Humping Rock .
Andre Willers
6 Jun 2014
“My old man was a dustman”
Pop song circa 20th century human era .
Synopsis :
Human hunters started clearing stones to get better hunting
.But what to do with those pesky stones?Have you ever humped stones ? It is really hard work . Which got optimized
over literally hundreds of thousands of years . But the dumping of stones
became Civilization . Go figure .
Discussion :
1.All sorts of strategies were tried to minimize effort and
maximize usable area .
2.This usually involved negative entropy :
Random rocks get stacked or dumped where they increase order
.
Walls , pyramids , piles , dumps , spirals, any shape just
for the hell of it .
Many mysterious stone ruins were simply whimsical ways of
disposing of unwanted rocks .
See Appendix AA .
2.1 The aim was
better grazing for prey animals .
Neolithic means stone . These guys knew all about stone .
Especially how heavy it is to carry around .
Might as well have some fun with it .
3 . Later , agriculture .
4.Might as well use the rocks for something useful : boundaries
, walls , buildings , fortresses .
This looks just like planned ruins , but it is just minimax
solutions to a rock-garbage problem .
Eg rock walls of Scotland or mid-africa .
5. Sometimes they just dumped them . Especially if easy
water transport was available .
A rock-garbage dump . Look around any big city with water
transport . Angkor Wat or Venice must have some serious dumps .
5.1 Other dumps visible from space with the naked eye :
5.1.1 The Greenhouses of
Almería[edit]
Greenhouses in the province of Almeria, Andalucía, Spain
What ! Never heard of them ?
The greenhouses complex
that cover almost 50,000 acres (200 km2) in the province of Almería,Andalucía, Spain [7] is
visible from space.[8]
The
dump ? Fertilizer and light .
The Kennecott Copper Mine is the largest
copper mine in the world. It can be seen from space. It is 2.5 miles across.
The dump ? Billions
of tons of pollutants . That white is Death White .
6 .Ho-Ho-Ho !
Following this argument to it’s conclusion , structures like
the Pyramids were built to hide things in the quarries of the originating stone
.
Has anybody bothered to look ?
What delicious irony if all those treasures and secrets were
entombed in the quarries.
Just the sort of thing they would do .
7.Curious Roman equivalent .
They used ceramic amphorae as shipping containers. These
were smashed at destination (one-time use) and the pieces dumped . These dumps
were later scavenged for building materials . Most of old med houses
incorporate broken amphorae .
8. Some links about humping stone .
See , garbage can be fun .
Andre
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Appendix AA
The Remnants of
Prehistoric Plant Pollen Reveal that Humans Shaped Forests 11,000 Years Ago
The discoveries could boost indigenous
populations' claims to ancestral lands long thought to be untouched by human
activity
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MARCH 5, 2014
MARCH 5, 2014
970135012851.5K
97013512801.5K
A tropical
forest writes much of its history at large scale, producing trees as tall as
skyscrapers and flowers the size of carry-on luggage. But by zooming in,
scientists are uncovering chapters in forest history that were influenced by
human activity far earlier than anyone thought.
A new study
of pollen samples extracted from tropical forests in southeast Asia suggests
humans have shaped these landscapes for thousands of years. Although scientists
previously believed the forests were virtually untouched by people, researchers
are now pointing to signs of imported seeds, plants cultivated for food, and
land clearing as early as 11,000 years ago—around the end of the last
Ice Age.
The study,
to be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of
Archaeological Science comes from researchers led by
paleoecologist Chris Hunt, of Queen’s University, Belfast, who analyzed
existing data and examined samples from Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Thailand and
Vietnam.
Pollen
offers an important key for unlocking the history of human activity in a region
where dense tropical forests make traditional excavations slow, arduous work,
and thick canopies hinder aerial surveys. Reliance on building materials that
perish with the centuries (rather than stone or ceramic) can make it difficult
to recognize signs of long-gone inhabitants. Pollen, however, can survive for
thousands of years in the right conditions and paint a picture of vegetation
over time.
In the
Kelabit Highlands of Borneo, for example, pollen samples dated to about 6,500
years ago contain abundant charcoal evidence of fire. That alone doesn’t reveal
a human hand. But scientists know that specific weeds and trees that flourish
in charred ground would typically emerge in the wake of naturally occurring or
accidental blazes. What Hunt’s team found instead was evidence of fruit trees.
"This indicates that the people who inhabited the land intentionally
cleared it of forest vegetation and planted sources of food in its place,” Hunt
explained in a statement about
the study.
Hunt’s team
also looked at the types of pollen reported in cores extracted from very
isolated areas where, in all likelihood, humans did not intervene with the
succession of plants that would have come about simply because of changes in
temperature, rainfall, and competition among species. The patterns in these
cores could then be used as a proxy for what to expect without human
intervention. When layers sampled from other, comparable sites in the region
failed match up, it raised a flag for the researchers that humans may have
disrupted the natural succession through burning, cultivation, or other
activities.
"Ever
since people had the ability to make stone tools and control fire, they were
able to manipulate the environment," explained biologist David Lentz, who
directs the Center for Field Studies at the University of Cincinnati. "In
pre-agricultural times, they would burn forest to improve hunting and increase
the growth of plants that were edible—often weedy plants with lots of seeds.
This is a pattern that we see all over the world." It’s not surprising, he
added, to see it documented in Southeast Asia.
And yet,
Hunt said, "It has long been believed that the rainforests of the Far East
were virgin wildernesses, where human impact has been minimal.” To the
contrary, his team traced signs of vegetation changes resulting from human
actions. “While it could be tempting to blame these disturbances on climate
change,” he said, “that is not the case as they do not coincide with any known
periods of climate change.
This kind
of research is about more than glimpsing ancient ways of life. It could also
present powerful information for people who live in these forests today.
According to Hunt, “Laws in several countries in Southeast Asia do not
recognize the rights of indigenous forest dwellers on the grounds that they are
nomads who leave no permanent mark on the landscape.” The long history of
forest management traced by this study, he says, offers these groups “a new argument
in their case against eviction.”
Such
tensions have played out beyond Southeast Asia. In Australia, for example, “the
impact of humans on the environment is clear stretching back over 40,000 years
or so,” says environmental geoscientist Dan Penny, of The University of Sydney.
And yet, he says, “the material evidence of human occupation is scarce.”
Starting in the 18th century, the British used that fact "to justify their
territorial claim" to land inhabited by Aboriginal Australians—declaring
it terra nullius (belonging to no-one), establishing a colony,
and eventually claiming sovereignty over the entire continent.
This latest
study comes as part of a larger discussion about when and how our species began
shaping the world around us. “Humans and pre-humans have been present in Asia
for a very long time, and there have been a number of studies that point to a
very long history of human alteration of the natural environment,” says Penny.
Hunt’s work in Southeast Asia, he says, makes a “valuable contribution” to that
discussion, and to a broader debate surrounding the timing of what scientists
call the Anthropocene—a
proposed period in human history when activity began to alter natural processes
in a significant way.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/remnants-prehistoric-plant-pollen-reveal-humans-shaped-forests-11000-years-ago-180949985/#VBpoeYtM6ZrzT3Xx.99
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