Deep Things out of Darkness: A History of Natural History

By John G. T. Anderson

Natural history, the deliberate observation of the environment, is arguably the oldest science. From purely practical beginnings as a way of finding food and shelter, natural history evolved into the holistic, systematic study of plants, animals, and the landscape. Deep Things out of Darkness chronicles the rise, decline, and ultimate revival of natural history within the realms of science and public discourse. Ecologist John G. T. Anderson focuses his account on the lives and contributions of an eclectic group of men and women, from John Ray, John Muir, Charles Darwin, and Rachel Carson, who endured remarkable hardships and privations in order to learn more about their surroundings. Written in an engaging narrative style and with an extensive bibliography of primary sources, the book charts the journey of the naturalist’s endeavor from prehistory to the present, underscoring the need for natural history in an era of dynamic environmental change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780520954458

John G. T. Anderson

John G. T. Anderson is the W. H. Drury Jr. Professor of Ecology and Natural History at College of the Atlantic. He was the editor of Drury’s Chance and Change: Ecology for Conservationists (UC Press, 1998).

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DEEP THINGS OUT OF DARKNESS

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University of California Press

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University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, John G. T., 1957–

Deep things out of darkness: a history of natural history / John G. T. Anderson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27376-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520954458

1. Natural history—history.  2. Naturalists—History.  I. Title.

QH15.A72 2012    2013

508—dc232012017404

Manufactured in the United States of America

21    20    19    18    17    16    15    14    13

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Cover image: Elephant and dragon from the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Cover design: Glynnis Koike.

For Karen, Clare, and David

For things that grow . . .

He discovereth deep things out of darkness.

JOB 12:22

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Adam's Task, Job's Challenge

1.From Hunter-Gatherers to Kings of Kings

2.A Wonderful Man: Aristotle and Greek Natural History

3.The Spoils of an Empire

4.An Emperor and His Descendants

5.New Worlds

6.Ray, Linnaeus, and the Ordering of the World

7.Journeys Near and Far

8.Before the Origin

9.Forms Most Beautiful: Darwin

10.The Geography of Nature: Humboldt

11.Hearts of Light: Wallace and Bates

12.Spoils of Other Empires

13.Breadfruit and Icebergs

14.Naturalists in New England: Thoreau, Agassiz, and Gray

15.From Muir and Alexander to Leopold and Carson

16.The Slow Death (and Resurrection) of Natural History

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1.Illuminated elephant and dragon, from Aberdeen Bestiary, 1542, illustrations circa thirteenth century

2.Cross-section of gooseberry, from Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants, 1682

3.Dissection of leaf, from Grew's Anatomy of Plants

4.Woodpecker, from Francis Willughby's Ornithologia, 1676

5.Early-nineteenth-century print of Selborne

6.The Wakes, Selborne, from back lawn

7.Birds, from Buffon's Histoire naturelle générale et particuliére, eighteenth century

8.Down House

9.Charles Darwin's study

10.Alexander von Humboldt in middle age, from K. Schlesier, Lives of the Brothers Humboldt, Alexander and William, 1853

11.Chimborazo

12.M. Park's First View of the Niger, from Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa Performed in the Years 1795, 1796 and 1797, 1816

13.Orang Utan Attacked by Dyaks, from Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago, 1869

14."The Red Bird of Paradise (Paradisea rubra)," from Wallace's Malay Archipelago

15.Natives of Aru Shooting the Great Bird of Paradise, from Wallace's Malay Archipelago

16.Frémont's Pyramid, Nevada, from Frémont's Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1845

17.Arched rock on Kerguelen, with James Cook's sailors clubbing penguins, an early-nineteenth-century reproduction of an illustration in Cook's Voyages

18.Hummingbird, from William Jardine's Natural History

19.Victorian couple examining skeleton of mastodon, from Louis Agassiz, An Introduction to the Study of Natural History, 1847

MAPS

1.Route of Darwin's voyage in the Beagle, 1831–36

2.Humboldt's travels in the Americas, 1799–1805

3.Wallace's journeys in the Malay Archipelago, 1854–62

PREFACE

We are all born natural historians. What happens next is up to chance, environment, and the circumstances of our particular narrative. I was lucky enough to be born of two serious amateur naturalists. My mother had been a lab scientist before children and my father was a classical archaeologist, but both had a deep and abiding passion for wild things, wild places, and careful observation of their surroundings. I grew up in the California of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was still assumed that children could and should spend as much time on their own outdoors as possible. I was a Scout in the last generation for whom camping skills were considered fundamental. Every summer of my teens, I spent up to a month in the Sierra, hiking, camping, swimming in cold lakes, and drinking unfiltered water from snow-fed streams.

