Speak out about endangered species
Jogging through a beach park in Vancouver, I saw a group
of crows pulling junk-food wrappers through a hole they’d
managed to tear in the side of a garbage bag. They reminded
me of vultures I’d seen pulling intestines out of a
hippo carcass in Africa. Africa’s biggest vulture, the
lappet-face, has a broad, powerful beak which is specially
adapted for cutting through the skins of big animals.
Twenty thousand years ago, huge condor-like birds with sixteen-foot
wingspans were tearing open the carcasses of hippo-sized ground
sloths here in North America with the same kind of heavy-duty
beaks. Mammoths and mastodons were giving themselves dust-baths
and pushing over trees. Cheetahs were hunting a large variety
of pronghorn and forked-horn antelopes. No less than five
other kinds of big cat were living on an extravagant assortment
of camel, llama, deer, horse, musk ox, bison, goat and sheep
species. With its giant bears, giant beavers, giant armadillo-like
species, giant tortoises, and its giant ground-sloth species,
North America was, without exaggeration, a super-Serengeti
containing many more big-animal species than present-day Africa.
As I continued my run, I thought about how strange it was
that the picnickers and joggers around me knew little or nothing
about all this. How odd, I thought, that they should know
more about the dinosaurs which disappeared sixty-five million
years ago, than about the marvelous array of big mammals and
birds that were seen, hunted – and no doubt named –
by the first humans to arrive here in North America around
twenty thousand years ago. This ignorance did not,
moreover, seem to be the product of indifference: a little
further down the trail, I passed a little girl wearing a T-shirt
which said “speak out about endangered species.”
* * *
As we saw in the introduction to this book, the “Serengetis”
of the New World, and those of Eurasia and Australia, disappeared
in what can still be called “prehistoric” times.
Extinction episodes involving big animals and birds continued
to occur, however, into the era of written history. The earth’s
last mammoths disappeared from Wrangel island, off the coast
of Siberia, just under four thousand years ago, when some
members of our species were already living in cities, working
metal, and using wheeled vehicles. A megafauna which included
gorilla-sized lemurs, “elephant birds” up to a
ton in weight, hippos and giant tortoise species, disappeared
from Madagascar less than two thousand years ago – so
recently that a distorted and fanciful account of the elephant
birds survives in the description of Madagascar’s “rocs”
or “rukhs” in the “Sindbad the Sailor”
stories in A Thousand and One Nights. Even more recently
– between eight and four centuries ago –
an astonishing collection of big bird species, which included
eagles considerably larger than any living today, and nine-foot-tall,
flightless moas, disappeared from New Zealand.
* * *
In 1876, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles
Darwin of evolution by natural selection, remarked on how
recent, how widespread and how mysterious the disappearance
of most of the earth’s big land-animals was:
...we live in a
zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest,
and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared;
and it is, no doubt, a much better world for us now that they
have gone. Yet it is a marvelous fact, and one that has hardly
been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so
many large Mammalia, not in one place, but over half the land
surface of the globe.
At first Wallace thought that the “sudden dying out”
of these big beasts had been caused by “the great and
recent physical change known as the ‘Glacial Epoch’,”
but, writing in 1911, his 88th year, he changed his mind:
Looking at the whole
subject again, with the much larger body of facts at our command,
I am convinced that the rapidity of the extinction of so many
large Mammalia is actually due to man’s agency, acting
in co-operation with those natural causes which at the culmination
of each geological era has lead to the extinction of the larger,
the most specialized, or the most strangely modified forms”
[The emphasis is in the original text.]
