Rock wriggling

South African mountains display many shapes and sizes of rock folds caused aeons ago by varied processes affecting the geological upper strata. These curvaceous outcrops in picture are the tips of geological events long ago in the Little Karoo.

Most of the surface rock not under water has become covered in soil and vegetation, often only shallowly on mountain slopes and even less or not at all on steep slopes.

Rock folds remaining visible are often combinations of synclines or troughs and anticlines or domes. Such folds are called open when shallow, closed when deep. When the layers in the limbs on both sides of the plane that cuts through the centre of a fold are parallel, the fold plunging or rising to a fully closed or tight position, it is called isoclinal.

The forces shaping rocks into folds are beyond the natural life limits of biological entities. Rock formation changes are imperceptibly slow or violently fast. During slow change the covering vegetation lives comfortably on top of most of it.

Roots break rock slowly, entering into cracks and crevices in search of water and nutritious minerals. This action makes a life for a plant in the short term. In the long term it combines with erosion, forming soil from broken rock and the accumulating remains of untold plants and animals. Plant impact on rock is extremely superficial, only in the biosphere part of rock formations uppermost in the earth’s crust.

The violent forces of volcanic action and earthquake movement of touching tectonic plates are, however, huge matters of life-changing or life-ending impact to all that wriggle and breathe. Nothing lives on earth on a scale sufficient for holding its breath in anticipation of those events.

The only sensible action taken in response to big cataclysms culminating in mass extinction is for all survivors to do as the living always do: keep alive as best they can and procreate with all vigour. Running rarely helps much. Several mass extinctions have taken away half or more of all living species out of the extant mix of the day, reducing numbers enormously. Meteorite impact kills instantly, its weather change effects reduce food supplies more slowly.

Reconstruction of prehistorical events with great precision holistically is not a science advanced to any levels of great accuracy when it comes to covering the overall duration of life forms on earth. We know quite a bit of the times since humans invented writing and started to record events around seven thousand years ago, maybe a little more counting the oldest rock art. Some sciences peer into the past with continually increasing ingenuity but many parts of the picture of the past will never be recovered by humanity.

The transition from hunter-gatherer Homo sapiens forefathers and mothers with brains like ours, living in a tough form of Eden since at least 70 000 years ago, happened between 10 000 and 12 000 years ago, the advent of farming. This is when roaming no longer grabbed them as the only way to go. Mothers may have wanted stable homes for child rearing or fathers had sore feet, so farm labouring types our ancestors became. Groups may have become big and strong enough to stand their ground, defend their territory in the internecine struggles among early humans. Maybe there are still regrets over this decision, but its too late now!

Whatever the truth, this is roughly one version of what some of the learned ones of our day have to say. They weren’t there, but it is the wont of our restless brain species to figure such things out. Firming up the past is often thought vital by people for approaching the future. Nascent notions grown to plausible possibilities are grasped like straws and grown like truth, adhered to like gospel. In this manner hand-me-down ideas heard around evening fires grew in attractiveness in the past, gained numerically in believed probability until they reached the belief stage. Beliefs grown this way cause trouble for people all the time, throughout history like the shadow of science. Beliefs sustain fighting among people over versions of the unknown, waxed into truth. Truth may be the most slippery gift humanity treasures.

Discovered fact stumbled upon or from eureka moments have sometimes dealt with this, as science came later. New beliefs working in this way keep growing and dying as long as people will think, talk, write and read. Science puts a word in, is listened to by some. Technology is favoured by more than science, as it is more directly linked to comfort and less loaded with the uncertainty and continual questioning that shadow science. 

Who knows what the little cauldrons of consciousness in generations to come will still warm up for each other? Our communal lantern of learning is in fact an endless collection of brief candles, individual consciousnesses casting little lights into our past, on our present and at our possible futures. Some people are more impressed than others with the rate at which this brightness of the light is increasing in our time. Light will be followed, whichever way it indicates. Science requires effort, resources and patience. Science is, however, not the only light seen by people. Science and woke are not bedfellows.

The lower estimate of the duration of continuous life of little somethings on earth is about 3,5 billion (i.e. thousand million) years. This number is more than half a billion years smaller than the upper estimate of that proposed date.

Human scribblings about contemporary history, counting every pen stroke or equivalent, is much less than 10 000 years: The earth is old, but only a third as old as the universe according to our current truth. Our minds grasp such numbers as poorly as those telling us about the distances to stars and galaxies, or those concerning the size of the atoms and their particles (Norman and Whitfield, 2006; Wikipedia).