by Adrian Berry
*Today, one of the men most hated in this region is the former Soviet dictator , who ordered the destruction of the descendants of these horses ‘to be made into sausages’. ‘In Central Asia, a Desert Horse Gallops Back from Soviet Abyss’, international Herald Tribune, November 11-12, 1995.
Accounts of their exploits and legends survive in the Sanskrit Vedas written a thousand years later and which still survive as sacred texts in modern India.
They gave their chariots a semi-divine status, burying them with their dead owners. Examination of a tomb containing the remains of a chariot in Sintashta-Petrovka shows that these early charioteers were the same people who first rode on horseback.
The chariot races of these nomads of the vast grassy plains that lie between Mongolia and the Carpathians are recounted in detail in the sacred text called the Rig Veda. They raced their chariots for many purposes. Sport may have been the least important of them. Others included the settling of legal disputes, deciding the guilt of an accused person, and conducting funerals. An example from later history is the chariot race described in the Iliad that was held at the funeral of Achilles.
But most important, their chariots revolutionized war. Until the invention of the short bow, easily drawn and discharged by a galloping horseman, the chariot was the ideal military vehicle. ‘A standing warrior in a chariot could shoot arrows with a large bow or cast spears, coming very close to his target before dashing away,’ said David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College at Oneonta, New York.
He has performed dating tests on grave sites which show that these chariots existed in Kazakhstan at least two centuries before they appeared in the Middle East. ‘They were invented in the steppes of Eurasia by people who were, comparatively speaking, barbarians,’ said .
The only sign of modern habits was their addiction to gambling. They used to throw hazel-nuts as dice. In the Rig Veda there is a lament of a gambler who cannot give up the habit even though his wife has left him in disgust.
For a thousand years the chariot was the superior military weapon. It later made possible the victories of the Hittites, the Egyptians and Myceneans. Only in the first millennium bc was it succeeded by cavalry.
The mastery of the horse and the invention of chariots brought one of the most important developments in human history, turning man from ‘slave’ to animals faster and stronger than himself into their ‘king’. Evidence of this achievement has come also from the examination of horses’ teeth at the prehistoric hamlet of Dereivka, 200 kilometres south of Kiev. The bones of a stallion aged seven or eight were found with a fragment of a deer’s antlers that had clearly been used as a bit with a leather strap as reins. Microscopic examination of its premolar teeth showed the horse’s mouth had been worn away by a bit.
Horses and chariots brought a revolution in virtually every aspect of the lives of primitive Europeans, since riders could travel across the grasslands three times further and faster in a day than people on foot. The people of Sintashta-Petrovka were so pleased with their invention that they appear to have worshipped either their horses or a god with the head of a horse.
The Rig Veda describes how two divine twins cut off a priest’s head and replaced it with that of a dead horse. The priest then spoke through the horse’s head. Scenes like this appear to have actually happened. When examined a grave site he found that it contained the remains of a human sacrifice, the victim’s head having been replaced with that of a horse.
But the cavalry who replaced the charioteers in about a thousand bc cannot have enjoyed the change. For it was not until the fourth century ad, with the coming of the Huns out of Asia, that stirrups were first introduced in the West. Riding a stirrupless horse must have been far less comfortable than standing up in a chariot.
The Man who Found Cod - but not Japan
To mark the 500th anniversary of the first voyage of , Britain’s pioneering explorer of the Americas, an almost exact replica of his ship, the , will sail from Bristol to duplicate his journey.
’s voyage deserves this commemoration - there have only been similar duplications in modern times of the first voyage of and that of the Mayflower -because of his role in Anglo-American history. But for , whose English successors explored and colonized much of the North American continent, those vast lands might otherwise have gone to Spain, with incalculable consequences for the human race.
is believed to have been an ancestor of the famous Massachusetts family whose aristocratic roots inspired the verse:
And this is good old Boston,
The land of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lozvells talk only to ,
And the talk only to God.
The modern replica of the that sails in 1997, part of the International Festival of the Sea and sponsored by the property company Helical Bar, will not be entirely identical to the original. It will have toilets and showers, which and his 17 crew members of course lacked. It will also have a twentieth-century galley.
The modern crew will all be non-smokers - which is appropriate since tobacco had not been discovered at the time of the original voyage; and, to comply with maritime safety laws, it will have radio and an engine for use in emergencies. But there will be no bunks, and the paid crew, still not chosen, must bring their own mattresses and sleep on the floor.
The story of , a citizen of Venice, is a fascinating one. As a young man he visited Mecca, which was then not only a place of pilgrimage but the world’s greatest market for the exchange of goods between East and West. Asking where the eastern spices, perfumes, silks and precious stones came from, he learned that they were from the north-eastern parts of furthest Asia. He instantly resolved that rather than pay the exorbitant prices in this market, Europeans must sail to Asia and trade directly. Like he decided the best route would be to sail west. And he would show Europe the way.
Rejected by Spain and Portugal, he anglicized his name and successfully sought support from England’s King , who gave him letters patent to ‘seek out whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’, and claim them for the Crown. The King was to get a fifth of the profits, and the rest.
