Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (23 page)

Fair enough in principle—but, again, the known timing precludes such an argument in practice. I will admit that if we happen to catch art at the very beginning, we would not
expect full sophistication right away. But the oldest known parietal art, at thirty thousand years ago, lies well into the history of
Homo sapiens
in Europe—far closer to us today than to the first invasion from Africa. I don’t know why earlier art hasn’t been found (perhaps we just haven’t made the discovery yet; perhaps people only moved into areas with caves at a much later time). I doubt that
Ugh, the first Cro-Magnon orator, spoke in truly dulcet tones. But we surely don’t regard Pericles as worse than Martin Luther King, Jr., just because he lived a few thousand years ago. Phidias doesn’t pale before Picasso, and no modern composer beats Bach by mere virtue of residence in the twentieth century. Please remember that the first known Cro-Magnon artist, at thirty thousand years ago,
stands closer to Pericles and Phidias than to Ugh, the orator, and Ur, the very first painter. So why should parietal art be any more primitive than the great statue of Athena that once graced the Parthenon?

As a final point, why should areas as distant as southern Spain, northeastern France, and southeastern Italy go through a series of progressive stages in lockstep over twenty thousand years?
Regional and individual variation can swamp general trends, even today in a world of airplanes and televisions. Why did we ever think that evolution should imply a primary signal of uniform advance?

This general line of criticism has been well articulated by Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut in their 1988 book
Images of the Ice Age.
(I am pleased that they found our paleontological theory of punctuated
equilibrium useful in constructing their critique.)

Empirical disproof
. Theoretical
arguments may be dazzling, but give me a good old fact any time. The linear schemes of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan had been weakening for many years as new information accumulated and old certainties evaporated. But one technical advance truly opened the floodgates. Thanks to a new method of radiocarbon dating—called AMS, for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry—only tiny amounts of charcoal need now
be used, and paintings may therefore be analyzed without removing significant material.

In late 1994, three French explorers discovered a wonderful new site, now called Chauvet Cave. The animals at Chauvet, particularly the magnificent horses and lions, match anything else in Paleolithic art for sophistication and accuracy. But the radiocarbon dates, multiply repeated and presumably accurate,
give ages in excess of thirty thousand years—making Chauvet the oldest of all known caves with parietal art. If the very oldest includes the very best, then our previous theories of linear advance must yield. In his epilogue to a gorgeous book, published in 1996, on this new site, Jean Clottes, a leading expert on Paleolithic art, writes:

Let us not lament any lost pleasure in abandoning the notion that we now reside on an ever-rising pinnacle of continuous mental advance, looking back upon benighted beginnings. Consider instead the great satisfaction in grasping our true fellowship with the first known Paleolithic artists. There but for the grace of thirty thousand additional years go I. These paintings speak so powerfully to us today
because we know the people who did them; they are us.

In a famous paradox, Francis Bacon wrote:
antiquitas saeculi, Juventus mundi
(or, roughly, “the old days were the world’s youth”). In other words, don’t think of the Paleolithic as a time of ancient primitivity, but as a period of vigorous youth for our species (while we today must represent the gray-beards). Paleolithic art records our own
early age, and we feel a visceral union with the paintings of Chauvet because, as Wordsworth wrote, “the child is father of the man.” But we should also note the less frequently cited first verse of his poem:

We have loved the rainbow for thirty thousand unbroken years and more.
We have struggled to depict the beauty and power of nature across all these ages. The art of Chauvet—and Lascaux, and Altamira, and a hundred other sites—makes our heart leap because we see our own beginnings on these walls, and know that we were, even then, worthy of greatness.

A LESSON FROM THE OLD MASTERS

T
HE MOST FAMOUS LITERARY TALE OF A HUMP INVOKES AN EVOLUTIONARY
theme of sorts. “In the beginning of years,” Rudyard Kipling tells us in his
Just-So Stories
, “when the world was so new and all, and the animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work.” Instead, when urged
to service by the horse, dog, and ox, the recalcitrant camel merely snorted, “Humph.” So the most powerful of resident Djinns, converting utterance to substance, put a hump on the camel’s back to make up for three lost days of work at the beginning of time: “‘That’s made a-purpose,’ said the Djinn, ‘all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work now for three days without eating,
because you can live on your humph.’”

Kipling ripped off the camel to preach a sermon for children about old-fashioned virtues of work, and the perils of idleness—for his accompanying poem abandons the charm of the tale itself for a heavy moral disquisition couched in doggerel:

I think that we owe nature a favor in return to expiate this exploitation of a long-standing evolutionary product, developed without the slightest human influence, and presumably long before our origin. So I too have a tale of a hump to tell—but for a different animal and an opposite purpose. In Kipling’s version, the camel develops a hump in order to serve a human master
diligently. In the story of this essay, we discover the existence of a hump only because ancient humans painted pictures of a feature that no conventional evidence of the fossil record could ever have revealed. I hope that nature will accept this trade: we rip off a well-known hump to construct a moral fable of dubious merit (Kipling’s camel), but our ancestors restore another by providing the only
possible evidence for a hump that would otherwise have disappeared into the maw of lost history (the Irish Elk of this essay).

