by Patrick Nunn
Asteroids, comets and meteorites (collectively known as bolides) regularly enter our planet’s atmosphere, almost always being fragmented above the ground surface but more often than not – unlike the situation at Tunguska – smashing into the Earth’s surface. Most bolides fall into the ocean, but some of course hit the land; impact craters pepper the landscape of every continent.
Bolide impacts are undoubted memorable events, worthy subjects for oral traditions, particularly in places where the extraterrestrial object hit the ground and created an impact crater. In Chapter 1 we saw how a bolide impact more than a millennium ago in Italy fast-tracked the people’s adoption of Christianity. Features like impact craters often remain visible in landscapes for hundreds of thousands of years, a constant reminder to local people of the events that created them. In the same way that some cultural groups venerate gods within active volcanoes, beseeching them not to direct eruptions across their fields and villages, so too are there records of group worship at impact craters. Consider this translated description from the 1920s of local traditions at the Campo del Cielo (Field of the Sky) site in the Argentine pampas, where there are numerous impact craters as well as scattered fragments of a giant iron meteorite:
The meteorite of the Chaco [province] was known since earliest American antiquity through stories from the Indians who inhabited the provinces of Tucumán. [These people] had trails and easily traversed roadways that departed from certain points more than 50 leagues [more than 278km/173 miles] away, converging on the location of the bolide. The indigenous tribes of the district gathered here … in veneration to the God of the Sun, personifying their god in this mysterious mass of iron, which they believed issued forth from the magnificent star. And there, in the stories of the different tribes of their battles, passions and sacrifices, was born a beautiful, fantastic legend of the transfiguration of the meteorite on a certain day of the year into a marvellous tree, flaming up at the first rays of the sun with brilliant radiant lights and noises like one hundred bells, filling the air, the fields and the woods with metallic sounds and resonant melodies to which, before the magnificent splendour of the tree, all nature bows in reverence and adoration of the Sun.40
This story may recall the arrival of this large meteorite, how it ‘flamed’ brighter than the sun, and the sounds that were heard as it exploded into pieces and smashed into the ground in dozens of different places within a short period of time.
To enable an understanding of how non-literate peoples may have recorded for posterity their observations of bolide falls and impacts, Australia again provides some useful examples. Not only is its Indigenous culture one of considerable unbroken longevity and demonstrably effective in preserving ancient traditions, but Australia – being comparatively dry in most parts – has environments that are particularly well suited to the preservation and study of bolide impact structures. The rocks – known as tektites – that form when a meteorite impacts the ground surface are strewn around the impact site (in what geologists call strewnfields), but are often found much further away. So powerful are some impacts that in an instant they cause the earth-surface rocks to melt or vaporise, creating small pieces of molten material that can be widely dispersed. Some even enter the atmosphere and are carried well away from the impact site; for example, Australian tektites are found in China and Antarctica as much as 11,000km (6,835 miles) from their impact site.41
There are 27 known bolide impact craters in Australia, most in the (drier) Northern Territory and Western Australia. It is something of an enigma that there are comparatively few Aboriginal stories about the formation of these craters, yet comparatively many describing meteorite falls. Hints that local Aboriginal people knew the origin of the Henbury meteorite craters in the central Australian desert come from the story that told that they should not camp near the place, which they called chindu chinna waru chingi yabu (‘sun walk fire devil rock’).42 The Henbury meteorite falls took place around 4,200 years ago.
