Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  Five years after finishing high school, Klaas left Urk and went into the fish processing and import/export business. He returned in his thirties to settle there and to work as a fisherman. His interest in the old bones was still with him and he told his fellow fishermen that he would pay them fifty guilders for every box of bones they brought to him and that was how his collection began.

  Sandra made an appointment for the two of us to meet him. She had hurt her arm falling off her bicycle, so I drove her geriatric Alfa Romeo. ‘If you start braking before you need to brake it will be fine,’ said Sandra vaguely. We left Amsterdam and joined the steady spread of the motorway system, heading towards the Waddenzee. As always the flatness of the reclaimed land made it seem like no land at all, just a thin surface of solidity rolled out on to a placid lake or the top of a vast table.

  The town of Urk was clean and tidy with an air of prosperity and that Dutch sense of there being nothing to hide in the way of sin or dirt or poverty. I thought I saw Creationists in every passer-by, recognising them by the purposefulness of their stride and their slightly haunted gaze.

  Klaas was nothing like my idea of a fisherman. He is an elegant man in his early sixties I would guess, although I am becoming increasingly vague about judging anyone’s age. We shook hands and he took us through an open-plan office where there were cabinet displays of mammoth teeth, rhino skulls and other bits of ancient anatomy. Then we went on to his main bone depot which was not far away.

  The first floor of the building was dominated by the skeleton of a mammoth which was being pieced together from a conglomerate of forty-year-old mammoths, a hip bone from one, a rib from another. Three rhino skulls were displayed on little plinths; two were from forty thousand years ago, but the third was a forest rhino for whom two million years had passed since he had been on his feet. Klaas said you could tell the difference between them by their nasal passages: the forest rhino had a much broader and more primitive set of air vents.

  Klaas spoke of his life and his work. I asked him questions in my fluent but grammatically incorrect Dutch and he answered in Dutch, moving to a more formal English if I got stuck and back to Dutch again if he got stuck. Sandra listened and did the odd translation between us and I took notes. Klaas remarked on my chaotic handwriting as it looped and slid across the pages of my notebook. I hoped this was not a comment on my character and laughed as if to show I was nothing like my formation of letters.

  He explained that they put everything they get into boxes and then specialists are brought in to work on them. Important pieces go to museums, but the rest can be sold. Footballers, or at least the designers who design the houses in which footballers live, love to have mammoth tusks on their bookcases. They cost about 36,000 euros for a pair. Because they have been soaking in sea water for so long they are not as strong as the Siberian ones and need to be heavily varnished to protect them. He showed me some, gleaming like plastic and turned a bright orange by the stains of age.

  Klaas has collected human artefacts as well: carved bone tools, antler harpoons, and a few worked flints. They are mostly sent immediately to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to be assessed, but the mesh size on the trawling nets is eight centimetres so the smaller things like flints and axeheads tend to drop through, back to where they came from.

  In 1985, a captain brought him a human jawbone with worn molars, and radiocarbon dating showed it to be 9,500 years old. It was one of the first intimations that Mesolithic people had lived in Doggerland. Klaas is pretty sure he has recently found evidence of two Mesolithic settlements under the sea at a depth of thirty metres, somewhere between England and Holland. He said it’s just a few wooden posts standing upright at the apex of a circle and around its edge, but he’s sure the wood has been placed in position and is not part of a forest.

  A fisherman called Albert came in and asked if we wanted coffee. He returned with cups on a tray and little plastic pots of the thick koffiemelk which everyone likes and sugar cubes and cinnamon biscuits in their own individual wrappers. Albert was a big man with a shy manner and a nervous smile and a look of distraction as if his mind was elsewhere, out at sea I suppose.

  Klaas began to describe the land beneath the sea; a vast savannah landscape like the prairies of America, with herds of mammoth moving around, hyena always close by. Rhino and other older fauna, but nothing was as numerous as the mammoth.

  I was having to concentrate very hard to follow the Dutch, but I understood that he has collected one hundred and fifty thousand kilos of bones in the last fifteen years as well as seventy thousand mammoth teeth. Albert has found around one hundred thousand bones of mammoth and a sabretooth tiger tooth, which was carbon dated to twenty-three thousand years. This caused a big stir in the scientific community because it was thought that the last of these cats died out three hundred to four hundred thousand years ago. Albert stood by and listened for a while and then he smiled and flitted off.

  Not long ago Klaas and Albert found a sixty-metre-deep pocket on the seabed of the Westerschelde and from that they have fished out some huge and heavy pieces belonging to creatures which died some nine million year ago. Klaas took us to see them. The smaller ones were lined up on IKEA-style metal shelves, while the most cumbersome lay on the floor. I stared at something which was the head of a not-yet-classified species of dolphin; it stared back at me from a round eye socket, although the rest of the skull and even the teeth looked like nothing more than a slab of weather-beaten rock. The stone shell of a leatherback turtle was almost perfect and easily familiar in spite of its age. On one of the shelves Klaas had a photo of his fisherman father feeding chickens in a chicken shed, the photo propped against the fossilised vertebra of a whale.

