were used to, their bodies would’ve been challenged on the way up the same way modern humans are today after we pass about the 1,800 meters of the Olympic Training Center – also the average height of important portions of Roof of the World back when Yellowstone boomed.

And cannabis may well have helped aid in that adaptation, since its physiological effects appear to help humans adjust to higher altitudes. But whether or not you want to explore the idea that cannabis may have played a significant role in our very humanity, it’s at worth taking a moment to appreciate that the Hamrca Supposition’s assumption that high altitude-acclimation was a driving force of modernization makes far more sense than the prevailing theoretical framework.

Much of which is based on the idea of “persistence hunting,” the theory that roughly 2mya proto-hominids were actually so fucking bad at hunting that this could somehow loop around to create a positive evolutionary force: “Okay guys, looks like we threw our sharp stick at that deer and it got away, along with the rest of its herd. Might as well start walking, with any luck those gorgeous ethereally creatures effortlessly gliding away from us will get tired at some point, and like that one I nicked might get the most tired, and hopefully we’ll get there before any of those giant fucking cavebears over there sniffing towards us, right?”

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If early humans were capable of anything, it was noticing Nature’s patterns. The seasonal movement of the stars, the regular motions of tides, and – going out on a limb here – probably the fact that large groups of animals return to the exact same areas very regularly, for access to water and edible plants and salt and any number of reasons.

Do you usually see deer in the same places driving around in your community? If you wanted to kill one, if you missed would you start haplessly jogging after it… or just watch it run away, shrug, and come back the next day?

Or, even better… set a trap with some lettuce or a carrot, and wait in hiding? Every modern western anthropologist swallowing and regurgitating the persistence hunting dogma either hasn’t bothered to think this out or is too stupid to consider just how bass-ackwards persistence hunting is – the idea of burning calories to pursue an animal that might be drawing in formidable predators as it leaves a path of blood to you pursuing it as well. Instead of just waiting around the same general areas to catch the animals which you’ve already observed returning to the same place, over and over again, due to stable environmental features.

If there’s any doubt, take a few months watching nature survivalist shows, and that’ll give you all the evidence you need for how much sense persistence hunting makes, compared to strategies like trapping and ambushes.

And so with persistence hunting not really standing up to even a moment of rational scrutiny, luck would have it that literally every single one of the psychological acclimations that seems to have accompanied modernizing humans, which is now explained in the literature almost universally by persistence hunting, can also be explained by acclimating to high altitude on the slowly rising Tibetan Plateau.

Most recently and perhaps convincingly, was the observation that despite needing far more calories to fuel our energy-hungry brains, and despite having about 10-times as many sweat glands as chimpanzees - it turns out that humans only need to consume about half as much water as all of our closest furry brethren: bonobos, chimps, and gorillas. And although sure, this would’ve allowed our ancestors to wander farther away from water sources… but what for? Animals need to come to water to drink anyways, it seems odd that there would be evolutionary pressure to be able to wander away from water for no particular reason, especially when access to fresh water is obviously central to all mammalian survival, so we all tend to congregate around rivers and lakes.

Certainly needing less water would allow for better drought survival, but there’s no mammalian parallel for evolving that kind of direct relationship with water due to access to water supplies. Humans always set up camp near water since without it, they die in a few days.

That kind of fundamental and profound difference in water usage would be much better explained by the steady but increasing ecological pressure of a slowly rising plateau. And one of the most unavoidable consequences of increased altitude is changes in fluid metabolism, as the altered atmospheric pressures combine with changing physiological processes to profoundly alter mammalian water metabolism. Soldiers likely to develop pulmonary edema at altitude have discrete changes in their urine, and cattle grazing at altitude are at risk of developing water retention disease.