But understanding is not necessarily witnessing, and there are Australian Aboriginal stories about the origins of meteorite craters that formed long before people first reached Australia (see colour plate section). In these situations, it is obvious that the details of eyewitness accounts of particular events were transferred to landforms that were patently of the same origin, despite being far older.43
In South Australia on the edge of the Nullarbor Plains, swathes of which are littered with meteorite fragments, there is a typical meteorite impact story. Belonging to the Adnyamathanha (Wirangu) people, a retelling for the school curriculum of the original story explains that:
A long, long time ago, a huge meteorite hurtled towards the earth from the northward sky, and smashed into the ground near Eucla. Because it was so big, a dent appeared in the crust of the earth and the meteorite bounced high into the air and out into the Great Australian Bight [ocean] where it landed with an enormous sizzling splash. It was hot from its trip through space so it gave off a good deal of steam and gas as it sank through the waves. But this was no ordinary meteorite. In fact, it was the spirit Tjugud. In the deep water near by, the spirit woman Tjuguda lay asleep. All the noise around her woke her up and she was very angry. She bellowed and the elements roared with her. The wind blew, the rain pelted from the sky and the dust swirled.44
Given that Aboriginal eyewitness accounts of meteorite falls in Australia are more common than impact craters, it is likely that – as at Tunguska – many of these events were airbursts, a solid bolide shattering above the ground surface and producing a rain of fragments, none of which proved large enough to create a visible crater when it hit the Earth’s surface. One example from New South Wales (a state without a single impact crater) recalls that:
The sky heaved and billowed … the stars tumbled and clattered and fell one against the other. The great star-groups were scattered, and many of them, loosened from their holds, came flashing to the earth. They were heralded by a huge mass, red and glowing, that added to the number of falling stars by bursting with a deafening roar and scattering in a million pieces which were molten … The disturbance continued all night. When the smoke and clamour had died away and morning had dawned it was seen that the holes had been burnt into the earth, and great mounds were formed by the molten pieces, and many caves were made.45
We cannot know the antiquity of this story because no airburst event has been identified in the area, but given the abundance of similar stories in Australian Aboriginal cultures, there is little reason to doubt that it is an authentic memory of a real event.
In other parts of the world, preliterate descriptions of meteorite falls are likewise somewhat vague and difficult to tie to any single event, something that would allow us to determine the antiquity of these stories. Just as there are stories in many cultures of a global flood, which are likely to be a palimpsest of stories of successive floods in particular places,46 so there are stories of a world fire that wiped out humanity in some cultures. In some of the associated stories, a cosmic origin is identified for the fire, suggesting that this tradition derived from successions of meteor showers or airbursts in particular locations.
Finally in this chapter, we turn to a little-studied topic of oral traditions, namely their potential for recollecting the existence of animals that are now extinct. The real challenge here is to move beyond the explosion in imagined creatures that has characterised post-nineteenth-century fiction and today transfixes many audiences, often confusing people’s ability to distinguish fantasy from past realities.47
One of the most extraordinary stories of this kind concerns one of our kin, Homo floresiensis, which is known to have co-existed with our own species on Flores Island in Indonesia until perhaps 12,000 years ago.48 The discovery was made in 2003 in a limestone cave named Liang Bua, 25km (16 miles) from the sea. At a depth of nearly 6m (20ft) in sediment layers dating from about 18,000 years ago, the remains of this small-bodied, chinless bipedal hominin were found. The young age for the remains of H
omo floresiensis puzzled scientists for a long time, but a recently revised age for the holotype at Liang Bua to some time between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago sits more comfortably with most.49 This is because our species, Homo sapiens, was pretty intolerant of other hominid species, and adept at eradicating them shortly after coming into contact with them. The stone tools found at Liang Bua suggest that the Homo floresiensis people living there continued doing so until some 50,000 years ago, which fits with the revised age for the hominid bones, but there are hints from oral traditions that they may have survived into more recent times.
