Man is like an animal. Alexander Nikonov man like an animal Nikonov man like an animal read

Title: Man as an Animal

About the book “Man as an Animal” Alexander Nikonov

Alexander Nikonov is a famous writer, author of the famous bestsellers “The End of Feminism” and “Crises in the History of Civilization.” Masterfully discussing sensitive and controversial topics, the author acts in his works as an apologist for common sense. Nikonov’s talented provocations outrage, make you want to find a refutation, challenge, but most importantly, they make you think. “Man as an animal” will undoubtedly cause a negative reaction among many representatives of our “human animal”. But what is a book if not a timely impetus to think?

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Quotes from the book “Man as an Animal” Alexander Nikonov

Have you ever noticed how trained, that is, cultivated, dogs feel superior to uncouth dogs? Dogs that have gone through training school rise above empty barking pranksters, like officers above civilian uniforms. They are full of self-esteem, they know life, they look condescendingly at silly little dogs, they do not run around like catechumens, they have a serious matter - to guard the territory or accompany the blind. They are internally polished and cultured, that is, they understand what is possible and what is not. Fire played approximately the same role with semi-wild monkeys...

But we can easily give up meat completely and switch to plant foods, and nothing bad will happen - on the contrary, there will be fewer problems with arthrosis and gout. But switching entirely to meat food for a person in the most literal sense means death.

We see that nature, having no brain, acts quite reasonably.

It is necessary, while moving in space, to actively obtain energy for movement, to run away from those who want to take advantage of the energy you have accumulated, and to perform another specific function - reproduction, that is, according to the irresistible program that has turned on, to look for sexual partners and interbreed with them. In principle, the entire treasury of world literature is dedicated to this - the fight against competitors and reproduction.

By the way, take note - people who are not genetically prone to drug addiction (in any form - heroin, alcohol, etc.) are not prone to all-encompassing, insanely passionate love. Their love is so calm. I would even say - civilized. Lucky people!.. Such people live in marriage all their lives. That is, for the strength of a marriage, love illness should not be acute, but chronic.

The four legs on which the table of love stands are testosterone, dopamine, endorphin and oxytocin. There are these four substances, which means the table is set, sit down to eat, please...

But from practice it is known that people who quit smoking begin to experience an acute shortage of nicotinic acid in the body and the addition of this vitamin makes it easier.

Of course, the economy, which arose on the basis of the natural behavior of primates, while developing, made certain adjustments to their (our) behavior. Thousands of years ago, during ancient civilization, for example, legal equality of citizens and the principle of private property were introduced, which made it possible to remove subdominant individuals from the blow of dominants. And thus gave them an incentive to work not “for one token”, but at full strength - because they won’t take it away. This intensification caused a rapid growth of technology, science, and the arts.

The pattern of our economy and the entire human civilization, including the economy, is determined by the characteristics of our instincts, the lifestyle of our ancestors and the general structure of our body.

What did the absence of a living mother lead to? To loss of socialization. Monkeys that grew up without a mother or with an artificial mother substitute turned into social degenerates. They did not know how to build relationships with other monkeys, as well as with the opposite sex. When the time came for procreation, the males simply did not know how to finish with the females. And no instinct, without being sharpened by education, helped. Only rigid fixation of the female in a special pen in a position suitable for mating helped: the male in this situation, with grief, managed to carry out sexual intercourse.

Download the book “Man as an Animal” for free by Alexander Nikonov

(Fragment)

There are many of us in the likeness of God,

And yet each one is flawed.

We owe it to the monkeys.

Oleg Grigoriev

“Nikonov can be killed. Even necessary. And burn his books. This will add scandalous popularity to them. I don't agree with a single word he says, except for conjunctions and prepositions. But I read to the end. The facts are too drawn out - unknown, sensational, shocking, upsetting the familiar world.”

Mikhail Weller, writer

“A talented person, kissed at birth by God in the very zone that subsequently determines literary talent.”

Arkady Arkanov, satirist writer

The idea for this book was as sudden as diarrhea. This is how good books always begin...

It’s just that one day, listening to the outpourings of my good friend about his dotted family life and relationships with money and women, I thought that all his life’s squiggles were caused not by his decisions, but by the triggered instincts of that monkey that sits inside each of us.

Our entire life - both small and large - is structured according to the mold of the beast from which we descended. If we had descended from another creature, for example from a sheep, the whole appearance of civilization would be completely different. Because each species has its own specific behavior. The habits of herbivores are fundamentally different from the habits of predators. And the behavior of a predator is from the behavior of an omnivorous herd creature living in the crowns of trees, which, by basic design, we are.

Therefore, damn it, it would be extremely interesting to look at man and the civilization that he created through the eyes of a zoologist or ethologist - a specialist in animal behavior. And then you and I will see the reflection of an omnivorous herd mammal jumping through the trees on everything that surrounds us - on objects, on relationships, on earthly art and on everyday trifles, on religion and on the highest soars of the spirit.

