The Last Word On Nothing

The other night I was in the midst of writing about the Ice Age when I strayed to the internet. Up came the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography that went this year to New York Times photographers Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for their coverage of the European refugee crises.

Fresh from writing a paragraph about early boat use — people are thought to have reached the West Coast of the Americas about 17,000 years ago — I was drawn back from the Pleistocene to here and now. The boats that tip over with migrants and refugees now take the lives of thousands. Space on our continents is running out, seas seeded with the drowned of Afghanistan and Syria as survivors by the millions crowd trains and buses, concertina wire propped up as tear gas and rubber bullets fly back across the Serbian border keeping out families and lone travelers desperate for a way through.

A long way from the paleo sciences I’d been scrolling through, these Pulitzer images arrived with startling clarity, railroad tracks turned into a walkway where Syrians pass through Serbia on their way to Hungary, babies hanging from front carriers worn by moms, a man with a young boy on his shoulders, nothing in their hands, nothing to own but a purse, a satchel.

I have seen people walking from Mexico into the Camino del Diablo where the Arizona desert holds their corpses. From mountaintops, they always looked small, so far away they could have been seeds. They carried water jugs, walking north into country they’d never seen. I woke in a canyon bottom to their footsteps. Looking up from my sleeping bag, I saw a train of men passing in the moonlight, water jugs in their hands, weight on their backs. Workers sweeping these borderlands have found hundreds of undocumented bodies, papers gone, names unnamed.

It would be easier to be an archaeologist and to discover in 10,000 years a few footprints preserved in ancient mud, a cache of water bottles buried beneath what was once a tree, disarticulated bones and skulls on the underwater shelves of Lesbos. It would be easier to see all this in hindsight.

I look back to before myself with an air of nostalgia. The earth had less than half the current human population when I was born. Colors were slightly muted, fading to black and white, and then mysterious realms before photography. I use archaeology to trace time before bombs and borders, back through the darkness of ages until our species numbered as few as thousands across entire hemispheres. The land beyond our small territories was unchecked, unknown, no rubber bullets or concertina wire blocking the way.

I won’t say it was an easier time to be alive. Paleontologist Sue Ware (who proved extinct dire wolves lived in packs) called the Pleistocene, “the playground of the huge.” Instead of fleeing human-on-human warfare, we would have fled animal encroachments. Though evidence of animals eating humans on this continent comes from only one specimen — dire wolf bite marks found on part of a human leg bone from a Florida cave — people were certainly getting eaten, or at least pressured from one territory to the next by carnivores. Migrating into the Americas, the first people had to negotiate prides of big cats and packs of wolves, the dire wolf more muscular and larger in the head and neck than modern wolves.

Having to survive, we may have once understood animals the way we now understand other people. In a 2007 interview, a Mongolian herder living in dense wolf territory said, “The wolves have a meeting time between December and February where they do not attack animals and just feed from the wind. In this meeting time of the wolves, a female leads the others. If a human kills the female wolf, then a male wolf will kill that human in retribution.”

Modern wolves are known to pack up and intentionally decimate other canid groups, wolves or coyotes. Might they have done the same to us when our numbers were far fewer, and theirs greater? Wolves and humans would have been similar kinds of predators in the Ice Age, both pack-hunters going after the same size of prey. We would have been competition.

A study looking at the jaws and teeth of Ice Age predators in the Americas revealed damage far above what is seen among modern African and Asian predators. People would have been entering a brawl. Blaire Van Valkenburgh and Fritz Herte at UCLA examined skeletal remains of dire wolves, American lions, saber-toothed cats, and coyotes exhumed from the Southern California’s La Brea tar pits, concluding they “utilized carcasses more fully and likely competed more intensely for food than present-day large carnivores.”

Coyotes, which got up to a hundred pounds heavier than our modern species, had the same damage pattern and frequency as modern gray wolves, suggesting they were going after larger prey. Everything was getting eaten by every carnivore, every part of the animal chewed up and digested. Similar patterns have appeared in the fossil beds of San Josecito Cave south of Texas into Mexico, and the coal-black tar traps of Talara, Peru.

People entering this new land would not have been on a stroll, parasol twirling over their shoulder. Holding a sovereign piece of ground may have been rare and hard won.

For as much as I want to shield my eyes from the present, imagining that we once lived in easier times, I know better. Pleistocene stragglers who survived an attack from a dire wolf pack must have fled into the nearest unknown country, unsure if they would find refuge, their eyes as shocked and sharp and exhausted as those now struggling onto the shores of Greece. Humans never lived in an unbounded world. There have always been borders.

Photo: shutterstock