by Tim Flannery
About the Book
Europe stands at the crossroads of the Earth. Formed as an archipelago 100 million years ago through the interaction of Africa, Asia and North America, it has been a melting pot in the evolution of the planet’s animal and plant life ever since.
As landmasses rose and fell, animals great and small found their way across land bridges and seas to the diverse and shifting islands. Europe was once home to elephants and rhinos, giant deer and lions—even the world’s first coral reef. Species arose and became extinct, immigrated and dispersed, hybridised and strengthened. The meeting of ancient humans and Neanderthals in this land of exceptional diversity, rapid change and high energy played a key role in the evolution of our own species.
From amazing fossil finds and the often eccentric scientists who sieved the tonnes of sand to find them, to tectonic shifts, ice ages and the future rewilding of Europe, Tim Flannery tells an enthralling scientific and poetic story of a remarkable continent.
‘No one tells it better than Tim Flannery.’ DAVID SUZUKI
Contents
Cover Page
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Time Chart
Introduction
I
THE TROPICAL ARCHIPELAGO
100–34 Million Years Ago
1 Destination Europe
2 Hateg’s First Explorer
3 Dwarfish, Degenerate Dinosaurs
4 Islands at the Crossroads of the World
5 Origins and Ancient Europeans
6 The Midwife Toad
7 The Great Catastrophe
8 A Post-Apocalyptic World
9 New Dawn, New Invasions
10 Messel—a Window into the Past
11 The European Great Coral Reef
12 Tales from the Sewers of Paris
II
BECOMING CONTINENTAL
34–2.6 Million Years Ago
13 La Grande Coupure
14 Cats, Birds and Olms
15 The Marvellous Miocene
16 A Miocene Bestiary
17 Europe’s Extraordinary Apes
18 The First Upright Apes
19 Lakes and Islands
20 The Messinian Salinity Crisis
21 The Pliocene—Time of Laocoon
III
ICE AGES
2.6 Million–38,000 Years Ago
22 The Pleistocene—Gateway to the Modern World
23 Hybrids—Europe, the Mother of Metissage
24 Return of the Upright Apes
25 Neanderthals
26 Bastards
27 The Cultural Revolution
28 Of Assemblages and Elephants
29 Other Temperate Giants
30 Ice Beasts
31 What the Ancestors Drew
IV
HUMAN EUROPE
38,000 Years Ago to the Future
32 The Balance Tips
33 The Domesticators
34 From the Horse to Roman Failure
35 Emptying the Islands
36 The Calm and the Storm
37 Survivors
38 Europe’s Global Expansion
39 New Europeans
40 Animals of Empire
41 Europe’s Bewolfing
42 Europe’s Silent Spring
43 Rewilding
44 Re-creating Giants
Envoi
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tim Flannery
Endnotes
Copyright page
Index
To Colin Groves and Ken Aplin, life-long colleagues, and heroes of zoology.
A GEOLOGICAL TIME CHART
Introduction
Natural histories encompass both the natural and the human worlds. This one seeks to answer three great questions. How was Europe formed? How was its extraordinary history discovered? And why did Europe come to be so important in the world? For those, like me, seeking answers it is fortunate that Europe has a great abundance of bones—layer upon layer of them, buried in rocks and sediments that extend all the way back to the beginning of bony animals. Europeans have also left an exceptionally rich trove of natural-history observations: from the works of Herodotus and Pliny to those of the English naturalists Robert Plot and Gilbert White. Europe is also where the investigation of the deep past began. The first geological map, the first palaeobiological studies and the first reconstructions of dinosaurs were all made in Europe. And over the past few years a revolution in research, driven by powerful new DNA studies, along with astonishing discoveries in palaeontology, has enabled a profound reinterpretation of the continent’s past.