Starting in the early 1960s, Paul Martin of the Department
of Geosciences of the University of Arizona, originally an
ecologist and palynologist, now an emeritus professor at the
same University, argued that humans weren’t just (as
Wallace had come to believe) partially responsible
for the disappearance of these big animals, but that they
were, in fact, entirely so. In the succeeding years
this theme was taken up by a number of other scientists, including
Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA. In 1993
Diamond, the most influential of Martin’s intellectual
successors, distilled his previous work on this topic into
a book called The Third Chimpanzee: the Evolution and
Future of the Human Animal. Third Chimpanzee
told the story of the “vanished Serengetis” in
an enormously perceptive and convincing way. I couldn’t
have written this book without the awareness and inspiration
I received from it. Diamond’s book did not, however,
tell the whole story of how our species wiped out Wallace’s
“huge, fierce and strange” beasts.
At the time Third Chimpanzee was written, most specialists
in the field of paleoanthropology still believed that humans
only became effective hunters between 40,000 and 50,000 years
ago. Diamond himself accepted that view, devoting one of the
book’s chapters to a description of what he called “the
Great Leap Forward” – the abrupt way in which
our species was supposed to have acquired a whole range of
new abilities, including the ability to hunt big game, in
that forty- to fifty thousand year-ago time-slot. Other writers
referred to this supposed “Great Leap Forward”
as the “Human Revolution.” In addition to big-game
hunting, this “revolution” was thought to have
ushered in the abilities to catch birds and fish, to produce
art and decoration, and to carry on long-distance trade. The
sudden cognitive advance which was supposed to have triggered
it, was also thought to have made linguistic communication
(or “fully syntactical” linguistic communication)
possible for the first time.
During the last years of the Twentieth Century, discoveries
like the 380,000-year-old Schöningen javelins, have shown,
however, that the big-game hunting skills that were supposed
to have made a relatively sudden appearance between forty
and fifty thousand years ago, developed, instead, in a gradual
way over a much longer period of time. The carefully designed
and shaped Schöningen javelins, found in 1995 in a Jagdlagerplatz
or “hunters’ cache” containing the
remains of at least fifteen horses, establish clearly that
“...early humans did not,” in the words of Hartmut
Thieme, the principal investigator of the site, “rely
mainly on carrion for their nourishment, as postulated in
the last few decades, particularly by Anglo-American pre-historians,
but that they were extremely efficient hunters.” (“...daß
der Urmensch... seiner Ernärung nicht, wie in den vergangenen
Jahrzehnten besonders von anglo-amerikanischen Prähistoriken
postuliert, überwegend durch das Erbeuten von Aas gesichert
had, sondern ein äußert geschickter Jäger
war.”)
The “early humans didn’t hunt” citadel
is crumbling to an extent that wouldn’t have been thinkable
a few years ago. Nearly seven times older than the Thieme
group’s already-astounding North German discovery, is
a series of bones, butchered by hominids in the late Pliocene,
which came to light in Ethiopia from 1997 to 2003. The first
part of this series (2.6 to 2.5 million years old) was found
at Bouri in that country’s Middle Awash region by an
international team co-ordinated by Tim White. The latest finds,
(dated to between 2.6 and 2.3 million years ago) made by a
group which has included Sileshi Semaw and Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo,
come from Gona, some sixty miles north of Bouri. The kinds
of tool-imparted damage visible on bones found at both Bouri
and Gona show that many of them were attached to relatively
intact carcasses, and/or covered with flesh when their butchers
gained control of them.
It’s highly unlikely that those butchers could have
come into possession of such fleshy remains as “lucky
finds,” and have enjoyed the opportunity, thereafter,
to cut meat off them without interference. Some observers
have concluded from this that (as Domínguez-Rodrigo
and his associates put it in a comment on the Gona finds published
in a Paleoanthropological Society abstract in April, 2003)
“hunting and/or aggressive scavenging of large ungulate
carcasses may have been part of the behavioral repertoire
of hominids by c. 2.6 - 2.5 ma...”
Aggressive scavenging is, as we’ll see in Chapter 10,
a very different strategy from passively waiting for the remains
of carnivores’ meals. If the small hominids of the Late
Pliocene possessed the weaponry and the social organization
needed to drive carnivores away from antelope carcasses, then
it’s highly likely that they would also have had the
ability to hunt antelopes.
