Why Xix

By John Weyland

This book contains 46 essays. They are all meant to say something new about the subject dealt with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665547192

John Weyland

(Author did not want to provide. All his other books for this series did not have ATA)

Book preview

Chapter 1

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We don’t know much about ourselves in the first millions of years of our existence.

We owe this ignorance to the refusal of the academic world to speculate.

Science made its big breakthrough in the 19th century.

Until then human beings had to rely on non-scientific books like the Bible to get what supposed information they had on their earlier years.

This was speculation. Because it was speculation the academic world rejected it. Failing to realize that while alternatives to speculation existed in science there were practically none when it came to themselves.

This was understandable at the time. All sorts of strange things were being discovered. So it seemed reasonable to expect discoveries about the early existence of human beings.

But that did not happen. A few bones were found here and there. Plus a few artifacts, which really did not go back that far.

The academic world began to realize that if they were going to rely on evidence, like good scientists, they were going to wind up with practically nothing.

The alternative to the scientific method is speculation. And speculation has produced some great results. But because of the triumphs of science and the great failures of speculation the academic world refused to turn to speculation. It associated speculation with religion and did not want to deal with that again. So it was left with almost nothing on the human species in its first millions of years.

It is time to make up for that. There is enough evidence about early human beings to do some useful speculation. And, luckily, there is something to supplement that. Primitive human beings still exist. And not just a handful. They existed in the 19th century and they have not all disappeared. So there is first-hand information available.

Speculation has to be dealt with case by case. It can be right. It’s all we’ve got. By now it does not make much sense to think new evidence from the remote past will be found.

Chapter 2

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We are lucky when speculating about human beings in that we have a form of evidence about their behavior.

Otherwise we would be reduced to guesswork.

The evidence is the conditions under which they lived. We can know some of those. And because we know that we can know to some extent how people lived.

Conditions determine how all creatures live. But with other creatures the adaptations have to be made by heredity. Human beings were (and are) different because they have intelligence.

Intelligence enables human beings to adapt much more quickly and specifically than heredity.

We have no idea why we can adapt like this. We used to think it was because some being out there we called God gave us our unique characteristics. But that belief has been abandoned by all but the most primitive and we cannot use it to solve the problem.

Because we have intelligence we cannot only adapt our behavior to conditions without heredity. We can create new conditions ourselves and adapt to them.

The strangest element in the situation is that we did not start to live the way we do now until 10,000 years ago. And what we have done in the 10,000 years is drastically different from what any other form of life has done.

We did not cause the new situation. It was caused for us by nature. It was the end of the Ice Ages.

Our species had developed under Ice Age conditions. We were hunters and gatherers. We lived in small family groups. We moved around a lot to follow game and other forms of food.

Our big discovery had been weapons. With weapons we could kill larger animals. This caused us to invent speech. We had to because we hunted together.

With the end of the last Ice Age agriculture became possible. Plants could grow. We could live from them.

With agriculture we had to stay in one place. The fields did not move around like game.

With agriculture we could support more people in a given area. And food from agriculture kept. It could be stored.

With agriculture we had to break up into families. The distance between places made it impossible to function together as a single unit.

With agriculture a family could produce and store more food than it needed to stay alive. That made more activities than getting food possible.

One of those other activities was war.

Primitive human beings did not fight wars. They fought. But what they fought were skirmishes—little fights that did not last long. They did not fight wars because they did not have the time or supplies. They lived a hand-to-mouth existence and had to quit fighting to find more food.

Once human beings became capable of fighting they had to start living together in larger numbers because numbers determined which side would win.

One of the other consequences of producing more food than we needed was that human beings had to stop living together