Life Everlasting

by Bernd Heinrich

  AFTER WORLD WAR II, before coming to America, I lived with my family as refugees in a forest in northern Germany. We foraged for acorns, beechnuts, mushrooms, and berries. My father had brought rat traps, and we “hunted” small rodents with them as well as with pitfall traps. I recall how my father once trapped a mallard duck in a clever noose made with horsehair. Finding food was our primary concern, and the most memorable events of my young life in the forest of Germany were these scavenging trips.

  At times when Papa and I went into the forest, it appeared to me that we were just looking around. One time—it was early spring because I remember finding a green frog on the brown leaves in a pool of water in an open beech wood—we sat down with our backs to a beech tree and were munching on a small crust of bread. It was quiet, although I suspect the chaffinches would have been singing because it was a sunny day. After a while we heard a dog barking in the distance. We listened disinterestedly at first, but then my father jumped up and ran toward the sound. I waited, and when he returned he was carrying a small roe deer on his back. He had found it dead with the dog panting beside it. He had shooed the dog off with a stick, and the prize was ours. On another occasion I found a dead boar in a spruce thicket, where it had probably died after being wounded by the British soldiers who hunted in this forest. It was winter, and I had heard ravens in that area several times on my walk to and from the village school, so I went to investigate and found the boar. It had been partially eaten, but there was still some fat on its hide. But our biggest prize came quite by accident. Marianne, my sister, who is one year younger, and I were out gathering firewood in the forest, our daily chore, when we found a dead elk lying along the bank of a small brook near some tall alder trees. The carcass was fresh, and we ran to the cabin to tell our parents, who rushed back to cover it with brush, the way cats hide their prey or ravens cache meat (as I discuss in the next chapter).

  Had this been a wild and natural northern ecosystem still inhabited by wolves, hyenas, and saber-toothed tigers, instead of one transformed by humans, it is unlikely that we would have removed and eaten these prizes. The large predatory and scavenging animals would have gotten there first. Even so, it was important that we quickly remove or hide our finds from other takers. If ravens came, they could both feed on our prizes and give away their location to other human scavengers—mainly the authorities, who would have confiscated such treasures for their own use.

  As a student at the University of Maine I continued to scavenge carcasses, mainly roadkill. I valued them as much as any grouse, hare, or deer I might shoot in the hunting season; every dollar I could save on groceries counted. These days I pass up eating most roadkill, though not all of it. But like my family after the war, people in many countries can’t be picky. A large, fresh carcass represents many desperately needed meals, as suggested in one photograph in an old National Geographic of Africans harvesting an elephant carcass. A more recent photograph by David Chancellor shows a large number of people who were “trying to survive under Robert Mugabe” in Zimbabwe crowded over an elephant carcass. As Chancellor explained: “Just after dawn a villager spotted the carcass as he passed on a bicycle. It was in the middle of nowhere, but within 15 minutes hundreds of people had arrived from all directions. The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting and stabbing each other to get at the meat.” The bulk of this carcass would have been quickly disposed of by mostly one species—ours. The people in this crowd had knives to open the carcass and spears or guns to back them up if the lions should crowd in to claim the carcass from them. Tools made the difference.

  In the Hahnheide forest as a child, I frequently found chipped flints that had probably been used by early people. At the time I was unconsciously closely allied with the Pleistocene mindset, and now, after decades of presumed improvements of my nature by cultural conditioning, that mindset may be sublimated or redirected, but not much. I think I was then a dyed-in-the-wool predator. I was obsessed with weapons, which in my preteen years were restricted to a jackknife and a slingshot I had made from a red rubber inner tube that some kids at school had scavenged from somewhere. I was continually on the lookout for upgrades of the “perfect” twig fork and small piece of leather. Even now I feel a twinge of nostalgia when I see a forked stick perfect for a slingshot. As a teen I became enamored of spears, bows and arrows, and then my .22-caliber bolt-action single-shot squirrel and hare rifle. Now I reserve my attention and respect for my Winchester .30-30-caliber lever-action deer rifle.