* * *
By the advent of the new millennium, the idea that hunting
by our species had only emerged relatively recently as part
of a “human revolution” was under attack from
several quarters. In a long and thoroughly-researched article
entitled “The Revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation
of the origin of modern human behavior,” which appeared
in the (39) 2000 Journal of Human Evolution, Allison
Brooks and Sally McBrearty argue convincingly that many of
the capabilities which our species is thought to have acquired
suddenly and recently – including the ability to hunt
big game effectively – have deep roots in its African
past.
Those deep roots explain why so many of Africa’s big
animals didn’t follow their counterparts on the other
continents into extinction. If the extraordinary big-game
hunting skills which destroyed the Australian and American
“Serengetis” had manifested themselves suddenly,
after all – in a “Great Leap Forward” which
only occurred between thirty and forty thousand years ago
– then the African megafauna would have been as unprepared
for them as the big animals of Australia and the New World
were.
The truth is that those skills appeared in Africa long before
the Australian, Siberian and American Serengetis were destroyed,
and that they came into being, moreover, in a relatively
gradual way. This gave the big animals of Africa time to learn
the hard lesson of living with a primate that was developing
an unprecedented level of intelligence.
Not all of Africa’s big animals were able, however,
to learn that lesson. At the start of the Pleistocene, 1,800,000
years ago, Africa had been the kind of “Super-Serengeti”
that North America still was 18,000 years ago. That “super-diverse”
African fauna included three kinds of sabertooth cat, four
elephant families, (versus the already-astonishing three which
inhabited the New World at the end of the Pleistocene) and
several kinds of hominid. Around 1.4 million years ago, all
the sabertooths, most of the elephant genera and several other
big-animal species, disappeared from the African continent.
Africa lost several more kinds of megafauna later in the Pleistocene,
leaving it with the still-marvelous but significantly reduced
collection of big-animal species which it has today. In Part
3 of this book, I argue that humans – or at any rate
hominids – were responsible for this reduction.
Recent finds in Georgia, Pakistan and China have shown that
hominids arrived in southern Asia two million years ago or
more. That arrival exposed the South Asian megafauna to the
same kind of “hard lesson” that Africa’s
big game was learning. Like Africa, South Asia lost a number
of large-animal species through the early and middle Pleistocene,
but South Asia is, because of its early exposure to the human
family, the only region outside Africa in which animals the
size of the Asian elephant and the Indian one-horned rhinoceros
have survived to the present day.
The behavior of big animals and birds living in areas which
had never been inhabited by any kind of hominid before
they were settled near the end of the Pleistocene by Homo
sapiens – Australia, Northern Eurasia, the Americas,
and the planet’s larger islands – would have formed
a sharp contrast with the wary, hominid-adapted ways of those
living in Africa and South Asia. None of the Australian species,
and few if any of the American ones, had evolved in the presence
of a predator that could set grassland and bush alight, kill
at a distance, and devise hunting strategies with the aid
of language. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the
big-animal communities living in these “virgin”
territories experienced catastrophic species-losses when they
got their first exposure to hominids – in the person
of sapiens – near the end of the Pleistocene.
* * *
Why were the small and medium-sized animals
of the American and Australian “Serengetis” so
much more likely to survive the sudden arrival of the super-predator
Homo sapiens? Shouldn’t the big, relatively
strong members of those animal-communities have been able
to put up a better defense against our species than their
small, relatively weak ones? Size and strength are, after
all, excellent defenses against most predators – anyone
who’s seen an elephant scattering a pride of lions knows
that.
Things are different, however, with respect to human predators.
Large size doesn’t only fail to protect animals
against our species – it makes them, in fact, far more
vulnerable to extermination by humans than small animals are.
Let’s test that statement with a fanciful thought-experiment.
