All posts tagged Homo neanderthalensis

Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden (2004)

Factual history has always played a central role in Foden’s fiction, possibly, arguably, to its detriment.

Thus his harrowing account of a (fictional) Scottish doctor who gets caught up in Idi Amin’s murderous regime in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ begins to go off the rails when it tries to have our hero present at an increasingly unlikely number of actual historical events.

Similarly, ‘Zanzibar’ is a novel about an American couple who get caught up in the 1998 terrorist attacks on embassies in East Africa, a text which, at some points, puts the fiction completely on hold while it delivers straight lectures about the origins of al-Qaeda, or the Starr Enquiry into Bill Clinton, or the precise functioning of a Tomahawk cruise missile, among many other factual digressions.

In this book, Foden’s fondness for historical fact triumphs over fiction: it is not a novel at all. It is a factual account of actual historical events but not done in the dry tones of an academic historian. These real events are viewed from a deliberately playful, quirky angle, written in a consistently whimsical style, and with many scenes and conversations imagined. Semi-fictionalised history…

On Lake Tanganyika

At the outbreak of the First World War, Germany ‘owned’ the colony of German East Africa, roughly present-day Tanzania, bordered by Portuguese East Africa to the south (modern Mozambique) and British East Africa to the north (modern Kenya and Uganda).

The key geographical feature of the region was Lake Tanganyika (at 420 miles, the longest freshwater lake in the world) which the Germans dominated by means of several big warships, two motorboats, a fleet of dhows and some Boston whalers.

Dominance of the lake was important because a) it was the lynchpin to ownership of the entire territory and war is about controlling territory; which in turn b) gave the Germans access to a potentially large supply of native or askari troops, with c) the worst-case scenario of Germ,any assembling an African army from across the region and descending down the Nile to take (British-run) Egypt and threatening the route to the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, India (p.46).

In 1915, with the war in stalemate on the Western Front and Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign about to lurch to disaster, the Admiralty was persuaded by a British big game hunter named John Lee, of a plan to combat and destroy the German battleships on Lake Tanganyika. The plan involved transporting the parts for a couple of fast motorboats by ship to South Africa, then north by rail up through Rhodesia, then by land and river through the Belgian Congo, then by train again East and so, finally, onto the lake directly opposite the German base at Kigoma.

Here the motorboats would be quickly assembled and set to attack the German warships. The whole expedition was put under the command of a well-known eccentric and semi-disgraced naval officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson.

A factual account

I initially thought this was one more of Foden’s deeply historical fictions. It certainly opens with an obviously imagined scene of a big game hunter stalking an elephant, using fictional devices to imagine his thoughts and actions. This, it turns out, is the big game hunter John Lee, whose plan is going to kick start the narrative. It establishes Foden’s method basing everything on documentary evidence of the historical events but freely inventing ‘fictional’ details, especially the characters’ dialogue.

What made me realise it is indeed a history is the extent of Foden’s quotations from other histories, from numerous memoirs, articles and lectures – every page has quotes from other books about the First World War or Africa – and from the flotilla of footnotes bobbing at the bottom of every page. These serve to indicate the scope of Foden’s research and reading and generally bolster the authenticity of the narrative, augmented by four pages of maps at the start, showing just where everything happened, and a three-page bibliography (listing 41 books and articles) at the end. Also at the end is a nifty page showing silhouettes of all the ships involved in the narrative, indicating their relative sizes.

Whimsy

Yet despite all this factual fol-de-rol, it’s not really a book for adults. This begins to be indicated 1) by the frivolous title, 2) by the deliberate ‘Swallows and Amazons’ hand-drawn style of the maps, and 3) by the fact that every chapter starts with an equally children’s book-style illustration (by Matilda Hunt). These all give the visual impression that it is a Swallows and Amazons-style children’s book.

Most of all it’s indicated by the book’s brisk skipping over massively important historical facts (such as the outbreak and progress of the Great War, the conception and deployment of the Gallipoli campaign) in favour of foregrounding the maximum amount of silliness.

For the whole thing is played for laughs, liberally sprinkled with scenes of high farce. Take one of the earliest scenes in the book, which introduces us to the future leader of the expedition, Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson, watching the vessel he was meant to be captain of being torpedoed and sunk while he was irresponsibly having a drink in the bar of an English harbourside hotel. The general idea is that Spicer-Simpson was an obsessive incompetent who the Admiralty was happy only too happy to send on some wild goose chase into darkest Africa.

The narrative goes out of its way to wring the maximum amount of comic effect from the eccentricities of many of the key characters. Take Spicer-Simpson’s insistence on only smoking handmade cigarettes with his name monogrammed on them. Or Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, ‘one of the earliest English aviators’ and his habit of affecting a monocle and a taste for Worcester sauce as an aperitif and his nickname Piccadilly Johnny. It’s history rewritten in the mode of Jeeves and Wooster. Michael Palin’s ‘Ripping Yarns’. History for the lolz.

It goes out of its way to emphasise the whimsical and and droll: Tubby Eastward acquires a chimpanzee he names Josephine (p.99). When they capture a goat which was a mascot on a German ship, it turns out the goat will let Josephine ride on its back (p.204). A Tanganyika guidebook advises that dead Zebra noses make pretty slippers (p.104). All this before we get onto the expedition leader’s fondness for wearing skirts, admittedly made from army khaki, but which he insisted were suitable for the hot weather, to the derision of pretty much everyone else on the expedition (p.171).

This question of whether it’s for adults was answered for me on page 35, where he gives us a lengthy footnote explaining what the Crystal Palace was, how it was transplanted to Sydenham, and burned down in 1936. He has to explain what the Crystal Palace was. From that point onwards I realised this is an intelligent child’s version of history, and wondered what the book’s target age group was intended to be: 12? 16? A feeling reinforced by the egregious use of exclamation marks to ram home the comedy.

It was supposedly a secret mission, although Kapitän Zimmer’s memoirs reveal that he knew there was a British naval expedition on its way to the lake by late May 1915: before it had even set off! (p.56)

More accurately, maybe, as Conan Doyle wrote somewhere, it’s for the adventuresome boy of any age.

Basic facts

The expedition was officially named the Naval African Expedition. Its mission was to transport two motorboats across land to Lake Tanganyika and use them to sink the Germans’ three battleships, Hedwig von Wissmann, the Kingani and the Graf von Götzen. Here’s all the facts you need to know:

Note how the Battle article cites an impressive number of citations from Foden’s book, suggesting that, despite its larky tone, it is now the definitive modern account of these events.

Why ‘Mimi and Toutou go forth’?

Mimi and Toutou are what Spicer named the two motorboats, telling his men they were French for ‘miaow’ and ‘bow-wow’, respectively (p.37).

‘Mimi’ in 1915. Note the cannon at the front and machine gun at the back. National Maritime Museum, London

As to ‘go forth’, this is a Ripping Yarns-type phrase which Foden deploys early on in the narrative, presumably hoping for a laugh, and then repeats at various points of their journey through the jungle and deployment on the lake, presumably for comic effect. Except that, like most of Foden’s attempts at comic effect, it doesn’t come off. Not for me, anyway.

Timeline of the journey

June 1915: the two motorboats undergo trials on the River Thames.

15 June: the two motorboats loaded aboard the Llanstephen Castle which sets sail from Tilbury, London, bound for Cape Town.

2 July: arrive at Cape Town to hear word of Royal Navy engagement with the German battleship Königsberg, on the Indian Ocean.

16 July: load the motorboats onto trains at Cape Town and set off on the 2,000 mile train journey north.

26 July: arrive at Elizabethville, the most southernmost major city in the Belgian Congo (p.81)

5 August: the expedition reaches the end of the railway at Fungurume. The two boats are unloaded from the train from Cape Town and commence their journey overland (p.90).

Pages 90 to 158 describe the long journey of the motor boats by train, by traction engine-drawn trailer through the jungle, up and over the Mitumba mountains and down into the Congo river for a spell, before docking and taking the train east to Lake Tanganyika, are awesome. It was an epic journey fraught with countless problems (rain, mud, quicksand, buckling bridges, the traction engines continually slipping off the track into the undergrowth or down steep slopes), the white men showing amazing resourcefulness and the reader boggling at the sheer physical labour demanded of the hundreds of native labourers they co-opted to labour for them.

28 September: after the gruelling portage over the Mitumba mountains, the expedition reaches the railhead at Sankisia and the motorboats are transferred to train.

1 October 1915 (p.128) A brisk railway journey brings them to Bukama station, where the motorboats are transferred to lighters on the Lualaba river down which they’ll be ferried. The Lualaba is in fact the name for the higher reaches of the main tributary of the Congo, it changes its name to Congo at the start of the Stanley Falls (p.127). They hitch a ride on the Constantin de Burlay, skippered by the drunk and angry Captain Blaes, passing across Lake Kisabe.

22 October: arrive at the railhead at Kabalo where they’ll leave the river and head east by rail along the valley of the Lukuga towards Lake Tanganyika (p.150).

26 October: the expedition arrives at the railhead which in fact, in that African way, comes to an abrupt halt a few miles before the port at Lukuga, which the Belgians call Albertville. The Belgians ran out of rails and sleepers. The boats are hidden in a siding until

Timeline of naval engagements

1 December: German ship Kingani comes in close to Lukuga and is fired on by Belgian guns (p.176).

22 December: first of the motor boats launched onto the lake (p.184)

26 December: the German Kingani comes incautiously close to the new harbour being built for the motorboats. These wait for her to pass then set off in hot pursuit, scoring direct hits, killing the captain and forcing the chief engineer to surrender. The badly damaged ship is towed into the Belgian port (Lukuga). Macabrely, Spicer takes the signet ring from the finger of the dead captain and wore it continually afterwards (pages 192 to 197). Our boys repair the Kingani, and Spicer renames it Fifi,  in line with his frivolous naming of the two motorboats. Apparently it was the first German ship to be captured and transitioned to the Royal Navy during the Great War (p.204).

