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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Biogeography
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Climate, Fire and Human Evolution - The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene (Paperback, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2016)
Loot Price: R2,940
Discovery Miles 29 400
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Climate, Fire and Human Evolution - The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene (Paperback, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2016)
Series: Modern Approaches in Solid Earth Sciences, 10
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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