Europe
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There is so little variation in the Y-chromosome of domestic horses that the original herd must have had very few stallions. In contrast, mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on through the female line, is spectacularly diverse. This could be because there were a very large number of mares in the original stock, or perhaps because additional mares from wild herds were added as domestic horses spread across Eurasia—an idea supported by the latest data. It seems that many were taken in during the Iron Age, between around 3000 and 2000 years ago.9 In genetic terms, no living horse breed is a surviving representative of Equus ferus.
Very few species have been domesticated since the horse. The bee was domesticated in Egypt by 4500 years ago, and the dromedary about 3000 years ago on the Arabian Peninsula: it was nearing extinction at the time, being restricted to mangrove areas in Arabia’s southeast.10 About 3000 years ago the Bactrian camel was domesticated in central Asia, and the reindeer may have been domesticated in both Siberia and Scandinavia. The only more recent examples are the rabbit and the carp, which were domesticated by monks in the middle ages.
You might have noticed an omission in this tale of domestication—the Romans. Few people have ever had access to the variety of wild animals that the Romans did, or kept them for such an astonishing variety of purposes. From lions to elephants and bears, destined for combat in the arena, to the lions that Mark Anthony reputedly used to draw his chariot, wild animals were captured and trained en masse. If, incidentally, Anthony’s lions were anything but legend, the feat of harnessing these big cats was one of the greatest triumphs ever of man over beast.
The Romans found dormice an irresistible delicacy, and to satisfy their appetites they would capture wild individuals and keep them in terra cotta containers known as gliraria, while they fattened. Dormice are only very distantly related to the rats and mice that infest our houses and crops; they are surviving members of Europe’s most ancient mammal lineage, whose history stretches back more than 50 million years. Yet for all their expertise in other areas, the Romans never domesticated dormice: they never got them to reproduce in captivity—a key threshold for domestication.
The Romans were also famous for keeping fish, including red mullet, which were captured as juveniles and grown to enormous size in ponds. A large red mullet could cost as much as a slave. And the Romans were the first to cultivate oysters, the praetor Caius Sergius Orata, who grew them in the Lucrine Lake—a coastal lagoon in the region of Baiae (modern Baia)—in the first century BCE, was the first recorded oyster farmer.11 But Orata’s oysters were, like the dormice and fish, collected in the wild, as spat. So oyster farming, like dormouse-fattening, is not a form of domestication, but rather captive rearing.
The failure of the Romans to add to the domestic stock is truly inexplicable. For about 500 years they ruled a peri-Mediterranean empire that was about the same size as the Incan empire in South America—though it lasted five times longer. Situated in a biologically diverse part of the planet, which they scoured in search of wild animals, and having the advantage of Virgil’s Georgics (an instructional poem dealing with agricultural techniques) and all their expertise in training, captive-rearing and even selectively breeding already domesticated creatures, they failed to domesticate a single species. Yet barbarians, whose cultures they knew and who lived just before them, as well as the Europeans of the middle ages who succeeded them, both added species to Europe’s domestic stocks.
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* Inexplicably, the jump was the day before the date on Childe’s letter.
CHAPTER 35
Emptying the Islands
Islands are central to the story of Europe, and even today its numerous islands are diverse and ecologically important. Yet so very much has been lost: the fate of Europe’s unique island faunas over the past 10,000 years is an extreme example of how natural heritage has been diminished by relentless human expansion. The story begins on Cyprus, the first major Mediterranean island to be colonised by humans. Whoever saw the island in its virginal state must have experienced a paradise.
Indications of what they encountered were unearthed by the founding mother of Mediterranean islands palaeontology, Dorothea Bate. Born in 1878, Bate received little formal education (she once quipped that her education had only briefly been interrupted by school). She became a ‘piece worker’ at the British Museum. The lowliest of employees, piece workers were paid only for each bird or mammal they stuffed, or each fossil they prepared. Bate persisted in this precarious occupation for more than 50 years, all the while teaching herself how to find fossils and research and write scientific papers.
