It’s a long way from the Pacific Coast to the International Construction & Utilities Equipment Exposition in Louisville, Ky. Even longer if the flights to Louisville route through Calgary and Atlanta.
Some reading material helps pass the time. Might as well delve into the latest research about how human beings came to be. After all, about 19,000 of those creatures would be attending ICUEE. It wouldn’t hurt to understand their backstory.
A special edition of Scientific America on an airport newsstand promises to reveal that their backstory — and it really is everyone’s backstory — is “stranger than anyone thought.”
Strangest of all, every person alive today descends from a small band of only several hundred human beings who survived a climate catastrophe about 150,000 years ago. That’s a small gene pool. As a species, human beings aren’t that genetically diverse in comparison with other animals, for example.
It’s a fascinating discovery — or rather a series of discoveries — that should give our species hope.
For one thing, it proves that we’re not that different from each other. Unfortunately, one of the most visible differences — skin color — has been involved in a lot of grief over the ages, to put it mildly. But really, it’s a reflection of adaptations that evolved quite quickly, in a geological sense, as our forebears migrated to different latitudes where lighter skin allowed them to take in more vitamin D, or darker skin protected them against ultraviolet radiation. Put that way, it seems a strange thing to get worked up about.
For another thing, that we all descend from such a small group reveals how resilient and resourceful human beings are. If about 700 humans can figure a way out of a climate emergency that forced them into a small area in the south of Africa, then seven billion should be able to put their collective minds together to solve our current climate crisis. By the way, a different kind of climate catastrophe walloped the world 150,000 years ago. It was a prolonged ice age, what scientists call Marine Isotope Stage 6, which lasted from about 195,000 years before present to around 123,000 years ago.
Of course, that humans beings evolved the smarts to figure all this out is another marvel. Now, scientists haven’t pinpointed the bottleneck exactly or come to agreement on its actual size. But they have developed sophisticated tools that are helping to piece together that ancient picture and how humanity evolved over the last few million years.
Among them are means of examining subsea core samples for layers of sediment that reveal geological evidence for cyclical climate changes. (About an inch and a half of muck accumulated every thousand years on the seafloor of the Arabian Sea off the African coast. Dark bands indicate drier times while lighter bands point to wetter conditions.) Using other tools, scientists can determine what ancient peoples ate at particular slices of prehistory, which also helps to figure out the local climactic conditions.
Of course, none of these particular technologies and tools are likely to appear on a service truck any time soon. Well, unless that service truck is supporting an archaeological dig somewhere. But the technologies on today’s trucks do share common antecedents — let’s say ancestors even — with the technologies brought to bear in anthropological investigations. For example, data crunching, whether it’s for telematics or analysis of core samples, depends on speedy and sophisticated computers.
The common human traits of ingenuity, creativity and problem-solving — which the human race inherited from a small band of survivors — manifest themselves in many ways. At ICUEE, it showed up in such innovations as lighter weight air compressors and systems designed to control all the hydraulic functions of a truck. About 150,000 years ago, these traits enabled the forbears of us all to survive a climactic crisis and for their descendants to spread out across the globe.
Over time, they developed different cultures, some in isolation, and some that came into conflict. These different strains of our extended family still fight from time to time. But more often they come together in international cooperation — as they did from more 65 countries for ICUEE. That’s a sure sign that humans are capable and ready to confront challenges of the magnitude that their ancestors overcame all those millennia ago.
— Keith Norbury