  I imagine an ancient Homo in the Hahnheide carving a spear out of just the right kind of sapling. Indeed, when Homo erectus lived in northern Europe at least 400,000 years ago, “he” almost certainly carried a spear and other weaponry. Lions stalked then, and mammoths dotted the plain, but very few dead animals would be lying about free for the taking. He would have had to fight for every carcass, especially highly visible ones that could not be carried off and hidden.

  THE HOMO LINE came out of Africa at the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 1.7 million years ago. It had evolved about a million years earlier from small, slender hominids, the so-called australopithecines, who were already making stone tools and eating large animals. How could these apelike bipedal creatures, being small and lacking the sharp claws and teeth of all the major evolved predators, have done anything other than pick up the dead and scavenge on what the much superior hunters had killed? How could they have overpowered fast antelopes, large hippos, aggressive buffalo, and elephants, all with a history of tens of millions of years of dealing with lions, leopards, and saber-toothed tigers?

  One scenario is that they—and we—didn’t hunt large animals. But Craig Stanford, from his perspective of studying present-day apes, and Baz Edmeades, a natural historian and self-taught archaeologist who grew up in South Africa, argue that we were mainly hunters from the start. Animals didn’t usually just drop dead, and even if they did, they would not have been available to humans. A large animal is a huge meat pile, whether standing or lifeless, and in a natural ecosystem filled with its panoply of powerful predators, it would be killed and eaten as soon as it weakened. Any carcass, however it was killed, would thus potentially be controlled by powerful hunters, and they, given their prize and their already heavy investment in it, would not readily yield it to a smallish hominid already on their prey list. So if you were a hominid wanting to eat meat, you might decide that rather than facing a pride of lions you would be better off as a hunter. Even if the hominids found a freshly dead carcass, they would have to reach the meat before the big guys came. Because they lacked the large, sharp, shearing teeth of the cats, hyenas, and wolves, it was critical to have sharp cutting tools—which allowed them to kill and predisposed them to do so. In the Hahnheide, we were lucky that we did have a knife; if we had not, there is no way we could have used the carcasses we found.

  But early man, to be a hunter, would also have needed other advantages to make up for his less than blinding speed as a runner. Current theory is that the advantage came from hunting in the heat of midday, thus reducing competition with the mostly nocturnal predators, and from matching and even exceeding their endurance in chasing large prey. To escape their predators (and competitors), the hominids could have climbed trees, but to catch prey both hominids and the competing carnivores could exercise their specific advantage on the ground. The cats had speed; the hominids, endurance.

  Big-game animals can’t hide, and they leave ample evidence of where they have been and where they are going in their easy-to-follow tracks. Their large size also predisposes them to overheating during exercise. The bipedal hominid who went naked, with a heat shield of hair on his head and shoulders and the ability to cool his body through profuse sweating, opened a niche for himself on the open plains by hunting in the daytime heat. Bipedalism and heat management allowed him to outrun his prey while also freeing his grasping hands, which had been useful in defensive climbing, to make and wield offensive weapons.

 
The use of tools such as rocks for throwing and poles for offense and defense generated a race for the evolution of intelligence in a self-reinforcing spiral, because undoubtedly what was crucial in the hunting game became currency in sexual selection, in the mating game. Early man’s nakedness became his strength, and it unlocked the meat locker of ever swifter and larger prey. The larger the prey that he killed, the greater the social accolade. Then as now and as with the other predators, the thrill of the hunt was the proximate mechanism of success. As I will indicate later, we apparently succeeded brilliantly as hunters, even against elephants, though obviously not those existing in Africa now.