Well? Let's put a magnifying glass over the global human race, as one philosopher called our civilization?

Dear children!

You should not ask, “What is an animal?” - but we need to ask: “What kind of object do we designate as an animal?” We call an animal everything that has the following properties: it eats, comes from parents similar to itself, grows, moves independently and dies when its time comes. Therefore, we classify the worm, chicken, dog and monkey as animals. What can we say about people? Think about it in terms of the characteristics listed above and then decide for yourself whether it is right to consider us animals.

Albert Einstein

Now I am not going to prove to every literate citizen who can read and think the obvious - that man is an animal. It is unlikely that among the readers of my book there will be at least one who would pass by this wonderful fact in life: we are animals, gentlemen!

I remember back in school, during a biology lesson, I argued with my narrow-minded classmate, proving to him that man is an animal. He resisted this evidence and did not want to believe it.

– Who else if not an animal? Robot, or what? – I was surprised at the tenacity of my dull friend.

Now even deep churchmen do not argue with this: yes, they say, man is an animal. And some even add that the Lord created man on the material basis that he had at that time - an animal. But he breathed soul into it! Which, they say, distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Man is indeed very different from the entire animal world. Strikingly different! That’s why the stupid classmate argued with me, not wanting to agree with his animality: for children, who are much closer to animals than adults socialized and trained by society, the fact that a person is an animal produces a shock impression - such a paradox. Once upon a time, a whole class of American schoolchildren, shocked by the biology teacher’s story that people are animals, wrote a letter to Einstein, asking him to judge their dispute with the teacher. You have already read what Einstein answered to the children in the epigraph...

The differences between humans and other animals are so striking that asking the question of how our species differs from others is, at first glance, even somehow stupid: we wear pants, eat with forks, and what a civilization we have built! We are reasonable, not some kind of beast!

My sister, who loves animals dearly, became interested in reading popular science literature a couple of years ago. When asked why there was suddenly such interest in science, she answered:

- Just imagine how many amazing things people have done on this planet, starting from the simplest nut, which also had to be invented. We went into space and found out why the stars shine. And just think - the beast did all this! An ordinary animal...

But this beast had a good tool - its mind. With the help of our minds, we have conquered the entire planet - from the humid equatorial regions that were once our homeland, almost to the very poles, where severe cold reigns. Having mastered fire and learned to protect our naked bodies from the weather with artificial skins called clothing, we expanded our habitat to the size of the entire Earth.

We have powerfully pushed aside other species that once lived where we now live. And now we are almost everywhere! Many species became extinct, unable to withstand competition with us, or were simply physically destroyed by us. But we have multiplied other species beyond belief - along with ourselves. Judge for yourself…

There are approximately five orders of magnitude (one hundred thousand times) more people and the so-called “domestic animals” that we breed artificially than animals similar to us in weight and type of nutrition. If you look at the graph below, you will see that the relationship between the abundance of a species and the size of its representatives is inversely proportional. That is, the larger the species, the fewer individuals of this species live on the planet. We fall out of this law.

Humanity has not only taken over the entire planet. It transforms the appearance of the planet itself. Academician Vernadsky wrote that humanity has become a geological force changing natural landscapes. And this was not a poetic metaphor for a scientist. We are truly transforming the planet in the most literal sense. Judge for yourself…

Geographically, Europe is a zone of taiga and mixed forests. But the forests here were cleared for arable land before the Middle Ages; they remained only in the mountains and nature reserves. Instead of continuous forest cover in Western Europe, there are now only small forest patches.

We are plowing up virgin steppes and building concrete jungles of cities. We flood the plains with artificial seas in order to accumulate water for these cities and generate electrical energy. We are literally tearing down mountains in search of minerals and digging giant pits for open-pit coal mining. Finally, as my sister pointed out, we have gone beyond the planet. And they even changed the face of their star system to some extent: over the past hundred years, the radio emission of our solar system has doubled, to the surprise of potential star observers from other worlds. And all because Marconi and Popov invented radio.

Moreover, what’s interesting is that humanity began to change the face of the planet, transforming entire natural landscapes not just now, “literally yesterday,” having risen to the heights of industrial civilization and armed with excavators and bulldozers, but hundreds and thousands of years ago. With a spear and a digging stick.

And when finally the ships of the Martians

The globe will be near the globe,

Then they will see a continuous golden ocean

And they will give him a name: Sahara.

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Alexander Nikonov

Man as an animal

There are many of us in the likeness of God, And yet each one is flawed. We will assume that the flaws We owe it to the monkeys.