Long before the discovery of Homo floresiensis remains, the people of Flores Island had stories about the ebu gogo, the name given to ‘short, hairy and coarse-featured’ hominoids said to have lived on the island until quite recently. In 1984, when anthropological researchers started work in the Nage region of central Flores, they were told a story by descendants of the inhabitants of the (former) village of ‘Ua how its people had once cornered a group of ebu gogo in a cave called Lia Ula several generations earlier. Fed up with them abducting children and stealing their crops, the people of ‘Ua set fire to a quantity of palm fibre and immolated these ebu gogo.50
Ebu gogo stories are known from other communities on Flores and may be part of the ‘wildmen stories’ that are comparatively common in island South-east Asian cultures,51 and in some other parts of the world. What is of key interest about the ebu gogo stories is whether or not they recall the presence until very recently of Homo floresiensis on Flores. At present there is not enough information to test this suggestion, especially since science would currently have this hominid species becoming extinct about 50,000 years ago. But it is an intriguing story that science may one day answer more satisfactorily. Another explanation is that the ebu gogo stories (not the ebu gogo themselves) have endured for thousands of years, ancient cultural memories being transposed onto more recent incidents; perhaps the occupants of the cave at Lia Ula were mere bandits, subsequently labelled ebu gogo to help justify their extermination.52
We now move to Australia and, again taking advantage of Aboriginal cultural ability to preserve stories millennia old, ask whether there are ancient creatures – perhaps long extinct – that were observed by Aboriginal people who then started the process of commending these stories to posterity. There are indeed such stories. Take that of the bunyip, a huge beast said to live, forever groaning and bellowing, in the deepest waterholes, from which it would emerge after dark to prowl the land in search of humans as food. One account from the 1840s reports through a colonist’s words the attitudes of Aboriginal Australians towards the bunyip:
… a large animal having at one time existed in the large Creeks & Rivers & by many it is said that such animals now exist & several of the Fossil bones which I have at various times shown to them they have ascribed to them. Whether such animals as those to which they refer be yet living is a matter of doubt, but their fear of them is certainly not the less & their dread of bathing in the very large waterholes is well known.53
Long-standing Aboriginal beliefs in bunyip certainly fed into the interpretation of sightings of other creatures in recent times. Consider the observations of cattleman Thomas Hall, who worked at Canning Downs (New South Wales) and visited an Aboriginal ceremonial site (a bora ring) in about 1858, where he saw a drawing of a bunyip painted with ‘raddle, pipe clay and emu oil’ on a large tree. Later he saw one, a creature local people knew as mochel mochel:
Mr Hall was bringing a mob of brumbies [wild horses] down from Swan Creek, and when some distance ahead of his companions, was startled by a scream coming from a place known as the Gap Creek Junction Hole. Riding over to investigate, he saw an animal in shape similar to a low set sheep dog, the colour of a platypus, head and whiskers resembling an otter, coming from shallow water across a strip of dry land into deep water … the impression made on Mr Hall’s mind was that the Mochel Mochel or Bunyip was a kind of otter … [local Aboriginal people], he says, had a great dread of it and nothing could persuade them to bathe in, or even go near a water-hole believed to be the home of the Mochel Mochel.54
In this case, it was indeed perhaps an otter. Yet the extract exemplifies the point that distant Indigenous memories of the bunyip – like those of the ebu gogo – were perhaps transposed onto other, comparatively unfamiliar creatures long after the originals had died out. The avoidance behaviour that characterised their distant ancestors’ attitudes towards bunyip also became transferred by Aboriginal people to these other creatures, as did their role in Aboriginal ceremonial life.
