China's Fossil-Fueled Future
Unearthing its evolving relationship with the United States
Trump’s fruitless state visit to China is not as inconsequential as it appears. In fact, Trump’s failure to secure anything other than a couple non-binding verbal agreements on trade only underscores the historical significance of the meeting. Think of it as a point on a graph when the slope of a rising power briefly intersects with the slope of a declining power. It is a moment of parity just before the two continue on their inevitable, divergent paths.
President Xi said as much in his opening statement’s reference to the “Thucydides Trap” :
“Can China and the United States overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’ and create a new paradigm for major-country relations? Can they work together to address global challenges and inject more stability into the world?”
It was a rather pointed use of an analysis first made in 1980 by American historical novelist Herman Wouk. Wouk compared the conditions that led to the Peloponnesian War between Greece and Sparta to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Over time, it became shorthand for the apparent inevitability of war between a ruling and a rising power. And it has since been repurposed by academics and pundits to describe this century’s competition between the US and China. But now we have the President of China using it to characterize his nation’s relationship with the ruling power he was hosting for bilateral meetings during a state visit.
It was a bold statement of a new reality reflected by the fact Trump not only came back empty-handed, he also assumed a conciliatory posture on Taiwan, student visas and Chinese ownership of US farmland. That’s because America has already fallen into the Trap. In many ways, it’s been there since 9/11.
The United States’ power has increasingly come to rest solely on military force in the In the twenty-five years since the towers fell. It is, to use Trump’s favorite phrase, the only real card the US has to play after nearly a century of non-stop wars, interventions, incursions, bombings and drone strikes involving at least two dozen countries.
Contrarily, it’s been nearly four decades since China attacked another country. Instead of pouring trillions into wars and weapons it sells to and rains on other countries, it builds infrastructure and soccer stadiums around the developing world. It also issues loans without the “do as I say, not as I do” provisions the United States applies to nearly every relationship. And it’s now filling the voids America is leaving behind as it exits the world stage, like it did on the issue of climate.
Now, ironically, the world is turning to the rising power’s vast lead on renewable energy and electric vehicles to mitigate the fallout of the ruling power’s latest illicit war of choice. Trump has doubled-down on the same old cocktail of oil and war at the very time the world increasingly seeks alternatives to both.
China is offering the world the future. The US is clinging to its past.
That difference was on full display during Trump’s visit. Xi projected an image of China as an educated, cosmopolitan, outwardly-looking “rising power,” while Trump was perfectly cast as the embodiment of a willfully ignorant, parochial, inwardly-looking “ruling power” that risks ensnaring the whole world in the “trap.”
The divergence runs deep, too … and in surprising ways.
While the United States is descending into a demon-haunted world of religious zealotry, tribal conflict and chest-thumping benightedness, its main geopolitical adversary is rewriting the story of human evolution.
Paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng of Shanxi University led a team of scientists who reconstructed three “crushed” skulls. For years the skulls were identified as examples of Homo erectus, a widespread ancestor of the last common ancestor (Homo heidelbergensis) of Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, modern humans.
Because the skulls (a.k.a. Yunxian 1, 2 and 3) had been crushed and distorted during fossilization, some scientists remained unconvinced they were examples of Homo erectus. So, they “corrected” the distorted skulls with new 3-D models that made it clear previous analyses had been wrong. The skulls found along the banks of the Yan River were not Homo erectus. Instead, they appear closely related to “Dragon Man,” a hominin suspected to be a “Denisovan.” Like Neanderthals, Denisovans were contemporaries of our direct ancestors (Homo sapiens) … and some contemporary humans carry the Denisovan DNA to prove it.
What this means, according to a British scientist who worked on the team and co-authored the paper, is that our species may have appeared far earlier than 300,000 years ago. Said Professor Chris Stringer to the British Natural History Museum:
“Our analysis suggests that all large-brained humans from the last 800,000 years or so can probably be put into one of five groups. These are the groups of Asian Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, the Homo longi group which likely contains the Denisovans, and of our own species Homo sapiens.
“What’s revolutionary about our analysis is that it suggests all these five lineages trace their ancestry back more than a million years, which is much older than almost everyone has said, including me. And there are a couple of aspects that suggest that it could be an even more ancient divergence.”
In addition to altering the timeline of our evolution, it may also change the roadmap:
It also opens the door for the potential that our own lineage first emerged somewhere in Eurasia, before populations migrated into Africa where Homo sapiens then evolved.
That hypothesis has yet to be tested against the African fossil record. But when it does, don’t be surprised if a Chinese paleoanthropologist is the lead scientist. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised that 11 of the 12 scientists who co-authored this reconsideration of the “crushed skulls” were Chinese scientists.
In China, paleo is more than diet. It’s a great career.
