old, older, oldest

arrowheads from Virginia 

As various of my friends are now turning seventy, we often say to each other, 'We're getting old.' It wasn't too hard to joke, "Oh, sixty is the new forty," but trying to position seventy as fifty doesn't work quite so well. Old. What is old?


Rummaging through various desk drawers, looking for this or that, I've forgotten what, I came upon this cache of Native American arrowheads. My father found most of these  in Virginia over the many years he was out tramping around in fields, either shooting doves or looking for cornfields that would be a good place to shoot doves. I picked up one of the arrowheads myself, but I can't say which, perhaps the one with the broken base. We looked several times in the red dirt of the plowed field just above his fishing camp on the Shenandoah River after a rain, and finally I spotted one. I remember being a little disappointed in it. 


Just upstream from the camp was a stone construction across the river called the Fish Trap. They said that this extensive V-shaped pile of large stones with an opening just at the bottom of the V was made by Native Americans, who could stand on the rocks and club fish as they were forced to swim down through the open water at the center of the trap. Now it creates a class One rapid, fun to shoot through on an inner tube.


My friend David, the Native American expert, suggests that these arrowheads are probably from the Late Archaic period, 3,000 BCE to 1,000 AD. They are certainly old, older than I'd imagined. Most children are fascinated by Indians and their gear, so arrowheads are familiar enough objects, even if it is hard to imagine being skilled enough to construct a functional bow and arrow, let alone killing something with this equipment.

flint tools from Wadi Run

The arrowheads put me in mind of the stone tools that we found in the desert in Jordan, Wadi Rum, where Lawrence of Arabia lived and the eponymous movie was filmed. By chance, the Bedouin guys driving big Toyota 4-wheel drive trucks stopped at a place where there were many pieces of flint scattered on the sand. Some of the beautiful silky stones were obviously worked to serve as knives or set into hafts as sickle blades. Other pieces were the cores from which the tools were knapped and some were random flakes. Oded, the Israeli archeologist, recognized at once that this must have been the site of a flint tool workshop. 


He identified the flints as Neolithic, made somewhere around 7,000 BCE, several millenia before the pyramids were built, long before the stories that form the Old Testament were told. The blades are so sharp you could easily cut a lamb chop with them. We know, because we tried. I tried to visualize the early Semitic people that lived in this harsh but beautiful desert, chipping away at the flints which came from a rocky outcropping not too far away. Flint is commonly formed as nodules in chalk or limestone under a sea, so at one time in the history of the planet, the area that is now as arid as the Sahara was under water.

Devonian fossils from Sylvania, Ohio

Last Saturday geologist Jerry invited me to go fossiling with him and his grandson Patrick to Sylvania, Ohio, just over the border from Michigan. A sunny, cool day, we climbed, clambered, and slid over enormous piles of waste material from a vast mine that digs out huge quantities of limestone to make cement. The fossils are anything but in situ, but they are plentiful and the smaller ones easy to find, especially after a rain the day before.


The large dark critter at the top center is a rolled-up trilobite, balanced on a brachiopod. If you look closely you can see two eyes left and right of its round head; the ridges are the back of its carapace. The other shells are those of two different types of brachipods. All these creatures were alive in a warm sea in the Devonian period, when this part of the North American continent was still joined with all the other continents in the mega-continent known as Pangea. The Sylvania formation was at that time near the equator. And when was the Devonian? Well, somewhere around 408 to 360 million years ago.


I find it hard to warm up to a filter-feeding brachiopod, elegantly designed as the bivalves are, who lived anchored in the sea floor muck by a long peduncle. But a trilobite, an arthropod like lobsters and wood lice, with a head and two multi-faceted eyes and a segmented body with legs to carry it scuttling across the seafloor: I can identify with a trilobite. The most commonly found trilobite fossils are curled up, a reaction the books say to fear. In fact, the "roller" (as Jerry calls them) that I found contains three trilobites, small, medium (the one you can easily see), and large, rolled up together. What could have frightened these critters so that they were driven to pile in on each other and then suddenly die? Were their predators the looming primitive fish in the Devonian sea? Did they go into shock?


All trilobites and almost all the species of brachiopods were killed off in what is known as the Permian-Triassic extinction of about 250 million years ago. About 90% of marine organisms died out and 70% of reptiles, amphibians, and plants as well. Scientists aren't sure why. Possibilities include sea-level change, climate change, ocean stagnification, carbon dioxide buildup, an asteroid strike, some or all in combination. This was a bigger extinction than the more familiar and more recent Triassic-Jurassic event that killed off the dinosaurs. Geologists recognize that there have been five mass extinctions here over the thousands of millennia. 


Which reminds me, that if our species is intent on going extinct, as it seems to be, it won't be the first time on planet Earth that such an event has occurred. One question might be: how many other species will we take down with us? Perhaps not many; perhaps the world can get along quite nicely, much better in fact, if we and our destructive ways are gone. No more need for killing weapons, agricultural chemicals, genetically modified organisms, dams, power plants, asphalt, the internal combustion engine...on and on. We're not old, we're very new, and probably not going to last long.