Life

by Tim Flannery

  After returning to London in 1922, Childe was unemployed for several years; but this was the most productive time of his life. He researched in the libraries of the British Museum and the Royal Anthropological Institute, and in 1925 published The Dawn of European Civilisation. Along with The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins, which came out a year later, the book established conclusively the importance of the East as the fountainhead of ‘European’ civilisation.

  As a Marxist historian, Childe saw prehistory in terms of revolutions and changing economies. Among his great excavations was Skara Brae, a famous Neolithic complex in the Orkney Islands, and among his profound insights was the identification of the ‘Danubian Corridor’ that was used by many species, including Europe’s human–Neanderthal hybrids, to migrate westwards. A fervent supporter of the Soviet Union, in 1945 he wrote to his friend Robert Stevenson, the Keeper of National Antiquities of Scotland, that ‘the brave Red Army will liberate Scotland next year, the Stalin tanks will come crunching over the frozen North Sea’.6 The brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 disillusioned him, and towards the end of that year he retired prematurely from his position as director of the Institute of Archaeology and returned to Australia. In a letter dated 20 October 1957, marked ‘not to be opened until January 1968’, he told of his last days:

  I have always considered that a sane society would…offer…euthanasia as a crowning honour…For myself I don’t believe I can make further useful contributions…An accident may easily and naturally befall me on a mountain cliff. I have revisited my native land and have found I like Australian society much less than European without believing I can do anything to better it: for I have lost faith in my ideals.7

  On 19 October 1957 the great archaeologist flung himself over the 1000-metre-high precipice known as Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains, near where he had grown up. We can only hope that he revelled in the acceleration of his last moments.8*

  New species continued to be added to the human retinue. The cat seems to have domesticated itself in the near east by 9000 years ago. And around 5500 years ago the most important species to join the household—the horse—was domesticated somewhere in the steppes of western Eurasia. It arose from Equus ferus, a genetically well-mixed species (having little geographic variation) that existed across a vast range, from Alaska to the Pyrenees. Unlike the aurochs, whose regional ancestors can be traced genetically, the history of the horse is ‘a genetic paradox’, though it’s clear that Przewalski’s horse is not an ancestor of the domestic horse, but a separate lineage going back 160,000 years.9

  There is so little variation in the Y-chromosome of domestic horses that the original herd must have had very few stallions. In contrast, mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on through the female line, is spectacularly diverse. This could be because there were a very large number of mares in the original stock, or perhaps because additional mares from wild herds were added as domestic horses spread across Eurasia—an idea supported by the latest data. It seems that many were taken in during the Iron Age, between around 3000 and 2000 years ago.10 In genetic terms, no living horse breed is a surviving representative of Equus ferus.

  Very few species have been domesticated since the horse. The bee was domesticated in Egypt by 4500 years ago, and the dromedary about 3000 years ago on the Arabian Peninsula: it was nearing extinction at the time, being restricted to mangrove areas in Arabia’s south-east.11 About 3000 years ago the Bactrian camel was domesticated in central Asia, and the reindeer may have been domesticated in both Siberia and Scandinavia. The only more recent examples are the rabbit and the carp, which were domesticated by monks in the Middle Ages.

  You might have noticed an omission in this tale of domestication—the Romans. Few people have ever had access to the variety of wild animals that the Romans did, or kept them for such an astonishing variety of purposes. From lions to elephants and bears, destined for combat in the arena, to the lions that Mark Anthony reputedly used to draw his chariot, wild animals were captured and trained en masse. If, incidentally, Anthony’s lions were anything but legend, the feat of harnessing these big cats was one of the greatest triumphs ever of man over beast.

  The Romans found dormice an irresistible delicacy, and to satisfy their appetites they would capture wild individuals and keep them in terra cotta containers known as gliraria, while they fattened. Dormice are only very distantly related to the rats and mice that infest our houses and crops; they are surviving members of Europe’s most ancient mammal lineage, whose history stretches back more than 50 million years. Yet for all their expertise in other areas, the Romans never domesticated dormice: they never got them to reproduce in captivity—a key threshold for domestication.

