Life Everlasting

by Bernd Heinrich

  An Acheulian hand ax I found on the ground while walking in Botswana. It was probably fashioned and used by a Homo erectus as early as 1.7 million years ago.

  Perhaps the most spectacular find relating to ancient hunting tools apparently for large prey was uncovered by Hartmund Thieme in 1997 in a coal mine near the town of Schöningen, Germany. Nearly a half million years ago, Lower Paleolithic hunters living at the edge of a lake in a cool climate of spruce and birch trees left evidence of campfires and numerous stone cutting tools among the remains of many butchered animals, including horses but also elephant and deer. Their finely crafted spears were well preserved because they had become waterlogged. The spears, up to eight feet long and two inches thick, were crafted like those now used in track and field events, with their weight shifted into the forward third for aerodynamic stability. Such a find was truly miraculous, considering the near certainty that perishables such as wood and animal remains would be erased in a short time.

  Another find, near what used to be an ancient lake in Kent, England, was the remains of an elephant estimated to weigh ten tons (twice as much as a modern elephant). It was apparently butchered about 400,000 years ago; its bones were surrounded by fine flint tools that had probably been used to cut it up. This elephant may have been found dead or may have been killed when it could no longer defend itself. But it might have been deliberately hunted, as had to have occurred in some cases if man was indeed the cause of the elephants’ demise.

  The innovation of the bow to launch an arrow gave humans a powerful tool for hunting elk and other large animals, but it could not have been effective against the seven now-extinct mammoth species or against mastodons or against the other dozen-plus elephant-like animals. Killing an elephant would have required a more powerful weapon: the spear. And if Akeley’s experience killing African elephants is any indication, a man with a spear would still have been powerless facing one of the ancient elephants. However, one can make a compelling case that the African elephant is not a fair model for judging the animal that the mammoth hunters faced. The African elephants (two species are recognized now) did not go extinct, probably because they evolved with man. There would have been an arms race of coevolution: by slow stages the human hunters would improve their offensive skills, while the prey would evolve better defenses. Larger body size would have been an advantage for elephants until the hunters developed better spears. The prey then may have learned to aggregate into family groups, which might have been countered by the hunters attacking in groups, leading to the elephants aggregating into herds of many hundreds. This last step may finally have made them immune to humans equipped with only spears. Caution, aggressiveness, and cohesion to help others in the herd would also have resulted through selective pressure as a reaction to hunting by hominids over a million years, or maybe much less.

  Not all of the elephants on earth had been shaped by selective pressure as a result of hominid hunting, so the people who left Africa entered a very different world from the more competitive one they were leaving. For many prey species, the arrival of hominids was like the smallpox virus first coming to America—or like a wildfire in dry grass.

  The effect of species’ isolation from humans and the consequent lack of defenses against them is demonstrated in Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1831–1836). Here is his entry of September 17, 1835, when the Beagle had moved into St. Stephen’s Harbor in the Galápagos, where there was an American whaling ship: “The Bay swarmed with animals: Fish, Shark & Turtles were popping their heads up in all parts. Fishing lines were soon put overboard & great numbers of fine fish 2 & even 3 feet long were caught. This sport makes all hands very merry; loud laughter & the heavy flapping of the fish are heard on every side. After dinner a party went on shore to try to catch Tortoises, but were unsuccessful . . . The Tortoise is so abundant that [a] single ship’s company here caught 500–800 in a short time.” A little later in the narrative, the young Darwin mentions that “little birds, within 3 or four feet, quietly hopped about the Bushes & were not frightened by stones being thrown at them. Mr. King killed one with his hat & I pushed off a branch with the end of my gun a large Hawk.” Substitute mammoths for little bird or hawk, and it is almost impossible to envision such animals showing any fear of man.

  Fear of predators is one of the most basic survival strategies, and animals may acquire fear behavior through genetic programming, by learning through direct experience, or by cultural learning from others. In both us and some of the other major predators, fear cuts both ways. Before we had weapons, the more powerful carnivores could have used us as prey, especially if they lured us to their kills. We needed to fear them. After we made and launched spears and poisoned arrows, they needed to fear us. We could drive them off like robbers that run at the mere sight of a cop in uniform. Until recently, when the Masai of East Africa hunted lions with spears, the lions ran away at first sight of these red-robed tribesmen. The southern African native, adventurer and writer Laurens van der Post wrote over fifty years ago how his grandfather in southern Africa told him about how the Bushmen (armed with poison arrows) could drive lions off kills with smoke and fire and then eat the rest of their kill. Anthropologist and writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas noted how the Bushmen drove lions from their kills by an apparent accord with them. But that accord was likely cultural conditioning, derived from the Bushmen’s weaponry and cleverness. Although now, armed with rifles, we might even more easily scavenge off predators’ kills; pre-humans didn’t have that luxury.

  Fear or heightened alertness, as well as structures that hamper movement, are costly in terms of energy. It is unlikely that the giant turtles ever felt fear, because of their armor and their isolation; they just needed to retract their head into their shell. And the elephants, because of their enormous size, would not have seen humans initially as threats. A man could probably have approached an elephant to within a few meters, and a brave man could have come at it from directly under the belly, as Pygmies in Africa did until recent times.

