Deadly Voyager
Page 13
MEGAFAUNA
The Pleistocene extinction in North America took out some 35 large mammals. The survival of even a few — one in particular — would have changed human, biological, and cultural history forever.
Equus had been present in North America since the Mid-Eocene some 50 million years ago. The earliest migrants to North America would have long been familiar with the wild horses of Asia. Without the extinction, once they got beyond the ice and onto the plains of North America, pre-Clovis people would have encountered vast horse herds. As proved to be the case in so many of the great cultures of history, there is no question that the Clovis or their descendants would have domesticated the horse.
The first evidence of horse domestication dates to 4,800 BCE (about 6,800 years ago) on the Pontic-Caspian steppes that stretch from the North shore of the Black Sea eastward to the Caspian. Though this may conjure up visions of skilled prehistoric riders, the horse was likely first used as a source of meat, one of its several indispensable contributions along with milking, plowing, transportation, hauling, leather, and war.
Without the YD cooling and the megafaunal extinction, on the same Eurasian timetable the pre-Clovis would have had about 6,000 years (13,000 - 6,800) in which to domesticate horses and develop a horse culture. Given the alacrity with which the Plains Indians went from never having laid eyes on a horse, to “adopting” available Spanish horses, to becoming among the most skilled horse-archers in history, there is no reason to think that their ancestors would have been slower than other societies to take advantage of the horse. By 1706, some 150 years after Spanish contact, the Comanche already had substantial herds, but evidently could never have enough as they stole horses from the New Mexico rancheros and raided deep into Mexico for more. The number of horses became a sign of wealth, as did cattle in other cultures. In The Red Pony, John Steinbeck captures the essence of the horse in the human mind and in history: “A man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.”
The advantages of the horse have proved irresistible to societies throughout history, changing one after another: the Mongols, whose empire stretched from the Sea of Japan to Hungary, the Scythian and Turk nomads, the Huns, the Plains Indians, and of course the Conquistadors who made sure to leave room for horses on their voyages west in their tiny vessels.
Without the YD extinctions, by the time Hernan Cortes landed at Vera Cruz in 1519, the Clovis or their descendants would have had a horse culture for thousands of years. Cortes and his 15 horses would have met Moctezuma’s myriads of mounted warriors.
Another Spaniard, Francisco Pizarro, serving in Panama and having learned of Cortes’s success and wealth, as well as his methods, mounted expeditions south to conquer the Incan Empire, like the Aztecs said to be rich in gold and silver. In 1532, Pizarro arrived in the Peruvian town of Cajamarca to confront Emperor Atahuallpa, who was accompanied by an 80,000-man army. Pizarro had 62 mounted soldiers and 106 on foot, yet within minutes, following Cortes’s example, he had captured the Incan emperor, whom he then imprisoned and executed.
One thing we can be sure of is that had the horse not gone extinct in the Western Hemisphere, and assuming that the Americans did not get to Europe first, instead of being shocked into submission by a few dozen soldiers mounted on unfamiliar beasts (whom they mistook for a single creature, a centaur), mounted Aztecs and Incas would have recognized that they outnumbered the horsed invaders by many hundred-fold. It seems unlikely that Spanish steel and their few primitive guns would have been enough to save them from annihilation, thus denying the Spanish their history-changing foothold in the Western Hemisphere.
To get an idea of how much difference a single animal could have made to a society, consider the impact on the Incas of the llama, which survived the Pleistocene extinction in South America but not in North America. One scholar believes the Incas had such large herds that the use of their dung of as fertilizer allowed the switch from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society. Later, the llama may have enabled the rise of the Incan Empire, one expert noting that its greatest expanse came at the same time as the largest distribution of alpacas and llamas.
Another animal lost in the extinction could also have proved critical in the drier parts of North America: the camel. These animals have made the difference between life and death in arid regions like North Africa, being able to go for up to ten days without water and providing many of the same advantages as the horse.
The survival of the camel and horse in the Western Hemisphere would have brought many ancillary changes, as they did elsewhere. Consider the wheel. Its earliest depiction in prehistoric art is the Neolithic Bronocice pot, inscribed with a sketch of a wagon with four wheels and a shaft for a draught animal to pull it, dating to about 3,500 BCE. The animal might have been an Auroch, the ancestor of modern cattle and the European bison. A Sumerian image from about 2,500 BCE shows a chariot pulled by a wild Ass, or onager.