Imagine, for a moment, that technologically advanced –
but capricious – aliens arrive on earth. “O.K.
humans,” they tell us, “this is the deal. Get
rid of every single elephant on your planet within three years
or we’ll vaporize you.” I suspect that we’d
be able to carry out that insane order. We’d have to
be specially careful not to overlook an elephant or two in
places like Gabon or Burma where there are still relatively
big tracts of undisturbed forest, but I’d give us a
good 75% chance of escaping vaporization. If those aliens
gave us the same ultimatum in relation to black rats, however,
we might just as well sit back and enjoy the last three years
of our lives. Although we’d be able to kill a great
many more rats than elephants in that period, we would, at
our present technological level, be quite incapable of killing
them all –within three years, within ten years, or,
for that matter, within a hundred.
Why wouldn’t we be able to wipe out the rats? The answer
doesn’t lie in their supposed cunning – elephants
are far smarter than rats. Some biologists might argue that
Rattus rattus is resistant to extermination by humans
because it’s a non-specialized omnivore with a wide
distribution. But the brown bear Ursus arctos is
also an adaptable omnivore with a wide distribution, and humans
have wiped that animal out in most parts of a range which
still stretched, in historical times, all the way from the
British Isles to Mexico. Rattus survives the strenuous
efforts our species makes to exterminate it, because, in addition
to being a widely-distributed, non-specialized omnivore, it
is much smaller than the brown bear. Wholesale habitat
alteration by humans can, of course, exterminate both large
and small species, but the kind of selective killing by humans
which is called “hunting,” (or “poaching,”
or “fishing,” or “vermin control”)
poses a far greater threat of extinction to large animals
than it does to small ones.
A size-difference need not, moreover, be as big as the one
between bears and rats to affect an animal’s chances
of surviving in the presence of our species. Humans have driven
the 110 lb. gray wolf Canis lupus and the 90 lb.
red wolf C. rufus to the edge of extinction in the
“lower 48” United States where these two species
survive only because our species has begun to tolerate and
even re-introduce them in a few small areas. The 35 lb. coyote,
C. latrans, continues, however, to prosper throughout
most of North America, and is, in fact, expanding into areas
like Nova Scotia and the Pacific Northwest which lie outside
its original range, despite the best efforts of our species
to shoot, trap and poison it into local extinction.
If the coyote is dramatically more resistant to human-caused
extinction than the wolf because it’s one-third of the
size of the latter, then we can assume that vulnerability
to human hunting might well be affected by even smaller
size-differences. It doesn’t seem unlikely, in fact,
that members of a given species which are, say, only 10% bigger
than the average members of that species, might still, statistically
viewed, be somewhat more likely to succumb to human hunting
than their average- and less-than-average-sized fellows. If
this is true, then one could expect to see reductions
in the average size of species which have been hunted
by humans over a long period of time.
Such size-reductions have, in fact, taken place: in Chapter
20 of his Future Eaters – in which he discusses
what he calls “Time Dwarfs” – Tim Flannery
tells us that gray kangaroos living 40,000 years ago, were
up to twice as heavy as their present-day counterparts. The
red kangaroo, several species of wallaby, as well as predators
like marsupial “wolves” and “devils”
also experienced significant size reductions over the last
40,000 years. We know, too, that present-day lions weigh only
about eighty percent as much as their late-Pleistocene ancestors.
The biggest of the surviving big cats – the Siberian
tiger Panthera tigris altaica – also happens
to be the one that has had the shortest exposure to our family.
Red deer (Cervus elaphus) living in present-day Western
Europe, where they have been hunted by hominids for 800,000
years or more, weigh less than 250 lb on average, while the
North American members of that species, which have only been
hunted by humans for something like 15,000 years, have an
average weight of somewhere between 600 and 700 lb.
Like large size, armor can also provide effective protection
against non-human predators: lions have been seen to paw at
tortoises, turn then over, and gnaw on their carapaces to
no avail. Armor is, however, even more vulnerable to human
ingenuity than large size. A tortoise – safe, as I’ve
said, from the attentions of hungry lions – would be
in deadly danger if it were found by a group of hungry humans.
