In the excellent recent documentary series Human, there’s a scene in a cave in Canada where field scientist Duncan McLaren extracts an apparent bear rib from a rocky wall while recounting to the narrator, paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, a theory of how prehistoric humans hunted formidable cave bears. “Essentially, a hunter would go with a party to a cave, smoke the bear out of the cave, and entice that bear to attack a single hunter,” said McLaren. The animal would move in with a crushing bearhug, but if things went well for the human, a spear braced against the ground would impale the bear’s heart.
YouTube commentators were almost unanimously dismissive, arguing the theory shows no familiarity with bears or hunting. “This guy had to be trolling her with that stupidity. He’s secretly on our side and is just seeing if she’ll run with that nonsense,” wrote one, indicating a culture-war angle to the skepticism; the crowd evidently disliked scientists, as well as Al-Shamahi’s hair. The braced-spear theory may or may not be correct, but it’s been analyzed in science journals and fits evidence of bones and spear tips, some 13,000 years old. It irritated me that prehistoric hunters may’ve embraced such danger, aiding humanity’s spread and survival, only to be scoffed at by argumentative know-nothings on the internet.
In a recent Scientific American article, Vincent Ialenti, anthropologist and former Energy Department official, discussed long-term plans for nuclear waste, opening with a vignette of the year 51,500: “Feloo, a hunter, chews a strip of roasted caribou flank, washing it down with water from a nearby lake. Her boots press into thin soil that, each summer, thaws into a sodden marsh above frozen ground.” Also: “Feloo is unaware that 500 meters below her feet rests an ancestral deposit of copper, steel, clay and radioactive debris. Long ago, this land was called Canada. Here a group known as the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) built a deep geological repository to contain spent nuclear fuel—the byproducts of reactors that once powered Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.”
Ialenti noted how different countries have approached such projects. In the U.S., the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a New Mexico site that stores waste from nuclear weapons, has had proposals for signage and monuments that would keep people away far into the future, such as giant concrete thorns jutting from the desert floor; ideas have included an “atomic priesthood” that would pass a warning message down through generations. By contrast, Finland’s Onkalo repository was designed with an assumption that any institutional control or communication would fail, instead burying its waste irretrievably deep. France is taking a different approach with its planned Cigéo repository, legally requiring its operations be reversible for at least a century so that future generations can revisit today’s decisions; that fits with the possibility that what we consider nuclear waste may be “nuclear treasure,” as one scientist puts it, useful in future technologies.
The last idea has appeal on the basis that current-day humanity has no special wisdom and, considering recent technological and political developments, may have lower intellectual capability than past or future cohorts. The YouTube comments on prehistoric bear-hunting are a data point for that thesis, as is, more importantly, the reversal of messaging where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), once a prestigious scientific agency, now dismisses extensive research finding no link between vaccines and autism, on grounds that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” an empirically-unattainable standard of proof of a negative.
The Human series noted that other branches of humanity, such as Neandertals, Denisovans and Homo floresiensis (known as “hobbits”), disappeared after contact with our branch, Homo sapiens. Whether this is because our ancestors killed them, or outcompeted them for resources, or from unrelated reasons, is unclear, though there also was interbreeding such that people today carry portions of the DNA of extinct human lines. In any case, thinking about humanity’s distant past and possible distant futures raises intriguing questions as to how far-reaching the decisions of today may turn out to be.
