Shunya's Notes

Modern Myths of Prehistory

This is the sixth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Anatomically modern humans—people like us—have been living on this planet for some 300 thousand years. Most of that time—over 98% of our time on Earth—all societies were nomadic, subsisting entirely on foraged, wild foods. There were no permanent buildings or roads. Every person lived in a wild landscape. That is, they didn’t live in a world primarily shaped and controlled by human desires, but rather one where humans were only one among many forces—some equal to or more powerful than themselves—all co-creating their environment.

Popular narratives that imagine those early lifeways tend to presume that our ancestors lived such materially simple lives because they were primitive brutes, simply incapable of building anything more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized.’ Prehistoric, non-state peoples—often derided as ‘cave men’—are cast as mentally dim, miserable and hungry, impulsive and cruel in their treatment of each other. Or as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, their lives were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ We expect they understood little and did nothing worthwhile. Since their time, we tell ourselves, humans have followed a preordained path of progress from lower to higher states of understanding and living. We’re led to presume our modern lives are so much richer and full of leisure or pleasure than theirs could possibly have been. And this leads us to presume that those beyond the reach of modernity even today are in want of our ‘civilization’ and programs for their ‘development.’

But such narratives mythologize both the past and the present in the service of rationalizing the status quo, including the present distributions of global power, wealth, and exploitation. These attitudes are the same prejudices once called White Man’s Burden, though we’ve adopted them as our own; we may now say Industrialized Man’s Burden, instead. The truth is, our ancestral cave-dwellers—and the few peoples who live beyond the reach of state power today—simply lived differently and with different expectations than we do. Yet they lived in a state of healthfulness and ease at least as satisfying to them as our own is to us—very likely more so. In modern times, we know that whenever any non-state society has been made to give up their ways of life in exchange for ‘civilization’ (not to be conflated with individual goods, which they might take and use on their own terms), they have always resisted the imposition with as much force as they could muster; this does not signal desire.

In fact, for most of our human experience, we could neither imagine nor desire any other way to live than to be forever on the move, sleeping in temporary encampments, no other food to eat than what commonly surrounded us. We had no other way to spend our time, other than traveling, adventuring, telling stories, looking after the children, fashioning tools and self-adornments, playing games, singing and dancing, discussing and arguing and sometimes fighting. We continually discovered, tested out, and prepared new foods and medicines, studied the lifecycles of the landscapes and animals and the shapes in the stars. We explored and learned about our world. We searched for meaning.

The Human Animal in the Circle of Life

This is the fifth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Basic ecology teaches us that there is no life without the flow of energy. Most of life’s energy is sourced from the sun: Sunshine falls upon the land and water, at a finite daily rate, where it’s absorbed either kinetically—as heat, driving winds and ocean currents and evaporation—or chemically, by plants whose photosynthetic powers can trap it within the chemical bonds of carbohydrates, a form of fuel that can later be burned as needed by most living cells, for growth, health, and reproduction.

Almost every living thing on the planet takes its energy from this sun-fed system, either tapping into it closer to the source, like the plants who first capture it, then the deer who eat the plants, or further from the source, like the big cats who eat the deer, or the fungi and microbes who eat all of these after they’ve lived and died. Humans eat all of these things too. After we die, we’re also eaten by the fungi and microbes; the materials that make up our bodies are returned into the soil and the air, and eventually reabsorbed by the plants. Energy and materials flow through this circle of life—really, multiple interconnected circles, or a web of life—with each species occupying its place, or niche, within the flow.

Indians | Ep 8: The Vijayanagar Empire | A Brief History of a Civilization

The Vijayanagar Empire (1336–1565) once ruled much of south India. Foreigners have left vivid accounts of its capital city, aka Vijayanagar—its grand temples, palaces, royal baths, audience halls, Islamic quarter, bazaars, military might, and cosmopolitanism. Considered the birthplace of Carnatic music, Vijayanagar also evolved syncretic forms of architecture, governance, and courtly attire. Folk tales abound of its famous king, Krishnadevaraya, and his minister, Tenali Raman, who had a clever solution to every problem. The city’s remains now lie near Hampi village, in a beautiful rocky landscape by the Tungabhadra River.