9 February: the Hedwig is order to spy out the Belgian port before rendezvousing with the Götzen. Instead it finds itself engaged with four of the allied boats (though not Toutou which had been damaged in a storm, p.222). After an extended chase and shooting, the Brits score two direct hits on the Hedwig and sink her, capturing her captain and crew.

5 June 1916: the flotilla sail south to Bismarckburg to link up with colonial soldiers who take it from the Germans (p.252).

11 June: Belgian seaplanes bomb the Graf von Götzen (p.254).

26 July: seeing that a large Belgian force was about to seize the German base of Kigoma, the captain of the Graf von Götzen gives orders for it to be scuttled (p.255).

After which (from page 257) Foden gives a kind of epilogue. The naval force was broken up. A depressed Spicer was invalided home. The two motorboats were handed over to the Belgians. Various other members of the crew met different fates, staying on in Africa or returning home via different routes.

Ripping diction

Posh diction in a multicultural society

I live in the most multicultural constituency in the UK, Streatham Hill, where over 120 languages are spoken, not least by my Chinese postman, the West African women on the Tesco’s checkout, the Brazilian receptionist at my Asian dentist’s, the Albanian labourers who fixed my fence, the Somalis who sweep the streets and so on.

Foden went to a jolly good public school (Malvern College, current annual boarding fee £46,000 i.e. entire secondary education £322,000 plus extras). He has done terrifically well in the London literary mafia where such a background sets the tone.

Living in this multicultural, multilingual, white minority environment makes me more aware than ever how incongruous it is that a certain kind of jolly, public schoolboy English diction lives on and flourishes in the world of ‘literature’, when it has is being erased and superseded in the world I live in.

Examples of chaps phraseology

It’s this variance between the posh boy diction I still meet in books, and the people I encounter in the real world which made so much of the book’s phraseology really stick out to me. It felt like it came from a lost world, from the ripping yarns of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.

  • It is not surprising that Spicer’s fellow officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright dangerous. (p.14)
  • [Spicer insisted on his medical officer wearing a cutlass], tearing a strip off the doctor when he questioned the point of a medical officer wearing such an item. (p.41)
  • Every evening in the bar he would hold forth on his skill in hunting big game. (p.49)
  • They bespeak the wisdom born of experience… (p.49)
  • The German inshore guns began to fire – 47 mm field guns and small arms – but the Severn and the Mersey returned the compliment in heavier kind. (p.69)
  • Away to the south-west, at a dinner table in Salisbury, skulduggery was afoot. (p.71)
  • Sinking the Hedwig would be no mean feat (p.79)
  • Fate would test Spicer again soon enough (p.164)
  • Odebrecht realised the game was up. (p.225)
  • … a world about to be shaken to its core. (p.237)

I know Foden is writing a deliberate and knowing homage to John Buchanesque adventure stories, I know it is to a large extent deliberate pastiche, but this phraseology feels to me like a message from before the flood, like an old colonel at the club asking for another pink gin, rather than a denizen of 21st century Britain.

One does, doesn’t one?

As does Foden’s routine use of ‘one’:

  • One can be sure that the full story of the victory did not come through on the Lanstephen Castle’s Morse set (p.61)
  • How Spicer didn’t know about the Götzen is a mystery one can only attribute to the parlous state of communications in Africa… (p.77)
  • One certainly gets a more powerful sense of the danger from Dr Hanschell’s account (p.114)
  • One gets a sense of what this must have been like from the travel journals of Evelyn Waugh… (p.135)

I know it’s partly or wholly pastiche and maybe I’m having a bad sense of humour failure, but the archaic pomposity of the style outweighed the slender trickle of comedy and got on my nerves. Only the king sounds like this.

Dangling prepositions

I know it’s a petty point but, given what I’m saying about the modern world and modern English usage, I am irritated by Foden’s sometimes going to absurd lengths and distorting normal English word order so as to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. This is a feature of ‘good style’ which was old fashioned in the 1960s. but lingers on like a fossil in Foden’s writing. Mostly it’s just irritating but occasionally it really messes up the sense of the sentence.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander, ordered that [the guns] be dragged back to Dar es Salaam, to which task 400 Africans were promptly put. (p.73)

Why not avoid the problem and write something clear and readable such like: ‘a task which 400 Africans were promptly put to.’ Americans aren’t afraid of ending sentences with a proposition, but posh Brits are. Why? Here’s some advice off the internet.

Yes, it’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition. The ‘rule’ against doing so is overwhelmingly rejected by modern style guides and language authorities and is based on the rules of Latin grammar, not English. Trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition often results in very unnatural phrasings. (Scribbr.com)

Which kinds of schools still teach Latin in part because it is meant to form the basis of good English prose style? British public schools of the type Foden attended, bastions of conservatism in thought and style, forming the habits of mind of such masters of English prose as Boris Johnson.

Poor editing

The book appears to have been unusually badly edited. On page 65 we are told that a young journalist named Winston Churchill had stayed at a particular South African hotel during the Boer War.

It’s odd that the text introduces Churchill in this way as he has already been mentioned half a dozen times already:

  • starting on page 22 when his disagreement with First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher is discussed as a contributory factor to the failure of the Gallipoli campaign
  • then later when his removal from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty was a condition of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar-Law joining Lloyd-George’s wartime coalition in 1915
  • then again when Churchill is quoted describing the monotony of life aboard ship (p.48)
  • and the silly tradition of having someone dress up as Neptune and insist on pranks when a British ship crossed the equator (p.57)

So for Churchill to be introduced on page 65, as if for the very first time, reads very much as if whoever edited the book hadn’t noticed the earlier references (?) or that maybe the book was published in magazine instalments and then hastily cobbled together with nobody checking for continuity (?). Whatever the reason, it felt amateurish and further knocked my confidence in the narrative. The research seems to have been pretty thorough but the actual writing of the book, as everything I’ve listed above indicates, is surprisingly slapdash.

The African Queen

Speaking of clumsiness, I was surprised at the clumsy way mention of the classic movie ‘The African Queen’, based on the 1935 novel by C.S. Forester, was just dumped into the text early on, in a parenthesis and without any preparation or explanation.

Their brief holiday over, the Congolese paddlemen were once again put to work. As they paddled through the reeds – sometimes getting out to tug the boats through by hand, as Bogart and Hepburn would do during the filming of The African Queen 36 years later – enormous numbers of birds flew up from their nest places in the marsh. (p.140)

There’s no previous explanation of the film or its stars. It’s just assumed that you know what this is referring to. I do because I’m the kind of white, middle-aged, middle-class film and literature buff this kind of book is aimed at, but the throwaway introduction of the huge fact that Forester’s book and the resulting movie are fictionalised accounts of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika which this book is about, is further disconcerting example of the casual, random, throwaway way even the most important historical or cultural references feel like they’ve just been chucked into the text, almost at random.

Only at the end of the main narrative does Foden devote an entire chapter (chapter 23, pages 265 to 280) to the story of C.S. Forester’s novel and the movie adaptation of it, but even here he tells the story in a cack-handed, arse-over-tit, convoluted way.

In a condensed, hectic way he jumbles up the real history, Forester’s version, John Huston’s screen version, stories about Hollywood producers, a reference to Kathleen Hepburn’s memoir about the filming, quotes from Huston’s autobiography, then that a novel was written about the making of the movie of the novel, and then that this novel was itself made into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, then that the screenplay was written by James Agee who had written the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans’ famous photographic record of the Deep South, and so on.

It’s an extraordinarily muddled, helter-skelter, brain dump of a chapter, a shambles as explication, more like the embarrassing name-dropping of a cocky A-level student. Foden goes on to tell us that Huston’s film crew were ferried about in a boat which, twenty years later picked up Ernest Hemingway after he’d been involved in a plane crash, took him onto another location where he was promptly injured in another plane crash, tells us what Hemingway’s injuries were, then straight onto the trivial pursuit factoid that Hemingway was a big fan of Forester, and so on and so on.

It’s a movie buff equivalent of trainspotting, packed with trivial pursuit facts, quite bereft of insight or interest. I was appalled at the poor level of this farrago.

Heart of Darkness

The most obvious literary reference for any journey in the Congo is Joseph Conrad’s super-famous novel, Heart of Darkness. Foden is not shy about being obvious and his text contains references to and quotes from Conrad on pages 127, 131, 133, 146, 207, 272 and 275.

None of these shed any light whatsoever on Conrad, they are used in the most basic, bucket, banal kind of way just to cross-reference this or that setting or episode in Foden’s narrative. For example, he quotes Conrad’s descriptions of the river Congo, or the jungle, adding nothing much to the narrative except the Sunday supplement pleasure of spotting literary allusions. At one point, with wild inappropriateness, Foden compares Spicer’s daily bath– which he turned into a ritual for the bemusement of the local Africans – with the behaviour of Conrad’s Mr Kurz, who was (obviously) an absolutely and completely different kind of man (p.208). The comparison adds nothing to our understanding of Conrad or Spicer, it’s just a handy reference to chuck in along with a lot of the other lumber and junk which clutters the narrative.

Just as unoriginal is Foden’s yoking in of T.S. Eliot. Dear oh dear, what a lazy sixth form name to drop. The pretext is that one of Eliot’s poems (The Hollow Men) features a quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (‘Mistah Kurtz. He dead’) and his most famous poem, The Waste Land, was to feature another, super-famous quote (‘The horror! The horror!’) until its editor removed it.

