Image credit to Beth Zaiken
Why we need the skeletons in humanity’s closet more than ever
A jaguar stalks peccaries through dense brush as a California condor circles far above. A Columbian mammoth slowly lumbers by wild horses, yesterday’s camel, and Glyptotheriums as bison bulls fight for mates. The site of the scene I’m painting? New Mexico, circa 12,000 years ago.
These animals dominated our world no farther back than several millennia ago. Nine-foot tall kangaroos and wombats the weight of cars from down under, horses, giant sloths, and mammoths wandered the Great Plains here in America, and hyenas and macaques dwelled in Spanish plains during the Pleistocene epoch, colloquially known as the Ice Age. But where did they go?
Beginning about 13,000 years ago (45–40,000 in Australia), a cascading wave of extinctions, dubbed the Quaternary extinction event, shook ecosystems around the world. Their megafauna (animals weighing over 100 pounds) began to die en masse. Probably the most famous example, the woolly mammoth, managed to fend off extinction until 4,000 years ago. The world’s biggest — and most important — herbivores and carnivores suddenly departed, leaving ecosystems reeling. In a recent paper from Yale, Bill Hathaway found that the number of wildfires globally increased due to the surplus of uneaten brush. Populations of flora and fauna reliant on these megafauna quickly deteriorated, such as California condors or the beloved avocado. Worse yet, entire ecosystems disappeared. The mammoth steppe, a dry, windswept grassland ecosystem that spanned across the northern hemisphere disappeared without megafauna crushing and eating the seedlings of trees. Without them, the steppe turned into forest.
There are two major theories for their extinction: one that says climate change killed off the megafauna, and the other, the “overkill hypothesis” pioneered by Paul S. Martin, states that human settlers hunted them to extinction and rapidly damaged their habitat.
The increasingly accepted theory today among scientists is the overkill hypothesis, as the best evidence points towards human responsibility. Archaeological evidence has shown that each continental extinction coincides with or occurs shortly after human migration into the area. Humans entered Australia 65,000 years ago, and the extinctions in Australia soon followed. The American extinctions started 13,000 years ago, the same time as a new migration of people arrived — the Clovis people. The Clovis were big-game hunters with advanced spear-tip technology capable of taking down any large game they wanted. In Europe, the migration of the first agriculturalists led to a severe altering of the landscape, from primarily a mosaic of forests and grassland to domestic pasture. This, combined with hunting, spelled the end of many species.
Despite the fact the extinctions did coincide with a cooling event, the entire Ice Age was made of warming and cooling events. Every animal that went extinct survived all of the previous climatic events, and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t have survived this one. However, a disrupted climate would be harmful to any population, and the likeliest scenario is that humans with advanced hunting knowledge found disrupted populations, and the combined stress pushed many over the edge.
The concept of the “6th mass extinction” has become common knowledge, disseminated through the media and activists. But with the story I’ve presented to you, we must reconsider the common narrative; is the Anthropocene mass extinction post-Columbian in its recency, or has this human-created extinction event been going on for the past ten thousand-odd years? And if humans are principally accountable for this, what is our responsibility in fixing it now, in the Holocene?
Humanity’s modern relationship with the natural world is warped. We’ve egotistically separated ourselves from nature for millennia, saying we’re above beast, calling ourselves civilized. Our intense artificial separation from the natural world is the primary cause of a vast amount of modern woes that afflict us. But the biggest damage we see, though, is in flammable rivers, trash-soaked landscapes, and rainforests, slashed-and-burned for cattle; in holes in the ozone layer, in California burning, in islands drowning. There’s a truly enormous amount of progress we must achieve to fix it: from changing our food systems from industrial to regenerative agriculture, giving back ownership of wildlands to indigenous tribes, and restructuring our consumerist society to function with much slower economic growth. But one of the single biggest fixes we must make — and quickly — is healing wildlands and ecosystems.
We cannot do this with the biggest players, keystone species, missing.
Rewilding is a new and progressive conservation philosophy that advocates for returning animals, specifically large animals, to the area they formerly inhabited.
This doesn’t merely pertain to extinct behemoths of prehistory. Many extant species have been driven to extinction in parts of their range in historic times, like beavers, wolves, black and brown bears, elk, bison, and more.
These animals are the focus of mainstream conservation programs, which is certainly good, but to successfully repair our ecosystems, scientists must be much more ambitious. Many living animals are extirpated from their prehistoric ranges. Horses, now restricted to Eurasia, have been gone from North America for only 5,000 years — a blink in ecological time. Parrots once flew through Arizona and New Mexico’s foggy sky islands. The iconic elk of western North America ranged to France, and hippos, too, lived in Europe’s Mediterranean coastal water only three millennia ago alongside hyenas and lions. Komodo dragon fossils, dated to 50,000 years ago, were found in Queensland, Australia, meaning it likely went extinct due to the direct or indirect effects of people. Even dholes, a strikingly Indian canine, then thrived from Alaska to Mexico.
Right now, we need to focus on what’s living because they’re here, ready to reintroduce. But with the miracle of advancing genetics technologies such as CRISPR, we very well may be able to restore what we thought was lost forever. Woolly rhinos, Columbian mammoths, and saber-toothed cats are all on the table for revival. This technology is tantalizingly close to being our reality: Colossal, a genetics company, recently received fifteen million dollars to revive the woolly mammoth and plans to do so in the next six years. Other projects in motion include revival efforts for the quagga, aurochs, and Pyrenean ibex. The future of de-extinction is already here.
Conservation is all but entirely looked at from sterile, scientific angles. But John Muir — and others like him — knew better. His relationship with nature was an entirely personal one: religious, in fact. This is relevant because too often this topic is bogged down with banal politics and economics which distract from what is important. Nature, especially its biggest members, brings wonder to our lives like few things can. Despite this, we are continuing a millennia-long process of robbing our children and grandchildren of this wonder that we’ve taken for granted.
It’s hard to believe that humans have lived side-by-side with prehistory’s (recent) behemoths: look no further than the stunning San Juan River mammoth petroglyphs. We are living in fragments and shards of what once was, of what should be, and I want to see the day when yesterday’s megafauna heal today’s broken ecosystems. We will be the first people in 12,000 years to walk with these creatures, and one day, hopefully, the Great Plains will again look akin to the Serengeti. The Anthropocene has begun, and thus has the revival of the epoch of ice giants.
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