How did Vijayanagar acquire all the wealth that impressed foreign travellers? Their eyewitness accounts—and contemporary scholars—reveal much about its economy, social customs, big festivals, and the cloistered lives of its elite women. I’ll describe what’s known about its trade, taxation, governance, policing, crime and punishment. I’ll also look at Vijayanagar’s religious landscape and courtly norms, its eager embrace of Persianate culture, and its war machine and shifting military alliances in which religion mattered little. And finally, the causes of the empire’s massive defeat at the battle of Talikota. Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a self-conscious bastion of Hinduism bravely resisting the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true? As we’ll see, history is messy, and it often confounds sectarian readings of the past.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Becoming Human: Shaped by Ice

This is the fourth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Morteratsch Glacier, Switzerland. Photo: Daniel Schwen/CC BY-SA 2.5

Our planet has experienced great temperature fluctuations throughout its past. Even in the Pleistocene ice age, beginning about 2.5 million years ago and continuing until the present, average global temperatures have repeatedly cycled between extremes of five or six degrees. When the temperatures swung downward, glaciers engulfed large parts of Eurasia, North America, and Greenland, burying the midlatitudes, which we consider temperate today, under mountains of ice. We call those frigid periods glaciations. The air was cold and dry; subtropical deserts expanded or shifted their locale.

But when the temperatures cycled upward again, the glacial periods were broken by spells of great warmth, called interglacials. The air grew warmer and moister; deserts like the Sahara might even bloom with grasses. Forests expanded, and animals moved to higher latitudes across the continents or into higher elevations on the mountainsides. Interglacial temperatures were more like what we consider historically ‘normal.’ Yet the glaciers always came lurching back, devouring mountains and plains and rivers with their tongues of ice, continually remaking the landscape.

 In fact, for the past million years, glacial conditions have dominated the planet with each episode typically lasting around 90,000 years, while the interglacials each lasted less than 15,000 years. And all of recorded human history has occurred only during our present interglacial episode, called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, continuing until modern times. If humans had not so radically changed the climate, our present interglacial would also have come to an end with temperatures sliding back toward the next glacial phase, in keeping with the longstanding patterns of the Pleistocene.

This cycling of the climate through cooler-dryer and warmer-wetter millennia, the expanding and shrinking of glaciers, rising and falling of sea levels, was the world into which early humans evolved. Yet we shouldn’t presume our ancestors were miserable brutes mutely suffering these conditions; it makes no more sense to imagine they hated the ice age than to imagine that polar bears hate the Arctic today or that whales hate the sea.

The ice age shaped what we are. And in it we thrived.

Becoming Human: Forged by Fire

This is the third article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Wildfire in Bandipur National Park, 2019. Photo: NaveenNkadalaveni/CC BY-SA 4.0

Fire looms large in the ancient myths of many peoples around the world. Interestingly, most of these old stories share a common motif, in which fire was withheld from humankind—either by gods or by some other being—until humans finally acquired it only through an act of theft, violence, or other ignoble means.

In a tale from ancient Greece, the god Prometheus steals fire from his fellow gods to share it with humans; for this transgression, the other gods condemn him to endure an eternity of torture. The Polynesian demigod, Maui the trickster, ventures to the end of the world to retrieve fire from his grandmother Pele, the god of fire, by taking her burning fingernails one by one—only to churlishly extinguish each one; Pele finally grows so angry with him that she sends fire chasing after him into the human world. In one Diné (Navajo) story, the fire god hoards fire for himself, using it only to destroy things, until trickster Coyote steals some and gives it to humans. Among different Australian Aboriginal peoples, the origin of fire is placed with various animals, or sometimes human women, from whom it is forcibly taken through violence or trickery; it’s then distributed among the trees of the land, from where anyone can recover it. The ancient Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions are a bit different, but the fire god—Agni or Atar—is both devourer and protector. As the light of knowledge and acculturation, Agni too once hid from humans, before serving as an intermediary between humans and the gods of the Vedic pantheon.

Such stories from every quarter of the planet engage with the mystery and power of fire in ways that we of industrial civilization do not. They imagine fire as being of divine origin or imbued with some property fundamentally tied to our very humanity, the world we inhabit, or divinity. Without it, our human world is incomplete. Yet an ambivalence too surrounds fire, either through explicit acknowledgement of its dual nature as both benefactor and destroyer or an implicit association of it with an act of transgression or moral corruption. But we need it, the stories tell us; its power to cook food and to keep us warm enables our human existence. Our evolutionary story is, in fact, very deeply bound up with fire. And though no living society can possibly retain a true memory of the origins of a bond forged millions of years ago, it’s remarkable that a mythic awareness of its centrality to human societies, its powers and its dangers, remains alive among peoples who retain their cultural connection with a non-industrialized worldview.

