Younger Dryas...

I've written a good bit about archaeological sites before, including Göbekli Tepe, one of the oldest sites in existence. And it's not a topic I'm likely to exhaust any time soon. Today, I want to share fascinating info about the oldest agricultural site on the planet.

People lived and worked Tell Abu Hureyra—located in present-day Syria, about 75 miles east of Aleppo, between 13,000 and 9,000 years ago. The epoch shows civilization’s clear transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural communities.

Abu Hureyra was home to the earliest known farmers in history. The Tell part of its name refers to the hill over the site; a tell is a large, flat hill composed of collapsed buildings, debris, and household items that piled up over the years the village existed.

Agricultural activity at the site started at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, which is commonly described as the cause of the rise of agriculture. The Younger Dryas was a brief return to the climate of the Ice Age, 13,000 to 11,000 years ago. (That’s brief…in geological term.)

…and Older McCoy

Many scholars believe this period kick-started agriculture. The rapid and prolonged temperature dip of the Younger Dryas rendered the Middle East less capable of supporting hunter-gatherers, forcing them either to migrate southwards or adopt new strategies for acquiring food. And here we’re talking about agriculture.

Abu Hureyra shows this exact pattern. Most of the hunter-gatherers fled early in the Younger Dryas, with the remainder switching to agriculture. It remained inhabited for another 4,500 years after that.

Sadly, Abu Hureya is no longer accessible to anyone. It was drowned underneath Lake Assad following the construction of the Tabqa Dam in 1974. The site had only been excavated for the two years prior to that. And in great haste: archaeologist knew their time was limited.

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Quotable

Okay, Yard Ramp Guy: No complaints from me, but know that my challenge is greater than yours. You try spelling backwards.

“Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.”

— Jonathan Sacks

Anabranching: From the Air

If you live on the East Coast, especially in the mid-Atlantic region, you might be familiar with the types of streams you often find there—meandering streams, with high banks full of fine sediment. They tend to erode badly, so stream restoration has become a multi-billion-dollar industry on the East Coast.

Here's the interesting bit: those high-banked streams they're restoring aren't natural.

Prior to European settlement, streams on the East Coast tended to be composed of multiple channels that were divided by islands and wetlands, with fairly low banks (also called anabranching). The wetlands tended to be highly effective carbon sinks. You definitely didn't find the single-channeled meandering streams you do today. So what happened?

In a word? Millponds. Water-powered mills dammed up rivers and streams all across the East Coast. This slowed down the streams and created spots where the sediment could settle out of the water at much greater rates than normal, producing those high stream banks.

A Millpond

Now that we don't use water-powered mills to grind our flour and cut our lumber like we used to, most of those mills have vanished over time. And most of that multi-billion- dollar stream restoration industry? It's just trying to keep the streams and rivers flowing in a manner unnatural to them.

The stream restoration industry players aren't fighting an entirely uphill battle. Some of them are starting to listen to the science. Instead of repairing the eroding streambanks, they're accelerating the process in order to return the streams to their former state.

This approach is not exactly popular yet because it involves bulldozing all the plants and trees that have grown on the stream banks, which isn't very pretty.

There's a more important lesson to take from all this: namely, that we change the world around us in ways we seldom recognize.

Many of our ideas about what nature is come from what we see around us, which is seldom untouched. And nature possesses nearly unstoppable inertia; look at the stream banks eroding now.

Nature had to wait centuries, but she’s still reclaiming her streams on the East Coast. We need to be cautious about where we build and how we alter nature. It’s best to work with her. In the long run, working against nature is seldom a winning strategy.

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Quotable

Yep, Yard Ramp Guy: Backwards we continue with the alphabet quote-off:

“Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.”

— Seth Godin

Yep. That works.

Quick quiz: What's the most important resource for civilization? Let’s exclude water, which is, far and away, the most important (and would, ahem, leave me without the topic I chose to write about this week).

You’ll be tempted to say oil, but that's not even close. Nor is metal.

The correct answer? Dirt.

“Yes,” you’ll say, “dirt is literally everywhere. It's what the ground is made of, for Pete's sake. How can something so common be that important? I mean, yeah, we need it to grow all of our food, but it's not like we're going to run out anytime soon.”

Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you but, naturally we'll first need to go back in time.

During the Roman Republic, the fields of Italy were famed for their fertility and were a big part of Rome's early conquests. And during the Roman Empire? All of the grain was shipped from the fertile fields along the Nile via the Port of Alexandria. In time, the fields of Italy were no longer capable of supporting the population of Rome; the soils had been exhausted of nutrients, with much of the topsoil stripped away.

Let's travel even further back to ancient Mesopotamia. The end of Mesopotamia's reign as the center of civilization ended due to the very thing that made it possible: irrigation. Long-term irrigation caused the salinity of the fields to increase until the fields were too salty for crops.

“But,” you’ll say, “we're talking thousands of years, here. Technology's increased to the point where we don't need to worry about that anymore.”