  AFRICA IS SAID by some people to still have a “Pleistocene fauna,” one that inspires awe. Theodore Roosevelt wrote:

  It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to realize the immense quantities of game to be found on the Kapiti Plains and the Athi Plains [near Nairobi, Kenya] and the hills that bound them. The common game of the plains, the animals of which I saw most while at Katinga and the neighborhood, were the zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant’s gazelle, and “tommies” or Thomson’s gazelle; the zebra and the hartebeest . . . being by far the most plentiful. Then there were impala, mountain reedbuck, duiker, steinbuck, and diminutive dikdik. As we traveled and hunted we were hardly ever out of sight of game.

  This abundance, in addition to Africa’s antelopes, zebras, and giraffes, as well as apes, elephants, hippos, wild dogs, leopards, cheetahs, lions, and hyenas, was long thought to be a pristine assemblage. But even though the savanna has been a feature of the African continent for five to ten million years, its current occupants are only a pale semblance of what once lived there.

  The easy-to-kill large animals went extinct first. Meanwhile, hominids evolved into many forms, and the australopithecines’ evolutionary descendants ultimately became the large, big-brained, athletic Homo erectus, who mastered fire, probably talked, made stone tools for cutting and piercing, spread out of Africa, and hunted elephant-sized animals.

  As the late anthropologist Paul Martin first explained, H. erectus were deadly hunters who spread over the globe; from one continent to another, the extinction of the magnificent megafauna followed soon after they arrived. Those extinctions include a number of species of elephants, most famously the woolly mammoths. The explorer and trophy hunter Carl Akeley, whose elephants and other African game animals are on vivid display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, reported that the largest elephant he ever saw measured eleven feet four inches to the top of the shoulders. One of the biggest he heard of had “good-sized tusks—80 pounds.” The mammoths that H. erectus killed, though, were giants compared to the African elephant.

  Akeley learned that killing a modern African elephant is not easy, even with an elephant gun. Nearly a hundred years ago, he was in the top of a tree in Uganda “to inspect two hundred and fifty elephants which had been chevying me about so fast that I had not a chance to see whether there were any desirable specimens [for the museum display] among them or not.” Another time he was in the middle of a herd of seven hundred elephants making “a continuous roar of trumpeting, squealing, and crashing of bushes and trees.” What had been jungle was trampled flat. On one occasion an old bull “took twenty-five shots of our elephant guns before he succumbed.” Akeley himself almost succumbed when a bull charged, thrusting his two tusks to impale him, but they instead stuck in the ground on each side of Akeley.

  It’s hard to imagine how Pleistocene humans killed elephants such as mammoths with spears, but they apparently did. There are few whole adult mammoths around for comparison with African elephants, but rare specimens have turned up in Siberia (where they may have sunk into floating bogs or drowned by breaking through iced-over lakes or rivers). In 1846, during an abnormally warm summer in Siberia, people on a steamboat ascending the Indigirka River in a remote area were astounded to see “a huge black horrible mass” covered with long brown hair bobbing out of the swirling water: it was a woolly mammoth. When the carcass was dragged out of the river by horses, it was found to be thirteen feet in height and fifteen feet long, with tusks eight and a half feet in length. As the people who came upon this scene were examining the mammoth’s stomach contents (fir and pine shoots along with young cones), the bank it had been hauled up on gave way and the beast was swept off in the current. Another Siberian mammoth carcass, partially eaten by bears, wolves, and foxes after it thawed out of the permafrost, had tusks that were nine and a half feet long and weighed 360 pounds—four and a half times more than the weight of good-sized African elephant tusks, according to Akeley. Did people discover a way to feast on such massive elephants? Our only direct evidence consists of some isolated spear points found implanted in carcass remains. But these mammoths no longer exist—and we have circumstantial evidence that we may have hunted some past elephant species to extinction.

  The Arctic tundra mammoths (genus Mammuthus) lived from at least the Pliocene epoch, nearly five million years ago, almost to the last “moment” (perhaps less than 4,500 years ago), when they went extinct. Another, much smaller elephant, the mastodon (genus Mammut), was “only” about the size of the African bush elephant and only superficially similar to the mammoth. It had, among other differences, distinctive teeth. It was a contemporary of Mammuthus species living in the cold spruce, fir, and birch woodlands. Forms of Mammut are known from the Oligocene, thirty-four million years ago, and they, too, went extinct only several thousand years ago, again at precisely the time Homo arrived.

