Toward the topic: "The Silurian Hypothesis"
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Author's Commentary: "Stewards of the Drawdown"
I was unfamiliar with the name “Silurian Hypothesis” or its origin before Isaac did this episode, but of course, being such a popular sci-fi concept—ancient aliens or an Atlantian high-tech human civilization that vanished—the idea wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me. As I’m trying to put each of these videos out nearly concurrently with the topic videos that inspired them, I don’t have access to all the useful input that I’d have if I could watch Isaac’s videos first, so I’m just going on what I think I know about the concept. And just as I’m likely to get a lot of physics wrong on a topic in the future, I’m certain I got some commonly accepted ideas about ancient pre-human species wrong here.
For the record, there are no humans in this story. I didn’t intend for the stewards to come off as fully human, and the homs referenced in the story I think of as early hominids, probably homo erectus. I’m no anthropologist, but I’m also not totally ignorant of some of the mysteries of pre-sapiens hominid evolution. I’ve studied a little linguistics and a lot of narrative, and one of the key questions I’ve looked at a lot is how language evolved, and oddly enough, I think that language’s deepest roots are intertwined with the ability to record place-memory in the hippocampus, which, also oddly enough I just had to tie into the generational memory of elephants in this story. Throw in an impending supervolcano eruption and, voilà! A recipe for a weekly short with a basketful of anthropological easter eggs that are hopefully as tongue-in-cheek as they are aspiring to be factual. It is fiction, after all.
Hope you enjoy!
Rowe