Anthroposaurus
Does the Mass Extinction Today Parallel that of the Cretaceous Period.
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
Time’s Secrets
Davy Jones’ Locker is the legendary repository of everything lost at sea—full of priceless treasures amidst the wrecks of laden merchantmen, cluttered with the jetsam of men desperate to gain a minute’s respite on a doomed vessel, strewn with the broken flagships of defeated fleets, and haunted by the bones of sailors crushed in the embrace of the covetous sea.
To be in Davy Jones’ Locker is not only to be lost geographically, it is to be forgotten too. The sinking of the Titanic was sensational, yet no one knew the huge vessel’s resting place until seventy years later when salvagers finally located the wreck. Five hundred years before, the Mary Rose, pride of the British fleet, unfurled her sails off Spithead only to capsize in shallow water within sight of multitudes on shore cheering the ship on its way to the wars with France. Bulging with sailors and marines the ship, turning too quickly, keeled over and sank, its gun ports, open for the occasion, admitting the callous sea. Though thousands witnessed the tragedy, the site was lost until underwater archaeologists rediscovered it only a few years ago.
This is not a book about accidents at sea. These maritime incidents serve simply to draw a parallel between the ocean and time. Both are guardians of countless secrets. If Davy Jones’ Locker beneath the seas is full of forgotten treasure then time’s locker must be a trove beyond our conception. For 500 years a shallow estuary concealed the Mary Rose, a wonder of its day. What greater secrets are hidden in time’s vast domain? Let us take three successively longer jumps back in time to see what scholars can reveal of the dark recesses of the past.
- The Hittites were a powerful nation, a superpower of their day, sharing the domination of the known world with the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians only 3000 years ago. Yet they disappeared almost without trace. Only the Bible, in references thought to be mythical, preserved their name until modern archaeologists uncovered and identified their ruined cities.
- Mankind has been evolving from a common ancestor with the modern apes for several million years, yet scholars know few details of this evolution. Time’s coffer still holds secure the history of early man and his precursors. Our knowledge stems from a scant collection of pieces of bone and fragments of skulls, together with chippings and artifacts that a layman cannot distinguish from natural pebbles and flints. We have scarcely revealed any of our prehistory though we are a geologically recent animal.
- Vast families of huge creatures lived on this earth for hundreds of millions of years until they died out about 65 million years ago, but they remained unknown to mankind until the end of the 18th century when Baron Cuvier and others began to expose some of time’s secrets. They prised time’s locker open, only by a chink, but enough for us to know that dinosaurs existed. But the recesses of time’s dark chest hides much more about those astonishing beasts than mankind has imagined.
What could we know of an intelligent race of beings that briefly inhabited the world 65 million years ago? Time has not revealed much of them—not sufficient, at any rate, to be recognized by our experts. Yet I shall argue that such a race did inhabit the earth, that it evolved to a similar level of technology to our own and that, as we threaten to do, it destroyed itself in an orgy of selfish and thoughtless excesses that carried into oblivion the last of its own and many other species of the day, including every other remaining dinosaur.
Anthropologists used to think that mankind made discoveries once and then they spread to other peoples and places. Now we know otherwise. Discoveries were made more than once and the centers of ancient civilization were not always the centers of diffusion of skills:
- Cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) are now known to be older than those in the “cradle of civilization” in Mesopotamia
- mining of coal and ores for smelting occurred in widely separated prehistoric industrial sites often in areas thought to have been primitive by comparison with the known centers of learning
- stone temples built on the Island of Malta predated the pyramids of the mighty Pharaohs
- people did not first successfully cultivate wheat in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East—people on the banks of the river Rhine considered barbarians had succeeded before the Egyptians and Mesopotamians
- Agriculture was invented more than once.
If discoveries have been made by different people in different places at different times, could they have been made earlier still, in previous geological epochs, perhaps? We must concede that they could have—perhaps must have!—provided that sufficiently intelligent creatures existed to make the discoveries. But could technological intelligence have arisen in an earlier geological epoch? In the age of the dinosaurs, for example? There’s the rub.
Stephen Jay Gould, a noted celebrity in the field of evolution, says most paleontologists regard the development of human-like life anywhere else, even where conditions are similar, as “deterministic”. In other words, just because it happened in our case does not mean it will happen for others. They maintain the development of consciousness and intelligence is a “quirky evolutionary accident, a product of one particular lineage”. Gould concludes:
Conscious intelligence has emerged only once on earth and presents no real prospects for re-emergence should we choose to use our gift of destruction.
This argument makes mankind unique. It puts us where medieval churchmen placed us—in the center of the universe—and where post-Darwinian Victorians considered us to be—at the apex of evolution. The paleontologists anthropocentric preconceptions preclude them from asking questions such as, “Could the mass extinction of the dinosaurs be self-inflicted?” or “Has intelligence arisen before mankind?”
Sir Peter Medawar has noted that “scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds”. In this case the rudiments even of the question did not arise. Men believed mankind to be the pinnacle of creation, indeed created in God’s own image. No other animal could have that divine image, no other animal could occupy that unique position, since otherwise man would simply be another beast, another of God’s experiments in creation. These questions have not been asked because the answer might be the wrong one. To avoid wrong answers you do not ask questions like these!
Looking beyond mankind’s ego, there was another obstacle to the idea of intelligence in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were believed to be cold blooded—they were reptiles. warm blood seems necessary for a high capacity brain—reptiles and lizards are cold blooded. Today there is no such objection to the evolution of intelligence in the dinosaurs—they were warm blooded! They were not cold blooded and sluggish reptiles—they were not reptiles. And they were active.
