by Tim Flannery
It must be said of both the Neanderthals and the Tasmanians that their capacity to innovate persisted. In the early nineteenth century Tasmanian Aborigines adopted dogs and guns following contact with the Europeans. And there is some evidence that once the Neanderthals made contact with humans they borrowed ideas and ways of doing things, in doing so creating the Châtelperronian culture, which persisted until the moment of Neanderthal extinction.
What to make of these most intriguing beings? We place such great emphasis on our own large brains in our claim to be Homo sapiens. Is it unreasonable to think that the Neanderthals may have exceeded us in some capacities? And what of their exquisitely made javelins, the equal of those that our best craftsmen can produce today, and of their ability to persist in the most extreme environments by hunting large, fierce prey? Imagine felling a woolly mammoth, or ousting a great hyena from its cave? I suspect that in some measures the Neanderthals were our superiors.
But zoogeography was against them. Africa is larger than Europe, and its tropical climate and the fertile soils of the Great Rift Valley make parts of it highly productive. This means that populations of large mammals were usually greater and denser in parts of Africa than in Europe. Moreover, modern humans seem to have occupied a broader ecological niche than the hyper-carnivorous Neanderthals, eating vegetable matter processed by cooking, which allowed humans to sustain higher population densities than Neanderthals could.
Competition between individuals in large, dense populations drives evolution faster. It produces more competitive types that can spread from their point of origin, displacing groups that dispersed earlier. This process can be aided by diseases, which also evolve swiftly in dense populations because transmission rates increase. Immunity builds in the dense population, but when isolated populations, not previously exposed to these diseases encounter them, they are likely to be devastated. This phenomenon of expansion from the centre is known as ‘centrifugal evolution’, referring to the way a centrifuge works to push things outwards; it goes a long way in explaining the demise of the Neanderthals.
The final days of the Neanderthals have been extensively researched. Until recently, it was thought that they survived on Gibraltar until about 24,000 years ago, but all such late dates are now thought to have resulted from errors. A recent study, using more rigorous methods, could not find any valid dates for Neanderthals more recent than about 39,000 years ago. It is now thought that the Neanderthals began a rapid decline starting in eastern Europe around 41,000 years ago, and that they were extinct everywhere by 39,000 years ago.21
It is widely believed that Neanderthals and humans overlapped briefly in Europe—for between 2500 and 5000 years. But I treat this with caution: the oldest dates for modern humans in Europe are highly questionable. The Neanderthals were the last species of Homo to share the planet with us modern humans. After they became extinct somewhere in Western Europe about 39,000 years ago, we were left alone. Our immediate family had been exterminated—almost certainly by our own hands. Yet this is, at best, a partial truth. Neanderthals did not die out, nor did modern humans colonise Europe.
Of Assemblages and Elephants
2018
WHEN HUMANS ARRIVED in Europe, an already chilled Earth was becoming more intensely cold. The substantial ice caps had lowered sea levels by eighty metres below today’s level. In the millennia thereafter, the glaciers would wax so thick, and sprawl so far, that sea levels would drop by a further forty metres. As a result, there was no Baltic Sea, and you could have walked from Norway to Ireland, even if it meant crossing ice and a few rivers. The cooling was fast by geological standards, but it would have been imperceptible to anyone living, being at least thirty times slower than the warming trend that we are currently experiencing courtesy of greenhouse-gas pollution. It was, nonetheless, forcing changes in the abundance and distribution of flora and fauna across Europe.
After the glacial advance that occurred around half a million years ago, many European animals came to exist as two related or ecologically similar types—one of which dominates in the cold phases, and the other during the warm periods that have prevailed just 10 per cent of the time over the past million years. The woolly mammoth and Europe’s straight-tusked elephant are such a pair, as are the woolly rhino and Europe’s extinct forest rhinos. The carnivores were not as likely to split as the herbivores because they were better able to cope with a variety of climates by sheltering in caves. The spotted hyena, for example, was once distributed from the edge of Europe’s polar desert to equatorial Africa.
Europe’s mammals are described by scientists as comprising faunal assemblages—groups of species that typically occur together. Let’s look at five large creatures from Europe’s ice age, warmth-loving faunal assemblage: the straight-tusked elephant, two rhinoceroses, the hippopotamus, and a water buffalo. The largest of these was the straight-tusked elephant, which first reached Europe from Africa around 800,000 years ago. They could grow to be very large indeed; one male is estimated to have weighed fifteen tonnes, which is half as large again as the biggest elephant living today.
Europe’s straight-tusked elephants probably had a herd structure similar to that of other elephants, in which females and young live in small groups, while the larger males were either solitary or congregated in bachelor herds. Straight-tusked elephants could be found in forest and more open habitats, including the warmth-loving oak forests and varied vegetation types that continue to grow around the Mediterranean and in southern and central parts of Europe today. It’s reasonable to suppose that, were they still around and left unmolested by hunters, Europe’s straight-tusked elephants would thrive in forests from Germany to Sicily, and from Portugal to the shores of the Caspian Sea.