This history begins around 100 million years ago, at the moment of Europe’s conception—the moment when the first distinctively European organisms evolved. Earth’s crust is composed of tectonic plates that move imperceptibly slowly across the globe, and upon which the continents ride. Most continents originated in the splitting of ancient supercontinents. But Europe began as an island archipelago, and its conception involved the geological interactions of three continental ‘parents’—Asia, North America and Africa. Together, those continents comprise about two-thirds of the land on Earth, and because Europe has acted as a bridge between these landmasses, it has functioned as the most significant seat of exchange in the history of our planet.*
Europe is a place where evolution proceeds rapidly—a place in the vanguard of global change. But even deep in the age of dinosaurs, Europe had special characteristics that shaped the evolution of its inhabitants. Some of these characteristics continue to exert influence today. In fact, some of Europe’s contemporary human dilemmas result from those characteristics.
Defining Europe is a slippery undertaking. Its diversity, evolutionary history and shifting borders make the place almost protean. Yet, paradoxically, Europe is immediately recognisable. With its distinctive human landscapes, once-great forests, Mediterranean coasts and Alpine vistas—we all know Europe when we see it. And the Europeans themselves, with their castles, towns and unmistakable music, are every bit as instantly recognisable. Moreover, it is important to recognise that Europeans share a highly influential dreamtime—in the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome. Even Europeans whose forebears were never part of this classical world claim it as their own, looking to it for knowledge and inspiration.
So what is Europe, and what does it mean to be European? Contemporary Europe is not a continent in any real geographical sense.** Instead it is an appendix—an island-ringed peninsula projecting into the Atlantic from the western end of Eurasia. In a natural history, Europe is best defined by the history of its rocks. So conceptualised, Europe extends from Ireland in the west to the Caucasus in the east, and from Svalbard in the north to Gibraltar and Syria in the south.* So defined, Turkey is part of Europe, but Israel is not: the rocks of Turkey share a common history with the rest of Europe, while Israel’s rocks originate in Africa.
I am not European—in a political sense at least. I was born in the antipodes—Europe’s opposite—as the Europeans once called Australia. But corporeally I am as European as the Queen of England (who, incidentally, is ethnically German). The history of Europe’s wars and monarchs were drilled into me as a child, but I was taught next to nothing about Australia’s trees and landscapes. Perhaps this contradiction triggered my curiosity. Whatever the case, my search for Europe began long ago, before I had ever touched European soil.
When I first travelled to Europe as a student in 1983 I was thrilled, certain that I was going to the centre of the world. But as we neared Heathrow, the pilot of the British Airways jet made an announcement I have never forgotten: ‘We are now approaching a rather small, foggy island in the North Sea.’ In all my life I had never thoug
ht of Britain like that. When we landed I was astonished at the gentle quality of the air. Even the scent on the breeze seemed soothing, lacking that distinctive eucalyptus tang I was barely conscious of until it wasn’t there. And the sun. Where was the sun? In strength and penetration, it more resembled an austral moon than the great fiery orb that scorched my homeland.
European nature held more surprises. I was astonished at the prodigious size of its wood pigeons and the abundance of deer on the fringes of urban England. The vegetation was so gentle and green in that moist and cushioned air that its brilliant hue seemed unreal. It had very few spines or harsh twigs—so unlike the dusty, scratchy scrub at home. After days of peering into misty skies and looking at soft-edged horizons, I began to feel that I was wrapped in cotton wool.
I made that first visit to study in the collections of London’s Natural History Museum. Soon after, I became curator of mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney, where I was expected to develop a global expertise in mammalogy. So, when Redmond O’Hanlon, the natural history editor at the Times Literary Supplement, asked me to review a book on the mammals of the United Kingdom, I reluctantly took up the challenge. The work mystified me because it failed to mention the two species—cows and humans—that had long pedigrees in the United Kingdom, and which I had found to be abundant there.
After receiving my review, Redmond invited me to visit him at home in Oxfordshire. I feared that this was his kind way of telling me that my work was not up to scratch. Instead, I was given a warm welcome, and we chatted enthusiastically about natural history. Late at night, after a sumptuous meal accompanied by many glasses of Bordeaux, he conspiratorially ushered me into the garden, where he pointed to a pond. We crept to its edge, Redmond signalling silence. Then he handed me a torch, and, among the waterweeds, I spotted a pale shape.
