I grew up in South Africa, where big animals still exist
in the wild. My parents took me to see those beasts, and I
had long discussions about them with a grandfather who was
a zoologist and a paleontologist.
I made up in enthusiasm, during those discussions, for what
I lacked in comprehension. I must have been about eight when
I understood my grandfather to say, on one occasion, that
the biggest tigers in the world live in the northern reeds.
Fascinated by the idea of those reeds, I asked him to tell
me more about them, only to be informed that he’d been
speaking about regions rather than reeds.
He was trying to point out to me, he explained, that Siberia’s
tigers are bigger than those of the southern parts of Asia.
Embarrassed by my mistake, I was left, nonetheless, with an
indelible image of a big tiger walking in a forest of reeds.
This grandfather, T. F. Dreyer, had discovered, at a place
called Florisbad in South Africa’s heartland, the partial
skull of what was later realized to be the immediate predecessor
of Homo sapiens – a species he named Homo
helmei. This skull, thought when it was discovered in
1932 to be about 40,000 years old, has now been directly dated,
by electron spin resonance, to 259,000 years before the present,
and has become one of the main supports of the “out
of Africa” theory of modern human origins.
T. F. had studied zoology at Halle in Germany, and I spent
hours poring over his German books, fascinated by their illustrations,
and awed by the impenetrable grandeur of their Gothic script.
T. F. and I communicated in both Afrikaans and English, but
German was still inaccessible to me at that time. We talked
about the things young children are interested in –
like where the biggest tigers lived. I only remember one occasion
on which our conversation touched on the topic that would
become thesis of this book, viz. that humans exterminated
most of the planet’s big terrestrial animals and birds
before the advent of written history. I’d seen the fossilized
remains of several specimens of Pelorovis antiquus
(the extinct, long-horned buffalo whose image appears of the
home page of this site) in the National Museum in Bloemfontein,
where T. F. had an office. I knew, by that time, that Pelorovis
must have become extinct more recently than the dinosaurs.
It was, after all, a big mammal, and big mammals had –
as I was already aware – only come into existence well
after the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
I was still surprised, though, when my grandfather told me
that Pelorovis had only disappeared from the earth
a few thousand years ago. What, I asked him, had caused that
very recent extinction? Wearing an expression which didn’t
invite discussion, he replied, simply, “Die mens.”
This was the Afrikaans equivalent of the German der Mensch,
and meant, in that context, “humans.” I remember
being startled by the counterintuitive idea that stone-age
humans could have exterminated animals – especially
large animals. I didn’t pursue the question, though,
or even think about it again, until many years later, when
the writings of Björn Kurtén, Paul Martin, and
Jared Diamond brought it back into my consciousness.
* * *
An ingredient with less obvious relevance to this book than
my enthusiasm for wild animals, but of equal importance to
it, was the friendship I developed with members of Canada’s
Indian or First Nations community some years after I’d
emigrated from South Africa to that country.
1980 – the year in which I made those friendships –
was a time of serious illness for me. Toward the end of that
year, I was fortunate enough to get to know several people
whose support and understanding set me on the road to recovery.
The most important of those new friends was a Cree woman called
Liza. I was relatively free, at this time, of the white South
African racial attitudes I’d been exposed to as a boy,
but I’d begun to share a misconception which some white
Canadians have about the “aboriginal” inhabitants
of their country. That misconception involves the contradictory
notion that Indian people are in a sense superior to other
Canadians, but somehow unequal, at the same time, to the demands
of contemporary life.
The “superior to other people” side of this equivocal
stereotype is typically linked with the supposedly “spiritual”
connection which First Nations people are thought to have
with the nature – a bond which leads them to act as
“stewards” or “guardians” of the wilderness.
With considerable vehemence – leavened by a humor which
touched even the most serious things she talked about –
Liza told me that didn’t associate either superiority
or spirituality with the community in which she’d grown
up. That community was, she explained, profoundly affected
by alcoholism, child abuse and suicide.