  The modern spear, the javelin used in men’s track and field events, weighs 800 grams and is 2.5 meters long. It is close in appearance to the 400,000-year-old spruce spears found in Germany. The world record throw (held by Uwe Hohn of Germany) was 104.8 meters. But contemporary Olympic javelin performances likely underestimate the power of the spear as a weapon for ancient man, partly because the modern javelin for athletic events is deliberately engineered to reduce not only its range but also its power. (The world record is now, ironically, 6.32 meters less than it used to be, because the year after Hohn’s world record was set, the governing body of the International Association of Athletic Federations instigated a change in javelin design to reduce its range.) For at least 30,000 years, hunters with spears have used an atlatl, a device that acts as an extension of the throwing arm. Sometimes an amentum, a leather strap attached near the spear’s center of gravity, was also used to give the missile a spin, greatly increasing its accuracy and armor-penetrating power.

  After we evolved to become humans and, probably armed with spears, started to leave Africa, some of us may have been nomads. Rather than settling in one place, we could continue on in hopes of more food and fewer enemies. As nomads, we had to kill for food frequently, leaving the remains to swarms of ravens in the north and to vultures in the south.

  Our use of tools and our communal culture spread our cleverness, while our ability to gather as a crowd for strength when needed helped us secure animal carcasses in the face of formidable carnivores. As hunters, we would also have used animals that had died naturally. But regardless of how we obtained our meat and whether or not we caused all of the megafauna extinctions, prehistoric man ranks among the world’s premier disposers of animal carcasses of the very largest land animals that ever existed.

  By becoming meat eaters, via both hunting and scavenging, hominids tapped into a highly concentrated energy source. That boost in turn made even more energy available to them thro
ugh evolution, first by reducing the digestive apparatus and hence reducing body weight, increasing running speed, and increasing brain size. A brain is a huge energy sink: ours eats up an estimated twenty percent of our calories, and in most animals even a one percent energy saving is a selective advantage. Any extra energy cost would be quickly selected out unless it conferred a huge selective advantage; no species will develop a large brain unless it can afford to feed it reliably. The highly nutritious protein and fat we got from animal carcasses permitted our large brain size but does not explain the reason for it, since the brains of other carnivores did not expand as much. However, relative to the carnivores, the early hominids were physically helpless, and they needed wits to take the place of what the others had, namely, armaments.

  Just as chimps learned to insert a stick into a termite mound, pull it back up, and lick off the termites, early hominids probably learned that a broken rock can cut (after all, they would have experienced cuts on their bare feet). The next step was to deliberately smash a rock to give it a sharp edge and then, perhaps, fasten it to a stick to jab a half-dead animal. Killing a mammoth without being trampled may have required a half-dozen or more individuals to hurl their spears simultaneously, to drive the animal into a bog where it would get mired, or to ambush it in a ravine. Early humans were successful in these social tasks, far beyond our own good, as the extinction of at least a dozen species of elephants suggests.

  As R. Dale Guthrie, emeritus zoologist at the University of Alaska, argues, Paleolithic art is a convincing indication of our ancestors’ fascination, if not obsession, with large animals. They were important, and not just as food, or else these people would have depicted acorns, tubers, and beechnuts in their murals, along with horses, deer, and aurochs. Hunting required thinking, teamwork, and communication skills to create and use tools such as bows, spears, and the atlatl. Making accurate predictions necessitated intimate knowledge of animal tracks and the exercise of imagination along with constant reference to the real. Empathy for the animals would have been an almost inevitable byproduct, because the hunter needed to get “under the skin” of the animal to understand and predict its behavior. Van der Post notes that the Bushmen, who were consumate hunters, “seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, a steenbuck, a lizard . . .” They were well-known also for their endurance in running down prey. Along with strength, endurance, vision, and passion for the hunt, a hunter had to have sound knowledge. Hunting large animals would not have been possible without cooperation and communication among the men, but it also involved a partnership with women, for skinning, processing meat, tanning, and making clothing, tools, and shelters. The importance of the tasks at hand in the lives of the people, as in almost all animals, would have become currency for mate choice, to initiate sexual selection. A man who killed or helped kill aurochs would be preferred as a mate to one who did not do so, just as a woman who could tan a hide and fashion a warm garment from it would have been prized by a man. The ability to meet big challenges would have been a badge of worth independent of the individual’s worth in other respects. As the peacock’s tail demonstrates, bigger is better, despite the potential costs, and that principle is deeply ingrained. I’ve never met a (well-fed) Maine deer hunter who would pass up the biggest buck he could get, or one who would brag about shooting the smallest.

  The cult of bagging the biggest would have been as powerful then as it is now, as it was not only a measure of success but also a basis of our livelihood. We were “successful” in eradicating the many species of moas in New Zealand and the elephant bird (which weighed up to 1,000 pounds) in Madagascar. The elephants and giant turtles had by then been long forgotten; they were not on anyone’s conscience.

