by Tim Flannery
Human persecution of the brown bear may have altered its ecology. Elemental analysis of bones has shown that in times past Europe’s brown bears were much more carnivorous than they are today. Brown bears that take livestock are hunted down and killed, and it’s reasonable to think that this has happened since the dawn of agriculture. Because food preference is at least partially genetically determined, it’s easy to see how the very strong selective pressure might have led to the current largely vegetarian population.
Anyone who has met a European brown bear in the wild will have noticed that these great, shaggy beasts that could kill you with the swipe of a paw display abject terror at the sight of a human, and flee at the first opportunity. How different is this behaviour from that of the polar bear, which in the far north has had very limited contact with people, and which, according to the nineteenth-century explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld, approaches man ‘in hope of prey, with supple movements, and in a hundred zig-zag bends, in order to conceal the direction he intends to take, and thus keep his prey from being frightened’.5 Perhaps, before they learned how dangerous humans are, Europe’s brown bears also behaved like this.
There are parallels, I think, between the impact of Europeans on brown bears, and the effects of domestication, particularly on dogs. Both sets of selective pressure have altered the behaviour and diet of the beasts in question. Admittedly, Europe’s bears still live in the wild, but an argument can be made that the Europeans have domesticated wild Europe itself. It would be well worthwhile assaying the behaviours, diets and reproductive patterns of Europe’s wild animals to determine just how greatly human hunting and habitat alteration have changed them.
The catastrophic decline of Europe’s large mammals over the past 40,000 years has occurred roughly in order of size. One potent explanation for this is that ‘hunters focus on large adult animals (particularly males) to maximise return’.6 This drives extinction first of the species with the largest body mass and so on down through a size gradient. Within species, this same phenomenon can result in the selection of early maturing dwarfs. ‘The Emperor of Exmoor’ was a supersized red deer with a magnificent rack of antlers that proved irresistible to hunters. His death, in 2010, tells us a lot about the evolutionary pressure large mammals have been under ever since upright apes populated Europe more than 1.8 million years ago. At 2.75 metres tall and 135 kilograms in weight, the twelve-year-old red deer stag was the largest wild animal in the UK. Even so, he was a runt compared to his ancestors of 12,000 years ago, which would have reached more than twice his weight. The fact that Britain became an island must have contributed to the shrinkage of red deer living there, but the impact of human hunting cannot be discounted as a powerful influence. One study shows that over just ten generations, hunting for large male red deer can cause a decrease in the average body size.7
The Emperor was killed during the rut, and may have not passed on his genes before his death (red deer stags do most of their reproducing during the few years they are in their prime). Some months after his demise, the Emperor’s head and magnificent antlers mysteriously appeared, mounted on the wall of a local pub. As every fisherman knows, killing an oversized individual can bring prestige as well as meat or monetary profit. I suspect that the same has been true since the stone age, and that indeed some ice-age art is making the same statement as the Emperor’s mounted head.
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* Females weigh 17–34 kilograms, and males 67–117 kilograms.
* In their old age the guards told Luigi Boitani of their adventures while serving Videsott.
* Organisations such as Parks Africa and the Thin Green Line assist such rangers.
CHAPTER 38
Europe’s Global Expansion
After Columbus discovered a sea route to America in 1492, our globe was transformed biologically as well as politically by the great European expansion. By the fifteenth century there were two principal contenders—Europe and China—with a chance of establishing a world empire, and the favourite was China. A unified political entity with a population of 125 million, it was the largest polity on Earth. Europe, in contrast, had a population less than half that of China’s, and its states, despite being unified by religion, were perpetually at war with each other.
Both China and the European state of Portugal possessed leaders interested in pushing the boundaries of exploration. In the early fifteenth century the Yongle Emperor instructed his eunuch admiral Zheng He to undertake an epic series of explorations as far afield as Java, Ceylon, Arabia and east Africa, aboard the largest and most advanced ocean-going vessels ever constructed. Chinese junks carried nine sails, had four-tiered decks, were steered using stern-mounted rudders and possessed internal, watertight bulkheads.1 Guided by the magnetic compass, they had sailed as far as East Africa by the 1420s, carrying hundreds of people, along with those great Chinese inventions: paper money and gunpowder.