  He spoke of how the seabed and everything it holds moves with the tide, rising and falling forty centimetres every twelve hours, and how during a heavy storm it can rise and fall as much as two metres, causing all the sediment and rock to be lifted up and deposited elsewhere. He said that on a boat you can feel the depth beneath you, you can even feel the meandering of the rivers that flowed here and the steepness of their banks; the deep holes and trenches where whirlpools form and where fish like to hide alongside the bones that have got caught up in the swirl of it all. Fishermen know how to imagine the bottom of the sea; after all, they have been looking down at it for generations. You can give Albert a fossil from any part of the North Sea and he can tell where it comes from, just by its smell and the sand and mud and vegetation that cling to it. He said fishermen dream of the land that lies under the sea: they walk over it in their dreams.

  As we were leaving we passed a big metal container, something you might expect to see holding steel joists or other mysterious units of construction on a building site. It was filled to the brim with little bones, small enough to fit on the palm of my hand. They were all identical to the bone I had seen in Jonathan’s collection, the one that was like a human torso. ‘Ankle bones of horses,’ said Klaas. ‘Forty thousand years old. We have so many we don’t know what to do with them.’

  I asked if I could buy one and he laughed and said I could take as many as I wanted. I took three and when I got home I gave one to my friend Jayne and I put the other two on the polished rosewood base of an old mirror that once belonged to my great-grandmother, which has a rising sun with a rather surreal staring face inlaid into one of its curved drawers. The fetlocks, for that is what they are, stand side by side, next to a couple of pieces of mosaic from Jericho and a Roman lead dice that rolls in your hand as heavy as fate.

  KLAAS’S MAP OF THE NORTH SEA AND WHAT IS FOUND WHERE

  •Krijn: The large, red-hatched area near the Dutch coast is where hundreds of thousands of bones of Late Pleistocene Mammoth Steppes fauna have been found, alongside Early Holocene fauna. This is also a source of lots of Mesolithic artefacts and human remains from c. 10,000 to 8,000 BP.

  In or near the red-circled area known as de S
tekels, or The Spines, the remains seem to be more concentrated and include tools and wooden poles and other objects which might indicate burial grounds or some sort of camp. Closer to the coast, in Middelgrond or Middle Ground, older flint artefacts have been found. This is also where Krijn, the forehead from a Neanderthal skull was found.

  • In Engelse Banken, the English Banks, a limited quantity of fossil fauna from the Late Pleistocene and early Pleistocene have been found.

  • Elbows Pit is a quite unique, with only Early Holocene fossils, mostly red deer, elk and horse, and some tools made from red-deer antler, but no mammoth.

  •To my knowledge, Middle Rough is the most northern location for finding woolly mammoth, rhino and walrus fossils.

  •Near the Danish coast we may find a few remains of reindeer elk, and also the occasional artefact made from bone or antler.

  •Just below Heligoland is a limited source of mammoth, rhino, walrus, etc.

  •Borkem Rif has very scarce Holocene mammals and some Mesolithic artefacts.

  16

  Dick Mol is a good friend of Klaas and they have often worked together. He has been a customs official all his life. He lives close to his job, not far from Schiphol Airport. I went to visit him in Sandra’s car, driving through the pouring rain and trying to understand the Dutch of the sat nav, balanced precariously on the passenger seat because its suction pad no longer worked. Daarna, the voice kept saying, meaning and then.

  The house was part of several clusters of new buildings all crowding together. I phoned Dick to say I was somewhere close and he came to find me. He is a bulky-bodied man who looks as if he could have trained as a wrestler, but the bulkiness also seemed to imply a stubborn determination, something I suppose you might see in a mammoth, if they were there to be seen.

  I am endlessly surprised by the way strangers can welcome a stranger with such warmth. I was ushered inside the house. A pile of mammoth leg bones leant against the wall in a corner of the front hall, where you might expect an umbrella stand. We went into the front room and there was Dick’s wife, very womanly and welcoming, and also his colleague Bram Langeveld, who is the Curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum. Bram was only twenty-two and could have been their son; he shared the same bulky body, the same look of friendly intransigence.

  A low coffee table and soft armchairs and books in the bookcases and bones everywhere. Part of a mammoth jaw with big molars was sitting under a cheese dome on the coffee table. The head of a cave bear was on top of the bookcase, looking very big and dangerous in spite of its helpless condition. But mostly it was mammoth. The area between the front of the house and the kitchen–dining room at the back was a sort of mammoth compound, with skulls and other body parts gathered together. The bones that could stand up by themselves stood in convivial bunches, leaning against bookcases, walls or bits of furniture. The presence of so many bones was lightened, or perhaps confused, by a scattering of stuffed toy animals: a brown teddy bear on top of some leg bones, a little blue and white mammoth on top of a skull.

  We sat down to talk over coffee and cake. Dick is a good talker. He dived straight in and spoke perfect English. He grew up in Winterswijk, in the east of the country: an area fifty-three metres above sea level, which is high for Holland, and a place famous for its Triassic quarries in which remains of reptiles two hundred and fifty million years old have been found. There are clay pits from the Holocene close by. As a child he began collecting fossils and taking them to museums to be identified.