The European straight-tusked elephant was long classified in an extinct genus, Palaeoloxodon, the various species of which could once be found from western Europe to Japan and east Africa. But in September 2016 researchers announced that they had successfully extracted DNA from the bones of a 120,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant from Germany and identified its nearest relative, Loxodonta cyclotis—the African forest elephant.1 Africa has two elephant species—the rainforest-dwelling type, and the more familiar and widespread savannah elephant—which split between five and seven million years ago. When the full research findings of this work were published in February 2018 the story got even more astonishing. Genes from an ancestor to both African elephant species comprise the largest element in the European straight-tusked elephant genome, with the next largest contribution (between 35 and 39 per cent) coming from the African forest elephant, and much smaller contributions from both the woolly mammoth and African elephant. The European straight-tusked elephant is thus a complex hybrid.2
Pulling all the data together, it seems likely that the European straight-tusked elephant arose in Africa before today’s living African species separated. Then, at some time before 800,000 years ago, it hybridised extensively with the African forest elephant. Finally, limited interbreeding with both the woolly mammoth and the African elephant occurred. Just how the taxonomists will classify such a creature is yet to be resolved.3*
Both European straight-tusked elephants and African forest elephants have long straight tusks; those of older African forest males almost touch the ground. This contrasts with the curved tusks of Asian and other African elephants, and mammoths. The straight-tusked elephants include both the largest and smallest of all elephants. The largest living African forest elephants can reach six tonnes in weight, but the ‘pygmy’ elephant living in the Congo averages just 900 kilograms when adult. European straight-tusked elephants could weigh as much as fifteen tonnes, but some island-dwelling forms were pig-sized.
It seems almost unbelievable, but until 2010, scientists did not know that the two living African elephants were distinct species. But 110 years earlier, one of the most eccentric zoologists of all time, Paul Matschie, had identified the African straight-tusks as different. Matschie started his career as
a volunteer at the Berlin Zoological Gardens, and, despite his lack of formal qualifications, in 1895 was appointed its curator of mammals. In the habit of wearing pince-nez glasses and sporting a splendid moustache, by 1924 Matschie had become that august institution’s director.
Over the years of working with zoo animals, Matschie developed his own highly unusual theory of classification. Known as ‘the theory of the half-sided bastards’, it declared that each major watershed on Earth harbours a distinct species of any given kind of animal. If the animals living in the watersheds ever met on the ridges dividing them, the creatures might hybridise. Such hybrids could be recognised as ‘half-sided bastards’, because they would resemble one parent on one side of their head, and the other parent on the other.
I can imagine Matschie’s underlings coming to ‘Herr Director’ with the odd goat that had one horn straighter than the other, or a deer with one antler more elaborate than the other, or indeed an elephant with one tusk straighter than the other, hoping to curry favour. Such novelties may well have encouraged Matschie until his bizarre theory became an unshakeable foundation stone of his thinking. Indeed, on the joyous occasion that an unusual skull with asymmetrical horns or tusks turned up, Matschie celebrated by describing two new species based on the one specimen—one for each supposed unknown parent species, which he reasoned must still be lurking in their unexplored catchments. It is easy to understand why much of Matschie’s work was ignored. Yet who would have believed that, when it came to straight-tusked elephants, the truth was even more fantastical?
Perhaps one day Europeans will decide to return elephants to their continent. If so, they would be well served by starting with forest elephants from Africa. But they should not wait too long as the beasts are becoming increasing endangered. Part of the problem is their slow rate of reproduction. Straight-tusked elephants take about twenty-three years to reach sexual maturity, and thereafter give birth only once every five or six years. The African savannah elephant, in contrast, matures at about twelve years and can give birth every three to four years. The slower the reproductive rate, the more impact hunting has. Between 2002 and 2013, 65 per cent of the African forest elephant population was killed, mostly by poachers seeking ivory. At that rate, extinction will occur in the next few decades.
Many people find the prospect of elephants wandering the forests of Europe ridiculous, or even dangerous. Yet they accept that Africans must share their homes with the ponderous creatures. I think that we should take the long view and share the burden of conservation more equally. But bureaucracies keep getting in the way. The IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), for example, restricts use of the word ‘reintroduction’ to species that have become extinct locally or Europe-wide no more than 200 to 300 years ago. Just why this is I cannot imagine, but I urge the IUCN to appoint more palaeontologists to its committees!
