Climate, Fire and Human Evolution, 1st ed. 2016 The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene Modern Approaches in Solid Earth Sciences Series, Vol. 10

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo ? which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire. The advent of land plants since about 420 million years ago ensued in flammable carbon-rich biosphere interfaced with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Born on a flammable Earth surface, under increasingly unstable climates descending from the warmer Pliocene into the deepest ice ages of the Pleistocene, human survival depended on both?biological adaptations and cultural evolution, mastering fire as a necessity. This allowed the genus to increase entropy in nature by orders of magnitude. Gathered around camp fires during long nights for hundreds of thousandth of years, captivated by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, humans developed imagination, insights, cravings, fears, premonitions of death and thereby aspiration for immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the concept of god. Inherent in pantheism was the reverence of the Earth, its rocks and its living creatures, contrasted by the subsequent rise of monotheistic sky-god creeds which regard Earth as but a corridor to heaven. Once the climate stabilized in the early Holocene, since about ~7000 years-ago production of excess food by Neolithic civilization along the Great River Valleys has allowed human imagination and dreams to express themselves through the construction of monuments to immortality. Further to burning large part of the forests, the discovery of combustion and exhumation of carbon from the Earth?s hundreds of millions of years-old fossil biospheres set the stage for an anthropogenic oxidation event, affecting an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. The consequent ongoing extinction equals the past five great mass extinctions of species?constituting a geological event horizon in the history of planet Earth.

 Preface

 Acknowledgements

 Introduction   

Part I. Atmosphere-Ocean-Biosphere-Cryosphere Systems and carbon-oxygen cycles

1. Atmosphere dynamics

2. Atmosphere chemistry
The carbon cycle
The oxygen cycle
The sulphur cycle

3. Early Atmosphere-ocean-ice systems
Palaeozoic and Mesozoic atmospheres
Cainozoic atmospheres and ice ages
Evolution of life and mass extinctions
Archaean Life
Acraman Extinction and Acritarchs Radiation
Appearance of multicellular organism
Cambrian and Late Ordovician Mass Extinctions
Late and End-Devonian Mass Extinctions
Late Permian and Permian–Triassic Mass Extinctions
End-Triassic Mass Extinction
Jurassic-Cretaceous Climate Anomalies
K–T (Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary) Mass Extinction
Paleocene-Eocene Extinction

4.  Biological Evolution through the Cainozoic ice ages

5.  From primates to humans

6.  From genetic evolution to cultural evolution

Part II. Fire  The nature of fire

7.  The history of fire

8.  Fire and human evolution
Fire through the Pleistocene  
Neolithic burning and early civilizations

Part III. The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene
Homo sapiens’ war against nature
The Great Carbon Oxidation Event
The Sixth mass extinction of species
An uncharted climate territory 

Part IV. Epilogue: Future Blueprints

Appendices:
1.     Climate change charts
2.     Biologic evolution tree for the Cainozoic
3.     Human evolutionary tree

Index