Offering something for folks to ponder--the effect of major solar flare events on human history. The most significant one that we know much about was the one in 1859 which sent the Northern lights as far south as the Caribbean and which sent sparks causing fires off of telegraph lines. Yet relative to ones before we had the ready means to detect and record them, scientists think the 1859 one may not have been that large. The Russians have done a fair amount of related work (relative to weaponizing such energy via nuclear blasts--one can create a similar electromagnetic pulse, or EMP), and they have determined that that EMP's can reduce empathy by effecting the pineal gland and that they can also cause genetic mutations in plants.

So, 1859 relates to two of the bloodiest wars in human history, the US Civil war and the Taiping Rebellion in china, 1850 - 1864, where 20 million were killed. Was reduction in empathy a factor in the nature of either of these wars? And what about the genetic mutations? The greatest plant breeder in the history of the world was Luther Burbank, who began research in 1867. The scope of his work was so amazing that many can only explain it in terms of mystical abilities. Perhaps he was the right person at the right time, a classic case of serendipity, being given a huge palette of recent mutations in the many plants he worked with that no one working before him would have had.

So, what might a really large one much further back have done? There is some research suggesting that dating them via tree rings may be possible, and if this carried into petrified trees--we might suddenly be able to date them quite a long ways back--I know nothing of the technical details of any of this, so it is indeed mostly raw speculation. But it might explain the origins of settled grain agriculture. there are a couple of facts that are difficult to work into a hypothesis for this. Grain agriculture seemingly sprang up at different sites, with different grains at very similar times relative to the scope of human history. And then it spread rapidly. The spread has always been explained as the fact that it was a large improvement, yet now that we can learn about the health and longevity of humans from bone remains, there is good evidence that people lived longer healthier lives before the imposition of settled grain agriculture. I see this as the first arms race and the beginning of what I think of as the age of accumulation. One cannot raise a large army of conquest sending them off with tubers and greens. grains are needed for war, nation states, taxation, urbanization, and large scale religion. you must have a concentrated, shippable, storable food source to accumulate the wealth needed for these things. People that switched to grains could beat people who did not.

And the problem of explaining why people in different place who had lived their particular way for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years then in seemingly unconnected places suddenly made a remarkably similar shift, to settled grain agriculture? I think the shift to large scale organized war is consistent with a loss of empathy as might have happened worldwide from a major EMP event. So also might a similar mutation in various grass family members--grains, where perhaps they were easier to process, or less likely to lodge (fall over). Perhaps the story of the garden of Eden was originally the story of a large EMP event where people lost empathy (ate the forbidden fruit) and were forced to take up settled grain agriculture--they were driven from the garden not by god, but by the powers that be. I do know how sketchy all this is, so kindness and an openness to pondering would be appreciated,