Our words for horse and wagon derive from the ancient Tripolyte culture of today’s Ukraine, which may have been where people first used animals to pull a wheeled cart. The Tripolytes made miniature wagons with wheels, perhaps as children’s toys or as replicas of full-scale wagons. Native Indian cultures of Mexico and Central America also made wheeled toys, but because they had nothing to pull them, never scaled-up these playthings to the real thing.
The idea of a disc that can serve as a wheel may have naturally occurred to people at various times in human history, but only cultures with horses and oxen to pull a wheeled vehicle conceived of any reason to take it further than a children’s toy.
AGRICULTURE AND DOMESTICATION
The Conquistadors came looking for gold, but returned with something that proved more valuable in the long run: new crops. Potatoes, maize (corn), tomato, tobacco, coca, manioc, sweet potatoes, peanuts, peppers, pineapple, and more all originated in Mesoamerica and the Andes and went on to revolutionize agriculture in Europe and Asia. By one estimate, the potato was responsible for one-quarter of the growth in world population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. But had there been no Spanish conquest, how long would it have taken for these crops to cross the Atlantic?
The New World outdid the old in agriculture. But except for the llama, the Americas lacked large domesticated animals, returning the advantage to the Old World. But without the YD megafaunal extinctions, might not the people of the western hemisphere have been able to domesticate some of the same animals that others had domesticated elsewhere?
Sheep, goats, and pigs were domesticated in Asia by about 8,000 BC, well after dogs but millennia before horses. The Siberians who crossed Beringia brought dogs with them and thus would have had a model for domestication. In all those millennia, is there any reason to think they would not have domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and llama?
Perhaps the quintessential question is whether, during the additional many millennia that the absence of the YD cooling would have provided, the surviving pre-Clovis would have domesticated bison. We know of course that the smaller American bison survived the YD extinction and was never domesticated, but does that mean it could not have happened? Experts today agree that the earliest domestications were not intentional, but happened naturally and gradually as “humans became entangled with these species as the relationship between them, and the human role in their survival and reproduction, intensified.” Given the vital advantages that the bison provided to Paleo-Indians, who used them from snout to tail for all sorts of things in addition to food, might people not have become entangled in their daily lives with the most docile individuals and begun to raise bison calves into adults that could have eventually been domesticated? Through the millennia, selecting for ease of domestication without realizing it, might they not have wound up managing herds of bison? True, modern efforts to domesticate the American bison have had mixed success — but these have been more or less a hobby, and have been going on only for decades, not millennia.
CONCLUSION
One can pursue these what-ifs indefinitely. Good fun it is, and one person’s speculation is as good as another’s. We will never know what would have happened in the absence of the YD cooling and extinctions. But with a vast and still largely empty pair of continents at the disposal of the Clovis, with a warming climate and the rich possibilities provided by the survival of many of the animals that did go extinct, we can paraphrase Jared Diamond’s question into a new one: Without the YD, why should not Native Americans have turned out to be the equals of Europeans in invention and accomplishment. Perhaps some might have become seafarers, like the Vikings have learned how to keep their vessels on the same latitude, and discovered Europe.
What-ifs have no answers, but we can say with confidence that if an ET event triggered the Younger Dryas, as the evidence indicates it did, it changed nearly everything about the world as we know it.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Prologue: Paradise Lost
Part I: The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
1. The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes
2. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
3. Testing Hypotheses
4. Dead on Arrival?
5. An Independent Evaluation
6. A Cautionary Tale
Part II: Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Event
7. Synchrony
8. Microspherules
9. Precious Stones
10. Wildfires
11. Hiawatha
12. Over Half the Earth’s Surface
13. True Claims
Part III: Effects
14. The Enigma of the Younger Dryas
15. Clovis
16. The Fall of Clovis
17. Great Monsters
18. Paradigm Shifts
19. What if there had Been no Younger Dryas?
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Prologue: Paradise Lost
Part I: The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
1. The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes
2. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
3. Testing Hypotheses
4. Dead on Arrival?
5. An Independent Evaluation
6. A Cautionary Tale
Part II: Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Event
7. Synchrony
8. Microspherules
9. Precious Stones
10. Wildfires
11. Hiawatha
12. Over Half the Earth’s Surface
13. True Claims
Part III: Effects
14. The Enigma of the Younger Dryas
15. Clovis
16. The Fall of Clovis
17. Great Monsters
18. Paradigm Shifts
19. What if there had Been no Younger Dryas?