Direct human connection to fire began as global temperatures were dropping into the Pleistocene ice age. Our early hominid ancestors in Africa had left the forest canopies, where they’d enjoyed a diet of raw leaves and fruit, seeds and insects, to explore new ways of life on the expanding open savannas. Their grassland lifestyles favored evolution toward bipedalism, along with dextrous minds and hands able to sharpen rocks into cutting implements. They must have learned they could glean good food from the charred leavings of forest fires. This accidental cooking rendered some foods easier to eat and digest, enabling these hominids to enjoy nutritious foods they might not have eaten before, like the calorifically dense tubers and corms that grew underground. This meant their bodies could receive more nutrition from food while expending less energy in processing and digesting it, because fire effectively did some of that processing and digesting for them.

Indians | Ep 7: Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | A Brief History of a Civilization

In the early second millennium, two famous travellers visited India: Alberuni and Marco Polo, who’ve left behind vivid impressions of social life. Alberuni, a great scientist and scholar of the Persian ‘Golden Age’, was in north India between 1017–30, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples. Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent thirteen years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts. In 1030, he published his magnum opus, Alberuni’s India, containing sharp insights into Brahminical religion, scriptures, caste, marital norms, festivals, inheritance, taxes, crime and punishment, etc. He also assessed the quality of the ‘Hindu sciences’. Alberuni’s portrait of India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant–adventurer. Returning home from China in 1292, he stopped in south India. He landed in the kingdom of the Pandyas, near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He spent a few months going around the coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat. Marco Polo was less scholarly and more gullible than Alberuni, but he still astutely recorded many practices of religion and caste, customs and professions, norms of beauty and sexuality. These travellers add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has—or hasn’t—changed.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

A Planetary Perspective

This is the second article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Ancient lava flows, part of the Deccan Traps, visible today in Panna National Park, MP. Photo credit: shunya.net.

We live on a madly unstable planet. For billions of years it has never stopped wobbling and wandering, freezing and thawing, cracking and flowing, blooming, dying, regenerating. Small changes in its chemical composition, geological cycling, orbit, or orientation in space cascade into extreme changes felt on its surface. Despite this—maybe because of it—our planet has also given birth to a complex, interwoven, and forever changing family of living beings, a rarity in the cosmos as far as we know. Understanding this bigger picture of the relationship between the planet itself and human life can help us gain some perspective on our modern predicament. So let’s begin at the beginning.

Earth was born about four and a half billion years ago, alongside several sibling planets, all of them formed from fragments of material left over after the birth of the Sun. It began as a glob of fiery, fluid rock spinning amidst other bits of ice and stone. But over the course of Earth’s first half billion years, its molten surface cooled and solidified; its dry, sulfurous skies became unending showers of acid rain; its empty basins filled with water. In these new oceans simmered a rich elemental brew of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, iron—to mention but a few star ingredients—absorbing heat-energy from deep-sea hydrothermal vents and joining together into chains of chemicals. These complex molecules then clustered together, generating higher order structures, eventually forming cells that ate and breathed and reproduced—living avatars of dust, born of Earth’s own dynamically interconnected biological, geological, and chemical processes, or biogeochemistry.

While these earliest lifeforms were coming into being, Earth’s surface was still being relentlessly pummeled by meteors, some of them the size of mountains. Great impacts injected new material into our planet, cracking and reshaping its biogeochemistry. In this environment, about 3.5 billion years ago, some of those early cells evolved a new ability to convert light-energy from the sun into chemical fuel through a process, called photosynthesis, that takes carbon-dioxide from the air and emits oxygen as metabolic waste. By two billion years ago, the buildup of oxygen was turning Earth’s skies blue above its oceans of rust-red. Many forms of life in that nascent biosphere were poisoned by this atmospheric oxygen and went extinct.

But life itself was not defeated. The cells that did survive continued to diversify into myriad new forms that could withstand and even make use of this corrosive new gas. Some of these found ways to work together, joining into multicellular lifeforms, mixing genes through sexual reproduction, eventually filling the oceans with early forms of fungi, plants, and animals by around one billion years ago. These creatures grew and died, burrowed and crawled, built residual structures, stirred sediments, altered rocks and seabeds in ways that further changed Earth’s biogeochemistry. This changing geochemistry also affected the structure and motion of Earth’s crust, now sliding and tearing, bumping and churning up the landforms into barren mountains and valleys and volcanic alleys, exposing new, unweathered rock—which further changed biogeochemical systems.

At some point in the midst of this lively flourishing, the changes led to the entire planet freezing over. By around 720 million years ago, floating icebergs and islands of slush were drifting over the tropical seas of a ‘snowball Earth,’ as the planet lay cocooned within vast sheets of ice. In the stagnant, anoxic waters beneath, life barely carried on—but it did carry on. And after the ice truly loosened its grip, about 630 million years ago, the quiescent biosphere once again surged. As the seas turned bluegreen, saturated again with oxygen, undersea life burst forth in a stunningly rapid increase in biodiversity.

