As the co-author of what I like to think of as a kinder, gentler survival guide, I’ve spent a lot of mental bandwidth over the past couple years reflecting on humankind, and wondering how, with all the challenges we have faced in the span of our existence, we’ve managed to last here on Earth.
Jeanne Chilton Devon
In Paleolithic times, cave dwellings in Matera used channels carved in rock to serve as overflow from one home’s underground cistern to another.
We almost didn’t. About 74,000 years ago, the number of human beings on Earth may have dwindled to forty “breeding pairs,” thanks to the cataclysmic eruption of a supervolcano, called Toba, in what is now Indonesia. Toba erupted with a volume of ash 2,800 times greater than Mount Saint Helens, more than 900 times the scale of the Mount Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii, and thirty-five times the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 (also in Indonesia) that resulted in the infamous “year without a summer” in the Northern Hemisphere the following year.
Science writer Sam Kean told National Public Radio it’s a safe guess that Toba “dimmed the sun for six years, disrupted seasonal rains, choked off streams, and scattered whole cubic miles of hot ash (imagine wading through a giant ashtray) across acres and acres of plants.” It’s easy to envision how the population of humans crashed. And it took hundreds, if not thousands, of years to rebound. But we made it, right?
In a world staring down a whole series of inevitable climate catastrophes and an existential crisis of our own making, it’s good to have role models.
So how did they do it? What were the best practices that fostered the resilience of a handful of prehistoric humans, which made the difference between you reading this right now, and you and I never having existed at all?
I’ve been thinking about these questions for a lot longer than a couple years. As a child during the era of Ronald Reagan, I had a recurring nightmare about nuclear annihilation. In college, I took a semester-long seminar cheerily titled “Catastrophes and Mass Extinctions” and wrote a term paper about the creatures who managed to survive extinctions that wiped out up to 95 percent of all life on Earth. (I’m looking at you, horseshoe crabs!)
My professor showed us a chart that detailed predictions for something called “global warming,” a topic that had been talked about since the late 1800s. A social media clip that recently went viral, from a 1912 article in Popular Mechanics titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future,” warned that if the hypothesis about the effects of human-caused carbon emissions is true, the effects could be significant “in a few centuries.” But it wasn’t until 1988—the year after my catastrophes and mass extinctions class—that scientists began to insist that climate change enter mainstream discussion, and that steps be taken to mitigate the threat it posed.
Unfortunately, everyone has been right, from Popular Mechanics to my professor, to the climate scientists of today. But getting people to change their thinking, behavior, and lifestyle isn’t easy—especially when the fossil fuel industry has poured untold sums into public messaging against the systemic change required to combat climate change, and into the pockets of politicians who are happy to oblige by repeating the lie. Yet, here we are, having to contemplate our very survival in a world that seems rigged against us.
There is good news every day about ways people are mitigating climate change: solar and wind power, tidal power, green roofing—heck, one company even developed a manta ray-shaped robot designed to pull seaweed to the ocean floor to sequester carbon. Human imagination and innovation should never be discounted. And the computer age means we can all learn, share stories, and inspire one another at the speed of an electron.
But for everyone who dreams up a carbon-capturing robo-ray, scores of others avoid the pain of facing our future by simply denying it. Others still prioritize comfort and profit over the health of our planet and its people.
While we must look to the future world we envision, we must also focus on how to survive what we have already done. If carbon emissions were stopped right this moment by flipping a magic switch, temperatures on Earth would continue to rise for decades. Decades. Healing from this terrible self-inflicted wound is going to be a long process.
So back to how we have managed to survive what the planet has thrown at us. As often happens, revelations come from places we don’t expect. I was recently visiting a city in south-central Italy that most people have never heard of, called Matera. Matera is the third-oldest city on Earth, after Jericho, in Israel, and Aleppo, in Syria.
People—descendants of those forty breeding pairs from tens of thousands of years ago—chose this place to live in Paleolithic times, when the area was full of trees and wildlife, and a large pristine river provided a seemingly never-ending supply of potable water. Natural caves in the hills provided shelter, and the soft sandstone cliffs made it easy to carve out new dwellings. It was a good place to put down roots, and humans lived in these cave dwellings for more than 12,000 years—until the 1970s.
Jeanne Chilton Devon
Today, many cave dwellings in Matera are being converted into hotel rooms, bed- and-breakfasts, and bars.
