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NY Review of Books, MAY 9, 2019 ISSUE
Serengeti on the Seine
Natalie Angier
Europe: A Natural History
by Tim Flannery, with Luigi Boitani
Atlantic Monthly, 357 pp., $27.00
Alytes obstetricans, the common midwife toad, may be as small as a bar
of hotel soap with skin as drab as leaf litter, yet its life story is,
quite simply, one for the ages. The job that lends the toads their
informal name is done by the male. Come breeding season, a female toad
will solicit the services of a male, who mounts her from behind,
gripping her torso with his front legs while angling his rear toes to
stimulate her genitals. A few minutes pass, he gives her midriff a firm
squeeze, and out pops the “baby”: a glistening mass of toad eggs, linked
together like pearls on a string, which the male promptly fertilizes
with a shot of sperm. As the female hops away—her task is
through—midwife becomes nursemaid: the male carefully untangles the
inseminated strands of eggs and wraps them around his body. He will
carry this cargo everywhere for the next month or two, cleaning and
hydrating the eggs until they’re ready to hatch. Yes, he’s a model
modern father.
Alytes is also more European than a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. As Tim
Flannery explains in Europe: A Natural History, his deeply satisfying
and splendidly written survey of the geological, zoological,
climatological, and biophilosophical roots of that heavyweight set of
coordinates we call Europe, midwife toads are among the only animals
that survive from the dawn of the European project 100 million years
ago. That is when the European subcontinent, then a tropical
archipelago, began to consolidate and take the shape it more or less has
today, and when Europe as a biologically distinct landscape emerged.
It was the last phase of the age of the dinosaurs, and Europe certainly
had its share of fantastic giants. In 2002 researchers discovered in the
Transylvania region of Romania what may have been the world’s largest
pterodactyl. Hatzegopteryx had enormous, leathery wings that could
enfold it like Dracula’s cloak or open to a thirty-foot span—about as
long as a London bus—and a nine-foot head equipped with a dagger-like
beak, perfect for spearing the smaller dinosaurs on which it preyed.
Ammonite mollusks with spiraling opalescent shells the size of truck
tires swam in the tropical waters off Europe, while in the north vast
sheets of planktonic algae called coccolithophores bobbed in the waves,
their skeletons destined to end up as the large chalk deposits found in
Belgium, France, and, most famously, the white cliffs of Dover.
Nearly all of the “core fauna” from Europe’s infancy have long since
gone extinct, but not the midwife toads. “More venerable and more
distinctly European than any other creatures, the alytids are living
fossils that should be considered nature’s nobility,” Flannery writes.
They are “as precious as the platypus and lungfish.” And if the name
“midwife toad” has a faintly literary feel to it, evoking an image of a
beloved Victorian children’s book, so do other creatures in Flannery’s
European bestiary. We learn about true moles, sleekly pelted mammals
with tiny eyes, tiny ears, and large claws that spend most of their
lives underground. Members of the Talpidae family are now found
scattered throughout the world, but recent research suggests that the
mole first evolved in Europe—appropriate enough for the star of The Wind
in the Willows. Europe’s most ancient mammalian group turns out to be
the dormice, which are not mice but rather small, arboreal rodents with
furry tails that episodically hibernate: no wonder Lewis Carroll’s
tea-partying dormouse was a chronic narcoleptic. Literary and biological
archetypes at times fortuitously intertwine.
But what exactly is Europe, and who or what counts as European? Flannery
realizes that the definitional task is “a slippery undertaking.” After
all, contemporary Europe is not a distinct continent but “an appendix—an
island-ringed peninsula projecting into the Atlantic from the western
end of Eurasia.” Flannery finds unity in geology: for his purposes,
“Europe is best defined by the history of its rocks.” Similar underlying
rock formations link Ireland in the west to the Caucasus region in the
east, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the north to Syria and
Gibraltar in the south. So defined, Flannery writes, “Turkey is part of
Europe, but Israel is not; the rocks of Turkey share a common history
with the rest of Europe, while Israel’s rocks originate in Africa.”
Of course, there’s also the more amorphous condition of feeling like a
European, by dint of ancestry or cultural, political, and religious
preferences. Flannery, who is Australian, admits to feeling a strong
European identity, perhaps an inevitable result of his education: the
stories of Europe’s wars and monarchs “were drilled into me as a child,
but I was taught next to nothing about Australia’s trees and
landscapes,” he writes. When he first visited Europe as a student, the
landscape felt deeply familiar. How could one not be dazzled by it and
its ancient, vibrant culture, “whose achievements include the creation
of the first pictorial art and human figurines, the first musical
instruments, and the first domestication of animals”?