Oleg Grigoriev

“Nikonov can be killed. Even necessary. And burn his books. This will add scandalous popularity to them. I don't agree with a single word he says, except for conjunctions and prepositions. But I read to the end. The facts are too drawn out - unknown, sensational, shocking, upsetting the familiar world.”

Mikhail Weller, writer

“A talented person, kissed at birth by God in the very zone that subsequently determines literary talent.”

Arkady Arkanov, satirist writer

The idea for this book was as sudden as diarrhea. This is how good books always begin...

It’s just that one day, listening to the outpourings of my good friend about his dotted family life and relationships with money and women, I thought that all his life’s squiggles were caused not by his decisions, but by the triggered instincts of that monkey that sits inside each of us.

Our entire life - both small and large - is structured according to the mold of the beast from which we descended. If we had descended from another creature, for example from a sheep, the whole appearance of civilization would be completely different. Because each species has its own specific behavior. The habits of herbivores are fundamentally different from the habits of predators. And the behavior of a predator is from the behavior of an omnivorous herd creature living in the crowns of trees, which, by basic design, we are.

Therefore, damn it, it would be extremely interesting to look at man and the civilization that he created through the eyes of a zoologist or ethologist - a specialist in animal behavior. And then you and I will see the reflection of an omnivorous herd mammal jumping through the trees on everything that surrounds us - on objects, on relationships, on earthly art and on everyday trifles, on religion and on the highest soars of the spirit.

Well? Let's put a magnifying glass over the global human race, as one philosopher called our civilization?

We are what we eat

Dear children!

You should not ask, “What is an animal?” - but we need to ask: “What kind of object do we designate as an animal?” We call an animal everything that has the following properties: it eats, comes from parents similar to itself, grows, moves independently and dies when its time comes. Therefore, we classify the worm, chicken, dog and monkey as animals. What can we say about people? Think about it in terms of the characteristics listed above and then decide for yourself whether it is right to consider us animals.

Albert Einstein

Now I am not going to prove to every literate citizen who can read and think the obvious - that man is an animal. It is unlikely that among the readers of my book there will be at least one who would pass by this wonderful fact in life: we are animals, gentlemen!

I remember back in school, during a biology lesson, I argued with my narrow-minded classmate, proving to him that man is an animal. He resisted this evidence and did not want to believe it.

And who else if not an animal? Robot, or what? - I was surprised at the tenacity of my dull friend.

Now even deep churchmen do not argue with this: yes, they say, man is an animal. And some even add that the Lord created man on the material basis that he had at that time - an animal. But he breathed soul into him! Which, they say, distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Man is indeed very different from the entire animal world. Strikingly different! That’s why the dull classmate argued with me, not wanting to agree with his animality: for children, who are much closer to animals than adults socialized and trained by society, the fact that a person is an animal produces a shock impression - such is the paradox. Once upon a time, a whole class of American schoolchildren, shocked by the biology teacher’s story that people are animals, wrote a letter to Einstein, asking him to judge their dispute with the teacher. You have already read what Einstein answered to the children in the epigraph...

The differences between humans and other animals are so striking that asking the question of how our species differs from others is, at first glance, even somehow stupid: we wear pants, eat with forks, and what a civilization we have built! We are reasonable, not some kind of beast!

Current page: 1 (book has 18 pages total) [available reading passage: 12 pages]

Alexander Nikonov
Man as an animal

There are many of us in the likeness of God,
And yet each one is flawed.
We will assume that the flaws
We owe it to the monkeys.

Oleg Grigoriev

“Nikonov can be killed. Even necessary. And burn his books. This will add scandalous popularity to them. I don't agree with a single word he says, except for conjunctions and prepositions. But I read to the end. The facts are too drawn out - unknown, sensational, shocking, upsetting the familiar world.”

Mikhail Weller, writer

“A talented person, kissed at birth by God in the very zone that subsequently determines literary talent.”

Arkady Arkanov, satirist writer

The idea for this book was as sudden as diarrhea. This is how good books always begin...

It’s just that one day, listening to the outpourings of my good friend about his dotted family life and relationships with money and women, I thought that all his life’s squiggles were caused not by his decisions, but by the triggered instincts of that monkey that sits inside each of us.

Our entire life - both small and large - is structured according to the mold of the beast from which we descended. If we had descended from another creature, for example from a sheep, the whole appearance of civilization would be completely different. Because each species has its own specific behavior. The habits of herbivores are fundamentally different from the habits of predators. And the behavior of a predator is from the behavior of an omnivorous herd creature living in the crowns of trees, which, by basic design, we are.

Therefore, damn it, it would be extremely interesting to look at man and the civilization that he created through the eyes of a zoologist or ethologist - a specialist in animal behavior. And then you and I will see the reflection of an omnivorous herd mammal jumping through the trees on everything that surrounds us - on objects, on relationships, on earthly art and on everyday trifles, on religion and on the highest soars of the spirit.

