Story of prehistoric wilderness

Wilderness is widely communicated throughout human society. We also agreed that it offers many benefits that are already well known and accepted.

Wilderness has many forms. We know many of them and have gotten used to them. However, there is also a form of wilderness that many people, even wilderness lovers and their managers, are not fully aware of. It is the Prehistoric Wilderness.

Quality standard of prehistoric wilderness  

Prehistory is the period when the Earth was created and the amazing story of the development of life on it took place. It was a period of billions of years. But it was also the period when the prehistoric wilderness met all the demands placed on the Wilderness in the 20th century.

To be honest, the quality standard was more than met. The reason is very simple. Humans did not exist for most of this period. They appeared only in the last several million years. His activities since the early days, when he started to walk upright are the reason why today much of Europe does not meet the current Wilderness quality standard.

Does prehistoric wilderness make sense?  

It is likely, that many people, not only enthusiasts and friends of the Wilderness, will jump into the mind, whether it even makes sense to talk about the Wilderness in a period when there were no traces of man. After all, Wilderness is a man-made concept.

To tell the truth, even I cannot answer this question responsibly. It is an idea that popped up in my mind a long time ago when I was studying documents describing various processes that took place on Earth in the period before the existence of man. Processes that shaped nature at that time and in its own way also nature today.

Simple answer is not enough

A simple answer to this topic would be: it makes no sense and the topic is closed. On the other hand, we cannot give up this idea. After all, it was a time when there was nothing but wilderness all around the entire planet. The surface of our planet was formed by various processes that lasted billions and billions of years.

Wilderness life in prehistoric times

The first signs of life appeared about one and a half billion years after the formation of our planet. Even that life had a very peculiar form. It was nothing like life as we know it today. For billions and billions of years, it was only in the form of tiny single-celled organisms that managed to live in an oxygen-free wilderness. Without a protective atmosphere, they were also exposed to deadly cosmic radiation.

Life in oxygen-free wilderness

Until then the earth was oxygen-free wilderness and microscopic organisms lived in an oxygen-free environment. It was an environment dominated by nitrogen and other gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. All are poisonous gases. 

Only very gradually and more or less randomly, in the process of evolution, the creation of new types of bacteria occurred. Among them, some selected types were able to gradually use sunlight as an energy source. In the next step, this allowed them to create biochemical reactions that released oxygen.

Life in wilderness with oxygen 

At that moment, the oxygen appeared in the atmosphere for the very first time. Only very slowly its quantity begun to increase. It was the beginning of the process that oxygen killed the vast majority of bacteria that were used to live in an oxygen-free atmosphere. 

Only then, again very gradually and slowly, as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere increased, the first cellular organisms began to appear. Their life was linked to an atmosphere with increasing oxygen content.

This process started evolution and simple bacteria began to develop into multicellular organisms. This process in the course of the following million years ended up in the form of a rich plant and animal kingdom as we know it today.

Man enters the Wilderness scene

In the endless wilderness, the first signs of human existence suddenly appeared. This means a descendant of the monkey race, who at certain moments began to learn from his own mistakes. In the following steps, he gathered experience and, thanks to his slowly growing brain, created increasingly complex activities until he ended in the form of a reasonable person.

And we are already at the beginning of the human age, several million years ago. We are still very far from the point when man was so smart and aware that he began to realize that he was in danger of losing his cradle and all that wilderness that ruled the globe for more than 4.5 billion years. Man, consciously gradually created the concept of Wilderness.

Summary

I don’t know the answer to the question I asked at the very beginning of this text, “whether prehistoric wilderness makes sense?”.  I leave that answer to you, to the readers of this post and to your opinions that might appear in our mailbox and also on this website.

Wilderness is generally considered a subject created and communicated by humans. Therefore, it is up to us whether we decide to accept Primeval Wilderness or not.