Even a ten-year-old human child could figure out how to smash
the animal’s protective covering with a rock. The tortoise
species which have survived in the presence of human beings
are, therefore, all relatively small. This has added
what zoologists call “crypsis” – the ability
to be inconspicuous – to their armor-based defense.
And reduced size buys another form of insurance against extermination
by human predation: small tortoises can reach greater levels
of abundance than larger ones. A given area of veld or prairie
can obviously feed many more 5 lb. tortoises than 500 lb.
ones. Small animals also mature and reproduce more quickly
than large ones.
We think of remote oceanic islands as the “natural”
habitats of giant tortoises – as if there’s something
about mid-oceanic air that makes tortoises grow big. Tortoises
somewhat bigger than the existing oceanic giants lived on
the continent of Africa, however, until about three million
years ago, when small, upright-walking hominids became smart
enough to smash their armor with rocks. Since that time, the
spread of the hominid family out of its African homeland across
the rest of the planet has been faithfully tracked by the
disappearance of giant tortoise species. A tortoise more than
twice as big as the Galapagos giants lived in the southern
parts of Asia until the early Pleistocene. As we’ve
seen, hominids probably arrived in Asia shortly before the
Pliocene Epoch gave way to the Pleistocene 1.8 million years
ago.
Giant tortoises in the genus Meiolania (the so-called
“horned turtles”) lived in Australia until humans
arrived there some 50,000 years ago. One or more giant relatives
of the surviving gopher tortoise, lived in the present-day
“lower 48” or contiguous United States until our
species entered that region around 14,000 years ago. Giant
tortoise species have survived on the Galapagos and on Aldabra
only because those islands were discovered at a time when
Homo sapiens was already becoming aware of the need
to protect other species from its own destructive power. The
giant tortoises that used to share the Mascarene islands with
the dodo, and those which used to live on Madagascar, and
on many Mediterranean, Caribbean and East Indian Islands,
were discovered by our species, unfortunately, before that
awareness arose.
* * *
Even before the evolution of “fully modern” humans
in Africa some 125,000 years ago, members of the human family
had, as we’ve seen, already exterminated a number of
big-animal species on that continent, and several more in
southern Asia. The destructive potential of our family only
became fully apparent, however, during the last 50,000 years
or so, when “fully modern” humans actually killed
off most of the planet’s 2,000 lb.-plus land-animals
in the course of a move out of Africa which took them into
South Asia, (which had already been colonized, as we’ve
seen, by an earlier wave of hominids) and beyond that into
the virgin territories of Australia, northern Eurasia and
the New World.
The phenomenon of human-caused extinction didn’t come
to an end after the settlement of the planet’s habitable
continents was completed some twelve thousand years ago. It
continued unabated as humans discovered and settled the earth’s
previously uninhabited islands. The more accessible of those
islands, such as those in the Mediterranean and Caribbean
seas, were reached between five thousand and ten thousand
years ago. The Mediterranean islands lost, as a result, a
fauna which included dwarf elephant, hippo and deer species,
giant dormice, giant eagles, the Majorcan “goat antelope,”
and (as I’ve already mentioned) a variety of giant tortoise
species. The Caribbean islands also lost giant tortoises,
as well as dwarf ground sloths, endemic monkeys, bear-sized
rodents, and owl species in a range of sizes characterized
by Jared Diamond as “normal, giant, colossal and titanic.”
Our species only completed the task of discovering the planet’s
more remote islands around four hundred years ago. The settlement
of literally every newly-discovered island-group appears to
have been followed by extinctions. After Polynesian seafarers
reached Hawaii, for instance, around the time of the birth
of Christ, they definitely exterminated 35 bird species, and
probably exterminated 55 in total. (A further 18-20 species
disappeared from Hawaii after European settlement in the wake
of Captain Cook’s visit in 1778.)