Well? Let's put a magnifying glass over the global human race, as one philosopher called our civilization?

Part 1
We are what we eat

Dear children!

You should not ask, “What is an animal?” - but we need to ask: “What kind of object do we designate as an animal?” We call an animal everything that has the following properties: it eats, comes from parents similar to itself, grows, moves independently and dies when its time comes. Therefore, we classify the worm, chicken, dog and monkey as animals. What can we say about people? Think about it in terms of the characteristics listed above and then decide for yourself whether it is right to consider us animals.

Albert Einstein

Now I am not going to prove to every literate citizen who can read and think the obvious - that man is an animal. It is unlikely that among the readers of my book there will be at least one who would pass by this wonderful fact in life: we are animals, gentlemen!

I remember back in school, during a biology lesson, I argued with my narrow-minded classmate, proving to him that man is an animal. He resisted this evidence and did not want to believe it.

– Who else if not an animal? Robot, or what? – I was surprised at the tenacity of my dull friend.

Now even deep churchmen do not argue with this: yes, they say, man is an animal. And some even add that the Lord created man on the material basis that he had at that time - an animal. But he breathed soul into it! Which, they say, distinguishes man from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Man is indeed very different from the entire animal world. Strikingly different! That’s why the stupid classmate argued with me, not wanting to agree with his animality: for children, who are much closer to animals than adults socialized and trained by society, the fact that a person is an animal produces a shock impression - such a paradox. Once upon a time, a whole class of American schoolchildren, shocked by the biology teacher’s story that people are animals, wrote a letter to Einstein, asking him to judge their dispute with the teacher. You have already read what Einstein answered to the children in the epigraph...

The differences between humans and other animals are so striking that asking the question of how our species differs from others is, at first glance, even somehow stupid: we wear pants, eat with forks, and what a civilization we have built! We are reasonable, not some kind of beast!

My sister, who loves animals dearly, became interested in reading popular science literature a couple of years ago. When asked why there was suddenly such interest in science, she answered:

- Just imagine how many amazing things people have done on this planet, starting from the simplest nut, which also had to be invented. We went into space and found out why the stars shine. And just think - the beast did all this! An ordinary animal...

But this beast had a good tool - its mind. With the help of our minds, we have conquered the entire planet - from the humid equatorial regions that were once our homeland, almost to the very poles, where severe cold reigns. Having mastered fire and learned to protect our naked bodies from the weather with artificial skins called clothing, we expanded our habitat to the size of the entire Earth.

We have powerfully pushed aside other species that once lived where we now live. And now we are almost everywhere! Many species became extinct, unable to withstand competition with us, or were simply physically destroyed by us. But we have multiplied other species beyond belief - along with ourselves. Judge for yourself…

There are approximately five orders of magnitude (one hundred thousand times) more people and the so-called “domestic animals” that we breed artificially than animals similar to us in weight and type of nutrition. If you look at the graph below, you will see that the relationship between the abundance of a species and the size of its representatives is inversely proportional. That is, the larger the species, the fewer individuals of this species live on the planet. We fall out of this law.

Humanity has not only taken over the entire planet. It transforms the appearance of the planet itself. Academician Vernadsky wrote that humanity has become a geological force changing natural landscapes. And this was not a poetic metaphor for a scientist. We are truly transforming the planet in the most literal sense. Judge for yourself…

Geographically, Europe is a zone of taiga and mixed forests. But the forests here were cleared for arable land before the Middle Ages; they remained only in the mountains and nature reserves. Instead of continuous forest cover in Western Europe, there are now only small forest patches.

We are plowing up virgin steppes and building concrete jungles of cities. We flood the plains with artificial seas in order to accumulate water for these cities and generate electrical energy. We are literally tearing down mountains in search of minerals and digging giant pits for open-pit coal mining. Finally, as my sister pointed out, we have gone beyond the planet. And they even changed the face of their star system to some extent: over the past hundred years, the radio emission of our solar system has doubled, to the surprise of potential star observers from other worlds. And all because Marconi and Popov invented radio.

Moreover, what’s interesting is that humanity began to change the face of the planet, transforming entire natural landscapes not just now, “literally yesterday,” having risen to the heights of industrial civilization and armed with excavators and bulldozers, but hundreds and thousands of years ago. With a spear and a digging stick.

Chapter 1
Humanity eraser on world outline map

All deserts have been close to each other since time immemorial,
But Arabia, Syria, Gobi -
This is just the subsidence of the Sahara wave,
In satanic resurgent anger...

And when finally the ships of the Martians
The globe will be near the globe,
Then they will see a continuous golden ocean
And they will give him a name: Sahara.

Nikolay Gumilyov

Back in the Stone Age, casually swinging a flint ax, humanity destroyed all the mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses in Eurasia. And having moved along the Bering Isthmus to America, it knocked out all the megafauna there too.