Most of what are regarded as authentic Aboriginal descriptions of bunyip picture them as ‘long-necked, maned, tusked, [and] horse-tailed’, so the discovery of fossils in numerous Australian contexts of a herbivore, the extinct marsupial tapir Palorchestes azael, ‘about the size of a horse … [and like] no other creature known’, has raised the possibility that Aboriginal stories of bunyip recall encounters with this animal.55 Once thought to be a giant kangaroo, Palorchestes azael has also been likened to a bull in size and had ‘huge koala-like claws, enormously powerful forelimbs, a long ribbon-like tongue and a large elephantine trunk’. It occupied eucalypt woodlands close to shallow lakes or marshes, and once lived across much of eastern and southern Australia. Its possible representation in Aboriginal rock art (see colour plate section) strengthens suggestions that it may be the basis of bunyip stories.56 Direct dating of the fossil remains of Palorchestes azael shows that it lived mostly 40,000–50,000 years and more ago, but an age of 23,000 years ago – from surrounding terrace deposits – has been reported for its presence at Riversleigh, now a World Heritage Site, in Queensland. An age for a megafaunal bone cache at Spring Creek in Victoria suggests that this animal may have survived even longer here, perhaps to sometime within the last 20,000 years.57 Is it possible for Aboriginal traditions of this creature to have survived almost 20 millennia, or does the likelihood of its recollection in those traditions signify that it must have survived until even more recent times?58
To put into context Aboriginal stories of the bunyip and other possibly legendary creatures that might recall observations of megafauna, consider that the fossil record of Australia shows that it was once populated – like many other continents – by innumerable species of large-bodied animals, or megafauna, most of which are now extinct. The question of why megafaunal extinctions occurred in Australia, as well as in North America, South America and several other regions, has taxed scientists for more than 100 years and still occasionally provokes robust debate. Basically there are two camps: those who believe that, through predation, humans were responsible for rapid megafaunal extinctions; and those who regard climate change, perhaps a rapid cooling event like the Younger Dryas (see Chapter 4), to have led to megafaunal death from starvation and water deprivation. In deciding which explanation is correct or, indeed, whether both contributed in some measure to megafaunal extinctions in particular places, two things are important to consider.
The first is that megafauna are/were big and that, because most smaller animal species clearly did not suffer the same comprehensive degree of extinction at the same time, it follows that their large size made megafauna singularly unable to adapt to whatever it was that caused their extinction. It might be, for instance, that their large size made them especially attractive to bands of hungry human hunters who devised ingenious ways of killing them and, encouraged by their success, continued the blitzkrieg until their prey disappeared, unable to sustainably reproduce itself.
The second consideration is timing. If megafaunal extinctions occurred simultaneously on every continent, then it is a big ask to put the blame solely on people, because then you would need to suppose that they behaved independently in exactly the same ways towards megafauna at exactly the same times – and what are the chances of that? So simultaneous extinctions must point to some global (or near-global) cause, such as rapid cooling or, as in more imaginative scenarios, massive bolide impacts or vo
lcanic eruptions blotting out the sun for several years and plunging the Earth into a prolonged ‘volcanic winter’.
The fact of conspicuous megafaunal extinctions in Beringia (a region centred on far-eastern Russia and Alaska), and North and South America, gives us an opportunity to test competing explanations. It is generally assumed, albeit not proven, that the earliest Americans entered the continent through Beringia, thence into North America, and thence into South America. The first humans in the Americas were no fearless explorers determined to push the geographical limits of the known world, but were merely following the trails of mammoths and mastodons, camels and cheetahs, and horses.59 Radiocarbon ages for extinct megafauna in these three regions do indeed show a time progression suggesting that human overkill was a major factor in these extinctions, but the same is not true elsewhere.
Take Patagonia in the cold far south of South America, for instance. Here megafauna, including bears, horses, giant ground sloths and the various llamas and guanacos (whose smaller surviving relatives are essential beasts of burden throughout this region today) once ranged across the seemingly endless steppes. Humans first arrived in this part of Patagonia just before a cold (stadial) period – the Antarctic Cold Reversal – began. After it ended, about 1,700 years later, megafaunal extinction had begun and was quickly completed, so here it is attributed to a combination of climate change and human predation.60
The extinct megafauna of Australia are much more than the bull-sized marsupial tapirs, and included two even larger marsupials (notably the hippopotamus-sized Diprotodon), a number of kangaroos and wallabies – giants in comparison to their modern counterparts – and the ferocious tree-dwelling marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex): ‘the fellest and most destructive of predatory beasts’, in the words of the nineteenth-century palaeontologist who gave it its scientific name.61