Nobody Knows Anything

In a recent post, I wrote about the paradox of ice-age abundance. 30,000+ years ago in the cold, dry conditions of the ice age, human beings lived in a landscape that was populated with massive herds of megafauna like woolly mammoths and a range of equally enormous predators.

R. Dale Guthrie has been investigating the question for decades. (This paper presents a summary.) He provides a partial explanation based on the evidence he and others have collected over many years.

I've long wondered if the Ice Age is encoded in mythology. The "giants" of our lore might be those creatures like mammoths that our ancestors shared the planet with. Ironically, unexpectedly, maybe that was the garden of eden time, too. We collectively remember a time of abundance when we were pastoralists and just another animal.

Maybe "the fruit of the tree of knowledge" was agriculture an original sin, devil-deal if there ever was one... Maybe it was literally apples--fruit domesticated in what's now Kazakhstan. This lore all mixed with the star/solar mythology over time. Hell, maybe even the flood was real.. the end of the ice age. Water and humidity levels rising, maybe sometimes catastrophically.

Anyway, it becomes clearer to me every single day that human knowledge is exceedingly limited. It's cyclopean. The scientific method might be inherently flawed. The reductive approach forces isolated, serial answers to questions, while nature and the universe is totally interrelated and takes place all at once.

Nobody knows what caused the ice age. Nobody knows why it ended. Scientific explanations are not orders of magnitude better than mythological lore or speculative philosophy. They look quite a bit like a formalized version of the latter.