Wherever people came, they began by destroying large fauna. In the same Eurasia, by the way, we completely eliminated, in addition to mammoths and rhinoceroses, cave bears, cave lions, giant deer... In both Americas, humanity destroyed mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, giant rodents, horses and camels. Everything more or less large turned out to be knocked out.

Scientists for a long time could not understand what caused such a large-scale and rapid extinction, and at first they blamed the climate. More precisely, its changes associated with the advance and retreat of ice during the last ice age. However, ice ages are a periodic phenomenon in the life of our planet; they come and go with a frequency of approximately 100 thousand years, and all of the animals listed above tolerated these periods well and adapted. When the ice advanced, the animals retreated to the equator, but when the giant ice caps melted, the animals moved closer to the poles. But what happened to the ice did not concern the giant sloths at all; they lived in their own tropics and did not go anywhere out of laziness. However, they also disappeared from the face of the planet. And by a strange coincidence, the extinction coincided with the spread of an extremely aggressive and harmful species across the planet - homo sapiens, who sowed death wherever he appeared.

If the last glaciation had been the strongest, the extinction of large animals could be explained by the fact that the food supply was greatly reduced (by the way, during the last ice age, the northern ice cap covered all of Canada and the northern United States, that is, the edges of the glacier, so you understand, sank to the latitude of Sochi). But the trick is that the extinction did not occur during the advance of the glacier, but just the opposite - during the era of global warming, when the ice caps began to retreat to the north, and vegetation, that is, the food supply of mammoths, began to conquer more and more land space from the ice. This is where they could multiply on free grub! But no... They suddenly died out.

Then dozens of animal species disappeared. Our ancestors simply killed them. Moreover, unfortunate animals were sometimes destroyed on a scale exceeding food needs - simply in the excitement of the hunt. So a wolf in a sheepfold kills all the sheep, although he cannot eat more than one.

Dwellings were built from mammoth bones. The largest bones made up the lower part of the walls, and the smaller bones went to the top. Our ancestors made the power frame from tusks. So, the construction of just one, albeit the largest of the known dwellings of primitive people, found on the territory of present-day Ukraine, took the bones of more than a hundred mammoths. As you can see, the unfortunate people were simply killed on an industrial scale!

Why save if the resource seems inexhaustible? Thus, an obese bear during salmon spawning, when the entire river is literally teeming with fish, eats only the caviar and heads of the caught fish - what seems most delicious to him... So poachers throw cut-up salmon carcasses into a river teeming with fish, taking only the caviar... So a child eats only the filling from a pie... So the first people who came to New Zealand killed giant moa birds only to eat their thighs, and eventually exterminated all the birds on the islands. (But, as archaeological excavations show, when there were few moa birds left, people already ate all the meat and even gnawed the bones.)

Abundance inevitably corrupts. Ethnographers of the 19th century described driven hunts of savages (Indians, Africans) living at Stone Age levels, who during these hunts killed many more animals than they could eat. However, civilized Europeans, armed with rifles, were not far behind them, as we will see a little later.

The fact that people kill such large animals, in such quantities, and in such a short period of time (tens and hundreds of years, depending on the species and territory), causes surprise and distrust among many. Therefore, desperate attempts are still being made in science to explain the extinction of megafauna that happened 10-12 thousand years ago by natural causes - the same climate, for example, or some kind of disaster. There are even exotic hypotheses suggesting that mammoths died out from... old age. Not from personal old age, of course, but from the old age of the species. The fact is that animal species, like individual individuals, are not eternal and have a certain life span. So, they say, the mammoth, as a species, has come to the point of extinction. It is not clear why this time of “old age” of mammoths so strangely coincided with the time of “old age” of dozens of other species. And with the spread of humanity. And for some reason, elephants in Africa and India did not become extinct “from old age.”

By the way, why?

Why didn’t elephants become extinct in Africa? Didn’t people hunt them there? Perhaps this happened for the reason that man appeared precisely in Africa and it was there that his gradual, slow maturation and armament took place. The local fauna had enough time to adapt to the new predator. But when a person who was already skilled, experienced and armed with remote weapons (spears, bows) suddenly appeared in new places for the local fauna in the process of populating the planet, the animals simply did not have time to adapt to the appearance of a new misfortune.

It is known that before 1913, Siberians found and sold to buyers about 50 thousand mammoth tusks. Moreover, it was not particularly difficult to find them: often the tusks and bones lay underground concentrated in large piles, which contained the bones of dozens of mammoths at once.