She was fortunate to meet the Swiss palaeontologist Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major, who encouraged her to visit the islands of the Mediterranean in her search of fossils. Her first venture was to Cyprus, where she had been drawn by ancient accounts of bones in caves said to belong to the seven martyrs of island tradition, or the seven sleepers, who entered a cave and slept for a year. In 1901 she set out for the island on a self-funded expedition and stayed for eighteen months, locating several of the caves mentioned in older texts, including the ‘Cave of the Forty Saints’ at Cape Pyla, which contained rich deposits of fossil bones.
The fossils Bate excavated are now held in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, where the most interesting remains long lay unstudied. But in 1972 Dutch palaeontologists Bert Boekschoten and Paul Sondaar announced that the bones came from an unusual, tiny hippo, which they named Phanourios minor—‘small manifested saint’; the cave had been visited for centuries by villagers seeking the fossilised bones of their ‘saint’, who they believed could cure various maladies.1 The saintly hippo was, at less than a metre high and weighing only 200 kilograms, an island dwarf, which had presumably descended from full-sized amphibious ancestors that had swum out of the Nile to Cyprus. The hippo was widely distributed across the island, and it looks to have become entirely terrestrial in habits. Lacking predators, it may have been slow-growing and fatally naïve about carnivores.
The hippo shared Cyprus with a miniature straight-tusked elephant. The presence of small elephants on various Mediterranean islands may have influenced classical mythology. In 1914 the fascist Viennese palaeontologist Othenio Abel (he who disparaged Nopcsa’s island theory of dinosaur evolution) proposed that the fossilised skulls of dwarf elephants might have given rise to the story of the cyclopses—the one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, which appear in different guises in several stories. In the Odyssey, the cave-dwelling cyclops Polyphemus, who is said to live in a ‘distant country’, which is often taken to be an island, captures Odysseus and his crew. Kept for eating, they escape by blinding the giant. The skulls of dwarf elephants, Abel observed, are about twice the size of a human skull, so might have been thought of as belonging to giants. Moreover, they have a central nasal opening that could be mistaken for an eye socket. The discovery of such a skull in a cave, he thought, might have triggered the tale of the cave-dwelling cyclops.
Malta and Sicily were once joined, so they share a common biological heritage. But by the time humans arrived they had been separated for hundreds of thousands of years. Sicily lies close to the mainland, the Strait of Messina hardly posing a barrier for many large mammals, including aurochs, wisent, red deer, ass, horse and straight-tusked elephant, all of which swam to the island. Sicily’s straight-tusked elephants, incidentally, survived there until about 32,000 years ago, while the rest of the large mammals perished following the invasion of the island by the domesticators and their livestock.
Malta has a rich and varied faunal history, including dwarf elephants and hippos, and a giant, flightless swan that stood taller than the island’s pachyderms. But by the time humans discovered Malta, it had a more limited fauna, perhaps because various species had been lost due to the small size of the island during times of high sea levels. The survivors included several kinds of dormice and a deer, both of which were unique to Malta, and neither of which survived the
human impact.
Sardinia and Corsica are large islands that were connected at periods of low sea level. By the time humans arrived about 11,000 years ago, the islands’ fauna included a dwarf mammoth, a deer, a giant otter with broad crushing teeth that probably fed on shellfish, three other otter species, a pika, some rodents, shrews and a mole. It was also inhabited by a small dog-like canid known as Cynotherium, which may have fed exclusively on the island’s pikas.2
About a million years ago, Sardinia and Corsica were settled by a Homo erectus-like species that left abundant stone tools. But it became extinct and thereafter the islands lacked upright apes until they were rediscovered by the domesticators. The mammoth and other large mammals seem to have become extinct shortly thereafter, but the deer survived until about 7000 years ago, and the pika right into the eighteenth century (where it persisted on offshore islets). Sadly, today the entire endemic fauna is extinct.