Back in 2018, the Smithsonian Magazine dubbed China “the new epicenter of paleontology.” The government met a perceived “need for popular science education” by building “many new museums of natural history or geology” around the country. Seven years later, an academic survey of a century of Chinese paleontology details a thriving, well-funded scientific community that attracts some young paleontologists because they see it as “an advantageous career rather than out of their personal interest.”
Yeah, let’s repeat that … in China, young people go into paleontology because they see it as “an advantageous career rather than out of their personal interest.”
In the US, young people only go into paleontology or paleoanthropology out of personal interest. It is not an “advantageous career.”
Quite to the contrary.
Speaker Of The House Mike Johnson built his advantageous career on the belief that the Earth is around 10k years old and that humans were manifested by a supernatural being. He even helped Creationist Ken Ham build the Ark Encounter amusement park in Kentucky, where kids can learn that dinosaurs and humans were contemporaries and evolution is a hoax.
The Ark Encounter is a massive “replica” of Noah’s Ark that serves as a unnatural museum … or, if you prefer, a supernatural museum. Back in 2015, Ham’s organization hired Johnson as legal counsel and Johnson eventually secured millions of dollars in tax incentives for the bogus barge. Johnson was serving in Louisiana’s state legislature at the time … and occasionally hosting a religious radio show for the Family Research Council.
Not coincidentally, the war that led Trump to ask China for help opening the Strait of Hormuz is being managed by a former FOX News infotainer who belongs to an ultra-jingoistic Predestinationist Christian sect. Among other things, his fellow believers seek the establishment of a “Christian Nation” with its laws and culture based on Christian values (hello Sharia Law!). They also advocate repealing the 19th Amendment (only male heads of household get to vote) and the sect teaches that the Earth is around 6,000 years old. As for those pesky fossils? Well, the sect’s leader loves to say evolution is “stupid” and he speculates that fossils were likely planted sometime “after the fall of man” in Genesis.
Meanwhile, the day before Trump landed in China, yet another team of Chinese paleologists published their latest advancement of the understanding of hominin evolution. El Pais explained their findings:
Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years — five men and one woman — found at sites across much of the country from north to south. They were able to recover two proteins, and one of them — the M273V variant of the enamel protein ameloblastin — is key. The results show that this protein is present in all the fossils analyzed, which belonged to our ancestor Homo erectus. The same compound had previously been identified in the teeth of another human group, the Denisovans — close relatives of Neanderthals, themselves the species most closely related to our own.
Like the research cited above, this continues the lengthening of the human evolutionary timeline well-beyond the six to ten thousand years American political leaders defiantly cling to like a life preserver … although their version preserves delusions about the origins of life:
The finding implies that, at some point around 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus, which originated in Africa, and the Denisovans, a human population adapted to Eurasia, encountered one another, had sex, and produced fertile offspring. It is the oldest known episode of interbreeding between human groups, and the first to feature Homo erectus, a species that until recently had been largely overlooked.
It’s all part of a ever-more complex picture of the world our ancestors shared with up to five other hominin species:
Although we already knew that modern humans descend from Homo erectus, and that this species was the leading candidate behind the so-called “super-archaic introgressions” in our genome, this is the first conclusive proof. The new evidence adds to what was already known: that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, who left up to 4% of their DNA in us; and that Neanderthals interbred with Denisovans. Homo sapiens did the same, leaving Denisovan DNA in some present-day populations, with invaluable genetic legacies — such as the traits that allow humans to live at extreme altitudes, including the Himalayas.
This is the kind of research that happens when a rising power becomes a great power and it has the will and the money to invest in science that does not promise profits or lead to some military application. A nation that can afford to make paleontology an “advantageous career” is demonstrating its distinct advantage over nations that cannot afford it. The advantage is even greater over nations that simply refuse to do it out of a desperate need to preserve an ancient myth.
Interestingly enough, it’s not uncommon for an American Christian—particularly an Evangelical—to believe evolution is a hoax perpetrated by Satan himself. “Satan’s Lie.” as it’s sometimes called, is rooted in “worldliness” and a “man-centered deception” that seeks to usurp God’s sovereignty and replace it with the idolatrous worship of the natural world, much like paganism. Often referred to as “pagan science,” the epithet reflects an ignorance that is willful and perhaps even necessary to maintain the myths people have about themselves and the nature of their country.
Preserving myths well past their expiration date may be the last redoubt of a ruling power on the wane. That the age of the Earth or the widely-evident process of evolution are still bones of contention in “the world’s leading superpower” may be another sign that it is not equipped for the days ahead … that it is mired in denial about both the past and the future. Certainly, the rejection of the increasingly obvious is this ruling power’s defining feature at the quarter-way mark of the 21st Century.