  The Romans were also famous for keeping fish, including red mullet, which were captured as juveniles and grown to enormous size in ponds. A large red mullet could cost as much as a slave. And the Romans were the first to cultivate oysters, the praetor Caius Sergius Orata, who grew them in the Lucrine Lake—a coastal lagoon in the region of Baiae (modern Baia)—in the first century BCE, was the first recorded oyster farmer.12 But Orata’s oysters were, like the dormice and fish, collected in the wild, as spat. So oyster farming, like dormouse-fattening, is not a form of domestication, but rather captive rearing.

  The failure of the Romans to add to the domestic stock is truly inexplicable. For about 500 years they ruled a peri-Mediterranean empire that was about the same size as the Incan empire in South America—though it lasted five times longer. Situated in a biologically diverse part of the planet, which they scoured in search of wild animals, and having the advantage of Virgil’s Georgics (an instructional poem dealing with agricultural techniques) and all their expertise in training, captive-rearing and even selectively breeding already domesticated creatures, they failed to domesticate a single species. Yet barbarians, whose cultures they knew and who lived just before them, as well as the Europeans of the Middle Ages who succeeded them, both added species to Europe’s domestic stocks.

  Europe’s Bewolfing

  2018

  NATURE ABHORS A vacuum, and given half a chance it fights back against extinctions. Almost 10,000 years after the lion and striped hyena arrived in Europe, another carnivore is making its way west, all alone and without any conservation support. Until half a century ago the golden jackal occurred only east of the Bosphorus, in Turkey. Somehow, a few managed to enter Greece and the lower Balkans. The most recent sightings (and killings) occurred in Estonia, France and the Netherlands. It seems that soon golden jackals will be strolling Europe’s Atlantic shore.

  Is this blitzkrieg-like spread the result of a low density of wolves in Europe? The rise of the golden jackal and eclipse of the wolf may be no more than coincidence. For most of the Pleistocene, Europe was home to both a wolf-sized and a jackal-sized canid, the jackal-sized creature being restricted to the Mediterranean region before it became extinct about 300,000 years ago. The golden jackal may be filling the ecological role of its extinct relative. In any case, the golden jackal is an important new meso-carnivore in Europe and it is here to stay.

  The arrival of the golden jackal comes at a unique time in European history. After millennia of war, starvation and relentless expansion of the human population, a new prosperity arrived in the decades of peace following World War II. Europe’s human population began to stabilise, and to concentrate in the cities and coastal plains. Villages in the more remote and hardscrabble regions, including some mountain areas, are being abandoned, and nature is starting to creep back. But this time there are no royal decrees demanding renewed efforts to persecute wolves and other wild creatures. These animals are now seen as curiosities to be tolerated, or even cautiously welcomed. Seals cavort at Canary Wharf in London, wolves are seen in the Netherlands, and wild boar wander the streets of Rome. The ecology of Europe has, in just a couple of generations, shifted so dramatically as to usher in a bewolfing (and perhaps a bewitching) of the continent.
<
br />   By the 1960s the wolf was on the brink of extinction in Europe. Only in Romania was it present in any numbers. But by 1978 wolves were once more in Sweden, the result of a pair that travelled from Finland. The Swedish population really took off when another migrant arrived with a batch of fresh genes. As of 2017, there are more than 430 wolves in Sweden and Norway. Norway aims to maintain a national population target of four to six litters per year and is trying to restrict wolves to a small area along the border with Sweden.

  South of Scandinavia, wolves are growing in number almost everywhere. Some of the increasing populations, such as that in France, face intense opposition from farmers. But on the whole, the expansion is, so far at least, uncontroversial. In Germany in 2000 there was just one wolf pack. Now there are more than seventy, and nobody seems to mind. The same attitude prevails in Denmark, where the first wolf litter for several centuries was born in 2017.

  In early 2018 a wolf was seen in the Flanders region of Belgium, the first in more than a century. Belgium is the last continental European country to be re-colonised by wild wolves, so, at a national level at least, the bewolfing of Europe is complete. Environmental attitudes, the legal protection given to wildlife by European laws, the increasing densities of deer and wild boar near cities, and the sudden depopulation of mountain and hilly areas, have all aided the wolf’s expansion. There are now more wolves in Europe than in the United States, including Alaska!