Nope. Doesn't work.

Sorry to be a downer, but we need to worry about it now more than ever.

Soil is fragile stuff that can take decades—sometimes centuries—to form. Our ancestors needed millennia to master agricultural methods that preserved the soil, and we've largely discarded their methods.

Terracing, contour plowing, no-till farming, use of compost and manure: those are no longer in the playbook for most of our farms, especially the largest ones.

Tractors, nitrogen fertilizers, and genetically engineered crops allow us to do an end-run on soil. We can use them to grow crops in even the worst soil, at least for three to four years.

After that? They just move to a new field. That's not sustainable, though. We're already using about 40% of the Earth's surface for agriculture. We can't keep moving fields forever. We're simply eroding away soil faster than it's produced.

This isn't a situation where there's going to be a simple technological solution, in large part due to the fact that this is a technological problem. Instead, we need to concentrate on careful husbandry of the land, especially encouraging small farms that use sound long-term strategies.

Thankfully, this is starting to happen, but it's got a long, long way to go. Every single civilization that's neglected its dirt has suffered for it. We've neglected ours for far too long.

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Quotable

Dear Yard Ramp Guy: Onward, reverse-alphabetically. In the meantime, you B most excellent.

“Years later, people look back upon their darkest day and say—as Churchill said of London's war years—‘This was our finest hour.' In a tough spot right now? You may be on the very edge of winning.”

— Guy Lynch

Zeppelin: Unleaded

The federal government has maintained a helium storage program since WWI, with the express purpose of making sure that America never falls behind in, um, a zeppelin arms race.

The Federal Helium Program is often viewed as one of the biggest boondoggles the government keeps funding. Both Reagan and Clinton tried to get rid of it. They couldn't have been more wrong, though.

Even apart from the fact that the program pays for itself with the proceeds of the helium it sells to U.S. companies, the helium program has plenty of other benefits to keeping it around.

First off, helium provides 42 percent of the nation's supply of unrefined helium gas. Second, it's already all stored in a huge porous rock formation below the Texas Panhandle, so there isn't a lot in terms of maintenance fees.

Even if we did need to harvest more, it's not that difficult. Among other things, helium is a byproduct of harvesting natural gas in the Midwest. Most importantly, helium is surprisingly essential to industries across the board.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of helium's uses:

1. Airships are making a major comeback (see HERE), and they obviously need lots of helium.
2. Cryogenic purposes. Not just freezing dead bodies, but cooling the magnets in MRI scanners and other similar uses. Helium makes an extremely effective coolant and is part of the process of making oxygen-hydrogen rocket fuel.
3. Creating stable pressurized atmospheres. Deep sea divers often use atmospheric mixes that include helium.
4. Arc welding materials that are contaminated by air or nitrogen.
5. Supersonic wind tunnels.
6. Gas chromatography—a method of analyzing the components of chemicals.
7. As a protective gas in growing silicon and germanium crystals.

Last, and certainly not least: those party balloons that float and hug the ceiling? Filled with helium. I just bought 30 of them for my grandson’s birthday party. Birthdays just wouldn’t be as fun without helium.

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Quotable

Ho ho ho, Yard Ramp Guy. And all that jazz.

“Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”

— Dave Barry

Beware of Cat

The greatest mass murderer of all time is a housecat named Tibbles.

The Stephen's Island Wren, or Lyall's Wren, was a flightless bird about the size of a sparrow that was once found throughout New Zealand. By 1894, however, it had been driven extinct everywhere but Stephen's Island. (It got over to the island during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower; it didn't swim there.)

The story goes that Tibbles, the cat of the lighthouse keeper on the island, single-handedly wiped out every remaining representative of the species on the island, presenting many of them as gifts to his owner. It makes a great story, since that would make Tibbles the only creature ever to single-handedly wipe out an entire species.

And yes: it's probably not true. Most experts agree that feral cats on the island were responsible. (Though Tibbles certainly helped, and he did apparently bring lots of Lyall's Wren corpses as gifts to the lighthouse keeper.)

Only about 16-18 preserved specimens of the extinct bird (minus a few bones) are known to still exist. It seems like an evolutionary oddity. There are only four other flightless songbirds ever known to have evolved, including three other species of New Zealand Wren, and all are now extinct.

Lyall's Wren is, however, important to the study of how species go extinct, as it's a very clear-cut example of extinction as caused by invasive species. (The mainland extinction was mostly caused by the Polynesian rat, another invasive species.)

So, a few important lessons here. First, introducing cats to an area with endangered animals smaller than them is a bad idea. Second, ecosystems can be very fragile; it can only take the addition or removal of a single species to disrupt them.

Third, spay and neuter your pets.

And to anyone who thinks I'd spend all this time writing a post to complain passive-aggressively about a neighbor’s dog doing something irresponsible (again)…I have no comment.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: here’s a helpful quote for when your customers are trying to choose:

“Man selects on for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

— Charles Darwin