Given warm blooded animals, intelligence could have evolved repeatedly—a conclusion directly contradicting Gould’s. On passing a certain threshold intelligence would evolve increasingly rapidly. If the dinosaurs reached the threshold, they could have become intelligent in a geologically short time. Using human evolution as our only example, we can estimate the timescale using the molecular clock.
The molecular clock depends upon natural selection being neutral towards most genes. A beneficial gene survives in a population, but so does a gene that has no particular affect for good or ill. Only genes which confer manifestly disadvantageous characteristics die out through natural selection. Genes continually mutate at a fairly constant rate and, providing that the mutant genes are not harmful, they will spread among a population in which interbreeding freely occurs. Each species therefore has a common gene pool. Once species have separated, their genes no longer mix, there is no longer a common gene pool. If a mutant gene now arises in an animal of one species, it will spread among that species but it cannot spread into the other. The longer the time since two species separated, the greater the difference in genetic and protein structure. Comparing genetic and protein differences between species, and knowing the rate at which the differences multiply, allows us to calculate when speciation occurred.
In 1967, using a molecular dating technique, Victor Sarich and Allan Wilson showed that man diverged from the African apes as little as five million years ago. For orthodox paleontologists this was far too short a time. It spoilt their theories and put us too close for the good of their egos to the apes. They abused Sarich and Wilson and ignored their results for years. Gribbon and Cherfas say it was “as if theoretical astronomers had ignored the discovery of pulsars”. Yet only a few million years ago—perhaps seven million from more recent work—our ancestors were the creatures from which also descended present day chimpanzees. From that time a line branched off the common stock that became human. Mankind apparently reached the threshold of intelligence within perhaps the last five million years.
Sixty of the sixty five million years of domination of the earth by mammals elapsed before the intelligent model went into the prototype stage, but then in only about five million years technological society evolved. Sixty million years of mammalian evolution to arrive at the threshold of intelligence, yet the dinosaurs had 140 million years at the top—twice as long as the mammals. Could animals that succeeded so well for so long fail to develop an intelligent version of their own? There must be a possibility that dinosaurs too achieved thinking status… but 65 million years before us.
If intelligent dinosaurs existed, they must have made a big impression on their world, just as we have. Where then are their ruins, their relics and their kitchen middens?
Consider the following questions:
- Out of about 12 billion human people that have ever lived on the earth, how many have left any mark?
- What remains of their accumulated experience?
- Out of an estimated 80 million species of living organisms on the earth today how many will be classified before they become extinct?
- How many will leave any fossil remains?
- How many of the millions of insect species?
- How many of the estimated 8600 birds?
- How many of the 4000 mammals?
Hardly any! Most living things, intelligent or otherwise do not leave a trace. Species that are constructed mainly of soft tissues which decay quickly effectively leave no fossils. Species that live in environments unconducive to fossilization leave few fossils. Species that evolve and die off quickly leave few remains. Technological civilization only began two hundred years ago and might end in the next hundred. Human civilization, hugely impressive to us, is only an oily smear in the geological record.
In the millions of years that the dinosaurs dominated the earth, thousands of dinosaur species, billions of individuals, have left no trace. If just one of those species came to prominence very rapidly in evolutionary terms, as mankind has, perhaps making no significant mark until its last few centuries, would much be seen in the rocks 65 million years later? I think not, even if anyone were looking for signs of intelligence. And who’s looking? Not the paleontologists!
These views are speculative. Experts disdain speculation—though one of Britain’s leading thinkers, Richard Dawkins, allows that careful selective speculation can be constructive. Speculative hypotheses face a contradiction: they need more proof than less controversial ones, yet often the absence of convincing evidence is the reason why speculation is necessary. That is true here: direct evidence is sparse and badly documented. Indirect or circumstantial evidence is more plentiful, is generally sound, and constitutes the greater part of this book.
Mostly it is culled from popular but authoritative works of science, many written in the last decade, like Bakker’s book, The Dinosaur Heresies. Sources are given in the bibliography for the reader wishing to pursue the detail. Anecdotal evidence fills gaps where studies have been inadequate.
Experts, though they defend their own dogmas as determinedly as any medieval prelate, are liable to regard unorthodox ideas with contempt and show little eagerness to investigate them. These experts are often wrong. Though they are technically good at determining facts, they are prone to ignore troublesome ones, and continue to market outmoded theories until well beyond their sell-by date. Worse still, some are inclined to assert whatever is most acceptable to their peers or their paymasters. It pays to be skeptical about such people and wary of their assertions.
Independent writers and researchers in the last couple of decades have put together sufficient to challenge the paleontological dogmatists. Unorthodox proposals deserve attention if only to provoke the experts to justify their conventional arguments and thus periodically to force them into an honest reappraisal. My speculations might stimulate a more open-minded look at past events. Anomalies in old rock strata might be taken seriously and accurately dated rather than ignored. Curious artifacts and impressions in very ancient rocks, of the Cretaceous Period particularly, might be studied systematically to see whether an adequate theory can be constructed to explain them.
More importantly we should examine the parallels between the present time and mass extinctions of the Cretaceous. Tens of millions of years hence, geologists will simply see a sudden reduction in diversity terminating the Tertiary epoch. Will they notice that a couple of inches of sediment contain traces of one species of ape which briefly exploded in numbers prior to the mass extinction? It is doubtful.
Is the mass extinction of species the only legacy we wish to leave, as our sapient dinosaurian antecedents did? If my probe into time’s vaults motivates enough people to disown our dinosaur heritage and to stop our assault on the planet, we might yet, unlike the dinosaurs, survive.
I am not optimistic!
