by Scott Kaelen
60 million years ago saw the beginnings of the earliest true primates. Bird groups continue to diversify, some becoming flightless and land predators, others evolving into modern birds such as parrots, woodpeckers and swifts. Mammals such as sea cows and armadillos begin to appear in the diversification of life.
52 million years ago saw the evolution of the first bats.
50 million years ago saw rhinoceroses, camels and horses enter the evolutionary chain, and early primates continue to diversify.
40 million years ago, modern butterflies and moths enter the time-line.
Many species became extinct, and many others came into existence from the great diversity of life. The first eagles and hawks appeared, as well as sloths and dogs, and many grasses evolved from the flowering plants.
30 million years ago saw the earliest pigs and cats.
25 million years ago the first deer entered the evolutionary record.
20 million years ago, early in the Miocene Epoch, came the first bears, hyenas and giraffes.
15 million years ago early ancestors of the kangaroo appeared.
7 million years ago was the time of the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor, when the diversity of primates gave rise to the earliest of hominins – sahelanthropus and early australopithecines.
5 million years ago the Pliocene Epoch began, and the evolution of animals such as the hippopotamus, elephant, zebra and lion, as well as the woolly mammoth shortly afterwards.
4 million years ago early hominin australopithecus enters the fossil record.
Early in the Pleistocene Epoch, which began some 2.6 million years ago, the sabre-toothed cat known as the smilodon entered the fossil record.
2 million years ago the first members of the genus Homo appear in the fossil record in Africa, H habilis and later H erectus being the most prominent. Also the ancestor of modern cattle evolves in India.
Scarcely more than 2 million years after its emergence, Australopithecus becomes extinct.
1.2 million years ago homo antecessor emerges in Spain.
Roughly 1 million years ago saw the emergence of the hominid gigantopithecus, the giant ancestor of modern apes, across Asia.
600,000 years ago homo heidelbergensis entered the time-line in Africa, Europe and Western Asia, dying out some 200—250,000 years ago.
350,000 years ago neanderthals evolved.
Anatomically modern humans, known collectively as homo sapiens, and including the only sub-species homo sapiens idaltu and homo sapiens sapiens – evolved 200,000 years ago. Worth noting is that the neanderthals and gigantopithecus were both still alive long after the emergence of humans, but were gradually replaced by homo sapiens to the point of extinction.
223,000—100,000 years ago shows evidence of ancient hominins disposing of their dead in mass graves. Also evident is that Neanderthals buried their dead in simple graves, occasionally with blocks of limestone that may denote grave markers, perhaps indicating the earliest signs of pseudo-religion having not begun with humans, but with a completely separate species.
Homo sapiens idaltu died out some 160,000 years ago, leaving homo sapiens sapiens as the only extant species of the genus homo.
100,000 years ago gigantopithecus died out in Asia, after up to 900,000 years of existence. Also around this time the neanderthals began stripping the flesh from their dead prior to burial.
40,000 years ago in Europe, the neanderthals became extinct after some 310,000 years of existence. Also at this time came the first evidence for human cremation, discovered in the now dry Lake Mungo in Australia.
Homo sapiens sapiens survives all other hominins as the only extant species on the planet.
38,000 years ago the oldest known zoomorphic and semi-anthropomorphic sculpture was made, indicating that homo sapiens gave human characteristics to animals, perhaps representing deities, and providing further possible evidence of emerging religion.
30,000 years ago shows the first evidence of humans burying their dead along with apparent personal artefacts and tools, including figurines of women, some of which had been purposefully broken or repeatedly stabbed. Such burials may indicate a concern for what happens to the body after death. Also 30,000 years ago, an ancient place of worship existed in Botswana, at the World Heritage Site known as Tsolido.
25,000 years ago, evidence of burials is found across Eastern Europe, Iberia and Wales, including a more varied range of artefacts including shells, ivory beads, pendants, ivory blades and dolls.
From 21,000 years ago, there begins a lack of evidence for the continuation of burial activity. Such evidence resumed roughly 8,000 years later, 13,000 years ago.
With a gap in time of almost 10,000 years, the practice of burial resumes. Men, women and children in Italy were buried in the same place as their ancestors from 10,000 years earlier. The same burial practices also resume, burying the dead with the same artefacts and tools as their ancestors. Now the dead are buried side by side, just as in modern cemeteries.
In 9831 BC the Neolithic Revolution began, marking a distinct change in humans from hunting and gathering to settlements and agriculture. Humans became sedentary, non-nomadic, beginning the practises of irrigation and deforestation, division of labour, economy and trade, architectural art, administration and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, and ownership of property.
Several pine posts are erected at the site that would later become Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England.
Over the next few centuries many shrines are constructed along with other places of worship. Wall art consists of phallic symbols, feminine figures and depictions of hunting scenes. Possessions are left at the places of worship.
The proto Indo European people developed religion that focused on sacrificial ideology similar to previous practises among earlier shrines. This religion left offerings in the form of food, objects and animal sacrifices. These practises pointed further at humans worshipping a higher purpose, and possibly a higher entity or a divine being, heavily influencing future Indo European cultures and their religions.