However, many find it difficult to believe that such small animals as humans were able to knock out such giants as mammoths or woolly rhinoceroses. Indeed, how could creatures weighing 60–70 kg with primitive stone tools completely genocide tens of thousands of strong animals weighing up to 10 tons? Not only ordinary people, but also scientists doubt this. For example, the French paleontologist Claude Guerin wrote that hunting rhinoceroses by people is impossible, and all cave drawings on this topic should be considered as the fantasy of savages. But Claude Guerin is an expert on rhinoceroses, not hunting. And therefore, in this case, his opinion can easily be ignored. Although the surprise of a cultured Frenchman is understandable: you and I, even gathered together with our neighbors, are unlikely to defeat a mammoth without firearms, much less a ferocious and dangerous woolly rhinoceros. But wild people do this easily even with primitive stone tools.

Two Masai with spears take down one rhinoceros. One teases the beast, luring it towards him, and when the enraged rhinoceros runs towards him to kill him, the teaser jumps back at the last moment, and the second, sitting in ambush, plunges a spear into the beast’s ear. Sometimes one Masai performs the same trick - he jumps back and thrusts his spear into a flying multi-ton “bus”.

The Maasai are long, tall people. And the Pygmies are half as long as the Maasai. And twice as easy. But nevertheless, the pygmies go after elephants alone. And they kill them!

In a very cruel and unfair way. They sneak up in the wind so that the elephants don’t smell it, and plunge a spear into the groin or stomach. And they try, the bastards, to stick it in such a way that the spear sticks out forward: when the elephant runs in pain, the spear, touching the bushes or the ground, will open up its insides more and more. And soon the wounded elephant dies of sepsis.

Therefore, elephants in Africa are terribly afraid of pygmies, just as primates (including us) are instinctively afraid of snakes and spiders. This is fear built into the BIOS, or, in the language of biologists, into the genes.

Well, if not just one hunter, but a whole group, is involved in the hunt, then pelting an elephant with spears and waiting until he dies helplessly from loss of blood is a simple task. So, for the wild tribes of the Stone Age who specialized in hunting, it was not as difficult to exterminate mammoths and other megafauna with the help of tools as some modern urban scientists imagine.

Another fact in favor of the knockout hypothesis is that where there were no people, for example on Wrangel Island, mammoths lived quietly for several thousand years after their “official extinction.” And only then they disappeared - the last mammoth on Wrangel Island died only 3,700 years ago. Why did they die out there? They just degenerated! The fact is that mammoths traveled to Wrangel Island along a dry isthmus, which then connected the island with the continent. Then, as the ice melted, this part of the land went under water and the mammoths on the island were cut off. But the island is an island, the food base here is limited, so the mammoths began to degenerate - first they decreased in size (those who needed less food survived), then they began to suffer from various diseases due to inbreeding and, finally, they completely disappeared.

Man did not have a hand in this extinction, since, according to modern ideas, by the time Wrangel Island separated from Eurasia, people had not yet reached there. But where the human hand reached, soon there were no mammoths left. And not only mammoths. People on their way devoured everything.

There are Caribbean islands in the Atlantic Ocean. Excavations show that large animals went extinct there about 6 thousand years ago. By a strange coincidence, it was 6 thousand years ago that the first people appeared there.

In Australia, too, megafauna was once very richly represented; its mass extinction occurred approximately 50 thousand years ago. Now, if you are asked the question, when did man appear on this continent, you, by analogy with the previous example, will accurately answer: “50 thousand years ago, the first people reached from Asia to Australia!” And you'll be right. We got there and immediately cut out everything large.

People behaved in a similar way everywhere and, remarkably, until very recently. Giant apiornis birds were killed in Madagascar, moa birds were killed in New Zealand, bison were almost completely destroyed in Europe, and bison were destroyed in America. Moreover, the latter happened after the appearance of the white man in America. There were many bison - several tens of millions, but the species could not resist firearms - they shot them all! They killed not only and not even so much for meat (often only the tongue was eaten from the entire multi-ton carcass), but simply for fun - they fired from train windows and rejoiced at well-aimed hits. In the same way, primitive people rejoiced, receiving pleasure from a successful hunt, in those days when there was still a lot of walking meat. But when it became scarce...

The ecological disaster that resulted from the epidemically rapid spread of a new aggressive species with flint tools across the planet was not only large-scale, but also very tragic for this species itself: the depletion of the environment was accompanied by its mass extinction. It is believed that up to 90% of humanity died out then. The remnants, as you know, were saved by the transition to new technologies - from hunting and gathering, people moved to agriculture, that is, the artificial cultivation of plants and animals. This time was called the Neolithic Revolution.

Apparently, people found it easier to transition to animal husbandry than to agriculture. This is somehow simpler and more logical: if you have to wait a whole season for grain thrown into the ground to sprout, then the “captivity” of animals happens almost by itself. And in fact, if you managed to drive or lure a herd of wild horses into a certain law, for example, then it is stupid to kill them all at once - the meat will spoil. It is better to preserve live canned food, eating animals as needed. But if there are a lot of animals, they will starve and lose weight, waiting for their turn on the scaffold. Why waste meat? It is better to throw grass into the animals' pen. Or you can hobble them and let them graze. And keep an eye on them so they don’t wander off.

