Made in Americas

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How to Survive the Apocalypse

Indigenous Territories of the Americas—image courtesy of Native-Land.ca

The Apocalypse is here: floods, fire, famine, disease. It’s all happening right now, and it’s going to get worse. The first order of business is to stop burning fossil fuels. But that alone isn’t going to reverse what is already happening, or stop the runaway train of climate change. If humanity is going to survive The Apocalypse, we are going to have to change the ways we live. The history of the Americas just might have some lessons for us.

The Colonial Dream

The “colonial dream” is a dream of pristine wilderness. It’s a dream of nature “as God intended”. That wasn’t what Columbus found in 1492. The Americas were territories that had been populated by homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. The First Nations had transformed every habitat, from the farthest reaches of the north, to the farthest southern tip of what would come to be known as South America.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas, the “First Nations”, survived climate catastrophes, both localized and global, long before the arrival of Europeans. Those climate catastrophes included the end of the last ice age and the extinction of “mega fauna”. They not only survived, they thrived. The estimates of the human population of the Americas in 1492 range from 50-150 million. To put that in perspective, the population of Europe in 1500 was approximately 60 million.

So many older texts refer to most of the first nations of the Americas, especially in North America, as “hunter gatherers”. That term is at least somewhat pejorative. It doesn’t begin to capture the sophisticated nature of the relationship the indigenous peoples of the Americas had with the land they lived on.

The Achievements of the First Nations of the Americas

In Central and South America lidar imagery has uncovered evidence of advanced agriculture and cities in ecosystems where previous generations of archaeologists assumed agriculture and civilization were not possible. In North America archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered that forests that were once assumed to be “untouched wilderness” were in fact extensively managed.

So how is any of this going to help humanity, now, survive The Apocalypse? There is so much we can learn from the First Nations of the Americas. One of the best lessons is we can learn from them is the way they preserved and managed wild spaces without destroying biodiversity. Another critical lesson comes from the indigenous cities of Central and South America. They incorporated agriculture into their cities. This made food production local and sustainable.

The First Nations of the Americas were advanced in ways we in the West are only beginning to understand. The world needs the knowledge that they had. So much was lost as a consequence of the Apocalypse that was colonialism. But hidden under the canopy of jungles, locked up in the stories of elders, there just might exist knowledge that can help humanity survive The Apocalypse that is now.

Malta’s “Mysterious Cart Ruts”

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Malta's mysterious cart ruts

Much has been made of Malta’s “mysterious cart ruts”. My basic response is, “Rubbish, they aren’t mysterious at all.” What they are, very clearly, is evidence of stone age masonry, on a massive scale.

So how would that work? It’s simple. Take a hammer stone, made of a hard stone—I’m not a stone age mason with millennia of working with stone as my heritage, so I can’t provide details. However, I can certainly provide the basics. Hammer out a trench. Break out the blocks of stone. Malta, before the end of the last ice age, was high ground, the perfect location to quarry large stone blocks where you could move them greater distances, with the assist of gravity, to construction sites.

The signature of Stone Age masonry

Stone age masonry has a unique signature. The stone is worked with hammer stones, not cut or chiselled. This tends to produce surfaces that are curved, not straight. This is evident in the Maltese “cart ruts”. You also see it in stone ruins found above and below ground in Malta.

The sheer scale of Malta’s “mysterious cart ruts”

What is remarkable about Malta’s “mysterious cart ruts” is their sheer scale. Somewhere off the shoreline of Malta, there are some absolutely massive stone ruins, the smoking gun for an advanced stone age civilization, that predates the end of the last ice age.

We have examples of extremely advanced stone age civilizations in the Americas. There is no reason to believe that advanced stone age civilizations did not exist in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere—beyond the myopia of our academic and archaeological cultures.

Apocalyptic flooding at the end of the last ice age

There are human “myths”, world wide, that speak of advanced civilizations destroyed by massive floods. We know that apocalyptic levels of flooding occurred at the end of the last ice age, especially along oceanic coasts. Humans tend to build the majority of their cities close to sea level. It is entirely possible that there were what could only be described as “cities” in coastal locations at the end of the last ice age. Those cities would have been inundated by that flooding.

The true scope of human history

Our assumption that the most meaningful accomplishments in human history have occurred in the past 5,000 years is nonsensical rubbish. The history of homo sapiens goes back 300,000 years, and the history of humanity, a full 3,000,000 years.

Do I think that human civilizations that might predate the end of the last ice age had nuclear power and cell phones? Absolutely not, but there are many examples of remarkably advanced civilizations that predate the Industrial Revolution. Many of those civilizations show evidence of skills and technologies that we, with all our industrial might and tools, are unable to replicate.