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These animals,* with the trees they ate, were driven south by the
last advance of the ice. By the time the ice retreated, they had been
hunted to extinction. The trees returned to northern Europe, without
the creatures they had evolved to resist. Our ecosystems are the spec-
tral relics of another age, which, on evolution's timescale, is still close.
The trees continue to arm themselves against threats which no longer
exist, just as we still possess the psychological armoury required to
live among monsters.
Even if these speculations do not lead to the reintroduction of ele-
phants and rhinos, do they not render the commonplace astonishing?
The notion that our most familiar trees are elephant-adapted, that we can
see in their shadows the great beasts with which humans evolved, that
the mark of these animals can be found in every park and avenue and
leafy street, infuses the world with new wonders. Palaeoecology - the
study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our own - feels
like a portal through which we may pass into an enchanted kingdom.
They heard us coming long before I saw them, and the woods were
now filled with strange sounds - yelping, roaring, whickering and a
noise so deep that I heard it not only with my ears but also with my
chest: a sustained, resonant drone, like the lowest note of a church
organ. As we came within sight of the enclosure, the sounds intensi-
fied. The animals clustered around the gate. Thick-thighed, with small
pert ankles and hooves, they looked like fat ladies in high heels. The
rectangular blocky bodies were covered in dense bristles; their winter
coats were almost blond. The delicate snouts were so long that they
looked like little trunks. As the smell of the bucket reached her nos-
trils, the dominant female, crested and humped, a deep-bodied
battering ram, barged the other beasts out of the way.
When the pellets were scattered on the ground, the boar purred and
growled, occasionally exploding into shrieks and squeals as the big
sow drove the others off the food. They ploughed up the soft soil,
using not their little bleary eyes to find the food, but the sharper
* The straight-tusked elephant and the Merck's and narrow-nosed rhinoceros. Woolly
mammoths and woolly rhinos, which were mostly grass eaters, living in cold dry
steppes without trees, moved in with the cold weather.
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