Earth’s Changing Climate

A large building is seen being broken and carried away by a flooding river. Photo: X/@BhavreenMK

This is the first article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

If it seems like you’re hearing a lot more stories about heatwaves, fires, and floods than you remember hearing ten years ago, it’s not your imagination. June 2023 alone saw extreme heat break over Bihar and Uttar Pradesh that killed scores of people. Violent floods pummeled parts of north India in July and August, and Sikkim in October, drowning dozens of people, displacing untold numbers, causing landslides, destroying crops, homes, and infrastructure like roads and bridges. Parts of Delhi too were flooded as the Yamuna rose to its highest level in 45 years. And these are only a sample of stories from India.

During 2023, heatwaves killed hundreds in Mexico and the United States alone; heatwaves also struck Europe, China, Laos, and Thailand. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands were displaced by torrential flooding and wildfires in dozens of cities across the United States, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, China, Japan, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Greece, Libya—to name a few. This is to say nothing of the extensive damage to crops from heat, flood, fire, drought, and extreme winds across the world. As has frequently happened in recent years, 2023 was again declared the hottest year ever measured across the globe. But even more than that, 2023 was likely the hottest in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Yes, the situation is that far beyond what we consider ‘normal.’

As crazy as the weather has been, we are sure to see worse in the years ahead. This is because the frequency, extent, and intensity of such severe weather is increasing due to global warming caused by the accumulation of excess greenhouse gasses (GHGs)—like carbon-dioxide and methane—that trap heat in the atmosphere. These excess GHGs result directly from industrial and other economic activities linked to burning fossil fuels and destroying forests and wetlands. The excess heat they trap is causing the ice to rapidly melt away from the Arctic Ocean and Greenland, exposing dark waters and rock surfaces that directly absorb even more solar radiation; this then drives its own contribution to further warming—and thus further melting—in what’s called an amplifying feedback loop, one of several in the climate system. Over the coming decades, the lists of nations and cities hit by floods will grow longer, the heatwave death tolls more harrowing, the crop losses much higher. This much we already know will happen, as the globe continues to warm.

Indians | Ep 6: Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | A Brief History of a Civilization

Khajuraho was the capital of the Chandelas who built 85 temples between 900–1150 CE. The 25 that survive are now famed for their fine sculpture, including graphic sex on their walls. In the late first millennium, such temples arose across India, at Badami, Mathura, Konark, etc. Who built them and why? What sort of a worldview puts explicit sex next to their gods? How did a dominant religious culture that glorified austerity, renunciation, and asceticism as the path to God, accept such sexual imagery—on temples, no less? And how did Indians of that era turn into today’s woeful prudes easily scandalised by such erotica, no hint of which appears on their modern religious monuments?

Clearly, Indian religious culture then was very different. A key difference was Tantra, whose pre-historic roots go back to non-Aryan folk traditions. Tantra revered the idea of fertility, and saw sexual love as a path to spiritual progress and liberation. Rising from below, Tantra fused with Jainism, Buddhism, the Puranic sects of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta, and inspired sexual imagery on their monuments. The sex-positive, anti-caste, and goddess-centric folk culture of Tantra was also the soil that sustained the secular hedonism of the elites and the Kamasutra. But then came a huge conservative blowback within Hinduism that decimated Tantra. Discover the lost world of Khajuraho, the influence of Tantrism in early medieval India, and its decline.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 5: Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | A Brief History of a Civilization

Nalanda was a Buddhist monastery founded in the 5th century during the Gupta period (319–543 CE)—a creative age for literature, art, architecture, maths and science. Nalanda became the greatest centre of Buddhist learning in the world, lasting more than 800 years until the 13th century. It attracted student monks from across Asia, including three from China whose travel accounts contain fascinating insights into the social life of India and academic life at Nalanda in the 5–7th centuries. They describe urban life, laws, medicine, obsessions with purity and pollution, food taboos, untouchability and religious conflicts. They relate the rhythms of daily life at Nalanda, its curriculum, star teachers, academic debates, funding sources and more.

In this episode, I’ll also explore the many causes for the decline of Buddhism in India, starting in the second half of the first millennium. By the time of the Turko-Persian invasions, most Buddhist sites had already been abandoned, destroyed, or converted into Brahminical sites across much of India. Buddhist artifacts and texts were wiped out and Buddhism vanished from India's public memory. By the early colonial period, Indians had even forgotten that a man called the Buddha had existed in their past! Only in the 19th century did Indians rediscover Nalanda and their amazing Buddhist heritage through archaeology, texts that survived in foreign lands, accounts of Chinese and Tibetan monks, and other sources.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)