Setting off in May, 1497, the reached Newfoundland after 52 days at sea and, like five years earlier, was convinced that he had reached Asia. But his only useful discovery was that of the riches of the seas off the Grand Banks. His crew caught innumerable cod simply by lowering baskets into the water and lifting them up again.
found many new islands which he claimed for England, but was baffled by the absence of an oriental civilization in Newfoundland. The natives seemed much too primitive to have produced the exquisite goods he had seen in Mecca.
He undertook a second voyage, in 1498 - the King was delighted by the first, and this time paid for six ships. had been told by a certain that the country known as Greenland was in fact part of Asia. If he sailed north-west of it towards the icy regions, so Ilavrador said, he would come to the wealthy kingdom of Japan. But his passage was ever more thickly obstructed by icebergs. His fellow-captains threatened to mutiny, and meekly agreed to return.
This showed the one flaw in his character that prevented him from becoming one of the greatest explorers, a lack of the ruthlessness shown later by both Magellan and Francis Drake: when Magellan faced a similar mutiny he invited the two ringleaders to his ship to discuss the matters in dispute. He then beheaded one and marooned the other.
Indeed, the only immediately tangible achievement of ’s second voyage was the naming of Labrador. The name came from his ill-informed adviser, .
The Other Big Bang
Remarkable, perhaps ominous, discoveries are being made about the other Big Bang, not the event in physics that started the Universe, but the Big Bang of biology that very suddenly created advanced animals, including our own ancestors, some 500 million years ago.
Those who imagine that civilizations in the galaxy are commonplace might
do well to contemplate the meagre story of life on Earth. Not only was the planet devoid of intelligent life for 99.9 per cent of its history, it was also empty of any life more advanced than the primordial for nearly 90 per cent of this time. This hardly encourages the view that future interstellar explorers are likely to find Klingons whenever they approach a habitable planet circling a Sun-like star.
From the time of the first appearance of life some 4 billion years ago to the coming of complex life in the Cambrian age, there was a lull of 3.5 billion years during which, biologically, nothing interesting happened. Although Earth was the right distance from the Sun for life to form on it, a visiting alien spacecraft, unless its astronauts had gone searching among the rocks, would have encountered nothing, concluding no doubt that all their theories about the omnipresence of advanced creatures were wrong.
The biological Big Bang was apparently a very sudden event, quite unlike the gradual changes over periods of countless millions of years that envisaged. All the experts on the subject are now in agreement that the Cambrian ‘radiation’ of advanced life started exactly 543 million years ago. Before that time there was only primitive life; and immediately after it came the first complex animals.
The key to the Cambrian ‘explosion’ lay in the geological period that immediately preceded it, the Vendian. It was then that oxygen began to appear in enormous quantities in the oceans, created, apparently, by tremendous tectonic upheavals that caused carbon compounds to break up into oxygen and carbon. Only with oxygen could animals develop many cells and grow large. But no cause has yet been found for the Vendian tectonic upheavals. As far as we can tell they just happened; and they are responsible for one of the three great mysteries of Earth’s history.
The first of these is why primitive life appeared in the first place. The second is the Cambrian explosion, and the third is the much later appearance of intelligence. Without these events we would not exist. But because of those uneventful 3.5 billion years, there is a case for arguing that the second, at least, was very unlikely to occur and without it, there could have been no question of the third, making a powerful case for suggesting that advanced intelligent planetary life must be extremely rare.
And so, to ’s famous rhetorical question about alien civilizations in the Milky Way - ‘Where are they?’ - we have an answer: they never made it to the animal stage. Yet this may not be entirely bad news. With no aliens to oppose us, the galaxy will be ours for the taking.
A Monster that Liked Treasure
The gryphons, one of the most fearsome of mythical animals, may actually have existed. Its true identity is likely to have been Titanis, a ‘giant bird’ that once roamed the world, terrorizing lesser creatures.
First, the legend. , in his histories, says that in Scythia - a Crimean region - here was once a tribe called the Arimaspians whose people had only one eye.
These people were at constant war with gryphons, or ‘griffins’, huge animals with the heads of eagles and the bodies of lions. Their warfare was fiscal as well as physical. The gryphons had a great love for gold and precious stones with which Scythia abounded. Whenever the Arimaspians approached, hoping to lay hands on it, the gryphons would leap on them and tear them to pieces.
Stories of treasure guarded by dangerous and supposedly mythical animals are common in ancient legend, and , never reluctant to tell a good story, may have been drawing on folk memories. Hercules, for his eleventh labour, had to kill the dragons that guarded the golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides. And the dragon Smaug, in ’s The Hobbit, was always most comfortable when dozing on a pile of stolen treasure. The gryphon legend may have originated with the Titanis guarding its ‘treasure’, this being its young or eggs.
‘’s description of the gryphon sounds exactly like the scientific description of Titanis,’ says the British scholar . ‘From its agility, its lion-like limbs and its ferocity, there is a strong case for believing it was the same animal.’
