Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 91

case of elephants) in the Americas; then in the Middle East and North
Africa; then in most of Asia; eventually in most of Africa. The animals
conservationists are now desperately trying - and often failing - to
save are the last, tiny populations of creatures which once dominated
most of the earth's surface, so recently that we can almost stretch out
our fingers and touch them.
When Trafalgar Square was excavated in the nineteenth century,
presumably to build Nelson's column, the river gravels the builders
exposed were found to be crammed with hippopotamus bones; these
beasts wallowed, a little over 100,000 years ago, where tourists and
pigeons cluster today. The same excavations - and those conducted in
the square in the twentieth century - also revealed the bones of
straight-tusked elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs and lions. 3 Lions
raised their heads where the monument now stands long before Sir
Edwin Landseer got to work.
They were larger than those now living in Africa but probably mem-
bers of the same species. They hunted reindeer across the frozen wastes
of Europe, 4 and survived in Britain until 11,000 years ago: 5 the begin-
ning of the Mesolithic, when humans returned to the land after their
long absence. Spotted hyenas (also still living in Africa) survived in Eur-
ope until roughly the same time 6 (their fossilized faeces have been found
in Trafalgar Square 7 ). Scimitar cats ( Homotherium species), lion- sized
with great curved fangs, preyed perhaps exclusively on young elephants
and rhinos. These species - elephants and rhinos and the cats which ate
them - are likely to have dominated the ecosystem during the previous
inter-glacial period, which ended around 115,000 years ago (a blink of
an eye in geological terms). The curious features that some of our plants
possess may be ghostly adaptations to the way they fed.*
Elephants' habit of snapping or uprooting trees could explain why
species such as oak, ash, beech, lime, sycamore, field maple, sweet
chestnut, hazel, alder and willow can regrow from the point at which
the stem is broken.† In eastern and southern Africa there are dozens of
* The idea behind these speculations was seeded in my mind by the forester Adam
Thorogood.
† The only mention I have been able to find is in a paper by Oliver Rackham. 8
Coppicing and pollarding (resprouting at ground level, or from a cutting point higher