In view of current events, Flannery’s Europhilia might seem poorly
timed; not only is the European Union struggling to remain unified, but
white supremacy movements—which are, ultimately, European supremacy
movements—have surged. Yet a major theme of Flannery’s book debunks any
notion of white supremacy or the inherent grandness of the Nordic,
Germanic, or “Aryan” genome. Europe has always been at the crossroads of
the world, a place where immigrant species from Africa, Asia, and the
Americas have converged, mingled, and hybridized, blending genome with
genome to yield a bounty of new species that then colonized new lands.
Europe is a place of mongrels—and Europeans are “very special bastards
indeed,” Flannery writes. “There can be no more dangerous concept than
the idea of racial or genetic purity.” This is particularly true when it
comes to our own evolution. We may think of Africa as the cradle of the
human race, but Flannery argues that the emergence of modern Homo
sapiens owed much to Europe, the global centrifuge where our forebears
had one final opportunity to trade DNA with other members of the hominid
line—before we moderns were the last ones standing.
Flannery’s focus on Europe serves as a handy storytelling device,
allowing him to convey a tremendous amount of natural history while
maintaining a plot and point of view. Europe is our hero; watch our hero
grow. Scenes are vividly, sensorily drawn. You feel the warmth of the
ancient Tethys Sea, and you want to scoop up the single-celled
Nummulites that crept along the Tethys floor like mobile coins,
Methuselah’s spare change, sucking up detritus over a lifespan of a
hundred years. Because most of the history takes place after an asteroid
wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million
years ago, extinct mammals, which are often given short shrift in favor
of T-rexes or velociraptors, here take center stage. It’s startling to
realize how teeming and diverse Europe’s megafauna used to be, a kind of
Serengeti on the Seine.
With the onset of the Oligocene epoch, 33.9 million years ago, Earth’s
lengthy tropical age gave way to a cooler, drier climate. A
downward-sloping portion of Europe’s underlying tectonic plate broke off
and began to push the embryonic Alps mountain range skyward. At the same
time, Africa’s plate shifted direction and headed straight toward
Europe, gradually closing off the Tethys Sea and further uplifting the
Alps. Waterways that had separated Europe from Asia disappeared, and for
a brief spell a land bridge connected Europe with North America.
As a result, Europe was flooded with animal immigrants from all points
of the compass. In came the first cats, the first songbirds, tapirs,
marmots, and hedgehogs; dog-bears that looked like dogs but were related
to bears; bear-dogs that looked like bears but were related to dogs;
ruminants that resembled musk deer with fangs; and the Oligocene’s
“signature species,” the entelodonts, or “hell pigs,” apex predators of
the day. Flannery is no fan of pigs, having watched wild ones in
Australia rip apart lambs, and he revels in bringing the repellent
ferocity of this extinct clan to life: their bull-sized bodies bearing
massive heads “garishly ornamented with bony warts the size and shape of
a human penis,” their “crocodilian jaws” displaying “savage tusks and
grinding molars.” Fossil evidence suggests that entelodonts would run
down entire herds of their prey in an orgy of carnivory, slashing and
attacking everything in sight and saving the extra meat for later. “I
wouldn’t be surprised,” Flannery notes wryly, “if George Orwell took
inspiration from the Oligocene for his novel Animal Farm.”
The Miocene epoch that followed, stretching from about 23 million to 5.3
million years ago, was “arguably Europe’s most enchanting.” The Alps had
reached their current elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, migratory
corridors had widened, the climate was mild, and mammalian diversity
exploded. Europe hosted up to fifteen species of rhinos, as well as
saber-toothed and scimitar-toothed cats, long- and short-necked
giraffes, and the improbable chalicotheres, herbivorous, odd-toed
ungulates with heads like horses and steeply sloping bodies like
gorillas. Miocene Europe had its genuine gorillas as well, along with an
array of other hominids—the group that includes living and extinct great
apes and humans.
More specifically, Europe had early hominins—the taxonomic descriptor
for fully upright apes, of which humans are the only surviving species.
In fact, some of the oldest known hominin fossils have been found in
Greece: a 7.2-million-year-old jawbone and a 5.7-million-year-old set of
footprints thought to belong to a bipedal ape called Graecopithecus.
Over the past couple of years, paleontologists have acridly debated the
significance of the Graecopithecus evidence, and whether it indicates
that hominin evolution began in Europe rather than in Africa. Whatever
the case, soon after those footprints were laid, hominins abandoned
Europe, and would not reappear for another four million years.
