"10,000 BC" -The Film & Beginnings of Human Civilization
The 10th millennium BC is a seminal marker in the history of the human
species and the beginning of the the first part our current Holocene epoch.
The Pleistocene Ice Age ends with the retreat of glaciers and the beginning warming interglacial, spurred the re-settlement of northern regions of the planet. Sea levels rose abruptly throughout the world and massive inland flooding occurs due to glacier melt.
In North America the dire wolf, smilodon, giant beaver, ground sloth, mammoth, and American lion all become extinct. Europe witnesses permanent ecological change, with the savannah-dwelling reindeer, bison, and Paleolithic hunters withdrawing to the sub-Arctic, leaving the rest to forest animals like deer, auroch, and Mesolithic foragers. Homo floresiensis, the human's last known surviving close relative, becomes extinct.
Roland Emmerich's upcoming film, 10,000 BC (released in 2008), takes us back to a dark period that marks the beginning of modern man as we follow the perilous adventures of a 21-year-old mammoth hunter D'Leh.
Emmerich, director of Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow, follows D'Leh in a journey through time as he travels through unknown lands on a quest to rescue his people from extinction. Leading a primitive army, D'Leh uncovers a lost civilization in pursuit of a warlord who kidnapped his love, Evolet, encountering saber-toothed cats and other prehistoric predators in the journey to save his tribe.
Most of us are blissfully unaware that almost the whole of human history -from the hunters and gatherers to the rise of towns and cities, the development of science and medicine -the whole of our great human pageant- has taken place within an atypical period of fair weather known as the Holocene.
In 10,000 BC the entire world population was likely below 5 million people, mostly hunting-gathering communities of Neolithic cultures scattered over all continents, save for Antarctica. Pottery and cooking, was developed independently in Japan and North Africa. It is likely that the earliest incidence of Agriculture, based on the cultivation of primitive forms of millet and rice, occurred in southeast Asia, around 10,000 BC. Agriculture also began to develop in the Armenian Highlands, and the Fertile Crescent, but was not be practiced widely or predominantly for another 2,000 years. In Europe, Europe: the Magdalenian culture flourishes and creates cave paintings in France.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
A Bigger Threat than Global Warming: Mass Species Extinction
This extinction of Homo floresiensis, our last remaining relative, is a great story that needs to be told and we’ll know more once the original research team gets back to the caves in Flores. Hard to believe, but their work was halted by the Indonesian government at one point. Of course, I have a vested interest in hoping this story has some validity to it, having written a fictional novel on the find. There is more on this ongoing controversy about Homo floresiensis at www.floresgirl.com.
Erik John Bertel
Posted by: Erik John Bertel | July 24, 2007 at 09:14 AM