The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator also devoted his life to exploration; he sponsored a series of voyages down the west coast of Africa. His major breakthrough came with the invention of the caravel—a small, manoeuvrable vessel that made it possible to sail independent of the prevailing wind. By 1418 the Portuguese had discovered and settled Madeira, and by 1427 they had discovered the Azores. Just after Henry died in 1460, the Portuguese pushed down the west African coast as far as Sierra Leone. Although European histories celebrate Henry’s efforts, by Chinese standards, they were puny.
Darwin’s rule of migration favours larger entities in the evolutionary race, and, given its technological advantages, China was the clear frontrunner. But other factors were against it. The Chinese were not, and never had been, a colonising maritime power. Their battles for expansion and control were fought on land. Zheng He’s achievements were thus an anomaly, and soon forgotten. The Europeans, in contrast, had been undertaking maritime colonisations for at least 10,000 years. And they lived around a natural training ground: the Mare Nostrum, ‘our sea’ as the Romans called the Mediterranean. Beginning with the discovery and settlement of Crete 10,500 years ago, the earliest European farmers used ships to reach island after island, in a tradition that thrived right up to Carthaginian times, when Europeans briefly ran out of accessible, habitable islands to colonise. But by the ninth century the process had started again with the Viking discovery and settlement of Iceland, Greenland and, ultimately, North America. During the fifteenth century, Basque fishermen rediscovered Newfoundland, Columbus reached the Caribbean, and the Portuguese sailed to India.
By the time of Prince Henry, the Europeans had one important new tool in their exploration toolbox: the classical worlds of Greece and Rome. Henry could have read Homer and Plato, Plutarch and Strabo, and within fifteen years of his death his successors could read Herodotus. During the dark ages these texts had been lost to the imaginations of the western Europeans. But now they were learning once again that the world is round, and a very large, exciting and strange place.
When their maritime expansion began in earnest, the Europeans rapidly adapted to the opportunities they encountered in newly discovered lands in ways that extended their traditional ecological niche. Where stratified societies already existed, European colonisation consisted of a sort of social decapitation, in which the ruling class were replaced with European overlords. The conquests of the Aztec and Incan empires and various Indian kingdoms fit this pattern. Where populations were less dense and the ecology suited the Europeans, such as in temperate North America, South Africa and Australia, they followed the time-honoured tradition of settling the new lands as farmers. There were, however, some regions so inhospitable to the Europeans—such as much of equatorial Africa, or so remote—such as New Guinea—that the European presence, where it manifested at all, was fleeting.
In the animal world, there are very few species that have paralleled the European expansion by starting on small landmasses and successfully colonising large areas, but instances do exist. The most striking is the Pa
cific rat (Rattus exulans), a pint-sized rodent similar to the black rat, but weighing less than half as much. It originated on the tropical island of Flores (which has an area of only 13,500 square kilometres) in the Indonesian archipelago, and it remained there until about 4000 years ago.2 When voyaging ancestral Polynesians touched land there, the rat boarded their canoes. Today the Pacific rat is spread from Myanmar to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to Hawaii, making it one of the most widely distributed small mammals on Earth. How and why was this particular animal so successful at spreading from its homeland? After all, the Indonesian archipelago (and indeed the world) abounds with rats. Not coincidentally, Flores was also home to the pint-sized humanoid, known as the hobbit (Homo floresiensis). Weighing a third as much as an adult human, it stood only as high as a three-year-old. The hobbit’s ancestors may have reached Flores two million years ago, so there was plenty of time for the diminutive Pacific rat to form an ecological relationship with it.* The hobbit became extinct 50,000 years ago, about the time the first humans arrived on Flores, but the Pacific rat lived on. Perhaps the small rodent had discovered that the campsites of upright apes are congenial living places. To put it in ecological terms, the Pacific rat may have been pre-adapted to spreading into human-modified habitats through its long association with the hobbit. So, the Pacific rat and the Europeans appear to break Darwin’s rule of migration for very different reasons: the Pacific rat was pre-adapted to human-created habitats, while the Europeans were pre-adapted to a colonial lifestyle because they are a maritime people who originated at the crossroads of the world.
