Bronze Age Fern War

Author: Xiao Shui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Four hundred sixty million years ago, Earth was a blazing ball of fire, red like the scene of a nuclear war. It gradually cooled down, becoming desolate and decayed, like a pile of bare nuclear waste. Three hundred eighty million years ago, some land slowly emerged from the sea (e.g., the North China Plain in China). By six hundred million years ago, life slowly bubbled up in the oceans—fungi and algae scattered here and there, colorful, floating on the surface, like mold on the surface of a broth.
Excerpt: Earth as a Blazing Ball Four hundred sixty million years ago, Earth was a blazing ball of fire, red like the scene of a nuclear war. It gradually cooled down, becoming desolate and decayed, like a pile of bare nuclear waste. Three hundred eighty million years ago, some land slowly emerged from the sea (e.g., the North China Plain in China). By six hundred million years ago, life slowly bubbled up in the oceans—fungi and algae scattered here and there, colorful, floating on the surface, like mold on the surface of a broth. Three hundred million years ago, forests emerged on land. By two hundred million years ago, the dashing Mr. Dinosaur, dragging his long tail, ruled this planet. Unbeknownst to them, these armored giants were plagued by the hole in the ozone layer or asteroid impacts, and after ruling the Earth for over a hundred million years, they went extinct. After the dinosaurs died, there was a period of time when there were no heroes in the world: animals were all small in size, birds began to fly in the sky, lightly and carelessly, like a silent, plotless old movie.
The earliest human, a lady named Lucy, lived in Africa three million years ago, specifically in the central part of Ethiopia. She was tall (1.00 meters, a cool girl), striking in appearance, with a wide nose and a long mouth, and would startle you at night. Lucy was named by paleontologists. This human grandmother was not alone; half a million years later, she had a group of neighbors. This group included people of all ages, totaling thirteen, who roamed in neighboring Kenya. After their deaths, their bones scattered into hundreds of pieces, which are now unearthed by archaeologists. Additionally, there were some solitary "ancestors" who wandered alone in Africa, unsure whether they were eaten by beasts or whether they ate beasts—anyway, their bones were incomplete, some with only heads, or scattered thigh bones, strewn across the African continent. These earliest humans from three million years ago roamed the world, their remains buried in Africa, heralding the dawn of the Stone Age. It is reasonable to believe that Africa is the cradle of humankind. But in China, despite our frustration, no remains of humans from three million years ago have been dug up. Even when we dug as hard as possible, we only found two human teeth, which were used one hundred seventy thousand years ago (some believe seventy thousand years ago), and they were not the ancestors of modern Chinese (as they later went extinct). The location was Yuanmou County in Yunnan. The owners of these two teeth not only used stone tools but also used fire, as there were bones roasted by fire nearby, indicating they had a meal (though it wasn’t artificial fire). Experts determined from the teeth that he could already walk upright. (How did they determine that? Faint!) In any case, this handsome, toothed fellow who ate roasted meat had his cave illuminated by firelight, but eventually, the wind of time blew him away, leaving only two front teeth, now staring at the air in a museum.
Next, in southern Shaanxi, the Lantian County also found the Lantian Man. It was a small piece of skull bone and three teeth, dating back to five hundred sixty thousand years ago, living alongside lovable and strange animals like the Sanmenxia horse, giant panda, oriental saber-toothed tiger, and Chinese. As the timeline approached, more bones were found: the forty or so individuals and over a hundred bones of the Beijing Zhoukoudian people from five hundred thousand years ago. Males were 1.62 meters tall, and females 1.52 meters. They armed themselves with fire and clubs and fought for the right to live in the cave with the original inhabitants—a group of fierce hyenas. The hyenas repeatedly occupied the cave. Later, floods submerged the cave of the Beijing people, but the people who lived above them in the mountain survived. These eight people’s most distinctive feature was their vanity—they used animal bones to sew clothes, with thread made of animal tendons and hemp fibers, and clothing made of deer, fox, rabbit, and antelope hides. They wore seashell necklaces around their necks, greenish-yellow stone earrings, and bird or fish bone hairpins. The seashells were brought from hundreds of miles away from the coast, rare and precious, strung together and hung on their wrists, as valuable as watches. They also used graves, a pioneering achievement from twenty thousand years ago. Their brain capacity was already the same as modern humans, which is why they were so vain. However, they rarely sang, as their vocal cords had not yet evolved well, and their voices were hoarse—singing too loudly would attract wolves. At this time, the number of humans was still not as large as that of large beasts. Giant beasts could be seen roaming everywhere—saber-toothed tigers, rhinoceroses, wild boars, tigers, and wolves accompanied our ancestors, and our ancestors exchanged meat with them. These fierce beasts also lived in the caves. Sometimes, we found human bones in their caves, just as we found their bones in our caves. When our ancestors were lucky, they won the fight, tortured and retaliated against them, and used their bones as a base to smash them with another stone, creating primitive needles, straws, fishhooks, spoons, flutes, and shuttles. During the 20,000-year-old people era, humans had already made significant progress—besides knapping stone tools and sewing clothes, they invented the extraordinary bow and arrow, a long-range missile of that time. Our ancestors saw a crow perched on a mulberry tree, bending the branch deeply. When the crow flew away, the branch snapped violently, scaring the crow. This principle helped people invent the bow. The earliest bow was used to shoot stones, later modified to shoot sharpened wooden spears (spears) attached to it, which became arrows. The earliest bow and arrow was unearthed in Shiyu, Shuoxian County, Shanxi, dating back 28,000 years.
All the aforementioned lovely ancients were O-negative blood type, as their meat-based diet made their blood type uniform. They used stone axes, bows and arrows, and sharpened wooden spears, but they did not grow grains, living freely in a simple and beautiful Stone Age. One-third of them happily lived past their twenties before dying, while the rest only lived to fifteen.