After I had had a couple of summers to establish myself at camp, my father made it a habit to visit for a week every summer to be the resident adult and to offer training for the nature merit badge. The badge required us to identify a variety of plants and animals and to gain a good overall sense of where things could be found, what they were likely to be doing, and what else could be expected around them. I remember the fun of sneaking up on marmots sunning themselves on a rocky ledge above camp, and the relief of finding a snowplant in the nick of time to complete my list of plants identified. Nature was regarded as a difficult merit badge, not one to be taken lightly, especially when Professor Anderson was doing the testing.

Later I attended the University of California. I was not a good student. I wish I could blame it on too many afternoons lying on my back watching vultures tip and rock above the golden hillsides of the Bay Area, or too much time on my knees, watching garter snakes slither across dusty trails, but I am afraid that I was just lazy and self-satisfied, and by the time I woke up and realized that my grades weren't going to get me into medical school, it was too late.

For some reason that I still cannot fathom, the pre-med major at Berkeley then required all students to take either Vertebrate Natural History or Invertebrate Natural History. This was a class that had been founded by Joseph Grinnell, the pioneering ornithologist responsible for setting Berkeley on a par with East Coast institutions in field biology. I went to the bookstore and found my first copy of Joel Welty's The Life of Birds. I was lost from the moment I opened the text. The course was team-taught by three remarkable naturalists: Ned Johnson (ornithology), Robert Stebbins (herpetology), and Bill Lidicker (mammalogy). Besides the usual lecture/lab format, the class required half-day weekend field trips to regional parks and wildlife refuges. We were responsible for memorizing a subset of California vertebrates for later examination, and also had to keep field notebooks using the highly formalized Grinnell System (I still remember coming upon two of my erstwhile pre-med friends in the bathroom of the Life Sciences Building busily shaking water on their notes before turning them in. When I asked them what they were up to, they replied that they had rewritten their notes—strictly forbidden under the system—and had then remembered that it had rained heavily on the day of the field trip. The teaching assistants would immediately have cried foul had they received unblemished notes lacking clear evidence of raindrops!).

To my eternal gratitude, Ned Johnson allowed me to both take his ornithology class and to work at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology as an unpaid, extremely junior assistant to the assistant curator. Both experiences put me into direct contact with the lineage of California natural history, extending back to the museum's founders: Joseph Grinnell and Annie Alexander. I remember the museum as a dim, cavernous place entered through an undistinguished door firmly marked No Public Displays. It contained endless stacks of containers of study skins, each carefully labeled, and each label traceable to a field notebook similar to those that I had tried to emulate in class. Sometimes the notes were full of detail about locations and behaviors. Others were less informative about natural history, but contained hints about natural historians. All suggested a remarkable world of adventure and understanding that extended far beyond the endless rows of seats in lecture halls.

Best of all was the Grinnell-Miller Library, a small room at one side of the collections, filled with light and housing the very books that Grinnell had worked with, each bearing his personal bookplate with its motto, Inter folia, Aves: There are birds between the leaves. Oddly, I cannot remember any single book in the library, but the idea of a library containing books filled with birds caught my attention. The idea stays with me yet.

The next autumn, I managed to slip into Bill Lidicker and Jim Patton's mammalogy course as the only undergraduate, and the die was cast. Besides giving me a lifelong appreciation for taxidermy and fieldwork, Patton made it clear that natural history was, above all, fun. Natural historians got to go to interesting places, see beautiful things, meet unusual people, and ask endless questions. Natural history was science at its living, breathing best. I sat in on the museum lunches, listening to professors and graduate students fight it out over questions of ecology and biogeography, and realized that much of what was being presented to me in lectures as fact was actually at best a set of preliminary hypotheses, and that it would be our job to challenge, check, and refute these facts if we could.