The Balearic Islands of Minorca and Majorca were not discovered by humans until between 4350 and 4150 years ago—around the time of Egypt’s Old Kingdom—and so managed to hold onto their unique fauna for six millennia longer than the more easterly Mediterranean islands: three very unusual creatures inhabited these islands—the giant shrew Asoriculus, the giant dormouse Hypnomys and Myotragus—an enigmatic member of the goat family. The shrew is little known, but the dormouse weighed up to 300 grams and was probably partly terrestrial (rather than arboreal) and omnivorous.3 Myotragus (meaning ‘mouse-goat’) weighed between 50 and 70 kilograms and browsed bushes. The remains of all three of these strange creatures were, after many unsuccessful searches and dead ends, discovered and named by Dorothea Bate, who also published a brief description of the mouse-goat in 1909.
Bate’s work was not without its hazards: she caught malaria on Cyprus and nearly starved on Crete. On Majorca she was sexually harassed by the British Vice Consul, writing of the experience: ‘I do hate old men who try to make love to one and ought not to in their official positions’.4 Bate was a strong personality, and I suspect that her wry sense of humour was responsible for her idiosyncratic wording. Bate, incidentally, did not limit herself to fossils; the modern spiny mouse of Cyprus is among her discoveries. And, when in her 70s, she discovered the remains of a giant tortoise in—of all places—Bethlehem!
The ancestors of Myotragus seem to have walked to the Balearics nearly six million years ago, during the Messinian crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea dried up. Isolated for millions of years, they developed some highly unusual characteristics. Their eyes faced forward like those of monkeys and cats, rather than the usual sideways-oriented eyes of herbivores. And, like rodents, mouse-goats had a single stout incisor at the front of each lower jaw (hence the name mouse-goat). Their bones appear to have grown differently from those of any other mammal. Like the bones of reptiles, they have lines within them indicating long periods during which no growth occurred and the animal seems to have ceased much metabolic activity. This has prompted scientists to think that mouse-goats entered a kind of hibernation, or aestivation, perhaps in response to a lack of food or water. The young were very large at birth, and independent at an early age. Sometime after 4800 years ago, about the time the first humans arrived on the islands, the last mouse-goats died. It was once thought that the first humans in the Balearics had domesticated the mouse-goat, as what appeared to be pens filled with dung were found in some caves. But further study revealed them to be natural features.5
And so, beginning with Cyprus’ dwarf elephants and hippos, did the unique species of the European islands vanish, until even the rat-sized Sardinian pika, which survived into Roman times and probably beyond, was driven into extinction by hunting or competition with species humans carried to the islands.* Today, among all of the Mediterranean’s unique island mammals, there is a single survivor—the Cypriot mouse (Mus cypriacus)—a species so obscure and small that it was not even recognised as being distinct from the house mouse until 2006.** Was there ever a sorrier story of human ignorance and overexploitation than this? That every island from the coast of Turkey to the Pillars of Hercules has been emptied of its natural treasures, one by one, until just a single mouse was left.
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* The Sardinian pika (Prolagus sardus) weighed around half a kilogram. A burrower, it abounded at the time of human settlement. It may have survived on the island of Tavolara, off the northeast coast of Sardinia, until 1780, when that island was finally colonised.
** The spiny mouse of Cyprus may also survive, though it appears to be on the brink of extinction, and two endemic shrews also survive on the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. Other island populations of shrews and mice, which are occasionally claimed to be species unique to islands, may in fact be descended from recent immigrants.
CHAPTER 36
The Calm and the Storm
After the last European muskox died in what is now Sweden about 9000 years ago, the European mainland did not lose another species until the seventeenth century. In light of the changes that were occurring in human societies, this extinction gap is utterly extraordinary, for Europe’s human population increased 100-fold, and the Europeans transformed from hunter-gatherers into farmers, bronze and iron tools were invented, and social organisation went from the level of the clan, to that of the Roman Empire.