In 5000 BC, structures were built which were used for human sacrifices. Other evidence shows a shift in human thinking and perception, indicating a growing presence of religion.
According to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic scriptures, which would not be written for another 2000 years, 4100 years and 4570 years respectively, the Earth was created by Yahweh/God/Allah in 4000 BC.
In 3750 BC, the proto-Semitic people developed a set of proto-languages and religions across the Middle East. Those languages would develop into the Semitic languages known as Amharic, Tigrinya, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.
The proto-religions evolved into the Abrahamic religions, focusing on the figure of Abraham and beginning with Judaism, which was founded by Moses. No historical evidence exists to support the historicity of Moses’ existence, though he is purported to have been born in 1393BC, some 800 years after Abraham is written to have existed.
Christianity emerged late in the 1st century AD, following some decades after the purported life of Jesus, who spread word of Judaism and its prophets including Abraham, Moses and Noah.
Approximately 570 AD the prophet Muhammad was born. A century after his death the Judeo-Christian faith was used as a basis for a new religion known as Islam.
The rest, as they say, is history; a history that would become the bloodiest that the Earth had ever seen since its infernal birth 4.54 billion years ago.
I, ARCHITECT
I was the Primer, the Converger Aeternum,
I was here before the celestial birth.
I am the Gatherer, the Greatest Attractor,
Collector of Castaways, and Builder of Earth.
I was the Forming, the Cryptaean Soul,
the Kiln at the First Ocean’s Heart.
And I was the Lung of the Inferno,
the Breath that stirred Hadaea apart.
I was the Cooling, the Calming Flame,
the Laval Lakes of Archa
ea.
And I was the Shield, the Glacial Eye
of the freezing crust of Proterrae.
Then I, Phanaea, the New World’s Dawn,
gathered Vaalbarae and kissed it to life.
I reside in this world and in all other places,
I twist the screw, the hook and the knife.
I am the Retainer of Playgrounds,
in each congregation of future and past.
I am Star-Builder, the Puller of Strings,
the Master of Puppets leading the dance.
I am the Canary, the Pick and the Miner.
I tend the crush, the sparse and the void.
I, Architect, am the Cosmic Designer.
I am the Founder, the Creator of Toys.
I divided Pangaea and Panthalassa,
then I made my first mistake.
I tore at the crust until Gondovanaea,
but by then it was way too late.
I was the Mind that created this Earth,
I am the One to Blame.
It all went quite soundly until that first day,
when the uprights gave me a name.
A TALE OF TWO DEITIES
Before the Big Bang there was, of course, God, sitting around and picking at his behind for a trillion trillion years in the centre of a cold and otherwise empty void. He spent all that time asking himself one question: “What created me?”
But for all his omniscience, he couldn’t answer himself. He searched the void for answers, but, with it being a vacuum for as far as his infinitely-capable senses could reach, there were no answers to be found. So, after an episode of omniscient genius while enjoying a hot, soapy bath in a tub he’d conjured up a couple of million years earlier, God omnipotently created from his own omnipresence some stars and planets and dust clouds and ionized gasses. Then he spent a few billion years watching them coalesce.
On one of the planets he’d created he decided to place some biogenic graphite, a bit of bacteria and a peppering of archaea – uncomplicated little things compared to the bath-tub – and he watched them grow, divide, mutate and evolve, until finally, after another several billion years, the line of the universal common ancestor culminated with homo sapiens.
God knew he’d done well when the uprights started breeding and polluting the atmosphere and butchering each other in the most bizarre and morbidly fascinating ways. With his earlier question still plaguing his every thought, he decided to ask the self-aware but easily manipulated creatures the same question: “What created me?”
Not one of them could answer, and indeed many of them didn’t even hear him, despite pretending they could. Then, one day, the omnificent God caught one of the humans muttering to itself, and God made the fatal mistake of listening.
“Nothing created God,” the human vehemently insisted, “for there are no such beings as cosmic deities.” The human scoffed. “God is no more a deity than I am! In fact, to sum him up quite succinctly, he’s nothing more than the central figment of a collective dream of mass delusion and socially inherited neuroses. He simply does not exist.”
God, unable to disprove the human’s words, had a moment of omnipotent panic, during which he pulled a rather comical face which would have profusely embarrassed him had he not promptly disappeared up his own omni-massive black hole.
And the human was pleased.
The cosmos, from that moment on, and in true fairy tale fashion, was finally Godless and its inhabitants all lived happily ever after… until they died, that is.
THE RELATIVITY OF BEING LOST
My argument against religion will always be with the men and women who imagine and believe in gods, not with the gods imagined by them; men exist, gods do not. It is easy to argue about an unprovable concept, but it is impossible to engage in debate with one. I would no sooner seek to directly debate Voldemort or Sauron than I would Yahweh or Allah. To do so would make me seem as deluded as their worshippers, not to mention a bit silly. My sense of logic and lack of divine faith may not match someone else’s faith and lack of logic, but that should neither label me as a sinner nor insinuate that I’ve ‘lost my way’.