The life that Liza had made for herself formed a sharp contrast
with this state of affairs. She owned a small business which
gave her a measure of prosperity. If being sensible, cheerful
and kind was being “spiritual,” then Liza was
certainly a spiritual person. As I got to know her better,
it became clear to me that the qualities that made her likeable
and successful had not descended on her for free by virtue
of her ethnic origin. She’d gained them, instead, in
the usual way that humans achieve personal growth –
through conscious choices and hard work. Liza’s positive
attitudes and values were, in short, universal ones. The fact
that I managed, during the winter of 1980/81, to take baby
steps in the direction of adopting some of them, was an important
reason why I started regaining, at that time, my health, my
enjoyment of the company of my fellow-humans, and my fascination
with the natural world.
If my interaction with Liza, and the other First Nations
friends I made in 1980 brought home to me that “native”
North Americans don’t enjoy any kind of innate moral
superiority over other people, it also provided me with a
convincing demonstration that they are not, in any sense,
inferior to their fellow humans. It’s true that poverty
and illness are more frequently encountered in native communities
than in any other Canadian ethnic group, but that’s
because of the vulnerability of that group to a range of diseases
of which alcoholism and diabetes are currently the most destructive,
and of which smallpox was historically the most harmful. That
vulnerability – an immunological naivety in the widest
sense that term – is persuasively ascribed in Jared
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to arbitrary
and recent factors such the differences between the animals
and plants that were available for domestication in Eurasia
vs. those that were available in the Americas.
* * *
As of August, 2006, the footnotes to this book still have
to be collated and brought online, and some of the text still
has to be edited before I make it available. I could not,
however, have brought the project to this close-to-complete
stage without the extraordinary level of support – both
personal and material – that I’ve received from
my ex-spouse and close friend, Delphine du Toit. Conservation
is a long-standing tradition in Delphine’s family: she
is the great-granddaughter of Jakob Louis van Wyk, who introduced
in the Volksraad or parliament of the old South African Republic,
the motion to create the game reserve which would become the
Kruger National Park.
That motion, introduced together with another Volksraad
member by the name of R. K. Loveday, and accepted for discussion
in September of 1895 by a majority of one vote, resulted in
the proclamation by President Paul Kruger, on March 26, 1898,
of a “Gouvernements-Wildtuin” or “Government
Wildlife Park.” This “Wildtuin,” later known
as the Sabi Game Reserve, was expanded into the Kruger National
Park in 1926, and further expanded, in 2002, into the Great
Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which extends beyond the borders
of South Africa into Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
The preservation of this great wilderness is a part of the
larger story this book seeks to tell: how hominids exterminated
a number of big-animal species in Africa during the early
and middle Pleistocene; how Homo sapiens exterminated
most of the planet’s terrestrial megafauna
in the process of spreading out of Africa near the end of
that Epoch; and, finally, how sapiens is now undertaking the
unlikely task of protecting the surviving members of that
megafauna from its own destructive power, a task that can
only succeed in the long term if the biosphere, of which the
megafauna is a small part, can also be preserved.
* * *
Whenever I’m confronted by grandiose thoughts like
saving the biosphere, I think of something Liza told me in
1980: that it takes more courage to change your own life than
it does to change your planet. Thank you, Liza, for the potent
mix of realism and hope you exemplified for me at that time.
I’ve only been able to incorporate those qualities into
my life in a very imperfect way, but that has been enough
to make possible this humble contribution to the debate about
human-caused extinction.
To make that contribution, I didn’t only have to venture
into the wild, unfamiliar world of the Pleistocene Epoch,
but also into the equally wild and – for me –
unfamiliar world of writing a book. Fortunately my friend
Bill Gibson, a veteran of many journeys into that world, was
on hand to guide me past some of its perils.
“You’ll wake up some mornings,” he told
me on one occasion, “and you won’t just think
your book is shit – you’ll know it is.
What you do then is, switch on your computer and carry on
writing.” Thank you, Bill. That advice has brought me
through more such days than I care to recall.
I can’t thank all the other people who have helped
me to bring the book to this hopefully near-complete stage
– there are far too many of them. I’m going to
mention only the valuable assistance I’ve received from
my sons Eric and Nick, and the support and encouragement of
my friend, Shelagh Foster.
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