  Early man’s culture and hunting technologies undoubtedly developed slowly over millions of years. Significantly, as I will argue, the African elephant was probably not a significant target; it survived. The road to oblivion for the others started with much easier prey. It may have begun with a completely different animal, the tortoise, which provided a ready meal, but required a tool to get it out of the shell. Neither baboons nor chimps need tools to hunt and eat hares or monkeys, but the main human prey could not be eaten, and caught, without tools.

  FIVE MILLION YEARS ago several species of giant tortoises lived in Africa. Hunting them would have been essentially identical to scavenging: whether the animal was alive or dead, the predator would turn it on its back in order to penetrate its body. There is no proof that the australopithecines did this (how could any evidence have been left?) except that by three million years ago these tortoises had disappeared. But why would the australopithecines not have eaten turtle? They were meat eaters, and by the late Pliocene, about two and a half million years ago, the australopithecine prehumans were leaving cut marks on bones from manufactured stone tools and were probably engaged in what Baz Edmeades calls “confrontational scavenging.” Their brain size then was that of chimps’ brains today. Some chimps have discovered how to extract termites from their solid mounds by inserting a long twig into a hole in the mound, pulling the stick back out, and then licking off the termites adhering to it. They pass this behavior on through their culture. The australopithecines in the Pliocene probably learned to breach the turtle’s strong carapace to get at the meat within, possibly by smashing it with rocks. And smashed rocks also had edges, for cutting, or attaching to a pole for piercing.

  Meat as convenient hominid food did not stop at the end of tortoise availability in Africa. It continued as the hominid line evolved to become ever-better hunters. Wilhelm Schüle, an archaeologist at Freiburg University, convincingly demonstrated that hominids were responsible for the extinction of giant tortoises by 8,000 years—an eyeblink—ago, when Homo reached the islands of the Mediterranean. Hominids likely exterminated most, if not all, of the giant tortoise species living where they settled. Now such tortoises remain only on a last outpost—the Galápagos Islands—and only because they were strictly protected in the nick of time. As soon as their island citadel was breached by humans, the tortoises were stacked alive upside down on ships as rations of fresh meat; in that state they lived longer than other animals would have.

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sp; For eons, hominids would have seen the tortoises as easy meat—all they had to do was pick them up. Many tortoise species lasted for millions of years simply because it took that long for the australopithecines to evolve to Homo and for Homo eventually to occupy the remotest islands of the Pacific Ocean. The major megafauna extinction in Africa did not occur until several million years after the tortoise extinctions, probably because the australopithecines were not such adept hunters of elephants and other megafauna as the Homo erectus who supplanted them.

  A prerequisite to eating large mobile prey (whether acquired through hunting or scavenging) was having the appropriate tools. Before Homo came onto the African panorama, the continent hosted, as Martin and Edmeades have indicated, probably nine species of elephant-like animals, four giant hippos, giant pigs, giant wildebeest, roan and sable antelopes, giant zebra, giraffe, and giant baboons the size of gorillas. Pre-sapiens humans probably hunted large animals, including elephants; in Lehringen, Germany, a spear made of yew wood dating to half a million years ago was discovered with the remains of an elephant. In Boxgrove, England, a round hole, possibly a spear wound, was found in the scapula of a rhino dating to about the same time. The presumed hunters, descendants of H. erectus who left Africa (now commonly called H. heidelbergensis), had spread to Europe by a half million years ago and were making bifacial stone hand axes. They possibly used them as choppers or knives to cut up animal carcasses in what came to be called the Acheulian culture (named from tools first found in Acheul, France). Recent finds of these hand axes in Kenya by Christopher Lepre of Rutgers University and colleagues indicate that some of these tools date back to Homo erectus, 1.76 million years ago.