The next step is to wait until the captive animals begin to reproduce. And then the need for searching and hunting disappears altogether. Why hunt free people if you can protect prisoners? This is understandable even to criminals, who in the nineties, instead of eking out a living by casual “hunting,” began to protect the fat herds of cooperators and small entrepreneurs. In their time, feudal lords acted similarly, protecting the peasants from attacks by other predators.

In general, now there was no need to hunt, but only to protect your herd from other hunters... This is how the transition took place from predatory exploitation of nature to conservation. True, this saving was very relative, because the entry into the agrarian era led to cyclopean changes in the appearance of the planet. This step changed the landscapes of the planet more than the extermination of mammoths.

The reader may ask: “Wait, what is the connection between mammoths and landscapes?” A reasonable question.

The fact is that large animals - such as elephants and rhinoceroses - shape natural landscapes. Have you ever wondered why the savannah is not overgrown with bushes, because individual bushes and trees stick out there? Because elephants and rhinoceroses trample undergrowth with their wide feet. A certain homeostasis is maintained - a self-regulating biosystem works towards maintaining itself.

Similarly, northern Eurasian and North American ecosystems were maintained by mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Apparently, there was something between small forests and tundra-steppe. Northern Savannah! And the species set of vegetation was apparently somewhat different. And when the mammoths disappeared, there was no one to trample and eat the bushes, and also to powerfully fertilize the local expanses. And the plant scenery changed, marking the tragedy that had occurred...

The transition to new technologies for exploiting the environment not only saved representatives of our species from extinction, but also made it possible to sharply increase the carrying capacity of the environment: if in order to feed a thousand people by hunting and gathering, a territory approximately equal to the Czech Republic is needed, then to feed the same thousand With the help of the agricultural system, only a hundred hectares are needed. A gigantic reserve for population growth! Which individuals of our species did not fail to take advantage of.

The growth of humanity has been meteoric. Environmental consequences too. There is, for example, a hypothesis according to which the emergence in Africa of the world's largest desert - the Sahara - was the work of human hands. Of course, nature helped man in this, but it was he who pulled the trigger, starting the process of desertification. How?

Have you ever heard the phrase: “The goats ate Greece”? This phrase has a common twin: “The goats ate the Ottoman Empire.” What is meant here is that goat grazing has led to desertification and drying out of the land. Any Mediterranean countries can be substituted for Greece and the Ottoman Empire, because the goats did the same with the entire cradle of civilization - the Mediterranean.

The fact is that of all animals domesticated by humans, goats are the most omnivorous. The number of plant names they eat is almost one and a half times higher than the number of plants eaten by sheep, and almost twice as large as those eaten by cows. Goats are “all-weather”; they live in both hot Africa and the cold north. Goats can eat seaweed and even some poisonous plants without much harm. They easily gnaw branches. And the goats pluck out the grass and eat it along with the roots... However, what am I telling you! Surely, while vacationing in Egypt or Turkey, you saw goats peacefully grazing in littered wastelands and chewing paper...

Goats literally eat up the surrounding space - first they eat the grass clean, then they begin to gnaw on young shoots and bushes. Then they gnaw the bark from the trees, thereby killing them. As a result, the area is gradually losing its greenery. In nature, goats that are unpretentious to food are hunted by predators. But then the planet's main predator took the goats under his protection. The result is known - desertification of the area.

Herodotus described Crete as an island completely covered with forests. Oak groves and dense coniferous forests rustled here. Let us add that all this grew on a half-meter layer of black soil. What's there now? The landscape is sparse and familiar to the entire Mediterranean - yellow grass withered in the sun, sparse trees. Moreover, people began to cut down forests for agriculture, and goats completed the environmental disaster.

Once upon a time, the Greeks idolized goats. Indeed, it was a real find! There is no need to feed it specifically; the goat grazes itself, finding meager food anywhere and converting what it finds into meat and milk for free. An amazing device!.. By the way, about the fact that goats were idolized, I did not exaggerate at all. An ancient Greek myth says that Zeus's father Kronos had the bad habit of devouring his children. Therefore, Zeus's mother Rhea hid the baby from his father in a cave on the island of Crete. Little Zeus was nursed by a goat with the beautiful name Amalthea. In gratitude, the matured Zeus later took her with him to heaven, and now everyone can observe the celestial goat in person: the star Capella in the constellation Auriga is she, Amalthea. So says the legend...