Now, as any literature student knows, Eliot claimed that The Waste Land was ‘based’ on contemporary works of anthropology such as Fraser’s Golden Bough or Jesse Weston’s then brand-new study, From Ritual to Romance (p.251). All this irrelevant information is shoehorned into the text because Foden, reasonably enough, wants to give us an account of the African mythology of the people living around Lake Tanganyika and its surrounding mountains, goes on to describe the behaviour of the local Holo-Bolo tribe of killing off old kings and immediately crowning new ones – but it’s at this point that he begins to twist things by claiming that the Holo-Bolo ritual can be said to be an example of the cults of death and rebirth described by Fraser and Weston…and so all this can be linked to Eliot…and Eliot uses an epigraph by Conrad…and Conrad write Heart of Darkness about the Congo…and this book is about an adventure in the Congo…and so…SHAZAM! It all fits!!

See how contrived all this is? All this tying the text up in knots so as to name-drop some of the most obvious works of English literature. It’s like an undergraduate game of Consequences, clever and trivial.

It’s also disturbing or another reason not to take the book seriously, that Foden doesn’t take the opportunity to reference any modern anthropological work about the myths of central Africa, which I’m sure abound and would be genuinely interesting, but would require some actual serious research. Instead he prefers to draw on his own undergraduate degree to serve up bleeding obvious cultural references from a hundred years ago which will be greeted with knowing nods by every other English graduate but are absolutely useless as objective, serious anthropological analysis.

This entry-level use of undergraduate cultural references, combined with their clumsy shoehorning into a farrago of pointless name-dropping, really shook my faith in Foden as a writer. The factual historical parts of the book feel solid and interesting. But the blizzard of cultural references and ‘explanations’ which clutter it up feel obvious, thrown together, shallow and patronising.

Last night I read a comment by a reader on a Guardian article which immediately made me think of this book:

I think it’s quite common for writers to mistake cultural references for substance or insight in their prose. However, they often serve more to exclude rather than enlighten the reader.

(As backup to my view that T.S. Eliot is just about the most obvious English language poet for pretentious people to namedrop, I’m reading Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease, whose title is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, and when Achebe wants to highlight his protagonist’s callow inexperienced quickness to show off the learning he’s acquired in his recent English degree, he has him tell his nurse girlfriend that something she’s just said is ‘pure T.S. Eliot’. She is unimpressed. The scene exists in Achebe’s novel to highlight how callow, obvious and immature the protagonist is, keen to show off his newly acquired learning at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate…)

F0oden on human evolution

A prime example of a completely extraneous bit of pseud-culture which is shoehorned into the narrative and turns out to be both distracting and wrong comes towards the end.

In the final passages of the book, after the historical narrative is finished, Foden moves on to recount his modern-day journeys to research the story of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika. The idea is to see what physical remains of the events, if any, can still be found. Not much, is the answer. Instead these last 30 or so pages feel more like a tourist travelogue as Foden describes the various hardships he underwent on his journey round the lake looking for historical traces, almost as if they’ve been tacked onto the end of the book to bulk it out to the necessary length.

Thus it is that we find the author standing in the Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man and admitting that he can never remember the sequence of human evolution, does it go Australopithecus, then Homo habilis, then Homo sapiens?

Two points about this. Number one, why doesn’t he look it up on the bloody internet instead of making a point about his own ignorance? Because that’s the kind of text it is: cultivating a deliberate image of bumbling whimsy. It places Foden in direct descent from the bumbling Brits who managed to pull of their historic feat, not least the eccentric Spicer-Simpson. Maybe it’s meant to make him come over as endearingly imperfect, a sort of Michael Palin figure.

Number two: no, that is not the sequence of human ancestors, because our contemporary understanding of human evolution now rejects the entire idea of one line of human development. Instead, all the evidence points to a surprising number of Homo species arising in different places around Africa, flourishing for a while then dying out. The lineage we belong to survived by a fluke. The kind of simple one-line-of-descent Foden can’t even remember properly is, like his reference to Weston and Fraser, completely out of date and discredited. Read:

Having got this completely wrong, Foden goes on to repeat the equally out-of-date error that Homo sapiens ‘wiped out’ Homo neanderthalensis in a ‘genocide’ (p.288).

No. A genocide suggests a co-ordinated and sustained campaign of extermination which requires modern technology, weapons and, above all, population size. Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum, says that at their peak there were probably only about 50,000 proto-humans spread across all of Eurasia. The tiny groups they lived in might go years or even decades without bumping into other groups. There weren’t nearly enough early humans to conduct anything remotely like a ‘genocide’. Modern thinking is that they/we just had a fractionally better ability to survive than the Neanderthals, for whatever reason – slightly higher intelligence, slightly better social or cognitive skills – and that this gave us the edge which let us survive in a wide variety of ecological niches while the Neanderthals didn’t.

Why does Foden drag this incorrect misleading stuff into his text? Not to inform us, not to keep us up-to-date with the latest research but, it turns out, purely and solely because he wants to use the non-existent Neanderthal ‘genocide’ to introduce the topic of the appalling behaviour of the pre-Great War Germans in their colonies, where they mounted a real-life genocide against the native inhabitants of South-West Africa, and as a peg to describe how the Germans’ brutal treatment of natives in German East Africa triggered a revolt which was put down with equal brutality.

Why not just say that? Why drag in all this half-understood, out-of-date rubbish about human evolution to get on to the topic he wants to discuss?

By now I hope you can see how this just seemed to me just another example of the book’s modish superficiality. It’s a dinner party trope, a Radio 4 cliché, to talk about the ‘genocide’ of the Neanderthals, even though modern science thinks it’s bunk. Sounds cool, though. Makes it sound like you are a knowledgeable guy with a tough-minded approach to history.

Except it’s wrong.

And it’s insulting. If you’re going to raise the subject of a genocide then at least treat it with the respect it deserves. Foden mentions the extermination of the Herero tribe in half a sentence and the maji rebellion in less than a page. So this book is very much not the place to learn about either of these important events which very much ought to be memorialised and taken seriously.

If you’re interested in either, put down this book and pick up Thomas Pakenham’s epic account of The Scramble for Africa, which devotes chapter 33 to the Herero war (14 densely printed pages) and chapter 34 to the maji-maji rebellion (13 pages). That’s the way to treat a genocide. Give it the length, depth and detail the horribly murdered victims deserve.

So: the entire passage which starts quite promisingly with the author standing in Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man turns out to be inaccurate, misleading, and only there in order to provide a rather tortuous pretext for references to German imperial brutality which are, like everything else in the book – apart from the central narrative of transporting the motorboats – treated with almost insulting brevity and superficiality.

Thoughts

After working through 311 ages of often gripping narrative, I did, of course, learn a huge amount about this little-known aspect of the Great War. Nevertheless, I was very disappointed. I can see that the book is intended to be a comical entertainment but that comedy almost entirely depends on you buying into the world and tone of eccentric Edwardian chaps which Foden depicts and this, for some reason, I found impossible to do.

Maybe because I had been brutalised by the serious issues and graphic violence of Foden’s first three novels and was still reeling from the snakepit of issues raised by his descriptions of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, the clash of the West and Islam, discussed at length in his preceding book, Zanzibar and found it impossible to switch to the tone of light-hearted whimsy which dominates this book.

Maybe because I found the use of ‘one’, the odd word order, the jolly chaps phraseology, to be too much of a blocker. Maybe, quite simply, because the text just isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.

It has many striking and memorable moments. The account of the portage of the motorboats through the jungle, up over the Mitumba mountains and along the Congo is awesome. The account of the naval battles on the lake feels very thorough and authoritative. The factual accuracy about the ships, the war and the battles, at all times feels solid. The recreation of so many of the historical characters is full and persuasive.

But for me these achievements were undermined by:

  1. superficial discussion of related topics like the situation on the Western Front, or the sinking of the Lusitania (p.42) or the cack-handed treatment of The African Queen or the rubbish about human evolution or the inadequate treatment of tribal genocides, which I’ve mentioned
  2. the footnotes on every page, most of which are either really obvious or embarrassingly ‘quirky’
  3. the maladroit use of those Conrad quotations and all the other trite and clunkily inserted cultural references
  4. the repeated preference for slick attitudinising on the woke topics of the day (racism, imperialism, genocide) instead of the in-depth explanations or proper analysis which those topics deserve

Above all by the deliberate frivolousness of the tone which, as you can tell, just didn’t work at all for me.

If you like this kind of historical whimsy then ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika’ is for you, and I imagine it sold well to the same kind of people who bought ‘Nathaniel’s Nutmeg’ and other quirky takes on little-known episodes from history.

Maybe it’s a flaw in my taste that I either like full-on comedy (like William Boyd’s outrageously funny ‘A Good Man in Africa’) or full-on, serious history with proper analysis (see the many straight histories in my list of Africa reviews) so that, as you can tell, I just didn’t get on with this larky yarn which falls between both.

Interesting-sounding books which Foden namechecks

  • Phantom Flotilla: The story of the Naval Africa Expedition by Peter Shankland (1968)
  • The Great War in Africa by Bryan Farwell (1987)
  • The First World War by Hew Strachan (2001)

Compare with ‘An Ice-Cream War’

William Boyd’s second novel, ‘An Ice-Cream War’, is set during the First World War in British and German East Africa, so there’s some overlap (though not, in fact, as much as you might think, Boyd’s book being a sweeping account of the land war, Foden’s entirely about the relatively small and specific events on Lake Tanganyika). For example, the (real, historical) overall commander of German forces, Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, appears in both books.