All of this was enormously exciting. I was still not a very good student, but at least I knew what I wanted to do, which was to somehow join the remarkable company of people whose origins stretched back ever farther the more I looked: Ned Johnson was a student of Alden Miller, Miller was a student of Grinnell, Grinnell read Darwin, Darwin read Humboldt. . . . They went on voyages of discovery, they laughed, they swore, they ate bad food in dreadful conditions, they fought with friends, and they made friends of enemies, and each had a story that became part of a larger story that is history. Over time, I have been lucky enough to do many of the same things, visit some of the same places, and meet some of the people involved in natural history.

Eventually I became a professor. I have students. Some of them are not very good—at least at first. Some are far cleverer than I will ever be. Some require care and patience; others just need an opportunity to get out and shine. I try to find the things that will be useful to all of them; I try to let them learn from my mistakes. All too often these days, I encounter people who, when I ask them what they think or know about history, they reply, Essentially nothing; only that it is boring. This is both enormously sad and also troubling, for with a loss of history there is also an inevitable loss of connection with one's culture and indeed with much of oneself—we are, after all, the product of a personal history that ties back into more broadly defined ideas of a greater history of places, peoples, and civilizations.

I confess that I have never found history boring. It is stories—accounts of real people who did real things that had consequences for themselves and for us. It is hard to imagine truly understanding an event if you had no idea of the context in which the event occurred, and it is much easier to understand why someone did or thought something if you have some idea of the world that she or he took for granted. What makes history so fascinating is that history is us. History is gossip. History is savage, tender, inspiring, depressing, funny, and ironic, but never, ever boring. We came out of an infinitely long chain of events and people, and we are also links in a chain that extends toward an infinite future. My hope is that this book will introduce you to some of the people and stories that have helped me make sense of the science that I do and the culture that I do it in. We are going on a journey together; I hope you will find the company enjoyable.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Few books are solo enterprises, and this one certainly is not. I would like to thank Tom Fleischner and the other organizers of the Organized Paper Session on Natural History at the Ecological Society of America meetings in 2009 for inviting me to give the presentation that started this off. Tom and I met across a conference table and have killed many a bottle since in discussing natural history, naturalists, and the species and places we love. I would also like to thank Blake Edgar of UC Press for seeing something in my rather harried presentation that he felt worth following up on. Laura Harger has been everything one could ask for in a copyeditor, saving me endless embarrassment from foolish mistakes, and patiently correcting the grammar that would have been the despair of my teachers. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sarah McDaniel for her encouragement, editing suggestions, and periodic swift kicks in the behind when my whining got past bearing. No teacher is any good at all without great students, and I have been blessed with some of the best. As the most recent iteration of the New Lunar Society, Franklin Jacoby, Kaija Klauder, Hale Morrell, Luka Negoita, and Robin Van Dyke have been more helpful than I can express with proofing early drafts, typing bibliographies, criticizing silly ideas, suggesting good reads, and just by being. Thank you, every one. Robin Owings was a patient consultant on illustrations, as well as serving as cartographer. Kate Shlepr poured cup after cup of chai and shared wonderful insights into books, birds, and nature. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the Selborne Society and the Linnean Society of London for access to Gilbert White's sermons and letters, and to Tricia Cantwell-Keene and the staff of the Thorndike Library for endless interlibrary loans. Petronella and David Natrass provided shelter and suggestions while I explored White's Selborne and Darwin's Down. My son David was a wonderful navigator and companion during journeys from the Natural History Museum to the winding lanes of rural Kent and back. Jim Patton, naturalist extraordinaire, was incredibly generous with his time and enthusiasm to a very ignorant would-be ecologist thirty years ago and to a somewhat more seasoned one more recently. Finally, I would like to thank my family for putting up with a grouchy husband and father who would regularly slide off into soliloquies about people long dead and ideas always new. Without magical cups of tea and tolerance, this book would never have happened. Funding for research and writing the book was provided by the W.H. Drury Fund of the College of the Atlantic. Additional support came from the College of the Atlantic Professional Development Fund.