But things in that place changed over time. Today, the high-rushing river is more like a dark, slow-moving creek you wouldn’t want to use to fill your canteen. The arid grasslands surrounding Matera—full of grasshoppers and odd-looking snails—do not bring to mind a land of plenty. So why did people stay, and more importantly, how did they survive?
Part of the answer lies in the main reason for Matera’s UNESCO World Heritage Site designation, and it isn’t the city’s age or cave dwellings that earned the label—its water management did. Over the millennia, as the river slowed, the people who settled the area devised an elaborate system of cisterns to capture rainwater, complete with overflow mechanisms that diverted any surplus water to other cisterns. Each dwelling had one, and eventually, huge communal cisterns stored the precious rainwater for entire communities to use throughout the dry season. The system in Matera inspired the Romans to create their own aqueduct systems. Score another one for human innovation.
My Italian guide elaborated further on how humanity had managed to weather the changes, as we stood in an open space in front of the entrances to four cave dwellings. This was a “neighborhood,” he explained, gesturing to the doorways and the outdoor communal space in which we stood. “These four families would have been very close to each other, and traded food and wool, and helped each other to survive. We learn lessons here,” he said. “If you only try to live on sheep and wool, it is very hard. But if you trade your wool for vegetables, or eggs for meat, and everyone helps each other in this way, then life is easier. Together is how we survive. We cannot do it alone.”
Jeanne Chilton Devon
Four cave dwellings and a shared outdoor space made up a “neighborhood” in ancient Matera.
And there is the crux of it all. Yes, survival and adaptation require certain skills and measures we should all be taking to be prepared. It is essential that we know how to store water; grow and preserve food; have emergency plans in place; assess our homes and harden them to the natural disasters likely to occur; do simple home and car maintenance; understand basic first aid; and engage in committed practices that will keep us resilient in body and mind. Yes to all of that.
But we cannot do it alone.
After World War II, Italy was determined to wholeheartedly join the post-war modern world, and part of that transition meant removing the cave dwellers still living in Matera. No electricity, no running water, no heat, abject poverty, rampant disease caused by poor sanitation and living in close quarters with animals, and child mortality rates of more than 50 percent, all spurred reforms. So the Italian government moved the families out, one by one, breaking the bonds of the neighborhoods and separating groups in an effort to bring these residents into the modern world and a modern way of thinking and living.
Suddenly, communities were gone, and the individual members were living in apartment buildings, separated by walls, mostly inside, without common spaces. It was a painful transition at first, explained our guide, and many people did not want to leave what they had always known and what their ancestors had known for 12,000 years. But as they began to enjoy a life without disease, and child mortality rates began to decline, they were happy and no longer wished to return. Modernity, science, and technology galloped in and improved their quality of life and lifespan. The post-war transition in the caves of Matera is the story of humankind’s evolution, sped up and taking place in the twentieth century.
Jeanne Chilton Devon
Cave dwellings juxtaposed with modern city buildings show the evolution of human societies.
No one will argue that modern conveniences, utilities, sanitation, and healthy children aren’t good things, but we would be remiss not to recognize that while gaining these life-saving benefits, we have also lost something that may be equally important to our survival. Today, only 26 percent of people say they know most of their neighbors. In neighborhoods designed for cars, with houses and yards designed for privacy, with shops, bars, and restaurants located outside of residential zones, and in an era where central air has replaced sitting on the porch at night, we are isolated in our own comfy caves. But this is not what we are made for, especially in times of challenge and disaster.
More severe and longer-lasting storms, catastrophic flooding, more intense and longer wildfire seasons, crippling drought, interruption of supply chains, heat waves and winter storms, future pandemics—these will all test us. The swimming pool is filling up and some of us don’t know how to swim. We will all have to become learners, re-learners, practitioners, and teachers, and we need to do it quickly. In a future where the collapse of infrastructure is inevitable—whether on a small geographic scale or a larger, more insidious one—we need to be our own handyperson, our own first-aid station, our own farmers and foragers, our own security, our own energy and water providers, our own psychologists, and our own teachers. It’s a heavy lift. And the way to make it lighter is to figure out who is in your neighborhood, what they can do, how you can help each other, and how you can pool resources to be prepared.
We were made to rely on one another. We were made to work together, trade skills and goods, have each other’s backs, cooperate, share, and live in a community. Things may not always be easy—in fact, sometimes they may be almost intolerable—but we can survive together if we don’t forget the lessons learned from the third-oldest city on Earth.
“This is not just the history of Matera, or of Italy,” our guide said at the end of the tour. “This is the history of all people. This is how we all lived, and how we survived.”