If it was a choice between the two books, I would hands down recommend the Boyd novel, which is long, rich, deeply researched, wonderfully imagined and luminously written – the opposite in every way of this book.

Credit

Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden was published by Michael Joseph in 2004. References are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 27, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 27, 2023

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Prehistoric timelines

Texts about prehistory are liable to use three different timelines or naming systems interchangeably so it’s as well to be absolutely clear about them. What follows isn’t definitive, it’s the opposite. It’s my attempt to make sense of the timelines and period-related terminology used in the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. As far as I can tell there are three systems:

  1. the geological eras
  2. the sequence of ice ages
  3. the archaeological periods relating to human culture

1. Geological eras

The geologic time scale is the very high level division of earth history into units called — in descending order of duration — eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages. We are interested in just two epochs:

a) The Pleistocene epoch: 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago

This long period includes all the earth’s most recent periods of glaciations. It ends with the end of the most recent ice age and general climate warming.

b) The Holocene epoch: 11,650 to now

The Holocene is said to have started about 11,650 years ago, at the end of the most recent maximal glaciation or ice age, and we are still living in it today (although see the note at the end about the possible creation of a new epoch, Anthropocene).

Human figurines carved from yew wood with quartzite eyes from Roos Carr, East Yorkshire, 1000 to 500 BC © Hull Museums

2. Ice ages

The Quaternary glaciation: 2,588,00 YA to the present

The Quaternary glaciation started around 2,588,000 years ago (YA) and is ongoing. The dating of its start is based on the formation of the Arctic ice cap. The Quaternary glaciation itself consists of a sequence of glacial and interglacial periods and we are living in the most recent of its interglacial periods i.e. a warm spell between ice ages.

The Last Glacial Period (LGP): 115,000 to 12,000 YA

The Last Glacial Period (LGP), known colloquially as the last ice age, covers the period 115,000 to 12,000 years ago. The LGP is just part of the larger sequence of glacial and interglacial periods known as the Quaternary glaciation (see above). During this last glacial period there have been alternating episodes of glacier advance and retreat.

Last Glacial Maximum (LGM): 33,000 to 12,000 YA

The most recent period of glacier advance, when ice reached its furthest extent, is called the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Ice sheets covered much of North America and Northern Europe leading to a large drop in sea levels. The ice sheets began to grow 33,000 years ago and maximum coverage was reached between 26,500 and 20,000 years ago. At this point all of Scotland, most of Ireland and Wales and England north of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel was under ice. South of the ice the land was covered by permafrost with scattered glaciers and ice sheets at high points further south.

During the last glacial maximum, 26,500 and 20,000 years ago, the sea level was about 125 meters (about 410 feet) lower than it is today. After about 20,000 years ago deglaciation commenced in the Northern Hemisphere, and the ice cap began to retreat north, causing sea levels to rise.

The Holocene: 11,650 YA to the present day

Relevant both as a geological epoch and in the timeline of glaciation, the Holocene is the most recent geological epoch and the one we’re all still living in today. In Britain it correlates to the withdrawal of the ice sheets from the entire country.

As the ice sheets withdrew, Britain continued to be part of the continent of Europe, joined by an extensive area referred to as Doggerland. With the withdrawal of the ice and the rise of sea levels, Doggerland was flooded, creating what we now call the North Sea and the English Channel, a process which was complete by about 8,000 years ago.

Bone-bead necklace, part of the finds from Skara Brae, c. 3100 to 2500 BC Skara Brae, Orkney, Scotland © The Trustees of the British Museum

3. Human culture timelines

Human archaeology and ethnography uses what is called the ‘three age’ system, dividing the prehistory of humans into three broad categories – stone age, bronze age, iron age – according to the type of tools found in find sites.

It’s surprising to learn that this schema is 200 years old. It was developed by Christian Thomsen, director of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the 1820s. Thomsen wanted to categorise objects in his collection chronologically according to the main medium used for tool making in each era, and his collection suggested that stone tools came first, then bronze, then iron.

In 1865 the British archaeologist and ethnographer John Lubbock sub-divided the stone age into two, the old stone age or paleolithic (from the Greek paleo meaning old and lithos meaning stone) and the new stone age or neolithic (from the Greek neo meaning new and lithos). Almost immediately the British archaeologist Hodder Westropp suggested an intermediary stage, the middle stone age or mesolithic (from the Greek meso meaning middle and lithos meaning stone), which is still used but is a little more controversial.

Finally, it was realised that the huge extent of the so-called ‘paleolithic’ itself needed to be subdivided, eventually into 3 stages, the lower, middle and upper, which were proposed in the 1880s. And so we find ourselves with the following schema:

  1. Stone Age: 
    • Paleolithic 3.3 million years ago to 15,000 YA
      • Lower Paleolithic: 3 million to 300,000 years ago
      • Middle Paleolithic: 300,000 to 30,000 years ago
      • Upper Paleolithic 50,000 to 12,000 YA
    • Mesolithic: 15,000 to 5,000 years ago
    • Neolithic: 5,000 to
  2. Bronze Age 5300 years ago to 3200 YA
  3. Iron Age to (depends on region)

Two reservations

1. It’s worth emphasising that this entire system works well in Europe and some parts of Asia but doesn’t far at all with human developments in Africa, the Americas or far Asia. In many parts of the world there was no Iron Age at all, for example in Pre-Columbian America and the prehistory of Australia.

2. The term Megalithic does not refer to a period of time, but only describes the use of large stones by ancient peoples from any period.

Now let’s look at the ages in a bit more detail:

Fine jadeitite axe-head made from material quarried in the high Italian Alps, c. 4500 to 3500 BC © The Trustees of the British Museum

Paleolithic or Old Stone Age: 3.3 million years ago to 15,000 YA

Paleolithic indicates the fact that from the dawn of the first proto-humans who used any kinds of tools through to the discovery of metal smelting, all human species used tools made from stone, particularly flint blades and axes. The paleolithic covers a vast period of time, from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominids c. 3.3 million years ago to the start of the Holocene era, about 12,000 years ago. It covers 99% of the period of human technological prehistory. For that entire period humans appear to have been roaming bands of hunter-gatherers living off the land.

As mentioned, as long ago as the 1880s it was found necessary to subdivide the Paleolithic into three:

Lower Paleolithic: 3 million to 300,000 years ago

The Lower Paleolithic is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the period from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominids appears in the archaeological record until around 300,000 years ago.

I was a bit puzzled by use of lower and upper until I equated this with the physical location of the finds with the older findings being literally lower down in the earth, and more recent findings being less deep or uppermost.

Middle Paleolithic: 300,000 to 30,000 years ago

The Middle Paleolithic is the second subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. Anatomically modern humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Around 125,000 years ago they began migrating out of Africa and slowly replaced earlier pre-existent Homo species such as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus.

The use of fire became widespread for the first time in human prehistory during the Middle Paleolithic and humans began to cook their food about 250,000 years ago.

The later part of the period saw the development of a range of new tools: about 90,000 years ago harpoons were invented which brought fish into human diets. Microliths or small stone tools or points were invented around 70,000 to 65,000 YA and were essential to the invention of bows and spear throwers.

Upper Paleolithic 50,000 to 12,000 years ago

The Upper Paleolithic or Late Stone Age is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. About 50,000 years ago there was a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts. In Africa, bone artifacts and the first art appear in the archaeological record.

The early modern humans who migrated out of Africa and into Europe about 50,000 years ago, commonly referred to as the Cro-Magnons, left sophisticated stone tools, carved and engraved pieces on bone, ivory and antler, cave paintings and Venus figurines.

The distinct species Homo neanderthalensis, which had first emerged in the fossil record 400,000 years ago and lived widely across Europe and Asia, continued to live for a very long time – as long as 10,000 years – alongside the new incomers Homo sapiens. Then, abruptly, Neanderthals disappear completely from the fossil record 40,000 years ago, leaving archaeologists to speculate about the reasons for their sudden disappearance to this day.

This upper paleolithic revolution which kicked off 50,000 years ago saw many innovations. It witnessed the first evidence of human fishing. New implements were invented: for example, the spear thrower (30,000 years ago), the net (around 29,000 YA), the bolas, the bow and arrow (30,000 to 25,000 YA). From this period date the oldest examples of ceramic art, for example, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice (about 29,000 YA). Members of the European early Upper Paleolithic culture known as the Aurignacian had even developed lunar calendars by 30,000 YA.

Human populations

A really important fact to grasp is that human populations during this period were tiny. The entire population of Europe between 40,000 and 16,000 years ago was probably somewhere 4,000 and 6,000 individuals.

Bronze Age sun pendant, 1000 to 800 BC © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Mesolithic (in Britain): 12,000 to 6,000 years ago

The Paleolithic is said to end with the end of the last ice age and the spread back into Europe of human communities which developed new tools and techniques. The period from the end of the ice age to the arrival of metal smelting 4,500 years ago was initially simply referred to as the Neolithic or new stone age because of the proliferation of new techniques.

But, as we’ve seen, archaeologists almost immediately felt the need to define an interim period between the end of the Old Stone Age and the final period of innovation – hence the creation of the term mesolithic, which refers to the final period of hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and Western Asia, between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the Neolithic Revolution. In Europe it spans roughly 15,000 to 5,000 years ago.

Precise dating of the Mesolithic varies between areas because they were impacted by a) deglaciation and the creation of newly habitable land and b) the arrival of the agricultural revolution, at widely varying times. Thus the mesolithic is said to start in warm Greece around 15,000 years ago but in chilly Britain only around 12,000 YA.