The discovery of Titanis’s beak has enabled the animal to be reconstructed. of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California, calls it the ‘most dangerous bird that ever existed’. It was a flightless, ostrich-like creature that would strike down its prey with its gigantic talons, ripping victims apart with its hooked beak. Originating millions of years ago in South America, it was far more lethal than the peaceful ostrich it resembles. It was too heavy to fly with its feeble wings, but more than made up for this with terrific speed. Standing some four metres high, it could run faster than a horse and eat any animal it could catch. There must have been few mammals that could resist its attacks.
It even preyed on the gigantic armadillo-like mammals called glyptodons, which appeared to have no other natural enemies. Titanis’s only living descendant is a three-foot-tall, long-necked bird called Cariama, found in the forests of Paraguay. Like its much larger ancestor, it can also run at up to 40 kilometres per hour.
How Titanis migrated to North America, and then to Asia, where the Arimaspians supposedly encountered it, is part of a great geological drama of natural land-bridges that once crossed ancient seas. But for these the Earth would be far less rich in animal species.
About three million years ago, volcanic forces lifted the region of the Andes mountains that crosses Venezuela; and the two continents of North and South America, hitherto islands, were joined by the new land-bridge of Panama. Hundreds of large animal species were thus able to cross it and mingle in the now-united continent. Then, during the last Ice Age, a new bridge arose across the Bering Sea which separates Siberia from Alaska.
Falling water-levels exposed long-submerged land, enabling vast numbers of animals to migrate to Asia. The ancestors of the black bear, the porcupine, the armadillo, the ant-eater, the horse, the coyote, the llama, the wolf, and the terrible Titanis, crossed.
Humans were fully evolved at this time, telling many an awesome tale over their camp fires, which is how the story of the gryphon would have come down through the ages.
The extinct Titanis-gryphon is in a sense very much alive. Its fierce, beak-like head adorns heraldry. In the seven-teeth century, the heraldic expert Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his Pseudodoxia Empidemica: ‘The griffin is an emblem of valour and magnanimity, as being composed of the eagle and the lion, the noblest animals in their kinds; and so it is applicable unto princes, presidents, generals and all heroic commanders; so it is also born in the coat-arms of many noble families of Europe.’
The real-life gryphon, however, was very different from the witty fellow who told that shoes under the sea are made from ‘soles and eels’.
Edmond , ‘Pirate in the Pink’
One day in 1700 a fishing vessel was at work off the Newfoundland coast when a ragged-looking craft bore down on it. Fearing piracy, the fisherman opened fire. The result was a torrent of foul language from the ‘pirates commander, the astronomer Edmond Halley.
was not only famous for predicting the appearance of his comet. He was also a bold explorer, travelling the world in search of scientific information, who nearly lost his life trying to find Antarctica a century before Captain arrived.
His extraordinary exploits are revealed in Astronomy Now by the scientific historian , who relates that was not only a precursor of Cook but, in being faced with a mutiny that he himself partly provoked, of Captain too.
In his second voyage, begun in 1698, he set out in a Royal Naval vessel called the Paramour Pink. ‘Pinks’, flat-bottomed ships 16 metres long and 5 metres broad, specially designed for sailing in shallow seas and almost unknown in the Navy, were often mistaken for pirates sailing under false colours.
The crew numbered 20, making the vessel extremely cramped, and the first officer, a certain (no relation to the inventor of the marine chronometer) was a professional seaman who despised the ‘academic’ from whom, he complained with gross unfairness, ‘much is expected and little or nothing appears’.
During this voyage did in fact make extensive observations of the Earth’s ma
gnetic fields which, says, ‘remained indispensable shipboard companions for more than a century’. But he was an appallingly bad commander. Despite his naval authority, he never had a man flogged and instead attempted to enforce discipline with sarcastic and foul-mouthed abuse.
, openly insubordinate, countermanded orders and told the crew that had only been given command because of his wealthy connections, since he was useless for any other occupation. One day told in the presence of all the crew that he was ‘not only uncapable to take charge of a Pink, but even of a longboat’. had him confined to his cabin for the rest of the voyage. At the subsequent court martial the Admiralty appeared to recognize ’s faults, for the mutinous officer escaped with only a reprimand.
On a subsequent voyage in a Pink, this time with a more agreeable first officer, Halley put in at Recife, Brazil, where he fell foul of the English consul, a Mr Hardwicke, whom he afterwards alleged was an imposter. He told that the purpose of the voyage was to observe the stars in the southern skies. (, in fact, had earlier won election to the Royal Society for identifying 341 southern stars from the murky skies of Saint Helena.) said this story was too ridiculous to be believed. Citing the suspicious appearance of ’s ship, he ordered him to be arrested as a pirate. was released after a few hours at the intervention of the city’s governor but, incensed and refusing to accept apologies, he set off into stormy seas.
He was soon in the Southern Ocean hoping to find the fabled Lost Continent. The ship’s lookouts reported seeing three large islands, unmarked on any map. They were all ‘flat at the top, covered with snow, milk-white, with perpendicular cliffs all around them’.