Even more profoundly, babies born to ethnic Chinese at sea level and then taken up into Tibet at higher altitudes can die from subacute infantile mountain sickness. In adults the condition is much less likely to be lethal, however it still involves severe salt and water retention, without any of the expected changes in heart function. Given that water is the single most important substance for all life on earth, and that humans are no exception, dying if we go just a few days without it – humanity’s unique relationship with water alone provides incredibly strong support for the Hamrca Supposition since all mammals adapt to need much less water at higher altitudes.

However if you aren’t convinced, it turns out that every other physiological change associated with “persistence hunting” can also be explained by acclimating to high-altitude – all of the changes to cardiac function and oxygen metabolism thought to be due to persistence hunting being a genuine evolutionary force are far more parsimoniously explained by high altitude acclimation, and in fact are found fairly consistently in other mammals as they’ve adapted to high altitude as well.

And after examining fossils from about 1.8mya in the Horn of Africa’s Olduvai Gorge, scientists determined that the butchered bones appeared to have once belonged to healthy young adult animals close to their prime, only about 20% seemed to be from very young or old animals – the likely targets of persistence hunters.

Granted all of this seems pretty speculative, and flies in the face of the accepted anthropological science - so if you still aren’t convinced yet, keep in mind that after an animal was killed our ancestors, whoever they were, the ability to cook it appears to further delineate our modernity.

It’s hard to capture the Harvard undergraduate experience with a better word than “disappointment,” since it turns out that what was promised as Elysian Fields of intellectual discourse, is mostly insecure nerds who have no idea how inapplicable their ideas are to the real world, and rich kids who bought their way in one way or another. But if you’re ever lucky enough to get to sign up to learn from Dr. Richard Wrangham, that’s probably gonna be about as close as you can get to the ideal you had in mind.

Since even before he shot to international fame with the theory he presented in Catching Fire, he was the only professor at Harvard who seemed to genuinely enjoy engaging with undergrads and being challenged by them, and stayed after to chat with anyone who was interested - no matter who they were.

And he might know a thing or two about anthropology as well, since as his theory lays out, mastering cooking allowed humanity to modernize, since cooked food provides far more nutrition and can be consumed far more quickly - not only are modern humans unable to bring a baby to term on a raw diet, but monkeys spend something like 8 to 12 hours a day just chewing, making the time to do anything else like create art or culture fundamentally limited.

And it turns out, this permanent turn towards cooked food - something no other ape or monkey consumes, although they do prefer cooked foods in captivity - also occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 2mya. The dates are up for discussion, however Wrangham uses the assumed emergence of changes in brain volume and metabolism of roughly 1.8mya, the advent of the Pleistocene Ice Age. And since we know from the study of other ancient hominids that a new hominid species generally doesn’t show up in the fossil record for the first several hundred-thousand years it exists, the Yellowstone explosion of 2.1mya aligns in the anthropological record with this emergence of larger brains a few hundred-thousand years later.

Since it was starting back 1.8mya that the brain of homo erectus - technically a different “species” outside our shared homo genus, whose separateness isn’t supported by any genetic evidence at all and is only nominally assumed to be a discrete species from modern humans due to phylogenetic assumptions - began to double, appearing to max-out around 700,000ya. And so perhaps it’s the farthest thing from a coincidence that the Yellowstone Caldera had another less massive eruption right around 700,000ya, since that’s right about when the current model holds that modern humans and Neanderthals last shared an ancestor - but more about that kind of thing in a bit. And since supporting this drastic increase in brain volume would’ve been extraordinarily calorically-demanding, Wrangham postulates that it was mastering fire and cooking which allowed for early hominids to fulfill those demands.

There is, however, another explanation beyond catching fire and open flames. Since as Wrangham admits, the main issue with his theory is that although there are isolated instances of its human-controlled occurrence way back when, early hominids aren’t known to have actually mastered fire until about 300,000ya - about 1.5 million years after the assumed effect of flame-cooked food began.

And so to completely understand this alternate explanation’s implications, first we’re gonna have to spend some time with a few sleepy little monkeys.

How much time? Well, that’s part of the problem.

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Continue on to part II here!!

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