Broadly speaking the Mesolithic is associated with a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favour of a broader hunter-gatherer way of life, and the development of more sophisticated and typically smaller lithic tools and weapons than the heavy-chipped equivalents typical of the Paleolithic.

The Neolithic (in Britain): 6,000 to 4,500 years ago (2,500 BC)

The Neolithic is now used to refer to the period after the ice age when human society was transformed by the advent of agriculture with its enormous cultural, social and economic consequences, but most tools continued to be made of stone, albeit of high levels of sophistication.

The advent of agriculture is sometimes referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. It saw the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, with the domestication and breeding of edible grasses and farm animals. With settlement came villages and then towns. We have religious records which point to polytheism.

Some archaeologists refer to a ‘Neolithic package’ in which they include farming, herding, polished stone axes, timber longhouses and pottery. Farming formed the basis for centralised administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalised systems of knowledge (that’s to say, writing), densely populated settlements, specialisation and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture and greater property ownership.

The agricultural revolution spread from its origins in the Middle East, through Turkey, across Greece and slowly into central and western Europe. Different sites in the Middle East point to different dates for the domestication of different plants or animals but the process was underway by as long ago as 12,000 years ago.

The diffusion across Europe, from the Fertile Crescent through Anatolia, across the Aegean and central Europe to Britain, took some 3,000 years (9500 to 6000 years ago). It is calculated to have spread at a speed of about 1 kilometre a year, but it was patchy, spreading to some (fertile) areas, moving round mountains, stalling, then suddenly jumping again.

Interestingly, there is evidence of some communities keeping to the mesolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyle for very long periods after the neolithic package arrived, for as long as a thousand years! Archaeologists call such societies are called ‘subneolithic’, the ‘sub’ just meaning hanging on after the main era had ended.

One of the mind-blowing aspects of the neolithic revolution is that all the evidence suggests it made human beings measurably worse off! Many of the cultivated crops (wheat, barley, maize) are deficient in vitamins and minerals and relying on them and cow or goat milk to the exclusion of other elements in a diet can be very harmful. All the archaeological evidence suggests that the Neolithic Revolution led to much more limited diets and poorer nutrition. Human height decreased by an average of 5 inches! Apparently human height didn’t return to pre-neolithic levels until the 20th century.

In addition, close habitation with animals led infectious diseases to jump the species boundary. Smallpox and influenza are just two diseases we got from animals. And higher population densities, living with poor sanitation led to tainted water supplies and the usual diseases of diarrhoea and dysentery, typhoid and cholera.

Jared Diamond suggests that the status of women declined with the adoption of agriculture because women in farming societies typically have more pregnancies and are expected to do more demanding work than women in hunter-gatherer societies.

Having read widely about it, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Neolithic Revolution was a catastrophe for most humans.

The Bronze Age (in Britain): 2,500 BC to 800 BC

Bronze is produced by smelting copper and alloying it with tin, arsenic, or other metals to strengthen it i.e. use it to make stronger, more durable tools or weapons.

In Eurasia the development of bronze tools definitely follows the final refinement of stone ones, and supersedes them. When exactly this happened varies largely from region to region and even from site to site within regions.

In Britain the advent of the Bronze Age is generally agreed to be marked by the arrival of the so-called Beaker culture, so named for the sudden appearance of beaker- or bell-shaped bowls in graves. In Britain the Bronze Age is subdivided into an earlier phase (2500 to 1200 BC) and a later one (1200 to 700 BC).

The Beaker people appear to have known how to smelt copper from their first arrival but it is only around 2150 BC that there is evidence of them smelting copper with other metals (generally tin) to make bronze.

A 2017 study suggests that the Beaker People almost completely replaced the island’s earlier inhabitants, with an estimated 90% of Britain’s neolithic gene pool being replaced! That’s to say, the people who built Stonehenge were substantially wiped out and superseded.

Primarily the Bronze Age is characterised by the widespread use of bronze tools and implements. It is usually accompanied by most of the traits of ‘civilisation’, including craft, urban centres, crafting of precious objects, widespread trade. In the Middle East and Greece we know it was accompanied by the worship of ethnic gods.

Devon and Cornwall were major sources of tin for much of western Europe and the earliest Greek and Roman historians refer to trade with these remote islands which brought the ore to the Mediterranean heartlands.

Bronze twin horse-snake hybrid from hoard, 1200 to 1000 BC. Kallerup, Thy, Jutland, Denmark © National Museum of Denmark

The Iron Age (in Britain): 800 BC to 43 AD

The Iron Age in Britain is dated by the first finds of iron tools in burial sites (around 800 BC) to the arrival of the Romans (43 AD).

The Iron Age is characterised by substantial population growth which allowed increasing social specialisation in societies living in large settlements. In Britain there was a proliferation of large hill forts. There is sophisticated social organisation, for example a class system overseen by a king and the implementation of taxation. There is extensive trade, nationally and internationally, leading to burial sites rich in high value goods, sometimes transported across great distances.

Also a good deal of immigration with entire tribes moving into and settling territories. Whether this involved conquest or peaceful ‘diffusion’ is debated to this day. When the Romans arrived they found a land divided among tribes with a highly developed sense of identity, regional allegiance, names and kings.

The Iron Age is said to end when writing begins. Even though the same kinds of tools are used, a culture has clearly entered a new phase when it enters the historical record. But obviously this happened at different times in different regions.

Thus in the Ancient Near East the Iron Age is taken to end with the start of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, as it enters history in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. In Western Europe the Iron Age is ended by the Roman conquest, which was established by 100 AD. By contrast in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe that the Romans did not reach, the Iron Age is said to have continued until the start of the Viking Age in about 800 AD.

As the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum strongly indicates, the later Iron Age was characterised by increasing warfare and social strife. Skeletons show signs of multiple injuries. Average life expectancy at birth was around 25. Into this culture arrived the Romans with their writing, education, towns, roads and laws.

P.S. A new geological era – the Anthropocene?

Remember how I said we’re only interested in two geological epochs, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. Well, there is a new, third category: many scientists are pushing for the scientific community to recognise that the Holocene has ended and we have entered a new epoch, to be named the Anthropocene.

The idea is that this new era should be dated to mark the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. With widespread acceptance that manmade global warming is having (and will continue to have) a significant effect on the world’s ecosystems, you can see the logic of arguing that we live in an entirely unprecedented era. But to date, none of the official bodies which recognise the geological eras have accepted the anthropocene and there is ongoing debate about when  it should be said to have started.

The problem with our over-documented, over-determined time is that too much has happened. Since Hiroshima we live in The Atomic Age. And since the end of the Second World War we are also all living in an age of rapid technological and social change, which some historians call the Great Acceleration.

Or should we be going further back, should the start of the anthropocene be lined up with the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1710 or 1770 (depending on which precise technical discoveries you prioritise)?

Or, in a massive leap, should we go right back to the start of the neolithic revolution described above, which is when human beings first began to have a measurable impact on their environment? Which would make it identical the current term, the Holocene?

The debate is ongoing and there’s no shortage of candidates but if we stick to permanent markers which are being laid down now and which geologists will find in a million years time, then apparently radioactivity from the nuclear tests is now embedded in ice cores and a thin layer of microplastics has been laid down on the ocean beds, the kind of thing which 100% fulfil the geological criteria.

Personally I think it should be the 1780s and the invention of new, more efficient steam engines, as it was this breakthrough – more than agriculture itself – which set us on the course of greater and greater reliance on energy, first coal, then oil and gas whose use, we all now know, has led to our runaway proliferation, our destruction of every ecosystem we come into contact with, and what looks likely to be massive and irreversible effects on the entire global climate.

Will Stonehenge, built as a result of the neolithic agricultural revolution, survive long enough to see the world transformed by the manmade global warming which is that revolution’s long-term legacy? (Photo © English Heritage)

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Posted by Simon on February 21, 2022

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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

Back in the late 1980s and 1990s there was a fashion for popular science books, and I read as many as I could, becoming better informed about the three major subjects which dominated the lists – cosmology, paleontology with an emphasis on human origins, and environmental biology.

Among them were a number of books by E.O. Wilson, particularly the brilliant Diversity of Life (1992), which gives an unparalleled sense of the wonder and diversity of the natural world, and Richard Leakey’s book, The Sixth Extinction (1995). This latter is an often quite technical account of discoveries and debates in paleontology and environmental biology which, taken together, suggest that the rate at which humanity is killing off species of animals, plants, fish and other fauna amounts to a holocaust, a global extermination, which ranks with the other Big Five mass extinction events that have punctuated the 500-million year story of life on earth – hence the title.

Now, 20 years later, comes a book with the same title by American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. I was interested to compare the books, not only in terms of what’s changed in our understanding and the plight of nature, but in style and approach.

The situation’s got worse, of course. One third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed towards extinction. (p.17) (The radio news today informs me that 7 honey bees have placed on the US endangered species list, as colony collapse disorder continues to decimate hives.)

Kolbert approaches the issue through thirteen chapters, each devoted to a specific species, combining its history, her personal trips and visits to museums or rainforests, along with profiles of key contributors to the history of ecology, and ideas in evolution or conservation thrown up by each story.

The chapters

Thus she opens by visiting a research institute in Panama devoted to trying to save the Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki). It explains how the fungus Batrachochrytium dendrobatadis is wiping it out, along with scores of other frog species around the world – and so the chapter introduces and explains the notion of the historic mass extinctions.