What drove Europe’s straight-tusked elephants to extinction? We can never be certain, but we can look at patterns of climate, predation and distribution. Fossils reveal that as the ice age gripped the continent, straight-tusked elephants retreated to the warmer southern peninsulas of Spain, Italy and Greece. This would have limited their overall population size and divided it into sub-populations that could not easily intermix, making them more vulnerable to extinction. Straight-tusked elephants doubtless had their predators too, with lions and spotted hyenas taking the odd calf. There’s also good evidence that the Neanderthals hunted them. A 400,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant skeleton found in the Ebbsfleet Valley near Swanscombe in Kent was surrounded by stone tools indicating that it had been butchered, while marks on the bones of a second individual found in Britain suggest that it had been cut up. In both cases, however, it’s possible that the Neanderthals were scavenging from a carcass. But a third skeleton, found near Lehringen, Germany, was found lying on a 125,000-year-old wooden stabbing lance, which appears to have been used to kill it.4 Several other elephant skeletons have been found alongside stone tools in Spain, Italy and Germany, so it seems safe to say that Neanderthals could kill adult straight-tusked elephants.
Fossils suggest that straight-tusked elephants made their last stand on the European mainland in Spain, about 50,000 years ago. This is curious: 50,000 years ago, the ice had not yet fully extended and substantial areas of forest persisted. Indeed, conditions were not greatly different from those of previous glacial advances that the elephants had endured. Could it be that straight-tusked elephants survived longer on mainland Europe? It is a question that Signor-Lipps have a firm opinion on. And, indeed, a single 37,000-year-old image of a furless elephant from Chauvet Cave, France, may depict this species.
Europe’s straight-tusked elephants survived on various islands in the Mediterranean for thousands of years after they vanished from mainland Europe. All of the island populations were dwarfs, some being very tiny indeed. Cyprus’s straight-tusked elephants, for example, were only a metre high at the shoulder and weighed a mere 200 kilograms. These tiny elephants survived until about 11,000 years ago, and they shared the island with the smallest hippo known, Phanourios minor, which was the size of a sheep. Cyprus was settled by humans at least 10,500 years ago, and the campsites of these early Cypriots have been discovered in caves at Aetokremnos (Vulture’s Cliff) on the Akrotiri Peninsula.5 The bones of hippos are found in layers immediately below the human camps, but it is not known with certainty whether humans hunted the hippos, or indeed the elephants. The island of Tilos in the Dodecanese may have offered a last refuge. Its elephants, which averaged two metres high at the shoulder, survived until about 6000 years ago. This date, however, deserves further investigation, for Tilos supported a population of humans for thousands of years before that—and, at least on small islands, the archaeological evidence from elsewhere suggests that humans and elephants don’t coexist.
If a changing climate was to blame for the extinction of the straight-tusked elephants, why should they have survived on islands long after those on the adjacent mainland vanished? Surely climatic shifts would affect islands and the adjacent mainland equally? The fact that the pygmy elephants survived on Cyprus until around the time that humans discovered their island is, I think, telling. The cold phases of the ice age were bad news for straight-tusked elephants, but there was another, more decisive influence at work—humans.
From the Horse to Roman Failure
2018
RESEARCH INTO THE genetics of late-surviving European hunter-gatherers and the newly arrived farmers suggests that the farmers almost entirely replaced the earlier occupants in many areas.1 Since the advent of writing, Europe’s human history has been a sorry tale of war and extermination, so the replacement of one people by another 8000 years ago is not surprising. An analysis of skeletons from cemeteries shows that for about 700 years after agriculture became established in any area, the population increased rapidly. This was followed by a stable period lasting about 1000 years, after which populations began to collapse, and within a few centuries human numbers became much reduced.2 The expansion of the agriculturalists would not be the last great human migration into Europe. About 5000 years ago, horse-riding herders from the Russian steppes arrived in Europe, again displacing some peoples. As a result of this long history of invasions, going back all the way to Neanderthal times, every European living today is of widely mixed heritage, as our variable eye, skin and hair colour and form suggest.
Ever since humans first arrived in Europe, migration had been westward, and prior to the eighteenth century the great innovations were mostly eastern, often only penetrating Europe after considerable delays. A hundred years ago Europeans were all but unaware of this. The idea that Europe was an appendix of Asia as far as human cultures were concerned would have been derided as ridiculous or considered insulting. Among those who delivered the news that Europe was indisputably not the cradle of civilisation was Vere Gordon Childe, the first and arguably the greatest ever synthesiser in archaeology. Famous for his view that Europea
n civilisation was a ‘peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit’, rather than the apogee of human achievement, he was also one of the greatest eccentrics to wield an archaeologist’s trowel.3
Childe was—like that other original thinker Baron Nopcsa—the quintessential outsider. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1892, and son of an Anglican reverend, Childe was a perpetual valetudinarian, so sickly that he was home-schooled, and of such an ‘ugly appearance’ that he became the butt of cruel jokes.4 Awkward, uncouth and without social graces, Childe seems never to have had a sexual relationship.5 His one love in life, outside his work, was speed. He owned several fast and expensive cars, and after he moved to England he became infamous for his reckless driving—including a high-speed dash down Piccadilly in the early hours of the morning that attracted the attention of the police. After winning a scholarship to Oxford he became frustrated that his Marxist views prevented him gaining an academic position. So he returned to Australia to work for the New South Wales Labor Party, and wrote a book called How Labour Governs—a highly insightful if disillusioned study of worker representation in politics.