The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [17]
Modern humans have at least dealt out death fairly: We began our existence by killing each other. In what looks like a prehistoric bout of all-too-modern ethnic cleansing, Homo sapiens probably drove its closest hominid relatives, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, to oblivion. A minority of archaeologists cling to the notion that some interbreeding must have taken place, but genetic studies show this is unlikely.7 Modern human DNA instead confirms that all of us are descended from the same small initial Homo sapiens population that migrated out of Africa 50,000 years ago.8 The last Neanderthals hung on in remote mountainous parts of France until 38,000 years ago, and in southern Spain until about 30,000 years ago. The very last families died a few thousand years later in Gorham’s Cave in what is now Gibraltar, when their final refuge on the extreme southern edge of the continent was overrun.9 Officially, the direct cause of their ultimate demise is a mystery, but I think we can guess who the culprit was.
There is certainly enough evidence to mark out a crime scene. One Neanderthal skeleton discovered in Iraq bears a peculiar puncture wound on one of its ribs—a mortal injury that is most consistent with a spear thrown by an anatomically modern Homo sapiens.10 In early 2009, the anthropologist Fernando Rozzi reported the discovery of a Neanderthal child’s jawbone, found together with anatomically modern human remains at the cave of Les Rois in southwestern France.11 The bone bore characteristic cut marks, similar to those found on butchered reindeer skulls, suggesting that the tongue had been cut out and eaten. Some loose teeth scattered around also had holes drilled in them, perhaps as parts of a morbid ceremonial necklace. Rozzi drew an unequivocal conclusion: “Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands, and in some cases we ate them,” he said.12
There is even stronger evidence surrounding who killed most of the world’s largest animals, for their butchered bones are found stacked up everywhere humans invaded. As paleontologist Richard Cowen writes in The History of Life, “From Russia to France, [archaeological] sites contain the remains of thousands of horses and hundreds of woolly mammoths.”13 But the slaughter was far worse in the New World, where native species had no previous experience of this naked and harmless-looking but surprisingly rapacious two-legged predator. The North American death toll included six species of ground sloths, two species of mammoths, all mastodons, a giant bison, seven species of deer, moose and antelope, three species of tapirs, the North American lion, the dire wolf, the giant anteater, the giant turtle, the giant condor, all ten species of North American horses (then absent until reintroduced by invading sixteenth-century Europeans), two species of sabre-toothed cats, eight species of cattle and goats, the North American cheetah, four species of camels and two species of large bears.
But the biggest wipeout of all took place in Australia, which saw a near-total extinction of large wild animals. The continent lost some extraordinary creatures: a gigantic horned turtle as big as a car, enormous flightless birds standing more than 2 meters tall and weighing half a tonne, a snake 6 meters long, and a giant predatory lizard that grew up to 7 meters in length and must have been the most fearsome reptilian predator since the dinosaurs. About twenty species of large marsupial disappeared, including a cow-size wombat and a kangaroo 3 meters high. Quite how and when they died remains controversial: Many archaeologists have tried to absolve Homo sapiens of the crime, pointing to the lack of kill sites and the low density of human population. But the extinction is roughly coincident with human arrival on the continent,