Chapter 5 Chapter 5 Lost Animal Populations
In the dream, you walk outside and find your familiar landscape populated by strange and eccentric creatures.Depending on where you are, what you see will vary: maybe a reindeer with antlers as big as a tree trunk, or something as large as an armored tank.There is also a group of animals that look like camels, but with elephant trunks.Thick-skinned rhinos, woolly elephants, and even bigger sloths—sloths? ?There are also Mustangs of all sizes and stripes.Black panthers have seven-inch fangs; cheetahs are monstrously large.Wolves, bears, and lions are all gigantic...it must be a nightmare.
Is this a dream or an innate memory?It is such a world that Homo sapiens stepped into, when we were all the way from Africa to the distant Americas.If we never existed, would those mammals that are now gone still be on this earth?Will they come back if we leave?
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Among the various derogatory terms used to ridicule a sitting president in American history, Thomas Jefferson's political opponents gave him the most unique nickname in 1808 - Mr. Mammoth.Jefferson's ban on foreign trade was intended to punish Britain and France for monopolizing the sea lanes, but the ban ultimately backfired.With the U.S. economy in recession, political opponents jeered at him, as President Jefferson could be seen playing with his collection of fossils in the East Room of the White House.
This is true.An avid naturalist, Jefferson had been fascinated by reports a few years earlier of gigantic skeletons strewn around the Kentucky salt pans.The bones resemble those of a large ancient elephant found in Siberia, a species thought to be extinct by European scientists, the report said.African slaves identified the large molars found in the Carolinas as belonging to some kind of elephant, and Jefferson was convinced that the bones were from the same species. In 1796, he received a shipment from Greenbrier County, Virginia. He thought it was the bones of a mammoth, but a huge paw immediately changed his mind: it was some other species, maybe some kind of gigantic mammoth. lion.After consulting an anatomist, he eventually identified it, and he is credited with the first record of the North American ground sloth.This ground sloth is known today as "Jefferson the giant clawed sloth".
Indians around the Kentucky salt flats claim that the tusked giants survived in the north.This statement was also supported by other tribes in the west.This made Jefferson especially happy.After he became president, he sent Meriwether Lewis to study the giant beast site in Kentucky, joining William Clark in his mission to explore the mysteries of history.In addition to crossing Louisiana in search of rivers leading northwest to the Pacific Ocean, Jefferson had Lewis and Clark look for living mammoths, mastodons, or other similarly large and rare animals.
Their expedition failed; the largest mammal they found was no more than a bighorn sheep.Later, Clark returned to Kentucky to find the mammoth bones, and Jefferson displayed them in the White House with satisfaction, and today they are in the collections of museums in the United States and France.He is often credited with establishing paleontology, although this was not in fact his original intention.A well-known French scientist once claimed that everything in the new world is inferior to the old world, and wild animals are no exception.Jefferson had been hoping to prove that this view was nothing but nonsense.
He made a fundamental mistake in his perception of fossil bones, thinking that they must belong to some living species, because he did not believe that living things would become extinct.Although he is often seen as the intellectual representative of the American Enlightenment, Jefferson shared the view of many deists and Christians of the time: In a perfect world, nothing of creation should disappear.
As a naturalist he proclaimed his creed: "This is nature's system. She will never allow any of her species to go extinct." This idea pervades many of his writings: he wanted these animals to be Live, hope to be able to understand them.It is because of his thirst for knowledge that he established the University of Virginia.Over the next two centuries, paleontologists there and elsewhere confirmed that many species were in fact extinct.Charles Darwin would have said that these extinct creatures were part of nature—one species evolved into a higher form to adapt to a changing environment, while another lost its territory to powerful competitors.
Still, there's one detail that baffled Thomas Jefferson and others after him, and that's that the remains of this large mammal look nothing like a very old thing.They are not already mineralized fossils buried in layers of solid rock.Tusks, teeth and cheekbones found around Kentucky's Boulder Salt State Park were either scattered on the ground, exposed in shallow silt, or lying in caves.These large mammals could not have had such a large range.What the hell is going on?
The predecessor of "Desert Laboratory" was "Carnegie Desert Plant Laboratory".It was built a century ago on the top of Mount Tummamok.Tummamok Mountain is a hill in southern Arizona. The foot of the mountain used to be the most lush cactus forest in North America. The other side of the forest is the city of Tucson8.Paul Martin, a tall, broad-shouldered, affable paleoecologist, had been at the lab for almost half a century.During this time, beneath the giant-pillared slopes of Mount Tummamok, the desert disappeared in a clamor of residential and commercial development.But the imposing pagoda remained, a top-notch sight coveted by developers — who had been planning to wrest it from the University of Arizona.Leaning on his cane and looking out from the curtain at the laboratory door, Paul Martin said that human influence did not start in the last century, but 13,000 years ago - when people arrived here.
In 1956, the year before Paul Martin came to the lab, he spent the winter in a farmhouse in Quebec as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal.He used to be a graduate student in zoology. When he was collecting bird specimens in Mexico, he unfortunately contracted polio, and since then he has switched to laboratory research.While hiding out in Canada, he huddled next to a microscope, studying sediment samples collected from New England lakes at the end of the last ice age.The samples reveal how the surrounding vegetation shifted from treeless tundra to coniferous forests and from coniferous forests to temperate deciduous forests as the climate became milder—a process that some suspect led to mastodons of extinction.
Instead of counting tiny pollen grains one weekend, mountain roads were snowed in, he opened a taxonomy tutorial and started counting the number of mammals that had disappeared from the North American continent in the past 65 million years.As he counted to the last three millennia of the Pleistocene period (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago), he noticed something odd.
A mass extinction occurred 13,000 years ago, which is consistent in time with what his sediment specimens showed.Before the next geological epoch, the Holocene epoch, which continues today, almost 40 species disappeared, all of them large land mammals.Mice, shrews and other small furred animals survived unscathed, as did aquatic mammals.However, the land-dwelling gigantic animals suffered a fatal blow on a wide scale.
Gone are legions of giants of the animal kingdom: the giant armadillo and the even bigger glyptodon.They resemble armored Volkswagens, with pointed barbs at the end of their tails.There are also huge short-faced bears, which are almost twice as numerous as grizzly bears, with longer limbs and faster speed-some people think that it is the existence of short-faced bears in Alaska that made humans dare not cross the whitewater earlier. Ling Strait.There were also giant beavers, which were comparable in size to today's black bears.The boar may have been the prey of the American lion, which was much larger and faster than its modern-day kin, the African lion.Dire wolves are the largest canines, and they have a row of huge tusks.
The extinct northern woolly mammoth is the most famous giant.They are just one of many proboscises.Proboscises include imperial mammoths—the largest of which can weigh up to 10 tons and live in warmer regions, and pygmy mammoths of California's Channel Islands—which are no taller than a person and live only in An elephant of the same size as a shepherd dog on the Mediterranean islands is smaller than them.Mammoths are herbivores, and they have evolved to the Siberian Great Plains, grasslands and tundra, unlike their distant ancestors, mastodons, who can only live in woods and forests.Mastodons have been around for 30 million years, traveling across Mexico, Florida, and Alaska, and then, all of a sudden, they're gone without a trace.Three breeds of American horses disappeared.A variety of North American camels, tapirs, countless cervids - from the graceful pronghorn to the stag moose (which looks like a cross between moose and elk, but is bigger than both), saber-toothed cats, cheetahs (they are the reason why the only surviving antelope runs so fast), all are gone.All gone.There used to be so many of them.What, Paul Martin wondered, might have caused this situation?
In the second year, he came to the laboratory on Tumamok Mountain, curled up next to the microscope again.This time, he wasn't working with pollen grains that had been sealed from decay by the lake's bottom silt seal.Fragments of his previous observations have long been preserved in the vapor-free Grand Canyon caverns.Not long after arriving in Tucson, his new boss at Desert Labs gave him a gray clod about the shape and size of a softball.It's 10,000 years old, but it's a solid piece of shit.It was shriveled, but not yet mineralized, and grassy fibers and flowering bulbous mallows were noticeably growing on it.The abundance of juniper pollen that Martin found confirmed its age: The Grand Canyon floor had been too hot for juniper growth for as long as 8,000 years.
The owner of the droppings is a shasta ground sloth.Today, the only surviving species of slow lorises live in the woods of tropical Central and South America. They are small and light enough to live quietly in the shade of rainforest trees, away from the ground and away from danger.However, the owner of this mass of dung should be as big as a cow.Like their surviving siblings, the South American giant anteater, they walk on knuckles, protecting their claws for rummaging for food and self-defense.They weigh half a ton, but are already the smallest of the five North American ground sloth species that stretch from Canada's Yukon to Florida.Florida ground sloths were similar in size to today's elephants and could weigh up to 3 tons.But that's only half the size of the Argentinian and Uruguayan slow lorises—they weigh 13,000 pounds and stand taller than the largest mammoths.
A decade later, Paul Martin visited the red sandstone walls of the Grand Canyon above the Colorado River, where the ground sloth dung ball was collected.At this point, he had a better understanding of the extinct American ground sloth than just a giant mammal that mysteriously disappeared.The data accumulated like layered sediments, and Martin formed a theory in his head that he believed the fate of the ground sloth would provide conclusive evidence for that theory.Lampard's burrow contains a pile of feces, and he and his colleagues believe that generations of female ground sloths have sheltered and reproduced in this burrow.The feces pile was 5 feet high, 10 feet wide, and more than 100 feet long.Martin felt he had entered a holy place.
Ten years later, the savages set fire to the place, and the fossilized dung pile burned for several months because of its size.Martin lamented this, but by this time he had a theory of his own, making his debut in the field of paleontology: what gave rise to millions of ground sloths, wild boars, camels, elephants and two dozen species of horses —Where all sixty species of large mammals from the New World disappeared in just a thousand years?
"The answer is simple. When humans left Africa and Asia and moved into other parts of the world, the big trouble started."
Martin's theory was soon dubbed "Blitzkrieg" by supporters and critics alike.He contends that, beginning in Australia 48,000 years ago, humans encountered large animals on every continent they set foot on — and there was no reason for them to consider these diminutive bipeds a great threat.By the time they realize that's not the case, it's too late.Even when hominids were still at the stage of Homo erectus, they had already begun to manufacture axes and machetes on a large scale in Stone Age "factories", such as Mary Leakey in Oro, Kenya, a million years later. Gesseli found a similar tool. When people arrived in the Americas 13,000 years ago, they had been in the Homo sapiens stage for at least 50,000 years.Their brains were bigger than ever, and they had learned not only how to make handles for fluted sharp stone tools, but also how to use spear shafts-the wooden implements that kept them steady while throwing, Throw your spear quickly and accurately kill large, dangerous animals from a relatively safe distance.
Martin believes that the first Americans were good at making leaf-shaped flint-throwing points, and they spread across the North American continent.They and the pointed tools they made are known as the Clovis prehistoric human civilization, named after the New Mexico site where they were first discovered.Through radiocarbon testing of organic material found at the Clovis site, archaeologists now agree that the Clovis people lived on the American continent as early as 13,325 years ago.However, there are different opinions on what their appearance means: According to Paul Martin's hypothesis, humans are the culprit of the mass extinction. They shot and killed three quarters of the large animals in the Americas that lived in the late Pleistocene. Richer than Africa today.
The main reason Martin came up with the "blitzkrieg" theory was that at at least fourteen Clovis sites, they found pointed objects placed with the bones of mammoths or mastodons, some inserted into their ribs. "If Homo sapiens had never evolved," he says, "there would be as many animals over 1,000 pounds in what is now North America as there are in Africa today." He lists five large animals in Africa: "Hippos, elephants , giraffe, and two species of rhino. We'd have fifteen species in North America. If you add South America, you'd have even more." The salivata were shaped like camels, but with the nostrils at the top of the snout instead of the bottom.Or Cynodont, which looks like a cross between a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus, though anatomically they are neither. "
The fossil record shows that all of these animals once existed, though there is no consensus on what happened to them.Someone questioned Paul Martin's theory: Were the Clovis people the first humans to enter the New World?Among the opponents are Native Americans, who are wary of any suggestion that they are immigrants because it degrades their status as natives; Attack of faith.Some archaeologists have even questioned whether there is an ice-free Bering Strait for humans to travel through. Is it possible that the first Americans came by water and slid on the ice all the way to the Pacific coast?If humans arrived in Australia by boat 40,000 years ago, why is it impossible to go to America by boat?
It has also been pointed out that the Clovis civilization of some archaeological sites has been estimated too early.The most famous of these sites is the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, where archaeologists excavating believe that humans may have settled there twice: the first time a thousand years before the Clovis civilization ; the second time was thirty thousand years ago.If this is the case, then the Bering Strait was likely to be a waterway at that time, which means that the human migration journey included a sailing journey.Archaeologists also suspect that humans may have crossed the Atlantic Ocean at that time. These people believe that Clovis's technology for grinding flint is very similar to the stone tool technology developed in France and Spain 10,000 years ago.
It didn't take long for questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating at the Monte Verde site to cast doubt on previous claims that it proved the presence of early humans on the American continent.The peat bogs held clubs, stakes, spearheads and knotted blades of grass from the Monte Verde site, but most of the peat bogs were bulldozed before other archaeologists could visit the excavation site.So things got more confusing.
Even if early humans did reach Chile in some way before the Clovis civilization, Paul Martin retorts that their impact was transient, localized, and ecologically negligible, as were those before Columbus The Vikings who occupied Newfoundland. "Where are the vast collections of tools, artifacts, and cave paintings left by their contemporaries in Europe? Pre-Clovis Americans couldn't possibly have encountered an equivalent human civilization like the Vikings did. At that time Just animals. Why didn't they reproduce and spread?"
The second point concerns a more fundamental polemical divide in Martin's "lightning station" theory.For several years now, the most widely accepted explanation for the fate of the New World's megafauna has raised the question: How did some nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples wipe out tens of millions of megafauna?Across the continent, it is difficult to conclude that there was a mass murder of large animals from just 14 sites where animals were shot.
Almost half a century later, the debate started by Paul Martin is still a hot topic in the scientific community.There are those dedicated to proving or falsifying Martin's theory, archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists, dendrochronologists, radiochronologists, paleoecologists, and biologists sparking a A protracted and sometimes explosive debate.Almost all of them, though, were Martin's friends, and many were his former students.
As a rebuttal to Martin's "excessive shooting" theory, the most influential ideas they advanced were none other than climate change or the spread of disease, inevitably later parodied as "excessive cold" or "excessive disease" theories. The "excessive cold" theory has the most followers, but is itself a myth, as the terms "too hot" and "too cold" have both been criticized.One theory is that the end of the Pleistocene experienced climate deterioration, and as the glaciers melted, the world entered an ice age in an instant, but countless vulnerable animals did not know this.Others have suggested the exact opposite: that the sudden increase in temperatures during the Holocene spelled the end of fur animals, as they had adapted to the frigid climate for thousands of years.
The "disease excess" theory holds that the arrival of humans, or the organisms that accompanied them, brought pathogens, and all other life in the Americas disappeared.As the glaciers continue to retreat, mammoth tissues may be found, and by analyzing them, we may be able to prove the truth of this idea.This assumption is not unfounded: most descendants of the first Americans died tragically in the century after the arrival of Europeans.Only a few died at the sword of the Spaniards; the rest died from germs brought over from the Old World for which they had no antibodies: smallpox, measles, typhoid, and whooping cough.In Mexico alone, an estimated 25 million Mesoamericans lived before the Spaniards, but hundreds of years later that number dropped precipitously to 1 million.
Even if the disease mutated on its way to mammoths and other Pleistocene giants, or spread directly via dogs and domestic animals, Homo sapiens was still the culprit.For the "excessive cold" theory, Paul Martin responded in this way: "In the words of some paleoclimate experts, 'climate changes are quite frequent.' It's not that the climate doesn't change, but that it changes too frequently. "
Paleo-European sites show that Homo sapiens and modern Neanderthals migrated continuously south and north as the ice sheets advanced and receded.Larger animals do the same, Martin said. "Large animals are so big that changes in temperature don't affect them immediately. They can migrate long distances—perhaps not as far as birds, but certainly farther than mice. Rats, wood rats and others Small, warm-blooded animals survived the Pleistocene mass extinction," he added, "so it's hard to believe that sudden climate change would make it impossible for large mammals to survive."
Plants, which are less mobile than animals and generally more sensitive to climate, seem to have survived mass extinctions.Among ground sloth droppings in Lampard Cave and other Grand Canyon caves, Martin and his colleagues found wood rat dung piles, interspersed with layers of plant debris that had accumulated over thousands of years.With the exception of one type of spruce, the diet of foxtail wood rats and ground sloths in caves has not been wiped out by temperature changes.
But Martin's basis for this conclusion is ground sloths.All of the slow, clumsy, easy-to-catch food for ground sloths disappeared across the American continent in the millennium after the Clovis people appeared.Radiocarbon dating confirmed that bones found in Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico belonged to ground sloths that survived the next 5,000 years.Their eventual extinction coincides with the arrival of humans in the Antilles 8,000 years ago.In the Lesser Antilles, such as Grenada, humans arrived later, and the surviving ground sloths belong to earlier species.
"If climate change is sufficient to wipe out ground sloths from Alaska to Patagonia, it is unlikely that ground sloths in the West Indies will be extinct. Yet they survive." The evidence also suggests that the first The first Americans arrived in America by land, not by sea, because they did not come to the Caribbean until five thousand years later.
Events on another remote island provide further evidence that if humans had not evolved, the large animals of the Pleistocene might still be alive today.During the Ice Age, Wrangel Island 10—a wedge-shaped piece of hard tundra in the Arctic Ocean—was once connected to Siberia.However, because of its location too far north, humans entering Alaska did not take advantage of this route.During the Holocene, as seas warmed and sea levels rose, Wrangel Island was once again cut off from the mainland; the island's remaining woolly mammoths were caught between a rock and a hard place, forced to adapt to island life with limited resources.When humans in Sumer and Peru came out of their caves and built great civilizations, the mammoths on Wrangel Island survived, evolving into a dwarf species that outlived mammoths on other continents by more than 7,000 years. They survived the reign of the Egyptian pharaohs 4,000 years ago.
One of the most surprising species of Pleistocene megafauna, the world's largest bird, went extinct a little later because they lived on an island that humans hadn't noticed.New Zealand's wingless moa can weigh up to 600 pounds, twice the weight of an ostrich, and stand about a yard taller erect.The first humans lived in New Zealand two centuries before Columbus sailed to America.By the time the New World was discovered, the last eleven species of moa had become extinct.
In Paul Martin's view, the conclusion is obvious. "Large animals are the easiest to hunt down. Shooting them can bring the most food and the highest prestige to humans." Less than a hundred miles from the Tumamok Mountain Laboratory, on the other side of the noisy city of Tucson, ten Three of the four Clovis shooting sites are located here.One of the richest of these, the Murray Springs site, is littered with Clovis spearheads and mammoth remains.Two of Martin's students, Vance Haynes and Pete Meinger, discovered the site.According to Haynes, the strata had decayed and looked like "the pages of a book that records the history of the earth for 50,000 years."These "pages" included several extinct North American species: mammoths, horses, camels, lions, bison and dire wolves.Tapirs and two other animals that survive today were also found at nearby sites: bears and bison.
This begs the question: if humans have slaughtered everything, why have they survived?Why are grizzly bears, buffalo, elk, musk ox, moose, caribou and mountain lions still active in North America, but other large mammals have disappeared?
Polar bears, reindeer, and musk oxen live in areas relatively sparsely populated by humans who find it much easier to find fish and seals for food.In the southern part of the wooded tundra, bears and mountain lions are elusive and fast, hiding in forests or boulders.Other species, like Homo sapiens, arrived in North America around the time of the Pleistocene extinction.Today's plains buffalo are genetically closer to the Polish bison than the large, now-extinct American bison found at the Murray Springs site.After the extinction of the great bison, the population of the plains buffalo exploded.Likewise, today's moose migrated from Eurasia after the American male moose became extinct.
Carnivores like saber-toothed cats are likely to go extinct with the disappearance of their prey.Some Pleistocene species, such as tapirs, wild boars, jaguars, and llamas, fled farther south, hiding in the forests of Mexico, Central America, and South America.The remaining species went extinct, and the great sanctuary eventually took in more members—buffalo, elk, and other animals in company.
While excavating the Murray Springs site, Vance Haynes found signs that drought once forced Pleistocene mammals to seek water - a trail of footprints next to a muddy burrow, apparently an attempt by mammals Evidence of digging wells for drinking water.Here, they are easy prey for hunters.In the stratum above them was a fossilized section of black algae that had died in the cold waves mentioned by many proponents of the "excessive cold" theory - but below this stratum lay the bones of the mammoth, rather than among.
Here's another clue that if humans had never existed, descendants of these slaughtered mammoths might still be alive on Earth today: After the big game went extinct, so did the Clovis people and their famous stone pointed tools For the sake of succession.With their prey gone and the weather colder, they may have migrated south.But a few years later, during the warmer Holocene, the successors of the Clovis civilization emerged, making smaller spearheads for the smaller plains buffalo.There was a certain balance in numbers between these "Folsamians" and the rest of the animals.
The ancestors hunted and killed the herbivores of the Pleistocene insatiably, as if the source of these foods was inexhaustible, which eventually led to the break of this food chain.Did the descendants of these Americans learn from this incident?Maybe.Their descendants were the American Indians, who concentrated herbivores like deer into small fields in the forest and created grasslands for animals like buffalo.The formation of the Great Plains is largely due to the fires they set.
Later, diseases brought by Europe brought genocide to the New World, killing almost all the Indians, but buffalo numbers swelled and spread to other areas.They almost made it to Florida, where they met the white settlers who were expanding westward.Except for some that were kept to satisfy the curiosity, almost all the other buffalo were driven to extinction. After that, the colonists made full use of the plains opened up by the Indians to raise livestock cattle.
The Santa Cruz River originates in Mexico and winds its way north.Paul Martin's aerial view of the desert city on the Santa Cruz River from his hilltop laboratory.Camels, tapirs, native wild horses and Columbian mammoths once foraged on the green floodplains.Descendants of the humans who wiped them out settled here, building mud huts and planting cottonwoods and willows.All of this, once abandoned, quickly becomes part of the soil and the river.
After the prey dwindled, people began to cultivate the plants they collected, and the developed village was called "Xiaksun" by them, which means flowing water.They mixed harvested chaff with river mud to make mud bricks, which remained in use until after World War II when they were replaced by adobe bricks made of concrete.Shortly thereafter, the appearance of the hut drew many people here, and the river was drained.So they dug a well.When the well water also dries up, they dig down again.
Today, the powdery bed of the Santa Cruz River flanks downtown Tucson, and the city hall's massive concrete and steel beam foundations look at least as old as the Colosseum.But visitors from the distant future may have a hard time finding the Great Hall, as today's hungry humans leave Tucson and the overly sprawling Mexican border city of Nogales (Sonora lies thirty miles to the south) mile), the Santa Cruz River will eventually rise again.The weather will do its job, and the dry rivers of Tucson and Nogales will be recommissioned to create a flood plain.By then, the Great Hall in Tucson will be roofless, and silt will be poured into its foundations until it is buried in the ground.
What kind of animals will live on it is unknown.The bison had long since become extinct; the livestock cattle that replaced the bison could not have survived long in a world without humans, and without careful cowboys to keep the coyotes and mountain lions at bay.The Sonoran pronghorn, a small, swift subspecies of antelope left over from the Pleistocene epoch and the last antelope in the Americas, is endangered in the desert not far from here.Can the remaining pronghorn reproduce and replenish before the coyotes devour them all?This is doubtful, but not impossible.
Paul Martin came down Tummamok Mountain and drove west in his pickup truck, crossing cactus-strewn trails and into the desert basin below.The mountains in front of him had once been the last refuge of wild animals in North America, home to jaguars, bighorn sheep, and collard crows—known locally as "Jeffrena."Not long ago, the famous tourist attraction - Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum held a large live specimen exhibition here.This museum is actually an exquisite zoo surrounded by natural landscapes.
Martin's destination was miles away, but not a small, delicate space.The International Wildlife Museum has been created to recreate a French Foreign Volunteer Bastion in Africa.The museum houses the collection of the late millionaire hunter CJ McElroll, who still holds many world records.The collection includes the Mongolian argali, the world's largest mountain sheep, and the largest jaguar caught in Sinaloa, Mexico.Among the special collections here is a white rhino, one of six hundred animals shot by President Teddy Roosevelt during his 1909 trip to Africa.
McElroll has an estate in Tucson, one of which is dedicated to displaying trophies.A lifelong obsession with shooting large mammals, this room is filled with taxidermy trophies.The crown jewel of the museum is the faithful reproduction of this 2,500-square-foot showroom.The locals sarcastically dubbed it the "Museum of Dead Animals".Tonight, in Martin's eyes, the nickname was apt.
This time it's for the launch of his new 2005 work, Dawn of the Mammoth.Towering behind the audience is a phalanx of grizzly and polar bears—perpetually on semi-aggression.Higher than the podium wall is the carved head of a full-grown African elephant, its long ears resembling a spinnaker.On both sides, all animals with long spiral horns from the five continents are exhibited here.Martin stood up from his wheelchair and slowly examined the hundreds of heads: bongo, woodbuck, bushbuck, kudu, both large and small kudu, eland, great-horned tahr, barbary goat, Chamois, impala, gazelle, duiker, musk ox, buffalo, black sheep, sand wool sheep, longhorn antelope and wildebeest.His moist blue eyes were fixed on these hundreds of pairs of glass eyes.
“我没法想象出一个更加贴切的场景，”他说：“来描述什么叫做种族灭绝。在我有生之年，数百万人在集中营中遭到屠杀，从欧洲纳粹的种族屠杀到达尔福尔大屠杀，足以证明我们人类确实会做出这样可怕的事情。在我五十年的职业生涯中，我专注于研究大型动物的大灭绝——它们的头颅不会出现在这些墙上了，它们早已消失，因为屠杀它们易如反掌。收集这些陈品的人或许刚刚走出更新世时期。”
最后他诚恳地希望他对更新世的大屠杀所做的解释能够成为一个教训，不让我们再次犯错，更不要犯毁灭性的错误。他的书也同样以此结尾。杀手绝不可能在另一个物种消失之前动起恻隐之心，可事情远比这复杂。这还因为我们有贪得无厌的本能，不知何时该住手，直到某天我们从未想过要伤害的生物因为失去了所依而被夺去了生命。我们没有必要开枪射杀，才能将燕雀从天空中消灭。一旦攫走它们的家园，断了它们的食物来源，它们就会自己坠落下来，走向死亡。