The second chapter considers discoveries in the 1700s of large bones in America and Europe, specifically of what came to be named Mammut americanum, and how it led the French naturalist George Cuvier to develop and publish a theory of species being wiped out in sudden catastrophes (in an essay published in 1812) although the term ‘catastrophist’ (someone who believes the history of life on earth is marked by long periods of stasis broken by sudden catastrophes in which entire faunas are wiped out and entire new ones replace them) wasn’t coined until 1832, by William Whewell, president of the British Geological Society.

Kolbert contrasts Cuvier’s catastrophism with the ‘uniformitarianism’ of the great geologist Charles Lyell, whose epic work on geology inspired and underpins Darwin’s thinking. It was Lyell who for the first time gave a thorough sense of the profound age of the earth and showed how it had been formed over hundreds of millions of years by slow unrelenting forces. It was this rhythm and metaphor which helped the young Darwin grope his way towards a theory that life on earth had also changed in a slow but unrelenting way due to the process he called ‘natural selection’. The key to both is a nice steady uniform speed of geological and biological processes.

We learn this in chapter three, where it is tied into the history of the great auk (Pinguinis impennis) which went extinct in the 1840s. Kolbert takes a trip to Iceland to visit a nature centre and then go by boat out to the remote island where, supposedly, the last breeding pair of great auks were caught and killed before being sold for £9. This chapter is used to point out that Darwin must have known about man-made extinctions because he witnessed them wherever he went on his epic voyage round the world in HMS Beagle (1831-36).

Chapter four tells the story of Luis Alvarez’s discovery of a layer of iridium at the geological boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, the so-called Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary about 66 million years ago. Along with other scientists he interpreted this as meaning that the end-Cretaceous extinction, which saw about 70% of species wiped out, was caused by an asteroid or meteorite hitting earth. This chapter recounts the fierce opposition from most paleontologists who were wedded to one form or another of Lyell and Darwin’s uniformitarianism, and so harshly criticised Alvarez’s findings when they were published in 1980. As usual, Kolbert ties this account into a trip she took with paleontologists to a secret location in New Jersey where the K-T boundary is easily accessible and where they hunt for ammonite fossils.

Chapter five explains how ‘neo-catastrophism’ has become the new orthodoxy – i.e. that long periods of uniformity punctuated by disasters, have shaped the story of life and the nature of the current biosphere. This is told via a visit to Dobb’s Lyn, a mountainside stream in Scotland in heavy rain to look for glyptolites, followed by a warm dinner at a local B&B. Here the fossil hunters accompanying Kolbert explain the history of the term ‘Anthropocene’, first suggested in 2000 and now widely used.

Just as organisms are divided into kingdoms, phyla, families, genera and species, so geologists divide the entire history of the earth into eons, themselves divided into eras, which are in turn divided into periods, epochs and ages. Thus we are in the the Phanerozoic Eon, which dates from the beginning of multicellular life some 530 million years ago. This eon is divided into three eras: the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era and the Cenozoic Era, where ‘zoe’ is Greek for ‘life’ and paleo means old (Old Life Era), meso means ‘middle (Middle Life era) and ceno is from ‘koinos’ which means new = new life era.

Each of these eras is sub-divided into periods: the Paleozoic into the Cambrian Period, Ordovician Period, Silurian Period, Devonian Period, Carboniferous Period and Permian Period; the Mesozoic into the Triassic Period, Jurassic Period and Cretaceous Period; and the Cenozoic Era into the Paleogene Period, the Neogene Period and the Quaternary Period. And these periods are further divided into epochs: thus the most recent period, the Quaternary Period, is sub-divided into the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, the Pleistocene dated 3 million years ago to around 13,000 years ago i.e. until the end of the last ice age; the Holocene dating from around 13,000 years ago to the present day.

Over the last twenty years or so there have been growing calls from some biologists, paleontologists and archaeologists to define the epoch we’re living in as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene epoch, because human interaction with the environment is creating unprecedented changes to the entire planet.

I already knew from books and articles about the calls for our age to be named the Anthropocene – but I had never properly processed the full implications of the fact that, not only are we driving species instinct at an unprecedented rate now, in the present – but that all future life on earth will only be able to evolve and cope with changing conditions, from the smaller and smaller and smaller starting base that we are creating. It is not just the present or our children’s world that we are diminishing – but all future possibilities for life on the planet – forever.

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will be forever closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. (p.269)

I had never grasped the deep historical implications of our greed and arrogance and destructiveness.

Chapter six records Kolbert’s trip to Kastello Aragonese, an islet near Ischia. The island is home to volcanic vents which release a steady stream of CO2 into the sea. Kolbert meets scientists who are researching the impact of rising CO2 levels in seawater: basically it prevents calcifiers, that is all animals which create shells, from being able to do so – starfish, barnacles, clams, oysters, and scores of thousands of other species. Never in the history of the Earth has so much CO2 been injected into the oceans so quickly. Sea life hasn’t time to adapt.

Chapter seven takes this forward via a trip to One Tree Island off the Great Barrier Reef. Here, in a rough and ready research centre, she meets an international team of scientists who say the future for all coral reefs in the world, and all the species they support is ‘grim’. By 2050 they may all be dead. The Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science has said, that he is

‘utterly humbled to have spent the most productive scientific years of my life around the rich wonders of the underwater world, and utterly convinced that they will not be there for my children’s children.’ (quoted p.138)

She times her trip to observe the wonderful and weird sight of the annual ‘spawning’ of the corals. How many more years will it take place?

Chapter eight takes us to the rainforest of Manú National Park in southeastern Peru where scientist Miles Silman shows Kolbert around the 17 plots, each at a different altitude, which he and his assistants have marked out to explore different tropical communities. They were laid out in 2003. It incorporates the research done by Chris Thomas and colleagues from York Uni which estimate that, with worst case rates of global warming, up to 33% of Earth’s species will be exterminated. Back in Silman’s forest, Kolbert describes their research which shows that, as the climate warms up, species are in fact moving up mountains slopes to continue living in the temperature ranges they’re used to. But only so many species can even move (trees are not so mobile) and not many have mountain slopes to move up, but the real killer is speed – scientists think previous changes occurred over millions of years; we are changing the Earth’s climate in a matter of decades.

One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers – roads, clear-cuts, cities – that prevent them from doing so. (p.189)

Chapter nine sees her in the Amazon, visiting some of the squares of rainforest left standing among areas decimated for farmland, as an ongoing scientific experiment. Lots of numbers. There are about 130 million square kilometres of land which are ice free. Of this around 70 million have been drastically remodelled by man; of the remaining 60 million three-fifths is forest. (Another study, by Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty divides the world’s surface into 18 ‘anthromes’, or types of human land-use, which says that 100 million have been altered by human hand, leaving 30 million of wildlands – Siberia, northern Canada, the Sahara, Gobi, central Australian desert.)

Kolbert is taken into the rainforest by her hosts to look for birds, incidentally observing the mad profusion of trees, plants and insects, including a huge column of soldier ants (learning that up to 300 species of animals are dependent on soldier ants and the changes they create). At the base she meets Tom Lovejoy, now in his 70s, credited with putting the phrase ‘biological diversity’ into circulation.

Chapter ten The separation of ecosystems on different continents, islands, archipelagos etc has been one of the key drivers of speciation i.e. diversity. Man began to mess that up with his ocean going journeys from about 2,000 years ago as humans sailed out across the Pacific islands, with the Maori arriving 1,000 years ago in New Zealand and devastating its wildlife. But the real ecological mixing began in the Age of Discovery, which was kicked off when Magellan sailed round the world and Columbus discovered America – the introduction of thousands of Old World species to the New World is now referred to as the ‘Columbian Exchange’.

Nowadays human transports are criss-crossing the globe in mind-boggling volumes, transporting flora, fauna and diseases to every last nook and cranny. Kolbert quotes the estimate that in any given 24 hour period some 10,000 species are being moved around the planet just in ships’ ballast water. So it’s no surprise that diseases once restricted to tiny parts of the world can now travel widely, for example the disease killing off the Panamanian frogs we met in chapter one, and the fungus killing bats in Massachusetts – white-nose syndrome – which we meet here. She follows the catastrophic decline in bat populations in Vermont which have collapsed since the fungus was first identified in 2007. In less than a decade bats have gone from flourishing to endangered, and will probably go extinct in the next decade.

Chapter eleven A visit to see Suci, a captive Sumatran rhinoceros at Cincinnati zoo, is the peg for a review of the catastrophic decline of big mammals (elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers, pandas) over the last century. This leads on to a visit to Big Bone Lick, where 19th century naturalists found fossils and bones of huge animals which once roamed North America but which were completely extinct by the 1800s.

It was American ecologist Paul Martin who popularised the Overkill Hypothesis, which is that megafaunas were hunted to extinction wherever prehistoric man went – in Australia 40,000 years ago, in America from 13,000 years ago, in New Zealand 700 years ago and so on. Kolbert presents the counter-arguments of scientists who are not convinced that handfuls of technologically primitive peoples could wipe out entire continents full of big dangerous animals; and then the counter-counter arguments educed from mathematical models, which show that, given enough time, even killing only one big beast a month could wipe out entire species in a few hundred years – which is what appears to have happened.

The conclusion of this line of thinking is that man has never lived in harmony with nature but has massacred large animals and triggered major ecological change wherever he has gone.

Chapter twelve Kolbert visits the centre in the Neander Valley in Germany where Neanderthal Man was discovered (though the cliffs and cave where he were discovered were long ago demolished for construction material). Neanderthal man (Homo neanderathlensis) existed as a branch of the Homo genus for at least 10,000 years from 130,000 to 30,000 years ago. All the evidence is that, wherever populations of the more ‘advanced’ Homo sapiens appeared, Neanderthal man soon after disappeared. As Chris Stringer discusses in his book, The Origin of Our Species, was he pushed or did he jump? Was it environmental change which did for the Neanderthals or some form of warfare with our ancestors or both which led to his extinction?