  When the first waves of humans came to America, and the mammoths and giant sloths were eliminated, there probably was still no knowledge of limits. And when the latest invasion of humans arrived, equipped with ever new and more powerful weapons, the biggest land animal, the bison, went in a flash.

  “Big” sometimes referred less to individuals than to groups. The Eskimo curlew (now extinct), called “dough-bird” because its thick layer of fat felt like a ball of dough, was shot in Nantucket in such numbers that the slaughter stopped only when the island ran out of ammunition. The passenger pigeon was doomed when the tools of electronic communication and trains took the pigeon harvesters to the immense breeding colonies. The great auk and the dodo, which also lived in great colonies on islands, became accessible by boats, and were already long gone.

  THE CHALLENGE OF the elephants may have originally made us what we are, may have helped tip the balance in innovation for our eventual assault on even bigger game. Our tapping into the energy of meat some three or four million years ago instigated a “runaway” evolution, with one innovation furiously generating the next. This eventually led to a new stage of human social evolution, now cultural instead of biological, which was kick-started and maintained by the massive influx of energy from recycling the remains of 300-million-year-old plants, most prominently trees. This processing of fossil energy led to iron smelting, which opened the way to even more tools for energy extraction. Now these processes are fueling us through our farms and factories by feeding on ancient cycads, horsetails, and tree ferns. We are the ultimate scavengers of all time. Everything from the coal forests to a large part of the earth’s animal biomass—domestic birds and mammals (and, increasingly, fish)—are cycled directly into us, instead of into a sustainable world ecosystem. So far there is little evidence of conscious effort to stop “growth.” People (except possibly the Chinese) still don’t viscerally realize that there are limits to human population that must be adhered to whether or not we as individuals choose to do so. Nor do we see that now the toolkit we hold is like a box of matches in the hands of a child. We’ll never stop our unquenchable need for resources, but we can stop our growth, which will then provide freedom of choice in what we can use.

  II

  NORTH TO SOUTH

  As I write today, it is mid-May in Maine. The natural world around me is dramatically different from what it was a month ago. Color has appeared as a new dimension: two weeks ago the gray-brown forested hills erupted with the red blotches of flowering red maples. A week later these were intermingled with pale yellow patches of sugar maple trees in flower, followed in a day or two by white splashes of juneberry, like white sheets hung in a rising tide of green. Their berries are still green, but they are almost always picked by a large variety of birds before they even ripen. This tree is also called serviceberry, because it blooms at the time when church services were traditionally held for people who had died over the winter; the bodies were kept aboveground until spring softened the concrete-hard frozen soil.

  The season of new lives’ beginning and the disposition of the dead is cyclical in the north, and the flowering phenology of the trees is the best calendar of the season. But the calendar is locally specific, and burying can take place only when the undertakers are active. Here in the north, where I live, no burying beetles are about in winter or early spring; there is little or no bacterial decay, no flies or fly larvae, and the vultures have not yet returned from the southern areas where they spend the winter. Of the major undertakers, only some mammals and the ravens remain and stay active during the winter.

  Northern Winter: For the Birds

  We love the things we love for what they are.

  —Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook”

  OF ALL THE VARIABLES THAT AFFECT THE DISPOSITION OF dead animals, temperature is the one with the widest implications. At low temperatures, bacteria stop dividing, insect scavengers can’t fly, and vultures, with their naked necks, would freeze if they didn’t head south. When I put out the deer carcass in July, the unusually high temperatures made it possible for the flies to arrive in droves and win over all the other competitors, including birds and mammals. Had the deer been deposited at the same place in the fall, winter, or early spring, most of it would li
kely have been disposed of by ravens in a “sky burial.”

  But the first tier of undertaker participants in northern natural habitats are wolves, large cats, and coyotes, who may provide the carcass by killing a weakened animal or by ripping open one that died from hunger, age, or disease. Foxes and mustelids (wolverine, fisher, marten, weasels) and sometimes large birds of prey such as bald and golden eagles come next. They are followed in turn by ravens and magpies, and finally by jays, chickadees, and perhaps woodpeckers and nuthatches, who pick up the last scraps.

  ONE OF THE few places on the North American continent with a remnant of the magnificent megafauna that once existed here is Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Here there are now populations of deer, elk, and bison, along with their hunter-scavengers—bears, canids, mustelids, ravens, magpies, and eagles. The recently reintroduced wolf is now the top predator, although at times it is perhaps an overeager “undertaker” in that it preferentially dispatches the old and the weak, meaning that “natural” death as we think of it for ourselves is a rare event. As in all carcass disposition, there is an overlapping progression of participants. Even as the wolves are opening a fresh elk or bison carcass, crowds of ravens and magpies start arriving to take part in the feast. Individual golden and bald eagles may join in, and within a day the carcass is stripped. Yellowstone is a sample of the northern paradise that once was, where one could live in a cabin in the hills, hunt elk as needed, fish for trout, pick berries in the fall, grow a patch of garden in the summer, and later leave one’s body as a token for what had been taken. Now that country, from the human standpoint, is reserved largely for viewing.