BRIEF TECHNOLOGICAL HISTORY OF MANHunter/gatherer tribe society results in increased size of the brain case
Partnership with the dog
Stone and bone edged weapons
Crude "wild seed planting" Agriculture
Domestication of grass grazing herd animals
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Steel Age
Water Powered mechanisms
The Printing Press
Steam Powered Mechanisms
The Industrial Revolution
Internal Combustion Engine
Electro/Mechanical Technological Revolution
The Atomic Age
The Computer/Microchip Revolution
The Internet
The Genetic Revolution
The Year 2012 --
the end of all biological life that is dependent on cellulose or casein to hold their cell walls together This was caused when genes from an aggressive termite gut bacteria was combined with anaerobic characteristics taken from deep water magma vent viruses and was then spliced into a common air borne bread yeast as the container host plant. Apparently one of the viral side strains was NOT absolutely contained by the yeast cell as intended but took on some of the common ancestral viral replication modes as well as the slower as-planned bacterial/yeast budding and fission modes.
This ill conceived genetic modification was done by a mostly unsupervised single grad student in an attempt to make a more efficient at high temperatures sealed mass fermentation reactor. This new method creates hot ethyl alcohol vapor using the direct & rapid yeast bacterial digestion of grass and wood pulp instead of using food grains ground up into a wet mash that requires 5 process steps and a lot of fermentation time and a lot of outside input energy to repeatedly boil the entire fermented grain/water mass to get to the alcohol vapor.
His modified yeast would directly anaerobically digest the wood fibers, producing a very large temperature rise inside the reactor (above the boiling point of alcohol) by biological activity heat generated alone. The termite gut bacteria genes in the yeast modified by the very high temperature magma vent virus material could live quite happily and do its work very quickly at these elevated temperatures.
Vapors from his high temperature sealed reactor went directly into a cold water distillation loop, producing a crude alcohol in only one production step. His goal was to win the $100,000 Obama collegiate prize for alternate fuels for the year 2012 as he wanted to take his girlfriend "on a really nice vacation together." He was on his fifth attempt to generate the exact needed characteristics when the accident happened.
He first realized his mistake when his cotton underwear, shirt and blue jeans began dissolving leaving him buck naked inside a small but growing circle of crumbling plants and collapsing wooden furniture and wooden walled structures. Then a day later the casein in his fingernails and toe nails and hair slowly began to crumble, followed shortly by his joint cartilage and ligaments.
VIRAL VECTOR AND TRANSFERAL MEDIUM He had dropped a single drop of pipette transfered fluid on to the lab floor then had accidentally stepped in it, tracking the new bread yeast cum mutated virus variant (embedded and actively feeding in the rubber soles of his containment shoes) right on out of the sterile containment area through DECON and out into the unshielded environment where it multiplied rapidly, well, like a mutant virus.
It took the local, state and federal government 4 days to "study the situation" (ie fight over who had jurisdiction) and when they did attempt to react to control the spread of the small crumbling blight circle all their local efforts were totally ineffective. An increasing series of more severe chemical and pyrotechnic methods were tried, but once again were unsuccessful. The blight circle seemed to grow more rapidly the larger it became ....
The later attempts to sterilize the spreading blight area using all available nuclear weapons from both USA, Russia and China were unsuccessful and only exacerbated the spread as sunlight was not required for the anaerobic reaction to take place and the resulting very high heat and radiation levels only served to speed up the growth of the double gene spliced airborne virus (as well as mutate it further from the resulting high levels of radiation). The nuclear blast mushroom clouds put the virus way up high into the stratosphere, where the prevailing upper atmosphere winds carried rapidly from west to east to meet the ocean air currents.
As soon as the blight reached the oceans, it was all over for us humans .... photosynthesis stopped as the ocean algae, plankton and sea plants all died within 60 days. Some of the very largest hard calcium shelled crustaceans lasted another 3 weeks before their shells dissolved.
... but those of us humans that managed to get isolated out on a very few brand new active volcanic Pacific ocean islands, wearing heavily modified containment suits, we survived even longer than the crabs and the cockroaches. We had enough time to clearly document what humanity had done to themselves in case life ever does reach the multicellular level again and perhaps then evolves into advanced technological beings again.
Here is the sum of our wisdom ....
hey dummy, don't DO that gene splicing shite