A newt! My first. As Redmond knew, Australia lacks tailed amphibians. I was as awestruck as was P. G. Wodehouse’s wonderful creation in the Jeeves novels, fish-faced Gussie Fink-Nottle, who ‘buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts, keeping the little chaps in a glass tank and observing their habits with a sedulous eye’.1 Newts are such primitive creatures that watching them was like looking into time itself.
From the moment I saw my first newt, to discovering the origins of the Europeans themselves, my 30-year-long journey of investigation into Europe’s natural history has been filled with discovery. Perhaps what has amazed me most, as an inhabitant of the land of the platypus, is that Europe has equally ancient and primitive creatures that, though familiar, are underappreciated. Another discovery that astonished me was the number of globally important ecosystems and species that arose in Europe, but which are now long-gone from that continent. Who would have guessed, for example, that Europe’s ancient seas played an important role in the evolution of modern coral reefs? Or that our first upright ancestors evolved in Europe, not Africa? And who imagines that much of Europe’s Ice-Age megafauna survives, hidden away like the elves and fairies of folklore, in remote enchanted woods and plains, or as genes perpetually slumbering in the permafrost?
So much that shaped our modern world began in Europe: the Greeks and the Romans, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the empires that by the nineteenth century had divided up the planet between them. And Europe continues to lead the world in so many ways: from the demographic transition to the creation of new forms of politics and the reinvigoration of nature. Who knew that Europe, with its population of almost 750 million people, is home to more wolves than exist in the USA, including Alaska?
And perhaps most astounding, some of the continent’s most characteristic species, including its largest wild mammals, are hybrids. To those used to thinking about ‘pure-bloods’ and ‘mongrels’, hybrids are often seen as nature’s mistakes—threats to genetic purity. But new studies have shown that hybridisation is vital to evolutionary success. From elephants to onions, hybridisation has allowed the sharing of beneficial genes that have enabled organisms to survive in new and challenging environments.
Some hybrids possess a vigour and aptitude not seen in either parent, and some bastard species (as hybrids are sometimes known) have survived long after the extinction of their parent species. The Europeans themselves are hybrids, created about 38,000 years ago when dark-skinned humans from Africa began interbreeding with pale-skinned, blue-eyed Neanderthals. Almost the instant those first hybrids appear, a dynamic culture emerges in Europe, whose achievements include the creation of the first pictorial art and human figurines, the first musical instruments, and the first domestication of animals. The first Europeans were, it seems, very special bastards indeed. But long before that, European biodiversity would be destroyed and re-made three times over as celestial and tectonic forces shaped the land.
Let us now embark on a journey to discover the nature of this place that has so influenced the world. In order to do so, we will need several European inventions: James Hutton’s discovery of deep time, Charles Lyell’s founding principles of geology, Charles Darwin’s elucidation of the evolutionary process, and H. G. Wells’ great imaginative innovation, the time machine. Prepare to step back in time to that moment when Europe developed its first glimmerings of distinction.
______________________
* The size, shape and locations of these landmasses have changed over time. Africa had Gondwanan connections around 100 million years ago. North America has moved away from Europe over the past 30 million years. India’s three million square kilometres was not part of the Asian landmass until around 50 million years ago. At times higher sea levels have reduced the area of all of Earth’s landmasses, while at others rifting has expanded and fragmented the various lands (such as when the Arabian Peninsula separated from Africa).
** In a geological sense it is part of the Eurasian Plate.
* Even this definition is not clear cut, for large parts of Europe south of the Alps include fragments of Africa and ocean crust that have been incorporated into the European landmass.
