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Spirit of the Wild
SEPTEMBER 2005
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By David Quammen
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Photograph (above) by Michael Nichols
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The fate of Africa's great animals remains uncertain—and entirely in human hands.
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So: Africa is complicated.
The continent's most pressing concerns, yes, are political and economic and medical. Landscape itself is often a battleground here, not just for armies but for opposing visions of resource exploitation, conservation, and governance. Africa is fraught with issues that demand careful study, cool discussion, hard choices, compromise, meticulous attention to boring details, and patient planning; that call upon a range of human skills, including diplomacy and sociology. But beyond all the complexities, at the end of the day, at the start of our new millennium, there's one salient fact: Africa is an extraordinary repository of wildlife. It's the greatest of places for great beasts.
This fact, which seems so simple that people take it for granted, is actually a bit complicated itself. The roster of species, for starters, is dizzyingly diverse: three big cats (lion, leopard, cheetah), seven smaller cats (such as the caracal and the serval), two species of elephants (African and forest), two rhinos (black and white), two hippos (pygmy and regular), two giraffes (the tall one and the okapi), three species of nonhuman ape (gorilla, chimp, bonobo), three zebras, nine gazelle species, nineteen duikers, dozens of monkeys, five species of baboon, a gaggle of genets and civets, six different pigs, four pangolins, three reedbucks, some horsey antelopes, some dwarf antelopes, nine species of spiral-horned bovine (including the bongo, the sitatunga, and the eland), two wildebeests (that's gnus to you?), the aardvark, the aardwolf, the drill and the mandrill, the rhebok, the blesbok, the gemsbok, the wopbopaloobop (no, only kidding), the African buffalo, the Nubian ibex, three hyenas, three jackals, the Ethiopian wolf, the wild dog, and many other mammals, not to mention the ostrich, three species of crocodile, the African python, plus sharks and other sizable fish in the coastal waters, as well as smaller terrestrial animals of every imaginable sort. Wow. It's a spectacular assemblage, both in variety and in abundance, unmatched elsewhere in the contemporary world. But to appreciate fully what's present in Africa, you need to consider what's absent elsewhere, and why.
That's the task of paleontologists, who study wildlife and vegetation of the past. Their data come from the fossil record, and their vast backward calendar of Earth's history is demarcated by episodes of mass extinction. Each such episode represents an abrupt loss of biological diversity and marks a boundary between two (otherwise arbitrary) units of time. By the end of the Cretaceous period, for instance, 65 million years ago, there were no more surviving dinosaurs—not by coincidence, but because the disappearance of the dinosaurs is one of several important factors defining the end of the Cretaceous. At the close of the Permian period, 245 million years ago, came another massive die-off, cataclysmic and sudden, eliminating about 95 percent of all animal species in existence then. The Pleistocene epoch, a more recent unit that ended just 10,000 years ago, is also known for its extinctions, especially among big mammals and huge, flightless birds. The mammoths and mastodons vanished, along with giant sloths, giant bears, giant beavers, saber-toothed cats, giant kangaroos, and countless other large-bodied animals. Many of those Pleistocene extinctions occurred near the end of the epoch, most notably in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar. What caused them? Nobody knows. Lethal changes of some sort, still mysterious, still debated by experts, affected those particular continents and islands. Probably the arrival of humans was at least part of the problem. We appeared from nowhere, armed and dangerous and hungry.
Africa was different. Africa suffered only modest losses of fauna during the Pleistocene (which began about 1.8 million years ago) and no widespread, severe, or simultaneous set of extinctions at its close. Mostly the large African mammals of 20,000 years ago have survived as the large African mammals of today. For that reason, Africa has been called the "living Pleistocene." It stands to remind us of an epoch, before the rise of Homo sapiens, when the planet was really big and wild.
But remember another thing: The survival of Africa's wildlife hasn't depended on an absence of people. It has happened, to the contrary, amid constant human presence. We ourselves are an African species, at least by origin. We first emerged in this place, attaining our current shape, our brain size, our social instincts, and our sense of identity during millennia spent as members of rough-and-tumble African ecosystems. The animals adjusted to our presence—to our slowly but radically increasing capabilities—even as we adapted to life among them. One lesson along the route to civilization, learned accidentally by African peoples, and evidently not portable when humans dispersed elsewhere, was the possibility and rightness of coexisting with other formidable species, even those sometimes as menacing as ourselves.
That was a virtue derived from necessity. And now the necessity is gone. Killing wildlife, extinguishing species, and destroying habitat are easy with our current weapons and tools. Preserving the last of the great beasts in their landscapes, despite human needs and pressures roundabout, is more difficult. But wait, here's a thought, unabashedly hopeful and as wild as an aardvark: Maybe modern Africa is where we can rediscover how it's done.
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