  The bewolfing of Europe is bringing wolves and humans into a proximity not seen since the Stone Age, and some escalation in wolf–human conflict seems inevitable. With animal liberation movements on the rise, some will call for saving the life of every wolf. Others will seek a compromise between wolf and human needs. As they expand, wild-living wolves are encountering the descendants of wolves who threw their lot in with us 30,000 years ago. Since that time the descendants of those human-loving wolves have been shaped by intensive evolutionary pressure into dogs. And today feral dogs far outnumber wolves. Romania, for example, has 150,000 feral dogs and just 2500 wolves, while Italy has some 800,000 free-ranging dogs, and about 1500 wolves.

  The ecologies of wolves and dogs have diverged in interesting ways. Wolves eat deer and other large prey, but after millennia scavenging around our campsites, dogs have learned to eat almost anything, and will kill anything from mice to wisent, with free-ranging dogs forming packs to hunt large mammals. But while hungry dogs may evoke our sympathy, we are more likely to shoot a hungry wolf.

  Wolves and dogs can mate and produce fertile offspring. Indeed, they have been hybridising for a very long time, as is evidenced by the laika, a wolf-like dog that even today accompanies various Siberian peoples.1 Wildlife managers often try to eliminate dog–wolf hybrids, because they fear that hybrids will eventually replace the wolves. But more thought may be needed on this issue. Hybrids are such an important part of European evolution that an argument could be mounted that a hybrid species is more appropriate to a continent so profoundly modified by people. Such hybrids may in any case be a natural evolutionary outcome of wolves living close to humans. Should we accept them as long as they fulfil the same ecological functions of the true wild wolves? The moral question as to whether we Homo sapiens–H. stupidus hybrids should allow feral Canis lupus familiaris and Canis lupus lupus to hybridise is complex, to say the least. In trying to control evolution by preventing hybridisation, we may be acting in potentially dangerous and destabilising ways.

  In 2004, an Italian brown bear wandered into Germany. JJ1, or Bruno, as he became known, was the first brown bear seen in Germany since 1838. In a country whose capital has a bear on its city seal, you might think that the return of the creature would be celebrated. But on 26 June 2006, just two years after his arrival, Bruno was stalked and shot dead—on Rotwand Mountain in Bavaria. Many Germans were, in fact, delighted by the return of the brown bear, but Bruno came from a problem family. His sad story began years earlier, when ten Slovenian bears were released in the central Italian Alps. Among them were JJ1’s parents, Jurka and Joze.

  It appears that Bruno’s mother Jurka was something of a throwback to her carnivorous ancestors of thousands of years ago, and her meat lust was inherited by her offspring. By the time of Bruno’s death, he had accounted for thirty-three sheep, four domestic rabbits, one guinea pig, some hens and a couple of goats. As Edmund Stoiber, the president of Bavaria, put it, Bruno was a Problembär. And so, in a process begun by our ancestors thousands of years ago, Bruno and his brother were removed from the gene pool, in an effort to ensure that future generations of brown bears will be more sedentary—and vegetarian.

  Many people worry about the taming of bears for performance on street corners and in circuses, but few realise how deeply we have altered the ecology of wild bears. Over thousands of years, we have created a more fearful and tractable species—which is, from an ecological perspective, a miniaturised version of the vegan cave bear, and able to survive in today’s densely populated Europe.

  The people of northern Italy like their wild bears, but in 1999 the local bear population of the province of Trento was down to just two animals, which had no chance of reproducing. So the Trentinos imported ten bears from Slovenia. The program was a great success, and today there are about sixty bears in the region. But it has not all been smooth sailing. Recently, a female bear was killed by the authorities after she attacked a hiker. About half of the problems with the Trentino bears, incidentally, stem from members of Jurka’s and Joze’s family, so Jurka, the mother, has been brought into captivity. There can be little doubt that conflict will increase as bear numbers grow. But so far, at least in Italy, both human and bear behaviour is leading to a largely peaceful coexistence.