The chapter is titled ‘the madness gene’ because one scientist contrasts Neanderthals with Homo sapiens – particularly in regard to adventurousness. As far as we can tell Neanderthals made the same stone tools without any development or improvement for 100,000 years, whereas modern man’s culture evolved quickly. The cave paintings in the Dordogne region of France were made by modern man, whereas nothing comparable exists for Neanderthals. Above all, modern man spread far and wide, and the ‘madness’ idea comes in when you consider the urge, the adventurousness, the recklessness of the peoples who set off in primitive ships 2,000 years ago into the vast empty seas of the Pacific with no maps and no guides and no certainty of finding anything but ended up populating Hawaii and all the other Pacific islands, thousands of miles from the mainland. What is that if not reckless adventurism bordering on madness!

Chapter thirteen features the last trip, to San Diego Zoo which has a facility for deep freezing remains of nearly or extinct species – nicknamed the Frozen Zoo. Kolbert views vials full of deep frozen organic matter from various defunct species and wonders – is this what it will come to, will thousands and thousands of life forms survive only as sketches, photos and tubes of frozen gunk? And the reader who has followed her this far on her deeply depressing journey is forced to answer, Yes.

She pays lip service to the good intentions of the millions of nice people who support the Worldwide Fund for Nature or the National Wildlife Federation or the Wildlife Conservation Society or the African Wildlife Foundation and so on and so on. In this she makes what I regard as the classic liberal error of believing most people are like her, or us, educated middle-class, concerned, white people. As the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in Britain should have shown these kind-hearted liberals – most people are not like them. Most people in the West did not go to private school or attend university and didn’t study the humanities and don’t work in white collar professional jobs. Many are struggling to put food on the table or keep a roof over their heads.

And that’s without going further afield into the Developing World where the majority of the population lives in dire poverty, without access to clean water, sewage facilities or nourishing food, and don’t give a damn about the future of the Panamanian frog or the greater mouse-eared bat or the black-faced honeycreeper, let alone the thousands of insect and plant and fungi species Kolbert’s scientists are so concerned about.

There is no great conclusion. Read it and weep. In the book’s last pages she gives a few token reasons for hope and briefly references those sad people who think it will all be OK in the end because humankind can always go off and colonise the moon, or Mars, or other solar systems. Right. She doesn’t even comment on such expensive fatuousness. a) All attempts to live in artificial atmospheres or biomes have failed because we underestimate the complexity of the ecosystem which keeps us alive. b) We can’t even run this planet, what gives anyone the idea we’d do better somewhere else. c) Are we all leaving for Mars, then? All 7 billion of us?

Words and ideas

  • Hibernacula – a place (cave, mineshaft) where creatures seek sanctuary from the winter, often to hibernate.
  • The Latitudinal Diversity Gradient – the closer to the Tropics, the more species are found in ecosystems, thus the tropical rainforest is the most varied and densely speciated environment on earth. There are some thirty different theories why this might be. The Latitudinal Diversity Gradient
  • Psychrophile – a cold-loving fungus.
  • The Signor-Lipps effect – since the fossil record of organisms is generally incomplete, this makes it hard to be confident about the ends or beginnings of taxa or families. In practice it makes what may have been sudden extinction events look long drawn out. The Signor-Lipps effect
  • The Species-Area relationship – the larger an area you sample, the more species you find. The Species-Area relationship

Summary

At first I thought it was a gimmick that each chapter focuses on one particular species and goes to one particular location (sometimes two) where she meets one or more scientists working on a particular aspect of the massive issues raised.

But after a while I realised how cleverly Kolbert was dovetailing into each chapter not only snapshots of current research, but also key moments in the history of the discipline, going back to explain the early theories of a Cuvier or Lamarck, a Darwin or Humboldt, to give her reporting a historical dimension and to explain how theories about life on earth arose and have developed over the past century or two.

And I ended up respecting and admiring the skill with which the narrative moves forward on these multiple levels at the same time – all leavened with a dry American sense of humour and an eye for evocative similes (the thin layers of slate at the K-T boundary which she is shown how to handle, fall apart like the pages of an old book; stroking the tough hide of Suci the rhino is like running your hand over tree bark, and so on.)

If you’re new to the subject, this is an excellent, very readable, fascinating, wide-ranging and first-hand account of work going on all around the world. That said, most of us are by now very familiar with this subject. And all of us know in our hearts that things will only get a lot, lot worse.

Credit

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2014. All quotes and references are to the 2015 paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 4, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Nature, Science
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Posted by Simon on January 4, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/the-sixth-extinction-an-unnatural-history-elizabeth-kolbert/

The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer (2011)

This is a very demanding and scholarly book. In the last thirty years major leaps forward in DNA science, the technology of dating fossils, our ability to CT scan and analyse old bones and skulls right down to atomic level and other impressive techniques, as well as a steady stream of new finds of the remains of our prehistoric ancestors, have hugely deepened and complicated our knowledge of human ancestry, of the lineage which stretches back 6 million years to when our ancestors split from the ancestors of modern apes. It’s a massive, complicated and ever-changing field of knowledge.

As the blurb on the back points out, Chris Stringer has been closely involved in much of the crucial research into the origins of humankind and sets out in this book to explain all the latest research, techniques, discoveries and theories in the area, which he does comprehensively and thoroughly.

However, the patchiness of the evidence, the changing results given by evolving techniques, the legacy of sharply conflicting theories and interpretations etc, take a lot of explaining and putting into context. As well as the actual finds and the science we use to interpret them, the book slowly opens up a jungle of differences and debate between archaeologists, paleo-anthropologists, psychologists, DNA researchers, ancient historians and so on, at numerous levels, from large-scale over-arching theories to the interpretation of almost every single find and specimen.

Chapter by chapter, Stringer introduces us to all the evidence and all the techniques and all the controversies – but it is a lot to take in. It doesn’t help that the same theories, techniques and finds recur in different chapters, but in the context of different approaches or discussion of different theories or ideas. You need your wits about you. It’s a book to be read at least twice.

Two theories of human origins

In 1988 Stringer co-wrote an article titled Genetic and Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Modern Humans. This sketched out the two main theories about human origins: Recent African Origin (RAO) and Multiregional Evolution.

1. The multi-regional theory dates from the 1930s and believes that Homo erectus (himself descended from Homo habilis and a distinct species by about 2 million years ago) spread out from Africa over 1 million years ago, settling across Eurasia and Africa, and it was these scattered populations who all transitioned to modern man, Homo sapiens, although with variations which explain the different appearance of modern ‘races’.

2. Recent African Origin (also known as the ‘Out of Africa’ theory) agrees that Homo erectus spread across Eurasia by around 1 million years ago (the original or ‘Out of Africa 1’ scenario), but then postulates the separate development of ‘modern’ man (Homo sapiens) around 100,000 years ago, probably in East Africa. These modern humans also spread out beyond Africa (in so-called ‘Out of Africa 2’), superseding (overwhelming, conquering, killing?) their more primitive cousins wherever the two came into contact.

But a) there are numerous other theories which conflict with both the above, starting with an ‘Assimilationist’ theory, e.g. that Homo sapiens bred with Homo erectus rather than wiping them out; and b) almost every year brings new discoveries which throw up new puzzles and complicate the picture. Also c) Homo sapiens himself seems to have undergone a sudden burst of technological, cultural and social complexity around 50,000 years ago, when better tools, cave art, necklaces etc suddenly appear in the fossil record. It was this new, improved Homo sapiens who appears in Europe from 35,000 years ago. How does that fit into the timeline?

Neanderthal Man

In Europe a distinct branch of humans was named Neanderthal Man (after the first specimen whose skull and bones were found in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856). Neanderthal bodies were bigger, more muscly than ours, they had significantly larger brain cases (as Stringer humorously points out, in brains as with other things, size is not everything) but their most notable feature was really thick, heavy, threatening brow ridges over the eye sockets. Neanderthals are generally considered a distinct species, Homo neanderthalensis, and are thought to be descended from a more primitive species, Homo heidelbergensis, itself a branch of Homo erectus. Nenaderthal man became distinct from Heidelberg man around 600,000 years ago.

(Typically, some paleoanthropologists disagree with the whole notion of defining these different specimens as distinct species, and consider Neanderthals and all the other ‘types’ which have been found in the past 150 years to be subspecies of Homo sapiens – thus Neanderthals would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis).

One of the most intriguing questions remains what it was when I was a boy: We have evidence that modern man (often called Cro-Magnon Man in his European incarnation, after the cave in south-west France where the first specimen was found in 1868) and Neanderthal man both inhabited Europe at the same period, around 40,000 years ago (the Neanderthals having been around in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, modern man being a new thing, fresh out of Africa). Shortly after the arrival of modern man, records of Neanderthals come to an end; there are no specimens more recent than 30,000 years ago.

So, did we wipe Neanderthals out? Archaeologist Nicolas Teyssandier has noted the period of overlap of the last Neanderthals and the first Moderns is characterised by a profusion of different types of spear tip – was there a stone age arms race? Or did ‘we’ interbreed with Neanderthals to become a cross-breed, Neanderthal records stopping because they had been ‘assimilated’ into our line – so that each of us has a little Neanderthal blood in us? Or did Neanderthals die out due to climate or other changes which they were too dim to adapt to, but which we with our super-smart brains managed to survive? The theories have become more intricate as new DNA evidence has emerged – but to this day, no-one knows.

