Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
diverse over time. And we will show how these same forces have driven
us apart from our own nearest relatives, the apes, making us dramatically
dif erent.
We will visit the dry valleys of western Mongolia, where long ago humans
encountered wolves and began to tame the natural world through artifi cial
selection. As we follow the history of domestication, we will see how, again
and again, our ancestors hunted the wild relatives of domestic animals to
extinction and closed of vast evolutionary possibilities in the process.
We will walk in the footsteps of the fi rst people to leave Africa on the
greatest migration our species has undertaken, and see how they were forced
to adapt to the sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia and the searing deserts of
Australia. And we will follow close relatives of ours who had made that same
migration earlier, only to be eventually doomed to extinction even though
they shared many traits with us. If, as seems likely, our ancestors helped to
drive these people to extinction, how many possible evolutionary paths were
closed of in the process?
Everywhere we travel, we will see how evolution and ecology have inter-
acted to yield the world we live in. This interaction will be especially clear in
our visits to the tropics.
When we think of a tropical forest we visualize a wet, dense, and tan-
gled riot of plants, plunged into near darkness at ground level by giant trees
buttressed overhead. But the tropical forest of southern India's Mudumalai
National Park does not conform to this image. It is sunny, dry, and open,
characterized by relatively small native teak, myrtle, and almond trees. The
precipitous Nilgiri Hills to the east provide a consistent source of groundwa-
ter that percolates into the forest, but rainfall is uncertain and the dry season
lasts for half the year.
As a result the forest is often swept by fi re, which keeps the undergrowth
down. The wild and semi-wild elephants that abound at Mudumalai are able
to crash cheerfully about, stripping branches from the trees and sometimes
smashing the tree trunks into fragments.
H. S. Dattaraja (Datta to his many friends) and his colleagues at Ban-
galore's Indian Institute of Sciences have spent two decades following the
changes that have taken place in the forest. They have repeatedly carried