HUMAN MOVEMENTS INTO AND OUT OF EUROPE
38,000 years ago Europe is colonised by humans from Africa, forming a hybrid human–Neanderthal population.
14,000 years ago Western Europe is colonised by people from the East.
10,500 years ago Europe is colonised by agriculturalists from western Asia.
5500 years ago Europe is colonised by horse-riding people from central Asia.
2300 years ago Western Asia, parts of India and north Africa are colonised by Alexander the Great.
From 2200 years ago until seventeenth century CE Steppe nomads, Arabs and Turkic peoples invade Europe.
1000 CE Norse colonisation of Newfoundland.
1500 CE Beginning of European colonisation of most of the globe.
Mid-twentieth century European decolonisation of most of the globe.
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* They were certainly present by 800,000 years ago.
CHAPTER 39
New Europeans
Myriad wild creatures have made a home in Europe after humans imported them, but not a single species imported by the Romans ever established itself. Surely no people imported a greater diversity of creatures into Europe, so this fact is as astonishing as is the realisation that the Romans didn’t add a single species to the domestic menagerie. The Romans did, however, spread species within Europe, including bringing fallow deer and brown hare to Britain. The black rat spread wherever they settled, and so tied was it to Roman habitats that it became extinct in Britain following the Roman withdrawal, only to reappear in Norman times.* Thereafter the black rat prospered—until the arrival of the larger brown rat (also known as the sewer rat or Norway rat), which reached Britain at about the time of the Hanoverian succession in the eighteenth century. Renowned naturalist ‘Squire’ Charles Waterton called it the ‘Hanoverian rat’: a devout Catholic, and lover of British wildlife, he viewed its ravages and the influence of the German-speaking monarchs as equally pernicious.*
The Romans may also have had a hand in the spread of that most noble game bird, the ringneck pheasant. Originally Asian, the pheasant had spread as far west as Greece by at least the fifth century BCE, and Pliny mentions its presence in Italy in the first century CE. Its introduction to Britain, at least, may be down to the Romans: pheasant bones have been recovered from at least eight Roman archaeological sites in Britain. The possibility exists, however, that these birds were not raised in Britain, but were brought in from elsewhere.1
Like the black rat, the pheasant seems to have disappeared for a period after the Romans left Britain. The first written record in Britain dates from the eleventh century, when King Harold offered the canons of Waltham Abbey a ‘commons’ pheasant. The first clearly wild populations (which were protected by royal decree) date to the fifteenth century.2 The current British population is a hybrid: as one British game farmer put it, ‘just about every species and subspecies has been crossed by now.’3
Some 8000 years after the last members of the elephant family vanished from Europe, pachyderms made an unexpected and terrifying return. During the Second Punic War, 218–201 BCE, Hannibal trekked 37 war elephants across the Alps from what is now Spain into Italy. Just what species they were is hotly debated. A coin minted at the time shows what is clearly an African elephant. But the only creature to survive the war—Hannibal’s own mount—was called Surus, meaning ‘the Syrian’, suggesting an Asiatic origin.
Hannibal’s elephants were almost certainly not straight-tusked types, as the coin shows a creature with curved tusks. Moreover, by Roman times the straight-tusked elephants were restricted to equatorial Africa, which is very distant from Carthage. Hannibal’s elephants were possibly sourced from a now-extinct population of African elephants from the Atlas Mountains, which consisted of rather small individuals. But if some at least were Asian, they may have been derived from Indian war elephants captured by the Ptolemies of Egypt during their campaigns in Syria. Wherever they were from, they clearly took to life in Europe, surviving the alpine snows and thriving sufficiently to strike terror into the Roman legions.