  Elsewhere in Europe bear populations are also recovering. Due to careful conservation, the few bears surviving in Sweden have blossomed over fifty years into a healthy population of 3000 or more, and two tiny populations in northern Spain are increasing after many years of lingering in critically low numbers. But the population in the Abruzzo region, just two hours drive from Rome, is unable to expand. Because of a lack of habitat, it remains frozen at 50–60, making it vulnerable to inbreeding and extinction.

  In eastern Europe the brown bear is still present in large numbers in many countries including Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Greece. But to see a truly thriving population you need to go to Romania, where more than 3000 still roam—thanks to the bear-loving despot Nicolae Ceauşescu who, in a resurrection of the caccia medieval, reserved to himself the right to kill bears. So abundant are they that some have taken to rifling through rubbish bins on the outskirts of Braşov, one of the country’s largest cities. Today, Europe’s bear population overall is in good shape, in larger number than those in the lower forty-eight states of the USA (where they are known as grizzlies).

  The Iberian lynx is the largest carnivore unique to Europe. In the Stone Age it was widespread in southern Europe, and in historic times it roamed throughout the Iberian Peninsula and into southern France. But half a century ago it began a steep decline, due to a reduction of its prey (rabbits), accidents with cars, habitat loss and illegal hunting. By the dawn of the twenty-first century it had been reduced to just 100 individuals, of which only twenty-five were breeding females, clinging on in two populations in the Montes de Toledo and the Sierra Morena. A massive captive-breeding program, supported by the European Union and costing €100 million, has dragged the Iberian lynx back from the brink of extinction, and today there are more than 500. Its recovery is one of the greatest conservation successes ever seen in Europe.

  The Eurasian lynx is a larger feline that once coexisted with the Iberian lynx. Its distribution, however, was far more extensive, covering most of Europe. By the early twentieth century its last refuges were in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, the Carpathians in Romania (which are the European heaven for large carnivores) and the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Between 1972 and 1975 eight wild lynx from the Carpathians were released in the Swiss
Jura Mountains, where there are now more than 100, and some have been relocated to the eastern canton of St. Gallen. More reintroductions followed elsewhere in Europe, and now there is even talk of re-introducing the lynx into Scotland.

  For centuries seal hunting in Europe was relentless, and many populations were confined to breeding in caves. But people would pursue and slaughter them even there. Irishman Thomas Ó’Crohan left an account of one such hunt, which took place on Great Blasket Island in the late nineteenth century:

  The cave was…a very dangerous place, for there was always a strong swell around it, and it’s a long swim into it, and you have to swim sidelong…There was a strong suck of swell running. Often and again the mouth of the hole would fill up completely, so that you’d despair of ever seeing again anybody who happened to be inside…

  The Captain of the boat said, ‘Well, what did we come here for? Isn’t anybody ready to have a go at that hole’? It was my uncle who gave him his answer: ‘I’ll go in’, said he ‘if another man will come with me.’ Another man in the boat answered him ‘I’ll go in with you,’ says he. He was a man who stood in need of bit of seal meat, for he spent most of his life on short commons…

  Ó’Crohan’s uncle couldn’t swim, but he and the other man went in with a rope held between their teeth, and matches and candles under their hats. After a tremendous struggle they managed to kill all eight seals sheltering in the cave. ‘It’s odd the way the world changes,’ Ó’Crohan wrote much later, in the 1920s. ‘Nobody would put a bit of seal meat down his throat today…yet in those days it was a great resource to the people.’2 When hunting ceased, the grey and harbour seals recovered. Today Great Blasket Island is abandoned, and hundreds of grey seals breed on its beaches.

  But not all of Europe’s seals have done so well. Only about 700 individuals of the Mediterranean monk seal survive, across four populations. It is an ancient lineage: fossils dating to about six million years ago have been found in Australia. Until the eighteenth century it reproduced on beaches, but now it uses only inaccessible caves. Ongoing harassment, critically small population size, and ocean pollution, continue to jeopardise its future.