Extinction is merely the final act in what is usually a drawn-out process. During the extinction gap Europe’s larger mammals remained under relentless and increasing pressure from hunters and competition with domestic livestock. With each passing millennia their distributions became more restricted, their last refuges in areas unfavourable for human occupation, and perhaps in borderlands between tribes. Once the extinction wave broke, in the mid-seventeenth century, it quickly gathered strength, sweeping away the last survivors of group after group.
As with earlier extinction waves, this one disproportionately affected the largest species, but so severe was it that even the Eurasian beaver, which once thrived in waterways and lakes from Britain to China, was all but exterminated; there were just 1200 surviving globally by the early twentieth century. Historical records make clear that the cause was an increasingly dense, and deadly, human population.
By 200 CE the population of the Roman Empire (which then included much of Europe, along with parts of North Africa) was about 50 million people—that is 100 times greater than the population of the Europe of 11,000 years earlier. Importantly, in Roman times, between 85 and 90 per cent of people lived outside cities, surviving on what they and their communities could grow or catch.1 By 1700, Europe’s population had approximately doubled from what it was 1500 years earlier, to about 100 million—and the percentage of people living outside cities had hardly changed.
During the next two centuries, between 1700 and 1900, Europe’s population quadrupled, to 400 million. Yet, except in industrialised Britain (where the proportion of people living outside cities had dropped to around 75 per cent), 90 per cent of Europeans still lived outside cities. By the first half of the twentieth century, almost every available scrap of land, with the partial exception of the royal hunting reserves, was being squeezed for every ounce of productivity it could yield. In Mediterranean Europe, sheep and goats by hundreds of millions roamed the mountains, consuming all kinds of vegetation, and wherever possible hills and mountains were terraced for cultivation.
One important factor prevented this great human expansion from destroying even more species than it did. It arose from a peculiarly European attitude towards hunting. In Roman times, hunting was mainly carried out by servants and slaves. But by the Middle Ages it had attained symbolic meaning and was part of a complex social system. The caccia medieval restricted the hunting of certain creatures to particular social groups. It quickly became widespread across most of Europe and remained substantially unchanged until the French Revolution. The caccia medieval reserved to the landlords and their families the hunting of red deer, wild boar, wolf and bear—the noble game. The smaller game,
such as hares and pheasants, was usually left to the servants and common farmers.
It was from the caccia medieval that the large game reserves of most of Europe sprang, and in some places they remained until the end of World War II. One of their most ardent proponents was Spain’s Alfonso XI (1311–1350). Renowned as a skilled hunter, he wrote the popular Book of Hunting, in which he tells where the fiercest bears and boars dwelt in the various reserves (montes) throughout his kingdom, as well as how to hunt and kill them. Europeans were not alone in developing customs that protected large, prestigious game species. Many cultures, including those of Australia’s Aborigines, protect habitats that abound with game, and restrict consumption of the most delectable foods to older men. The royal game reserve was far from perfect as a mechanism to protect Europe’s largest mammals, but it did prolong the existence of the last vestiges of European natural grandeur.
The first extinction to mar the mainland of western Europe since the demise of the muskox 9000 years earlier occurred in 1627, in the Jaktorów forest of Poland. The aurochs was Europe’s most magnificent surviving creature. Bulls, which were blackish and much larger than cows, weighed up to 1.5 tonnes, making them, along with the gaur, the largest bovid ever to exist. Cows were reddish-brown and much smaller. Both sexes had an attractive white muzzle and athletic bodies, with deep chests, strong necks and shoulders atop long legs, making them as tall at the shoulder as their body was long. Their enormous horns, up to 80 centimetres long and 20 centimetres in diameter, curved through three orientations: upwards and outwards at the base, then forwards and inwards, and, at the tip, inwards and upwards. The form of the beast, and especially its horns, is evident in many European ice-age depictions.