Comparable findings have been made in respect to other Pacific
islands such as ‘Eua, in what is now Tonga. Extrapolation
of completed investigations to islands which haven’t
yet been archeologically investigated, suggests that as many
as 2,000 bird species were exterminated during the Polynesian
settlement of the Pacific Ocean alone. Since there are somewhere
between 7,000 and 9,000 bird species in existence today, the
settlement of the Pacific islands alone could have caused
the extermination of about a fifth of world’s bird species.
The International Council for Bird Preservation calculates,
by way of comparison, that humans have exterminated only 108
bird species since 1600 A.D.
As the dodos and their relatives, solitaires, were disappearing
from one of the last-to-be-discovered island groups, the Mascarenes,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (along with
the endemic bats, pigeons, ibises, rails, owls and giant tortoises
with which they shared those islands), humans were still exterminating
big animals on or near the continental land masses. In 1627,
the last aurochs, the ancestor of domesticated cattle, was
killed in the Jaktoróv forest in what is today Poland’s
Warsaw Province.
In 1768 – on the eve of both the industrial and the
American revolutions – Hydrodamalis gigas,
an elephant-sized dugong discovered by Vitus Bering’s
expedition just 27 years previously around the Komandorskiye
islands near Kamchatcka, was exterminated by our species.
In 1799, the bloubok, a member of the roan-sable family of
antelopes, was hunted to extinction by Dutch settlers on the
coastal plain of present-day South Africa’s Western
Cape region.
By the end of the eighteenth century, species other than
vertebrates may have started succumbing to the intensification
of the agricultural and industrial activities of human beings.
Who would notice, though, if inconspicuous and localized plants,
insects or fungi were being pushed into extinction by the
expansion of farmland in China or Western Europe?
* * *
The new ecological history of our species makes it clear
that Homo sapiens wiped out many more mammal and
bird species before the industrial revolution than it did
after that time. The idea that pre-industrial people could
have caused an extinction of this magnitude sounds, on first
hearing, completely nonsensical. How could hunter-gatherers
and pre-industrial agriculturists have destroyed more mammal
and bird species than present-day humans have, when the extinction
rate is literally hundreds of times higher now than it was
before the industrial revolution?
The answer to this question is that relatively few present-day
extinctions involve high-profile species like birds and mammals
– they involve, in the overwhelming majority of cases,
less noticeable life-forms like fishes, amphibians,
invertebrate animals, plants, and micro-organisms. Present-day
humans exterminate organisms like freshwater mussels, corals,
micorrhizal fungi, cichlids, flowering plants and insects
rather than mammoths, woolly rhinos, moas and dodos –
and they do so at a rate of literally tens of thousands of
species per year.
There’s no doubt, therefore, that the vast majority
of human-caused extinctions have occurred since
the industrial revolution – that most of the damage
is, in fact, being done now. Why fuss, then, with
the idea that humans started the present-day extinction-spasm
thousands of years ago? Shouldn’t environmentalists
get on with the urgent task of finding a way to stop the hemorrhage
of biodiversity which is occurring now, and leave the paleo-anthropologists
to argue about whether humans wiped out the mammoths and the
moas?
The problem with that suggestion is that we literally don’t
know how to go about that “urgent task”
– what to do about the phenomenon of human-caused extinctions
– while we’re still ignorant of the real facts
of our ecological history. If we accept, for instance, that
the first humans to settle the Americas, Australia and Polynesia
exterminated more mammals and/or birds than the later colonists
from Europe, then we’ll have to abandon the still-common
idea that people like the first Americans and Australians
upheld a “...widespread and well-developed tradition
of conservation, land stewardship, and religiously based environmental
ethics...” We’d also have to let go, therefore,
of the idea that we could stop wiping out other species by
re-creating what the environmentalist David Suzuki calls the
“sacred connection” that’s supposed to have
existed between “indigenous” peoples and the natural
world. Trying to remedy the problem of human-caused extermination
with that kind of prescription would be as futile –
the new ecological history tells us – as trying to prevent
malaria by avoiding mal aria or “bad airs.”