Sometime after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 CE, the highway to Africa re-opened. This time, however, instead of being a land bridge it consisted of Moorish vessels. The Moors, who settled many parts of southern Europe in the eighth century, proved to be enthusiastic naturalisers. They are strongly suspected of, or were clearly responsible for, the introduction of at least four important mammal species into Europe: the Barbary macaque, porcupine, genet and mongoose. The genet and mongoose arrived sometime after 500 CE. The genet is a handsomely spotted member of the ferret family which had been brought into captivity by the Moors (it is still occasionally kept as a pet in north Africa), but some escaped and the creatures now abound in southwestern Iberia, where the Egyptian mongoose too has found a home.
The Barbary macaque had been resident in Europe for millions of years, extending as far north as Germany during warm periods, but by 30,000 years ago it had become extinct in its last European stronghold in Iberia. It survived, however, in North Africa, and from there was re-introduced to Gibraltar at around the same time that the genet and mongoose arrived, although the first written record of the species dates only to the 1600s. The Barbary macaque would have become extinct on Gibraltar were it not for a peculiar belief by the British that they would hold the rock only for as long as the macaques remained. The British have occupied Gibraltar since 1713, but by 1913 only ten macaques remained. Some years later, to prevent total extinction, the governor of Gibraltar, Sir Alexander Godley, brought eight young females from North Africa, and the British army assumed responsibility for them. At the outbreak of World War II only seven apes remained on ‘the rock’, and Churchill commanded that five females be brought in from Morocco, with a directive that the population be maintained at 24. By 1967, when Spain looked set to claim back Gibraltar, the macaques were again in decline. Concerned at the severe sex ratio imbalances in some groups, the permanent under-secretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office sent a telegram, reminiscent of something from a Carry On movie, to Gibraltar’s governor:
We are a little perturbed about the apes…As we see it, at first glance there seems at least some chance of lesbianism, or sodomy, or rapes…the Queen’s Gate lads, one fears, may become a bunch of queers…So can you plan migration?4
Today the 230-odd Barbary macaques on Gibraltar are
the responsibility of the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society. They remain Europe’s only wild-living monkeys.
The crested porcupine also appears to have arrived in Europe sometime after the sack of Rome in 410 CE.5 At up to 27 kilograms in weight, it is a very large rodent. Fossils indicate that porcupines once inhabited Italy and other parts of Europe, possibly until about 10,000 years ago, but they may have been a different species. Today, the porcupine is restricted within Europe to peninsular Italy, though it is spreading steadily north.
Were the Moors trying to ‘Africanise’ Europe with their introductions of mammals? The Moorish homeland was outside Europe, and some Moors were desperately homesick. Abd al-Rahman I’s ode to a palm tree which was, ‘like myself, living in the farthest corner of the earth’ sparked a major theme in Andalusian poetry.6 After the fall of Granada in 1492, and the expulsion of the Moors from Europe, there was a lull in animal introductions which, with few exceptions, lasted until the European age of empire.
One important exception is the common carp (Cyprinus carpio), an oversized minnow originally found in the lower Danube and other rivers flowing into the Black Sea. It arrived in western Europe around 1000 CE courtesy of monks, who raised the fish in ponds to help people observe religious fast days, when fish but not red meat could be eaten. Within a few hundred years, carp farming had become big business, and the carp had transformed into a wild-living denizen of many European waterways.7
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* The black rat originated in southeast Asia. There is evidence of black rats in Europe and the Levant earlier than Roman times, but it only becomes widespread in the wake of the Romans. The fallow deer introduced to Britain by the Romans seem to have become extinct. The species was reintroduced during Norman times.
* Waterton was a genuine eccentric who delighted in dressing as a scarecrow and sitting in trees, pretending to be a dog and biting the legs of his guests or tickling them with a coal brush. He was much feared on his estate because of his enthusiasm for treating ailments that appeared among the tenants. Bleeding was invariably part of the cure.