When an atheist or any other so-called sinner gets labelled as ‘lost’ by a devout theist, it makes me both smile and sigh at what has become a hugely overused cliché. Who is more likely to be lost in this universe – a follower of science and philosophy, or a believer of archaic scriptures? ‘Lost’ is a relative term. But, in cosmic terms, any good physicist or cosmologist would be capable of estimating their position within the known sphere of existence, which in ilght years across is expressed thusly:
97,336,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I know; just looking at a number that long is exhausting. It’s no easier to understand when it’s shortened to 9.7336e+13ly. I’m reasonably sure this is the volume (radius cubed, 46b3) of the observable universe.
I would presume the likes of Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson – both of whom I hold in the utmost high regard – surely consider themselves far from being lost.
But, that being said, and despite the utter wonder and beauty of existence, there really is no salvation. So, yes, I accept that ultimately I am lost; not in life, but rather in death. My demise is inevitable. No working model exists, with proof of functionality, that could possibly save me from being snuffed out. Even if a magic elixir of vitality existed, it could not keep me from death long enough to prevent me being caught up in the eventual zero entropy of the universe, or the convergent crunch of the cosmos. All things must die. We don’t need to accept this fact sanguinely, but we should nonetheless accept it as truth. Believing in a super-entity saviour is the epitome of the deepest neuroses. Everlasting life will never be visited upon humanity, because no god and no science can withstand the ultimate fate of a universe.
So, whenever I get accused by a Muslim or a Christian of being lost (because these are often the worst offenders), the smile and the sigh is usually where it begins and ends, unless I’m in the mood for a debate. After all, responding with, “I might be lost, but so are you!” would just be a laughable parody of school-yard bickering.
THE OBJECT & THE FORCE
(WHEN FAITH AND SCIENCE COLLIDE)
Are the sciences and the religions beginning to blur together?
Existence (the observable universe, at least) is a place of harmony. But the cosmos is also governed by chaotic laws so intricate that it dances a rhythm of extreme complexity still well beyond our ken. Not all aspects of science are indisputable, yet the approach to knowledge often relies on educated guesswork to arrive at testable hypotheses, later to solidify into working models. Religion, on the other hand, relies on the belief that the universe, or rather all of existence, was created by something, someone.
This is the part I can’t accept.
I won’t recognise any validity in the claim that an infinite or near-infinite emptiness existed for an infinite or near-infinite time, while some unbelievably massive entity that is made of neither matter nor energy (I include thought-waves in that make-up) floated around in said emptiness with proverbial thumb up proverbial posterior, before one day thinking to itself, “Wait a minute! I know! I’ll just… do… this… and… BANG! There we are!”
Such a far-fetched prospect transcends hilarious and goes right into pitiable. After said entity lay the foundations of its universal creation, did it then wait for another 10 billion years until bothering to create basic organisms? Did it then spend the next 3 billion years by playing with the stars like puppets on strings while down on Earth it tweaked RNA and later DNA, making error after error and several times wiping the slate clean with a bunch of ice ages or stones chucked at the Earth to destroy those embarrassing failures?
I imagine that the entity, after all of its mucking about, might have concluded by saying to itself, “Ah! I know! I’ll create another lifeform, and this one I’ll torture and tease in equal measure, and I’ll cause it to torture itself, and I’ll give it a bun
ch of laws and parables and notions that will ultimately contradict one another – because I’m a capricious entity. And I’ll tell said lifeform a whole heap of lies – that the world it resides upon is brand new (although I know it’s really been around for nearly four and a half billion years); that the world is flat (even though I know it’s closer to a sphere); that there’s another entity living somewhere under the soil (even though I know the core of the Earth is a solid ball of nickel-iron alloy surrounded by a massive ocean of magma); et cetera, et cetera…”
I find all of this way too incredible. But what really seals the deal for me is this: I could never conscionably admire or respect such an entity, let alone worship it.
The observable universe, and by extension all of existence, may very well be a grand design, but that is merely the harmonic flow of nature, the turbulent marriage between chaos and order. The pendulum swings back and forth, creating, destroying, rinsing and repeating.
But one day the Sun will go nova and annihilate all life on Earth (except perhaps the tardigrade – tough little bugger that it is!) If humans haven’t sorted themselves out by then and left the planet for not quite so scorching climes, humanity will we wiped out and the slate will be wiped clean again, only this time permanently. There won’t be any religions left, because there won’t be anyone to care about or postulate over theoretical entities. Humanity will be wiped out to the last.
If science and faith somehow do end up merging together, I think the result could only neutralise such elements of religion as worship, commandments, control, leadership, genocide, and genital mutilation. The bigoted and spiteful acts, the petty and malicious murder of babies, toddlers, children, pregnant women, mothers, fathers, grandparents – all for inhumane reasons – must surely cease. Science could only ever accept one element of religion, one which would have to be designated as a testable theory – the suggestion that all of existence is controlled by a force extrinsic to reality, and yet also intrinsic to reality, influencing matter and energy (and, yes, plasma, for anyone with a cosmic plasma fetish – I know you’re out there!) Science would label this testable theory as ‘In Progress’, knowing an answer would very likely never be found. And there would still be a divide, because internal conflicting divisions is what humanity does best.
