My Favorite Recent Hominin Reconstruction

I suspect "WE"-- call us Modern or in Europe Cro- Magnon-- thought that our recently extinct  fellow "hominins'",  to use the latest correct term--  looked odd, as we did to them,  even though we did mix genes.  Most reconstructions are so steeped in reflexive egalitarianism-- wrong word, but I'm looking for a synonym for sappy "everything is beautiful"- ism-- that all depictions look like that mythical Neandertal on the train mentioned so often in the fifties (TRAIN? Did we all live in New York or London??),  who just looked a bit uncomfortable in his Mad Men commuter suit. Which is why I do love these Denisovans, who would give any Modern kid proper nightmares; I suspect their (and our) western kin, the Neandertals, would have too...

Passenger Pigeons Again...

Another little sample from my evolving proposal:
 

After the Ice

... I will draw on contemporary scholarship from Pielou to Paul Martin to paint a picture of the late glacial world – one with little place for the passenger pigeon as a major ecological actor. One keystone will be Australian ecologist Tim Flannery’s (The Eternal Frontier) hypothesis that the North American continent, by virtue of its shape, weather, and geology, has never had a stable environment, especially since the last glaciation.

Giant Vampire Bat

...and while we are on the Pleistocene, why not a giant prehistoric Southwestern vampire bat that preyed on the megafauna? From Randy Babb's drawing in Dave Brown's Vampiro, for Dr Hypercube (the paperweight is a bronze nighthawk with hidden eggs by Steve Kestrel):

"Homotherium is perhaps my favorite felid..."

... says Nathaniel below. I agreed, then laughed at the oddity of a blog where readers could make that statement with a straight face, though there are a couple of others on the blogroll...

Here is my favorite image of Homotherium serum, a frightening predator, in life bigger than an African lion and possibly cursorial like a hyena, by Mauricio Anton for The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives. The paperweight is a young mammoth's tooth found by Joe Hutto in Florida; young mammoths were the major prey of a species of Homotherium at one European site.

And a mother and cubs of another color morph:

Weekend Links

... good, bad, & strange. Bear with my light blogging for a couple more weeks please! First, good:

Tazi pix! Right from the source, Almaty & environs-- the bearded ethnic Russian guy is Konstantin Plakhov, who bred our Ataika, seen here as a pup at Kostya's there and as a matron, here, below.


Libby with Kostya and Zhendet the tobet, in 2004:
Very Bad: you are not paranoid when they are after you. I particularly like this quote: "“They can get rid of hounding and deal with a segment of their community that is not well respected. Or they can potentially lose all bear and bobcat hunting.” Us. The oldest Paleolithic partnership. "First they came.." Fill in your favorite. Are you listening David Peterson? Think they'll keep bowhunting?

Weird but probably true paleo- science. A bad time for megafauna! HT Walter H.

Fat Horses

Large- mammal and Pleistocene maven Valerius Geist thinks more is going on with the spotted horse cave paintings below than just realism-- be cites their exaggerated fatness as well:

"Horses in top condition thus have a large gut-fill, expanded further by storage fat about intestines and omentum. Consequently, the belly bulges downward. Simultaneously, the fat stored on the rump and haunches generates rounded rump and haunch contours. Because of the hanging belly, at a distance, fat animals appear short-legged. To signal the wish for a fat horse the artist sketches or paints horses with very large haunches, bulging bellies and very short legs. To this may be added atlatl darts or throwing spear arching towards or stuck in the horses vitals. The image is totally non-representational. No artist ever saw a horse like the one painted in Lascaux Cave, illustrating Rosner's article. However, the artists skillful exaggerations generated meaningful symbolism: may spears kill for you a fat mare."

This struck fire with me as Mongolian artists STILL portray even ridden horses as fat. Two examples from my own collection (one with dog a present from Andrew Campbell) below:


Of course the actual horses are chunky too: an "Appy" from Olgii:

Val wrote back:
"Wow! thank you so much for this note and images. Indeed the horses look "delectable". I am still investigating, but it appears horse fat has a multiple of the omega-3 content of ruminant fats. That's brain-building fat! Nice to see the spotted coats. As to leg-placement, it's wrong- alas!"

Headline of the Week

From Arthur Wilderson: "Swedish flamingoes massacred in frenzied anteater attack".

It is actually true if a bit breathless...