I’m not suggesting, in pointing this out, that the
early Australians or Americans (or, indeed, the early Asians,
Polynesians and Europeans) didn’t have a deep
connection to the natural world. It’s obvious, I think,
that the beauties and mysteries of the biosphere have inspired
feelings of awe and wonder in individuals from all human groups.
Far from being spiritually, morally or ecologically superior,
however, “indigenous” people like the first groups
to arrive in the Americas consisted of exactly the same kind
of intelligent, resourceful opportunists as any of the other
members of Homo sapiens.
Wallace’s “huge, fierce and strange” beasts
were exterminated, in short, by ordinary human beings, and
the enormous human-caused extinction that’s presently
eroding the biosphere, is simply the continuation of a process
which started gaining momentum with the disappearance of the
mammoths, the ground sloths, and the woolly rhinos –
a process which has culminated quite logically in our time
with the near-extinction of several species of the earth’s
very largest megafauna, its great whales.
* * *
The “humans did it” explanation for the disappearance
of the megafauna explodes the myth that “primitive”
or “aboriginal” peoples were protectors or “stewards”
of the natural world, but it doesn’t go to the other
extreme and suggest that humans are abnormally cruel or rapacious.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, the early
history of the human-caused extinction-spasm contains no indication
that the process was set in motion by moral failings like
greed or carelessness.
That’s a disconcerting realization, rather than a comforting
one. If the roots of that extinction-spasm did lie,
after all, in moral failings on the part of humans –
a lack of compassion, say, or an “unnatural” level
of aggression – then, no matter how difficult it might
be for us to overcome those failings, we would at least know
what we have to do to save our fellow-species. No obvious
solution suggests itself, by contrast, in a scenario in which
our species simply became too smart to be restrained by the
ecology. What remedial action do you suggest to a species,
which has, without fault on its part, and indeed without awareness
that the process was even taking place, reached a level of
intelligence which has overwhelmed the safeguards which used
to preserve the integrity of the biosphere in which it evolved?
* * *
“I dine,” David Hume wrote in his Treatise
of Human Nature, “I play a game of backgammon,
I converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after three
or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations,
they appear so cold, so strained, and ridiculous that I cannot
find in my heart to enter into them any further.”
That kind of mood descended on me frequently while I was
writing this book, and I had to remind myself on each occasion
that I wasn’t dealing with a comfortable or
conventional explanation for the human impact on
the biosphere. I, too, had reacted with incredulity and unease
when I started to make out the real shape of my species’
ecological history. My initial acquaintance with that history
was an accidental one. It resulted from an interest in wild
animals that wasn’t specifically focused on extinct
species. I became fascinated with Björn Kurtén’s
Pleistocene Mammals of Europe precisely because the
animals described in it seemed so modern – so contemporary.
The lions, leopards and hyenas that lived in Western Europe
fifteen thousand years ago were, Kurtén’s book
told me, identical or very similar to those I’d seen
while growing up in South Africa. Europe’s extinct woolly
rhinos and mammoths were close relatives of Africa’s
rhinos and elephants rather than the “primitive”
or “ancestral” creatures that I’d vaguely
imagined them to be.
The realization that vast herds of essentially modern wildlife
had roamed Western Europe so recently provoked the questions
that gave rise to this book: what had caused the sudden and
recent extinction of so many of those European animals? And
why had the extinction weighed so heavily on the larger members
of that fauna, while sparing its smaller ones? The writings
of Paul Martin, Jared Diamond, Edward O. Wilson, Jonathan
Kingdon and Tim Flannery convinced me that the European “Serengeti”
had succumbed, together with the planet’s other recently-vanished
big-game communities, to the same human-driven process that
is currently diminishing Africa’s larger animals.