But then, when people woke up and realized what the goat invasion was threatening them with, their reverence for goats collapsed and goat grazing began to be banned everywhere. On the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in Southern Europe, and in Asia Minor, measures were taken to reduce the number of goats. However, this is always the case with people - they see the last one who threw a piece of paper into a pile of garbage, and they begin to scold him as the main polluter. But the goat simply completed the cycle of eating out the environment, which man, having switched to cattle breeding, started, starting with cattle. Let me explain.

The cow is big and therefore comfortable. She, simply due to her geometric size, produces a lot of milk and beef. But for the same geometric reason, a cow needs a lot of food. When cows eat up the environment, people introduce more unpretentious sheep in their place. They pluck the grass almost completely clean. And only then comes the turn of wiry, stinking goats, which complete the picture of devastation, destroying not only the thinning grass, but also everything that is trying to grow.

The most striking example of the “goat disaster” is the island of St. Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled there by the British, ended his life. Saint Helena Island, located in the South Atlantic, was discovered in the 16th century. It was uninhabited and therefore wooded. Moreover, so-called “ebony trees” grew here in abundance, with wood of black or dark brown color, which was highly valued by furniture makers. Ebony is more expensive than red wood, more expensive than Karelian birch, so there was a lot of joy from the abundance of this value.

Alas! A little over two hundred years passed, and the island became completely bald. And not at all because all the trees were reduced to furniture, although that was the case. The forest was finished off by goats. They were brought by the first settlers and released to free grazing. Goats are addicted not only to gnawing young shoots of ebony trees, but also to gnaw the bark from adults. The result is known... By the way, together with ebony trees, goats almost completely destroyed such a rare plant species as tree daisies. It's also a pity...

What does the Sahara and desertification have to do with it?

And despite the fact that once upon a time, savannah bloomed on the site of this great desert, elephants and buffalos, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses roamed. Insidious crocodiles lurked unsightly in reservoirs... People first learned about this at the end of the 19th century, when rock paintings left by primitive hunters were discovered in the Sahara. All of the above animals were painted on them. Except camels, these ships of the desert.

One of the most extensive primitive “picture galleries” found in the mountains of Algeria was described by the French archaeologist Henri Lot. Its publication produced the effect of a bomb exploding in the scientific world. “Was it really possible that there once was a savannah on the site of the greatest desert? – the scientists were amazed. -Where did she go? Why is it all sand here now?”

Later, with the help of space photography, dried up beds of wide rivers with tributaries and sinkholes in the place of former lakes were found in the Sahara. The region was blooming!

Moreover, the most interesting and amazing thing is that these rivers and lakes in the Sahara are present on ancient European maps! For example, the famous maps of Ptolemy in the center and east of the Sahara show high-water rivers with large lakes. The largest river, the Kinips, flows north and flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Where did Ptolemy get these maps from, if 600 years before him, the father of history, Herodotus, described these places as very deserted and arid? However, this question deserves a separate book, and now we are more interested in the fact that the Kinips channel is clearly visible on satellite images, and it was not narrower than the Amazon in the lower reaches - almost 30 km wide! The Sahara lakes were not inferior in size to rivers and resembled seas. The Nile had a deep tributary flowing into it from the west, that is, flowing from the Sahara (Ptolemy does not have this tributary, but it is on the maps of Mercator, who lived in the 16th century).

When the Soviet Institute Hydroproject, in the era of friendship with Egypt, designed the Aswan Dam, and Soviet builders built it, a huge reservoir was formed, which bears the name of the second president of Egypt, Gamal Nasser. If you look closely at the map, you will see that Lake Nasser has a long narrow bay of a strange shape on the left - this water filled the dry channel of the ancient tributary of the Nile, which flowed from the once green Sahara, which dried up thousands of years ago.

The Sahara's neighbor, the Arabian Desert, also used to be a rather green place covered with a network of rivers. The same Ptolemaic maps show us the venous network of Arabian rivers with hematomas of lakes. More precisely, one large lake, in the place of which there is now a depression filled with sand with a diameter of 250 km. In space photography, both this depression and the network of dry river channels are clearly visible.

Archaeologists, in addition to inscriptions, discovered in the Sahara a large number of Neolithic sites and flint hunting tools, as well as bones of rhinoceroses, elephants and crocodiles.

So where did all this abundance, which was still in the memory of mankind, go? Who or what destroyed him?..

At first, as is usually the case in science, suspicions fell on natural causes—climatic ones. Previously, they were very fond of attributing all extinctions to climate. Ancient drawings hint at another reason. Rock carvings show us, along with elephants, ostriches and giraffes, grazing herds and wheeled carts. In later drawings, images of typical representatives of the savannah disappear, as well as images of herds, and images of camels appear. This means that the natural scenery has changed to desert. And this happened long after the retreat of the Ice Age, to which they initially tried to attribute such tragic changes.

The process of desertification was started by man. First, hunters killed off a fair amount of megafauna: elephants and rhinoceroses, ostriches and giraffes, after which the period of cattle breeding began.