Prompted by this and perhaps the recent Zoo posts, Arthur added some thoughts on a distant relative, the ground-dwelling late- Pleistocene monster Megatherium:

"I saw a mounted megatherium skeleton in Chicago's Field Museum. I was pretty impressed, and then thought, "yep, that's what they invented atlatls for." Trees, people, bears... I could readily imagine it backhanding any serious problem across the room with little difficulty.

"The notion of gutting and butchering a beast with such enormously robust bones and such a deep, massive torso with just little hand axes was fairly daunting too. Definitely a job for all the men, women and children in the band, well, those that aren't standing guard to discourage the attention that all that blood and offal would inevitably attract."

Speaking of which, the new crash- of- the- megafauna book, Once and Future Giants by Sharon Levy, is good-- much on the late great Paul Martin, though it goes well beyond his original thoughts and refines them. Apparently his fascination with the late Pleistocene started when a mentor put a ball of giant sloth dung in his hand-- as he did to me.

Thanks!

Busy-- just finished an assignment for Shooting Sportsman, starting two pieces on spec for Double Gun Journal, taking notes for my forthcoming Living Bird review, reading galleys of Pete Dunne's new installment in his seasonal birding series, Arctic Autumn (outspokenly pro- hunting, among other virtues, and yes, he gets a blurb!)...

But need to thank whoever got Levy's new "Pleistocene Overkill" book Once & Future Giants from my Wish List, and whoever thought of and sent The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, which also looks close to my heart's obsessions.

Re Overkill: I am aware Paul Martin, who first conceived of the Pleistocene Blitz: an inspiration to multidisciplinary researchers and to me personally though I only met him once, when he handed me a 12,000 year- old chunk of giant sloth dung; Libby's brother's PhD advisor; brave survivor of polio's effects for over 50 years; controversial proponent of "re- wilding", and of, in Michael McClure's and Grayal Farr's phrase, of Bringing Back the Pleistocene, is dead at 82. I hope I can convince busy Reid to put him in some proper paleontological- archaeological context (he crossed boundaries-- Libby's brother was a palynologist!) But meanwhile: Paul Martin, RIP.

One Link...

Long day, more visitors coming. But my speculations on the nature of the passenger pigeon at Living Bird are now online. Check them out and let me know what you think?

Science Links

A BBC news article seems to point to the "Overkill Hypothesis" as the major cause of the extinction of the American megafauna.

Studies of dung preserved in a Wisconsin lake suggest

"... a slow decline in megafauna that began about 15,000 years ago and appeared to last for about 1,000 years.

"This discovery rules out one idea that the extinction might have been caused by an extraterrestrial object striking Earth 13,000 years ago.

(Snip)

"This study is exciting because we're getting some solid data about the ecological consequences of the removal of these animals," said Ms Gill.

"After their decline we see an increase in the more warm-adapted deciduous trees, and an increase in charcoal [which means there was] an increase in the number of forest fires."

The last may have some bearing on my Passenger Pigeon project, A Feathered Tempest.

The Eleanora's falcon already leads a weird life, nesting on Mediterranean islands in the fall to intercept the songbird migration. Now it appears to also make one of the most amazing migrations.

"In total, the bird flies more than 9,500 kilometres across the African continent from the Balearic and Columbretes Islands before reaching the island of Madagascar. Some of the previously-obscure secrets now revealed by the scientists show that these falcons migrate by both day and night, and cross supposed ecological barriers such as the Sahara Desert." (HT Laura Niven).

A gallery of the wild apple forests of the Tian Shan. I have been there let's hope they don't all fall to villas for rich Kazakh businessmen. (HT David Williamson).

Mammoth Art

An incredible artifact, a piece of bone with an image of a mammoth carved in it, has been found in Vero Beach. It may be as old as 14,000 years.

"No similar carved figure has ever been authenticated in the United States, or anywhere in this hemisphere.

(Snip)

"Etched into the bone by a highly sharpened stone tool or the tooth of the animal is the clear image of a walking adult mammoth or mastodon. Extensive tests over the past two months have shown that the image was created when the bone was fresh, presumably right after the animal it belonged to was killed or died.

"Experts who have examined the bone, found at a location which has not been publicly disclosed on the northern side of Vero Beach, concluded the carving and surface are of the same age – 12,000 to 14,000 years old — with no evidence of recent tampering (see accompanying story on tests that have been performed to date).

"Dr. Barbara Purdy, professor emerita of Anthropology at the University of Florida, on May 19th told Vero Beach 32963 discovery of an image carved into a bone by a prehistoric human is unprecedented in North America, and she called the find by fossil hunter James Kennedy “the oldest, most spectacular, and rare work of art in the Americas.”