CHAPTER 1
Destination Europe
When piloting a time machine you must set two coordinates: time and space. Parts of Europe are unimaginably old, so there are plenty of options. The rocks underlying the Baltic states are some of the oldest on Earth, dating back more than three billion years. Then, life consisted of simple, single-celled organisms, and the atmosphere had no free oxygen. Fast forward 2.5 billion years and we’re in a world with complex life, but the surface of the land remains barren. By about 300 million years ago, the land has been colonised by plants and animals, but none of the continents have broken free from the great landmass known as Pangea. Even after Pangea breaks into two, forming the southern supercontinent of Gondwana and its northern counterpart Eurasia, Europe is yet to become a distinct entity. Indeed, it is not until around 100 million years ago, in the last phase of the age of dinosaurs (the Cretaceous Period), that a European zoogeographic region begins to emerge.
One hundred million years ago sea levels were much higher than they are today, and a great seaway, known as the Tethys (which was created when the supercontinents of Eurasia and Gondwana separated) stretched all the way from Europe to Australia. An arm of the Tethys known as the Turgai Strait was an important zoogeographic barrier, cutting Asia off from Europe. The Atlantic Ocean, where it existed at all, was very narrow. Bounding it to the north was a land bridge that connected North America and Greenland with Europe. Known as the De Geer Corridor, this land bridge passed close to the North Pole, the cold and seasonal darkness limiting the species that could cross. Africa bounded the Tethys to the south, and a shallow sea intruded over much of what is today the central Sahara. The geological forces that would in time tear Arabia from Africa’s eastern edge and open the Great Rift Valley (thereby widening the African continent), were yet to begin their work.
The European archipelago of 100 million years ago was positioned where Europe is today—east of Greenland, west of Asia, and ce
ntred on a region between 30 and 50 degrees latitude north of the Equator. The obvious place to land our time machine would be the island of Bal (which is today part of the Baltic region). By far the largest and oldest island in the European archipelago, Bal must have played a vital role in shaping Europe’s primeval fauna and flora. But frustratingly, not a single fossil from the latter part of the age of dinosaurs has been found in the entire landmass, so that all that we know of life on Bal comes from a few scraps of plants and animals that were washed out to sea and preserved in marine sediments that now outcrop in Sweden and southeastern Russia. It would be useless to land our time machine in such a ghastly blank.1
It is important to know, however, that ghastly blanks are the norm in palaeontology. To explain their profound influence, I must introduce Signor-Lipps—not some voluble Italian, but two learned professors. Philip Signor and Jere Lipps joined forces in 1982 to propound an important principal in palaeontology: ‘since the fossil record of organisms is never complete, neither the first nor last organism in a given taxon will be recorded as a fossil.’2 Just as the ancients drew a veil of modesty over the critical moment in the story of Europa and the bull so, Signor-Lipps inform us, has geology veiled the moment of Europe’s zoogeographic conception, leaving us to set our time machine dial to between 86 and 65 million years ago, when an exceptionally diverse array of fossil deposits preserves evidence of a vigorous infant Europe. The deposits formed on the island chain of Modac, which lies to the south of Bal. Modac was long ago incorporated into a region encompassing parts of almost a dozen eastern European countries—from Macedonia in the west to the Ukraine in the east. In Roman times, this great sweep of land lay within the two sprawling provinces of Moesia and Dacia, from which its name is derived.
At the time of our arrival, large parts of Modac are being pushed above the ocean waves by the first stirrings of the tectonic forces that will, in time, form the European Alps, while others are slipping beneath the sea. Amid this maelstrom of tectonic activity lies the island of Hateg, a place surrounded by submarine volcanoes that intermittently brake the surface, spewing ash over the land. It has endured for millions of years by the time of our visit, allowing a unique flora and fauna to develop. Approximately 80,000 square kilometres in area, about the size of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Hateg is isolated, lying 27 degrees north of the Equator and 200–300 kilometres across deep ocean from its nearest neighbour, Bomas (the Bohemian Massif). Today, Hateg is part of Transylvania, in Romania, and the fossils found there are among the most abundant and diverse of the last part of the age of dinosaurs in all of Europe.