  When he was thirteen he saw a picture of a mammoth molar and the caption under the picture said, ‘The pride of this writer’s collection. You will never find fossils such as these in an amateur’s collection.’ It was this presumption that triggered Dick’s determination. He had an aunt living in the port town of IJmuiden and he stayed with her as often as he could and made contact with fishermen, asking them what they knew, examining what they had found.

  He grew up and became a customs inspector, but the mammoth stayed with him. He wanted to understand them, where they had lived, what they had eaten, and, if one animal needed to consume two hundred kilos of vegetation every day, along with the two to three hundred litres of water, how did it manage to survive in a snow-covered tundra for eight to ten months of the year?

  In 1997 he took part in an important expedition to Siberia. A frozen mammoth had been located and he wanted to focus on what had been the cause of its death. Such a study had never been done before. The creature was removed within the block of ice that held it and taken to a laboratory. They used hairdryers to dry its mass of red hair, they examined everything its body held: the microorganisms on the skin, the contents of the intestines, the casual remains of plants and insects.

  He spoke of his subject with a very friendly intimacy and an outpouring of facts and figures. He has collected thirty-five thousand specimens of mammoth and some of them are in this little house with its three storeys, but the rest of what he has not sold or given away is in Urk, in Klaas’s storerooms.

  He said there is growing evidence that the southern bight of the North Sea and the Netherlands, between IJmuiden and Lowestoft, was dry throughout the Pleistocene, which means it was a solid land mass from 2.6 million years ago until the final flooding of Doggerland seven thousand years ago. At first it was savannah landscape in which the mammoth occupied the same niche as the mastodon elephant and the woolly rhino and lion, and then the climate became colder and the landscape was transformed into tundra steppe. The mammoth was able to adapt better than the mastodon because it grew a shaggy covering of hair and had more advanced molars that enabled it to become a pure grazer.

  The water was locked up during the dry glacial period and released when the weather became warmer, but there was always land in certain areas; he said you could see this from the mix of terrestrial and marine finds coming up in the same net. He described what he called the Lowland North Sea as a paradise for all sorts of creatures: cave lions, sabretooth cats, bears, bison, but mammoth were by far the most numerous. I must imagine great herds of them grazing, drinking from the rivers, and in the summer month of July walrus hunting for clams and molluscs in the soft mud along the coast and beluga whale breeding in the shelter of the estuaries.

  Dick picked up the tusk of a baby mammoth and he was explaining how the ivory grows as sedimentation in the pulp cavity and so the tip of the tusk represents the first day of the animal’s life, while the socket holds information about the date of its death. From the tusk you can also read its age and whether it is male or female, and even if it was still feeding on its mother’s milk. He said that although an elephant uses its tusks to loosen tree roots, a mammoth’s tusks were so huge and curled that their only function was to impress the female, to make her choose him as her own, and he became quite lyrical with the thought.

  I spoke with Bram for a while. He is the youngest museum director in Holland. He started collecting fossils in the dunes when he was eight and his mother had always insisted that he make meticulous notes on his finds, recording the date and exact location, and that had helped him later. He passed through what he called a dinosaur phase and settled down in the Pleistocene. He met Dick when he was fifteen and his mother took him to a lecture Dick was giving. Since then they have done a lot of work together, even going to the Yukon last year to study woolly mammoth.

  Mrs Mol had been with us throughout the conversation, nodding and smiling. She asked if I would like some lunch and returned with four bowls of soup, cheese sandwiches and slices of tomato and cucumber. She set them on the coffee table next to the mammoth molar under its glass dome. I asked her if she has had any training as a palaeontologist and she said no, she knew nothing.

  ‘But she comes with me on my trips,’ said Dick. ‘We have been to Yukon, Patagonia, Japan. And she is the one who dusts the bones twice a week, so in that way she knows more than most of us.’

  I w
as aware of the strange energy that is generated by people busy with the intensity of what they are doing, being who they are from what they do. Mrs Mol’s intensity seemed to come from loving her husband.

  Before I left Dick showed me a little bunch of hair from a Siberian mammoth, very red and pubic, nestling in a plastic box. When he closed the box, one hair was sticking out and I asked if I could have it. He put it in a beautiful embossed envelope and handed it over.

  Time Song 6

  He was named Yakuta,

  after the region in northern Russia

  where he – his head, front legs,

  part of the stomach and intestine –

  was found

  trapped in permafrost

  on the side of an oxbow lake.

  Male,

  almost three metres tall at the shoulder,

  weight four tons, maybe five,

  large spirally twisted tusks

  denoting maturity,

  worn molars,

  arthritic problem in the spine.

  The absence of tree pollen

  in his dung

  suggests a tundra landscape

  covering a considerable expanse.

  Dwarf willow was his main food.

  the thickest twigs, though thin,

  counted twenty annual rings,

  so the weather was cold

  and growth was slow.

  The availability of fresh drinking water

  indicating perennial wet areas

  is shown by traces of

  green algae in the dung,

  while remnants of marsh marigold,

  sedges and rushes

  attest to streams or standing water