The brief Pliocene epoch brought Europe’s last great flowering of
biodiversity, and giantism ruled. At nine feet long and weighing
fifty-seven pounds, Laophis crotaloides was the largest venomous snake
of all time; the land tortoise Titanochelon had the bulk of a Volkswagen
Beetle; and off Europe’s shores swam the megalodon shark, twice the
length of today’s great white and with a bite five to ten times more
forceful.
Those huge jaws wouldn’t bite for long. The climate was cooling, and
with the Pleistocene epoch that began 2.59 million years ago came a
series of ice ages. Glaciers and ice sheets spread across the globe like
spilled paint, covering, at their widest reach, 30 percent of Earth’s
surface. Permafrost extended down to Provence, while the future sites of
London, Paris, and Berlin were “a vast polar desert, all but devoid of
plant life.” More than half of extant mammals and a broad selection of
reptiles, birds, and other creatures were wiped from “the cosy café of
temperate Europe.”
Time for a different clientele. New animals appeared that could weather
the chill, including giant beavers, moose, large jaguars, reindeer,
woolly rhinos, and those possibly oversold Ice Age celebrities, the
woolly mammoths. And it is during the Pleistocene that early humans
appeared in Europe in significant numbers and, for better or worse,
began to reshape the world. Flannery briefly discusses Homo erectus, who
arrived from Africa about 1.8 million years ago, apparently had the
social skills to care for the toothless and disabled among them, and may
even have been able to speak. He is far more interested, however, in the
next arrivistes, who emigrated from Africa about 400,000 years ago: Homo
neanderthalensis.
What to make of the Neanderthals? When researchers began studying
Neanderthal remains in the mid-nineteenth century, they derided the
species as beetle-browed brutes who were clearly our inferiors,
incapable of “moral and theistic conceptions,” as William King, the
geologist who named them, put it. King’s contemporary, the German
biologist Ernst Haeckel, proposed naming them Homo stupidus. That
derogatory attitude carried over well into the twentieth century, but
recent molecular and paleoanthropological studies have yielded a far
more nuanced portrait of Neanderthals. Their brains were at least as big
as ours, they had tamed fire, and they displayed respect for their dead.
They were also tall and considerably stronger and more thickly boned
than we are, with barrel chests ideal for heat retention. Their pale
skin maximized absorption of the meager sunlight—critical for making
vitamin D—and their large, often blue, eyes helped them see in caves and
in the low light of a European winter. They were obligate carnivores
(that is, they needed meat), and they fashioned elegant and finely
balanced hunting javelins, attaching flint heads to wooden shafts with
an adhesive they prepared from the pitch of tree bark.
A male midwife toad carrying eggs on its back, Vaucluse, France
Neanderthals had an artistic streak, too, enlivening cavern walls with
ochred outlines of their hands, hashtags, and a variety of abstract
shapes. They drilled holes into seashells as though to make jewelry, and
arranged snapped-off stalactites into elaborate ring-like and possibly
sacred structures up to twenty-two feet across. But life was hard, and
there were never more than 70,000 Neanderthals in Europe at any given
time. By 41,000 years ago, Neanderthal populations were in sharp
decline, and soon afterward they went extinct—in part at the hands of
another immigrant group, modern Homo sapiens.
Or so the usual story goes. Flannery makes a plausible case that
Neanderthals didn’t truly die off, and that it wasn’t modern humans from
Africa who took over and colonized Europe. Based on bone and DNA
evidence from an important site near the Iron Gates on the Danube River
in Romania, Flannery suggests that a “chance encounter” in the area some
38,000 years ago allowed Neanderthals and humans to essentially
hybridize, and that these “very special bastards” are the ones who
spread through the subcontinent and displaced any unalloyed Neanderthals
in their way. He points out that Ice Age Europe was a forbidding
environment, and that tropical hominids would have had trouble
outcompeting residents adapted for the cold. But through hybridization,
the merging of genetic and cultural novelty from Africa with local
adaptations and survivalist skills, a new brand of European arose who
soon swept everyone else aside.
Gene-sequencing studies have shown that people of European and Asian
descent today carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, less than 2
percent of their total genome on average. That may seem like an
insignificant amount, but it’s not the same 2 percent from one person to
the next: taken together, up to 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome
lives on. Recent research links lingering Neanderthal DNA sequences to
variations in hair and skin color, sleep patterns, moodiness, and
susceptibility to illnesses like diabetes and Crohn’s disease.