HT Grayal Farr

Who Were the Cannibals?

More and more it has been suggested that we interacted little if at all with our close cousins the Neanderthals. Though there is still some controversy it mostly seems that we did not interbreed, finding each other too strange.

Some have wondered, more in literature than in science, if the appearance of our hairier relaatives made tehm the prototype for trolls and wild men-- "Grendel".

Now it seems we may have been their monster rather than they ours. A new study in the Journal of Anthropological sciences has found evidence of Neanderthal bones butchered like those of deer, and even Neanderthal teeth used as ornaments by our species.

"...Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

"Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said."

Of course the conflict may have gone both ways-- Neanderthals were physically stronger than Cro- Magnons. But it doesn't look like we were friends, at least in Europe.

The "Mammoth Killer"

Walter Hingley sent this good collection of links, pro and con, on the possible asteroid hit that may have contributed too the late- time extinctions. Maybe we didn't eat them all.

Re- Wilding

Laura Niven sends a link to this Wired magazine piece on the controversial practice of "Re- Wilding" -- reintroducing the megafauna to environments that have lost them.

To me the most interesting part is that Sergey Zimov's Pleistocene Park is succeeding as predicted in changing swampy taiga to biologically more productive steppe.

This agrees with the premises of an intriguing book, William Stolzenburg's Where the Wild Things Were. This is one I expect many readers of the blog should check out. In it, Stolzenburg examines in detail such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the deer- dominated eastern forest (and its other problem, the rise of fragmentation and small predators with no checks on their numbers, leading to bird species losses previously blamed on Central American deforestation); how cougars protect some public lands in Utah from losing their cottonwoods, while ones with heavier human use lose them; and how the loss of predators on islands in South American reservoirs leads by steps to the domination of leaf-cutter ants, which devastate them.

I thought the most interesting part was a chapter telling how the study of sea otter and seal predation by killer whales led some biologists to realize that they had only turned to such "little" prey because their original food source was great whales, an utterly un- PC fact that still is controversial in some quarters. But they have seen a chilling scene of orcas ganging up on a pod of sperm whales, who form into a circle with heads in (to no avail-- apparently most were killed!) Stolzenburg reminds us that the old whalers called them "whale killers", and that their teeth are virtually identical to those of a Tyrannosaur. "The killer whale came equipped for more than mere one- ton sea lions."

Stolzenburg makes a case that the top predators ultimately "control" everything from songbirds to kelp forests. In most habitats we may not know what "natural" looks like.

First Dogs?

New candidates for the first dogs? HT Cat Urbigkit.

Maybe, though there also may be at least one older claimant. I wonder if DNA supports the multiple origins idea?

Teeth

Polymath scientist- archaeologist- artist- writer- rancher Joe Hutto blew through the other day after running down to Catron County, on his way to home in Wyoming via the Carolinas. He brought us a beautiful dark Late Pleistocene mammoth tooth he had retrieved from the black waters of the Auscilla River on the border of Florida and Georgia.



I am holding a cast of a mastodon tooth given me by Laura Niven, and I really have to get out more this spring-- even given my puffy down vest I look like I outweigh Joe by fifty pounds-- yikes!

Joe's amazing turkey book can be found here. He has one forthcoming on bighorn sheep that may be even better.

Bill Buford did a good piece on Joe in the New Yorker last year but I can't find it online.

Meteor Strike Update

Dr. Valerius Geist has some ideas.

"There may be some thing to this meteor strike. However, the cosmic event did
not get rid of megaherbivores, such as mammoth and mastodons. However, the
short, but severe depletion pf large prey may have eliminated Arctodus
simus, and Miracinonyx. They seem to be gone about 13,000 BP. With Arctodus
gone the continent was open to human colonization. What is so nice: what I
wrote about the peopling of North America in my little book Whitetail Tracks
has now been confirmed. (a) the earliest humans in South America were not
Indian, but primitive Caucasoid-Negroid. (b) the earliest skeletons on the
Pacific coast are indeed Ainu! I also claimed that between 60,000 t0 12,000
BP there would have been thousands upon thousands of attempts to colonize
North America, which all failed. That means that you can expect an odd human
site here and there within that long time span. Well there is now a furor
over a few such sites! This interdisciplinary way of working does work."

Ice Age Impact?

Scroll down from here to that title to hear a Canadian broadcast on the possible 13,000- year old meteor strike that may have been implicated in the North American Pleistocene extinctions. We will be hearing more about this. (HT Walter Hingley).