Homo sapiens (left) Homo neanderthalensis (right)

Homo sapiens (left) Homo neanderthalensis (right)

Homo heidelbergensis

This is another distinct form of human, that lived in Africa, Europe and western Asia between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago (and named after the first specimen, discovered in 1907 near the German town of Heidelberg). Some paleoanthropologists think that a population of heidelbergensis migrated into Europe and western Asia between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago and evolved into Neanderthal man. A later branch of the same family had evolved into Homo sapiens in Africa by around 130,000 years ago and then also spread into south-west Asia and Europe where, for 100,000 years, both related species lived alongside each other.

Periods

The Pleistocene period is said to date from 2.5 million years ago (Ma) to 12,000 years ago.

The Stone Age or Paleolithic period period lasted roughly 3.4 million years and ended between 8700 BC and 2000 BC, with the advent of metalworking (the date varying according to location, since different human groups developed metal work at different dates).

The Lower Paleolithic Period is 2,500,000 to 200,000 years ago. The Middle Paleolithic is the era during which the Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Near East, c. 300,000–28,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic dates from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago in Europe, ending with the end of the Pleistocene Era and onset of the Holocene Era at the end of the last ice age.

The Holocene Era is marked by the end of the ice ages around 13,000 years ago, followed swiftly (in the Fertile Crescent of modern Iraq) by the birth of agriculture, in what Jared Diamond calls ‘the Neolithic Revolution’. This saw humans transition from a life of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, a transition whose causes and implications Diamond deals with at length in his classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel.

Dating technologies

The modern technology used to date fossils and ancient remains is now bewilderingly complex and dauntingly sophisticated. Here are some terms; if you’re interested, you’ll have to google them for full accounts.

  • ABOX Acid Base Oxidation-Stepped Combustion pretreatment methods for dating charcoal thought to be over 30,000 years old
  • AMS accelerator mass spectrometry – a technique for measuring long-lived radionuclides that occur naturally in our environment
  • CT computerised tomography X-ray scan
  • ESR electronic spin resonance, method of dating
  • OSL – optically stimulated luminescence
  • TL thermoluminscence dating technique

New words and acronyms

I’m a humanities graduate, not a scientist; I get pleasure from new words and from new concepts (even ones I don’t fully understand).

  • Allen’s Law: animals in cold climates have low surface-to-volume ratios; animals in hot climates, the reverse.
  • atlatl: a spear thrower.
  • Biological Species Concept: the notion that species are defined as groups which can interbreed
  • burins: engraving tools.
  • CI Campanian Ignimbrite: debris from a huge volcanic explosion which took place in Campania, central Italy, 39,000 years ago.
  • Doggerland: the area of land that connected Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice Age until it was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC.
  • Dunbar’s Number: after researching primate brain size against the size of their social groups British anthropologist Robin Dunbar estimated that humans can only form meaningful relationships with a maximum of 148 (generally rounded up to 150) other individuals.
  • EQ: encephalisation quotient, the ratio of brain volume to body mass.
  • glottology: the history or science of language.
  • Heinrich Event: brief but severe cold events when icebergs break off from northern ice caps and float south chilling the ocean and surrounding lands (pp.93-94)
  • microtephra: dust from a volcanic explosion which is invisible to the eye.
  • morphometrics: measuring shapes.
  • sapropels: dark layers of sediment laid down where the Nile reaches the Mediterranean.
  • survivorship: the proportion of a population surviving to a given age.
  • tang: edge or shoulder of a triangular stone point used to mount it as a projectile on a wooden handle.
  • varves: annually deposited layers in the bottom of deep lakes.

Snippets

  • Anthropologist Grover Krantz strapped on a fake thick protruding ‘brow ridge’ from a Homo erectus skull, and wore it for months (!) to see what advantages it brought. He discovered that it kept his hair out of his eyes, shielded his eyes from the sun – and scared the daylights out of people he met on dark nights. Stringer takes this last point seriously, saying the heavy brows of our ancestors possibly accentuated their stare, giving them an aggressive attitude which helped them intimidate other males and woo females, in the struggle for existence. (p.32)
  • Apparently, there are rumours in the paleoanthropology world that either the Americans or the Russians or both, in the 1940s and 50s, experimented by injecting human sperm into female chimps, bringing the resulting creatures to birth and experimenting on them. (p.33)
  • Male baboons gently fondle each other’s scrotums as a sign of friendship and trust – a defeated chimpanzee makes submissive noises and holds out its hand to the victor – if accepted the victor will embrace and kiss the supplicant, if rejected, he’ll bite it. (p.131)
  • Fire dates to around 1.6 million years ago in Africa, 800,000 years ago in Israel, 400,000 years ago in Britain. (p.140)
  • The Grandmother Hypothesis developed by James O’Connell and Kristen Hawkes proposes that human evolution favoured older women who lived on after the menopause (something which doesn’t happen in primates) who can help their daughters with child-rearing and food-gathering. (p.141)

Conclusion

The ninth and final chapter presents a conclusion of sorts – which is that, having extensively reviewed the current evidence, Stringer has modified his lifelong adherence to the Recent African Origin thesis in several ways:

1. The one that surprised me the most has to do with the size of the communities we’re talking about. Up-to-date genetic evidence suggests that the groups which left Africa and moved out to populate Arabia and around the Indian coast, might have numbered in the hundreds. Even within Africa the various species may at any one time have only numbered in the thousands. (‘The long-term effective size of the ancestral population for modern humans might have been only about 10,000 breeding individuals’, p.175, whereas the number of breeding Neanderthal females in Europe might have been as little as 3,500). Given these numbers, the extinction of the Neanderthals is changed from being some kind of war of extermination (as it is sometimes painted) into the dwindling and going defunct of already tiny scattered communities (and the most attractive interpretation Stringer gives for this is the notion that Neanderthals were just bigger, heavier and needed more food than the lighter, nimbler Homo sapiens – maybe in the unstable climatic situation in Europe 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, small and clever was simply more adaptable).

2. The last two chapters bring together evidence which Stringer says can be interpreted, in light of these small numbers, to suggest a new hypothesis – that there were, at any given time, multiple human species living in Africa (he repeats several times that modern-day Africans show vastly more genetic diversity than any other continent – modern DNA evidence suggesting that the populations of Asia, the Far East, the Americas, Australia derive from very small bands of ancestors populations with the genetic diversity of modern populations dropping the further you go from the African source). In other words, the linear model of one species evolving into another species has been replaced by a much more complex scene of multiple species or sub-species flourishing in different places at different times. ‘100,000 years ago Africa may have comprised a collection of separate sub-groups’ (p.244). The evidence now suggests ‘that Africa contained archaic-looking people in some areas when, and even long after, the first modern-looking humans had appeared’ (p.255). In other words, the multiregion theory could be true within Africa, where multiple species, sub-species, varieties and groups of humans evolved along separate lines, developing widely different levels of tools, some isolated, some inter-breeding and leaving behind a patchwork of random relics to puzzle and confuse 21st century paleoanthropologists trying to create one continuous narrative.

3. A recurrent problem in this new, more complex picture is that ‘superior’ technologies or skills seem sometimes, in some areas, to be replaced by inferior ones. Stringer uses the analogy of fires or beacons flaring up in the immense darkness of Africa for a millennium or so, then going out. Why? The brief answer, as with so much paleoanthropology, is that no-one knows. Climate change? Genetic drift? Drought, famine, conflict? But the stops and starts certainly fit with the newish idea of much greater diversity, variation, and contingency in our evolution than had previously been suspected.

4. All of which brings Stringer to modify his initial RAO thesis: maybe there wasn’t one, but multiple out-of-Africa events. To me, as a layman, this doesn’t seem that surprising. Pre-human species didn’t have maps: they didn’t know they were ‘leaving’ Africa; they were just roaming, hunting and gathering wherever food could be found. It makes more sense to think there would have been multiple ‘exits’ from Africa. If our theories only posited two until recently, that could be because the archaeological record is so thin and patchy as not to spot the others – or it could be that numerous other ‘exit’ populations went extinct leaving no fossil or genetic trace. We think the exit event which led to us is important because it led to us; but it might have been just one among many, and its survival down to pure chance.

5. And this leads to perhaps the most unsettling thought, which is all these theories tend to undermine our specialness. Even within scientific communities there has been a consensus that Homo sapiens is special because ‘we’ ended up inventing agriculture, cities, religion, states, navies, trains, rockets and all the rest of it – and therefore a tendency to try and identify the reason for that specialness and the moment when that specialness took hold. (Stringer thinks something happened around 50,000 years ago to change human behaviour, nudging it towards greater inventiveness – climate, size of social groups, who knows; but there are scores of other theories – he mentions the ‘Broad Spectrum Revolution’ theory proposed by Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery, a coming-together of climate, population size and innovation which they date to 20,000 years ago). But what if we’re not that special. What if Neanderthal man or some of the more obscure relics, such as Homo floriensis (the so-called ‘Hobbit’, a short version of modern humans found only in East Asia) or other sub-species and hominins as yet undiscovered, had just as much potential to develop and ‘succeed’ – but existed in such small populations that fairly limited events (drought, volcanic eruption, sudden chilling in an ice age) wiped them out and happened, just happened, to leave the field open to us? What if ‘we’ are only here by the merest luck or fluke but – with the arrogance typical of our species – have taken this as giving us an entirely spurious specialness, giving us the right to lord it over the earth and all the other species, when in fact our lucky ancestors just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time…

Credit

The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer was published by Allen Lane in 2011. All quotes and references are to the 2012 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Psychology

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by Simon on November 20, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, Science
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 20, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/the-origin-of-our-species-chris-stringer/