Intriguingly, the modern Y chromosome, which determines maleness,
appears to be completely free of Neanderthal DNA.
Human–Neanderthal hybridization may help explain the astonishing
artistic revolution that soon swept through Paleolithic Europe: the cave
paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France and Altamira in
northern Spain, bone flutes, ivory carvings of human–lion chimeras,
Venus figurines with their bulging breasts and vulvas. Flannery explores
Paleolithic art in some detail, and I was disappointed by his
unquestioning acceptance of the idea that “the creation of Paleolithic
art was a largely male activity,” much of it a form of early graffiti
that is “earthy and familiarly human, making the minds and culture of
our distant ancestors readily accessible.” Accessible to whom? The
thoroughly modern he-man?
I wish Flannery had mentioned recent scholarship on the Venus figurines,
which argues that the elaborately carved representations of head
coverings, string skirts, and bandoliers show signs of a female hand.
And what about those child- and woman-sized handprints that tattoo the
surfaces of various Stone Age ateliers? As the scholar Ellen Dissanayake
has observed, the act of “artifying” in traditional cultures is not the
province of men alone, but rather a joyous communal affair.
With humans fully established in Europe from the Pleistocene onward,
their impact on the natural world would soon rival a force of nature. As
the climate warmed and the ice retreated, habitable land opened up that
should have invited waves of new large grazers and their predators—but
the skill of human hunters kept many megamammals at bay. Even before
agriculture, people were recasting ecosystems on a large scale, burning
grasses to promote new growth and attract desired game animals, for
example. And then came planned planting and animal domestication, most
importantly of the cow. European civilization, Flannery says, was built
on the back of a heifer, and he reminds us that Europe was named after
Europa, the “cow-faced” one, who mated with Zeus in his guise as a white
bull. Further enhancing Europe’s love for cows was the rapid spread
through the population of a genetic trait for lactose tolerance, which
allowed people to digest fresh milk, cheese, and other calorie-rich
dairy products.
Carnivores that threatened livestock were persecuted mercilessly, none
more so than the wolf; the fourteenth century, when the Black Death
killed off nearly two thirds of Europe’s human population, was a golden
era for wolves. Interestingly, another phenomenon of the Middle Ages
helped protect other forms of wildlife. The tradition of caccia medieval
restricted the hunting of many game animals to landowners and their
families, and commoners were barred from large game reserves, a few of
which remained in place through World War II. By the first half of the
twentieth century, however, “almost every available scrap of land” not
given over to leisure “was being squeezed for every ounce of
productivity it could yield,” and the European population had soared to
400 million. The natural part of European history appeared to be nearing
an end.
Yet nature is persistent, even mulish. Today, Europe’s population
approaches 750 million, our feckless burning of fossil fuels is warming
the climate at thirty times the rate of the changes that melted the
great ice sheets about 21,000 years ago, and Europe is heating up faster
than the global average. Flannery understands the threat that climate
change poses to Earth’s biodiversity, but he also offers reasons for
hope. With most people now living in cities and along the coasts, nature
is reclaiming the interior land they’ve abandoned. Wolves and brown
bears were nearly extirpated by the mid-twentieth century, but today
there are more of them in Europe than in the contiguous United States.
Seals sun themselves on London’s Canary Wharf. Wild boar roam the
streets of Rome. The Iberian lynx, the largest carnivore unique to
Europe, was tottering on the rim of extinction just fifteen years ago.
Today, thanks in part to an intensive conservation and reintroduction
effort, five hundred of the magnificent cats now hunt rabbits in the
forests of Spain and Portugal. “Europe is once again becoming a wild and
environmentally exciting place,” Flannery says.
Yet more can and should be done. Flannery describes a number of
rewilding projects in various stages of development, and he discusses
the difficulties of determining how much restoration should be left to
nature, and how much demands some human tinkering—through captive
breeding and reintroduction programs, the culling of excess or
undesirable animals, creating artificial islands, and the like. He also
addresses recent widely touted efforts to resurrect extinct species like
the woolly mammoth through DNA technology. As Flannery sees it, such a
Spielbergian prospect demands that we first sort out what we mean by
“wild,” and which era of Europe’s long natural history we’re hoping to
recreate. Does it make any sense, in a warming world, to resuscitate a
shaggy behemoth from the Ice Age? On the other hand, Flannery suggests
that, if the reforestation trends continue, Europe might do well to
consider importing other megafauna that once called the subcontinent
home, including rhinos, elephants, and lions. Why expect Africa to make
room for the world’s remaining giants, he asks, if Europe won’t do it, too?
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