We know that certain mammals, from camels to Quasimodo, have humps. Deer, however, do not grow humps—although large deer with big antlers (moose, in particular) often develop a broadly raised area on their backs, in the shoulder region where forelegs meet backbone. But
the deer with the largest antlers of all time, the extinct (and misnamed) Irish Elk, did evolve a prominent hump—a wonderful fact that we can only know because human artists painted these giant deer on cave walls. A hump, as fatty tissue, does not fossilize.

Megaloceros giganteus
, the so-called Irish Elk, surely heads the hit parade of extinct deer. In a famous quip, Voltaire remarked that the
Holy Roman Empire had been misnamed in all attributes—for this amalgam of largely Germanic lands in central Europe was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Similarly, the Irish Elk was neither exclusively Irish nor an elk. This species lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia (with close relatives in Siberia and China), from about 400,000 years ago to a last record in Ireland
at 10,600 years
B.P.
(before the present). The Irish epithet derives from the superb preservation and frequent occurrence of Irish specimens, buried (and hermetically sealed) in sediments beneath layers of peat in the island’s numerous bogs. A cottage industry developed in the nineteenth century for excavating and selling specimens to museums and collectors throughout the world—hence the identification
with Ireland. (A 1994 article by Adrian M. Lister provides a summary of virtually all science and lore about Irish Elks. I have also studied this species extensively, and have published both technical accounts—see my 1974 article cited in the bibliography—and general articles, including the very first essay that I ever wrote in this series, now spanning eight volumes and more than 250 essays.)

The “elk” misnomer has a more complex history. Early scientists thought that the Irish fossils might represent the same species as the American moose, then poorly known. Moose, in Europe, are called elk—hence the confusion. In any case, since
Megaloceros
is not a moose, the common name makes no sense. In this essay, I shall follow the practice of all current experts on these fossils, and refer
to
Megaloceros
as the “giant deer.”

Giant deer had large bodies, about equal in size to those of modern moose, although slightly exceeded by a fossil deer species or two. But the antlers of
Megaloceros
—the source of celebrity for the genus—hold all records for size and weight. Growing outward from the head, essentially at right angles to the body axis, these large palmated antlers (platelike
rather than sticklike) could reach a span of up to thirteen feet from tip to tip, and a weight of one hundred pounds. When we recognize that male giant deer shed and regrew these structures annually (females grew no antlers), our wonder at the energetic drain can only increase.

In the light of this essay’s focus on earliest human interactions with giant deer, I note that the history of scientific
discussion about
Megaloceros
has always centered on questions of potential human contact with such a bizarre and fascinating creature. Two issues dominated the early literature.

1. I
S THE GIANT DEER, OR ANY SPECIES, FOR THAT MATTER, TRULY EXTINCT
? In the eighteenth century, as the Linnaean approach to classification became codified, and as the nascent science of geology began to reveal the earth’s
great age, a major debate arose among European naturalists: Could an entire species become extinct? Many leading naturalists rejected the possibility, either on traditional creationist grounds (for a hole would then be left in a system of relationships ordained as permanent and complete by an omniscient God), or by arguments derived from early forms of evolutionary thought (in Lamarck’s system,
for example, species maintained too much adaptive flexibility to die, though they could transform to higher states).

But if species couldn’t die, where was the animal that, in ages past, left such magnificent antlers under the Irish peat bogs? Some scientists believed that the uncharted forests of Canada might still house the giant deer, perhaps in the degenerated form of the smaller-antlered
American moose. (As mentioned previously, this conjecture led to the false name of “Irish Elk” for the giant deer.)

This debate ramified into a set of interesting byways. On the political front, a full-time statesman and sometime paleontologist named Thomas Jefferson blasted the great French naturalist Georges Buffon for his claim that all American species must be smaller and degenerated versions
of European forms (including the American moose as a demoted giant deer). As his
touché
, Jefferson wrote a paper on the fossil claw of a giant lion, surely larger than any Old World counterpart. Unfortunately, the claw actually belonged to a large ground sloth—showing once again that neither patriotism nor morality should be staked upon the uncertain facts of nature.

On the artistic front, Britain’s
finest painter of animals, George Stubbs, did a portrait of the Duke of Richmond’s yearling bull moose, the first to enter Britain. This work, executed in 1770, depicts the young moose on a mountain ledge, with storm clouds gathering in the background, and a pair of adult antlers lying in the foreground. The painting has long been celebrated, but the circumstances of composition have only
recently come to light. The work was commissioned by the great Scottish medical anatomist William Hunter as part of a project (never published) to determine whether or not the American moose might represent the same species as the fossil Irish giant deer—hence Stubbs’s depiction of
adult
antlers in the foreground! (See W. D. Ian Rolfe’s 1983 article, cited in the bibliography.)

Proponents for
extinction slowly gained the upper hand as further exploration, including the expedition of Lewis and Clark, encountered no living
Megaloceros
—while moose dropped from the running as their differences from giant deer become more apparent. Georges Cuvier, Europe’s premier anatomist and founder of modern vertebrate paleontology, provided a final resolution in 1812, when he published his four volume
Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles (Researches on Fossil Bones)
and proved both the fact of extinction in general, and the death of the giant deer in particular. Speaking with customary force, Cuvier wrote of the giant deer: