Prehistoric Totalitarianism and Tiny Elephants

I just got round to starting Steven Mithen's 'After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-50,000 BC'. As befits a book which comes recommended by Alan Garner, it is both a damned good read and an education.

Without abandoning his professional rigour, Mithen provides the layman with a tour of a prehistoric world, many of whose 'most remarkable events remain hidden from all but a few academics and specialist readers in scholarly works of impenetrable and jargon-laden prose.' This is the story of the origins of farming, towns and civilisation against the backdrop of (at times dramatic) shifts in climate.

As Mithen acknowledges, the bumpy journey from the Last Glacial Maximum to the more hospitable world of the Holocene offers food for thought for us, facing the unknowns of man-made climate change. There are stories here which put a quietness on you. Consider the Natufians, who lived comfortably in villages across the Middle East for fifty generations, before the climatic switchback of the Younger Dryas brought in a thousand years of cold and drought, scattering them to a hungry, wandering existence.

Then there is a nightmarish reconstruction of the early town of Çatalhöyük, with its fearsome iconography of bulls and women whose breasts split apart to reveal the skulls of dead animals. Mithen suspects its residents, alienated from nature, became trapped inside their own myths: 'every aspect of their lives had become ritualised, any independence of thought and behaviour crushed out of them by an oppressive ideology manifest in the bulls, breasts, skulls and vultures.'

After this, it is a relief to reach the chapter on Cyprus, which reminded me - somewhat improbably - of a post from my favourite blogging librarian, relating a visit from her inlaws. The following dialogue was originally offered as proof of their deepening strangeness:

MiL: You know they made small animals out of bigger animals?

Me: *wondering if we're about to get a Talk on the Miracle of Birth* Not exactly...?

MiL: Well, you know, like domestic cats were bred from big wild cats, and dogs from wolves, and so on.

Me: Oh! Yes, what of it?

MiL: Well, don't you think they should make tiny elephants? You could stroke them *vigorously mimes stroking 2ft high elephant* They would look so cute scampering around the house, and they wouldn't shed on the carpet.

FiL: They're terrible for shedding skin, though, elephants are. *nods wisely*

Me: *boggles*

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for hippopotami - so I was doubly delighted to discover that not only tiny elephants but herds of tiny hippo actually existed in prehistoric Cyprus! This came about, not as my friend's in-laws proposed, through domestication, but as a result of the lack of predators on the island, 'great bulks being quite unnecessary if the only worry is to procure sufficient food and sex to ensure the survival of genes':

Both elephants and hippos gradually assumed the size of large pigs, the latter far more numerous and seeming to behave like pigs themselves. They were good swimmers but seemed happier scurrying through the undergrowth, feeding on leaves and shoots. The hippos had drunk from freshwater springs on the cliff-tops. In cold weather they had sheltered in coastal caves, being adept at climbing up and down steep slopes.

Controversy rages, apparently, over whether these marvellous sounding creatures were hunted to extinction by the first humans to reach Cyprus, at around 10,000 BC, or had already given up the ghost as a result of climate change. (Mithen comes down on the latter side of the argument.)

So much to write about, and I'm not yet a quarter of the way through this utterly fascinating book! (Meanwhile, here is a pair of small hippos I met in Trafalgar Square the other weekend...)

The Hippo, the Tortoise and the Possibility of Change

It seems to have been all doominess on here lately, so I'm grateful to Anthony for reminding me of a more hopeful story. Maybe you heard about Owen the baby hippo, orphaned in the tsunami disaster of December 2004, who was adopted by an ancient giant tortoise.

As soon as he was placed in his enclosure, the orphaned youngster immediately ran to the giant tortoise also housed in that space. The tortoise, named Mzee (Swahili for "old man") and estimated to be between 100 and 130 years old, was not immediately taken with the brash newcomer — he turned and hissed, forcing the hippo to back away. Yet Owen persisted in following the tortoise around the park (and even into a pool), and within days the pair had forged a friendship, eating and sleeping together. Owen has even been seen to lick the tortoise, whom he regards as his new mother.

What stuck with me was a report one year on that the pair had developed a way of communicating. "We discovered that somebody was making a sound in the pen, we'd never heard it before, not even from other hippos. And then we realised it was coming from both Owen and Mzee... It's just very unusual."

Set against the devastation of the tsunami disaster, you might write this story off as a piece of kitsch. But I think it matters more than that, and here's why. We are always hearing stories about how our behaviour is shaped by our genetic code. Bookshop shelves heave under titles explaining our everyday actions as the replaying of scripts laid down by the survival needs of our cave-dwelling ancestors.

Now, I'm all for seeking a deeper understanding of the many ways in which the past plays itself out through the present, but this kind of pop science often has the opposite effect. By projecting today's supermarket or nightclub behaviour onto the almost blank canvas of prehistory, it masks the strangeness of the past. In my experience, it is by becoming familiar with that strangeness, with how differently people have lived in other times and places, that we can begin to become aware of how strange our current ways of living are.

When, as in much popular science and media coverage, the focus is all on the role of evolution in shaping our behaviour, the effect is to eternalise the present and make it seem inevitable - simply a more "developed" version of the way people have always lived. With such a perspective, there is little point in challenging anything, because it's just "human nature".

What I love about the story of Owen and Mzee is that it illustrates how much room for manoeuvre nature leaves us. If a hippo and a tortoise can learn to talk to one another, how wide a range of possibilities there are besides the ones we take for granted.