Climate, Fire and Human Evolution (eBook)

The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene

Andrew Y. Glikson, Colin Groves (Autoren)

eBook Download: PDF

2015 | 1st ed. 2016
XVIII, 227 Seiten
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-319-22512-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo - which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire. The advent of land plants since about 420 million years ago ensued in flammable carbon-rich biosphere interfaced with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Born on a flammable Earth surface, under increasingly unstable climates descending from the warmer Pliocene into the deepest ice ages of the Pleistocene, human survival depended on both-biological adaptations and cultural evolution, mastering fire as a necessity. This allowed the genus to increase entropy in nature by orders of magnitude. Gathered around camp fires during long nights for hundreds of thousandth of years, captivated by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, humans developed imagination, insights, cravings, fears, premonitions of death and thereby aspiration for immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the concept of god. Inherent in pantheism was the reverence of the Earth, its rocks and its living creatures, contrasted by the subsequent rise of monotheistic sky-god creeds which regard Earth as but a corridor to heaven. Once the climate stabilized in the early Holocene, since about -7000 years-ago production of excess food by Neolithic civilization along the Great River Valleys has allowed human imagination and dreams to express themselves through the construction of monuments to immortality. Further to burning large part of the forests, the discovery of combustion and exhumation of carbon from the Earth's hundreds of millions of years-old fossil biospheres set the stage for an anthropogenic oxidation event, affecting an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. The consequent ongoing extinction equals the past five great mass extinctions of species-constituting a geological event horizon in the history of planet Earth.

Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate Scientist, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Earth Science, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the ANU Climate Change Institute.

Inhalt

Foreword 10
Prologue 12
Acknowledgements 16
Contents 18
Chapter 1: Early Earth Systems 20
1.1 Archaean and Proterozoic Atmospheres 21
1.2 Early Biospheres 31
1.3 Greenhouse States and Glaciations 41
Chapter 2: Phanerozoic Life and Mass Extinctions of Species 63
2.1 Acraman Impact and Acritarchs Radiation 79
2.2 Cambrian and Late Ordovician Mass Extinction 79
2.3 Late and End-Devonian Mass Extinctions 80
2.4 Late Permian and Permian-Triassic Mass Extinctions 80
2.5 End-Triassic Mass Extinction 81
2.6 Jurassic-Cretaceous Extinction 82
2.7 K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary) Mass Extinction 82
2.8 Paleocene-Eocene Extinction 85
2.9 The End-Eocene Freeze 85
Chapter 3: Cenozoic Biological Evolution (by Colin Groves) 86
3.1 The Evolution of Mammals 86
3.2 From Primates to Humans 92
3.3 From Genetic Evolution to Cultural Evolution 98
Chapter 4: Fire and the Biosphere 102
4.1 An Incendiary Biosphere 103
4.2 The Deep-Time History of Fire 105
4.3 Fire and Pre-historic Human Evolution 111
4.4 Neolithic Burning and Early Civilizations 128
Chapter 5: The Anthropocene 139
5.1 The Modern Atmosphere 140
5.2 Neolithic Burning and Early Global Warming 149
5.3 The Great Carbon Oxidation Event 153
5.4 The Sixth Mass Extinction of Species 170
5.5 The Faustian Bargain 174
5.6 The Post-anthropocene World 188
Chapter 6: Rare Earth 193
Chapter 7: Prometheus: An Epilogue 205
References 212
About the Book and the Authors 233
Index 235

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.11.2015
• Reihe/Serie: Modern Approaches in Solid Earth Sciences
• Reihe/Serie: Modern Approaches in Solid Earth Sciences
• Zusatzinfo: XVIII, 227 p. 152 illus., 126 illus. in color.
• Verlagsort: Cham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geologie
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: Anthropocene • Climate Trends and Climate Change • Fire and Human Evolution • Human Evolution and Climate Change • Mass Extinction and Climate Change
• ISBN-10: 3-319-22512-X / 331922512X
• ISBN-13: 978-3-319-22512-8 / 9783319225128