Introduction

Adam’s Task, Job’s Challenge

This book is neither by nor intended for a professional historian. I am advancing no overarching thesis about the development of science or culture. Instead, I aim to resurrect the people and the stories that set the stage for modern ecological understanding. I am writing, first of all, for the advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students who have so enriched my own teaching and research experience. Second, but of equal importance, I am writing for the serious amateur naturalist—the sort of person who has played such an important part in the development and recognition of natural history across time, and who may feel a little shut out of the rise of increasingly theoretical and technologically driven brands of science. I hope that both groups may benefit from the book and enjoy some insights into the history of their discipline.

Reading an early draft of this book, some of my students asked me why I had selected biblical themes for the title and introduction. They were concerned that some readers might be turned off by a religious motif, or might form an odd picture of the author and his intent. My choices are deliberate and have very little to do with anything I may or may not believe about any religion. But in evaluating history and historical personages, I think it is important to consider context and background. For better or for worse, for over seventeen hundred years western culture has had a biblical backdrop. Whether you were Frederick von Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman emperor; Gilbert White, curate of Selborne; or Charles Darwin, discoverer of natural selection, you would have been familiar with biblical stories of creation, order, history, and purpose. Much that was thought and much that was written played out within the framework of this cultural commonality, and a strand of this book deals with how this commonality affected the development of natural history and what has happened as we moved away from it. Religion and science have always been uneasy bedfellows, but both of them are parts of the stories that we live by.

In the second book of Genesis, God brings every beast of the field and every fowl of the air to Adam so that they can be named. Adam names the creation, and that seems to be sufficient as far as both he and God are concerned. By contrast, in chapters 38 to 41 of the Book of Job, God lays out what amounts to an ambitious research program lying at the heart of natural history. As God taunts Job, he points out that Job is supremely ignorant of everything from astronomy to zoology. Job has not perceived the breadth of the earth (Job 38:18) and does not know the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth or mark when the hinds do calve (Job 39:1), among many other puzzles, and therefore he is in no position to demand explanations from God.

By naming things, humans established a common currency for a social structure that permitted increasingly complex hunting patterns and land use. Naming also provides a framework for a variety of taxonomies that can include comparative details of ecology and behavior. In a metaphorical sense, Adam starts a process that Job’s predecessors have built on and his successors will build on. Sadly, as an increasing proportion of humans live in cities, there is real danger that we will lose much of our understanding of undomesticated nature. The loss may be more than one of knowledge—it is much easier to get rid of things that one does not even recognize as being there, and, conversely, it is much harder not to care about things that one has spent time in understanding.

Humans evolved in an extremely complex world, both in terms of biological diversity and of experience. Much of the deliberate effort of civilization has been to eliminate or replace this diversity and to make our world a much more predictable and stable place. We invest enormous amounts of energy into ensuring that the temperature we encounter never varies by more than a few degrees in a day; our food intake generally stays within set bounds; our chance of a genuinely hazardous encounter is slim; and our patterns of movement, whether around the block or around the world, fit within orderly and predictable frameworks. There are enormous advantages to this world control, of course, but one has to wonder whether its downside may include even more than the effects of our energy consumption on global climate. If our humanity is a product of selection for life in a diverse world, and we lose that diversity through either ignorance or extinction, might we not expect dire consequences for ourselves? In this context, natural history serves as a basis for the appreciation and conservation of wild things, of wild places, and, ultimately, of ourselves.

In trying to read history, we must keep in mind the similarities and differences that time and culture create in the ways that we understand what we read. I remember a world without the Internet, but my students cannot. I cannot remember a world without the direct-dial telephone, yet when I was young I talked to people who could describe needing to go through an operator. They in turn had known people who could remember the first postage stamp. We all had and have a similar need to communicate with one another, but the methods available in a given era make for profound differences in both the form and the substance of communication, and these differences in turn both affect and are affected by the culture of our time. When Darwin on the Beagle wanted to communicate with his teachers in Cambridge, he wrote a letter and left it at a consulate or with a merchant in the next port, hoping that a passing ship might take it back to England. There might be a gap of six months to a year between his writing of the letter and his receipt of an answer. Today, in contrast, I can talk to a student in New Zealand as easily (and sometimes more cheaply) than I can to one a few hours’ drive away.

We can talk about Darwin and the gaps and lag time in his correspondence, but can we really understand what these were like for him? We take certain things so much for granted that we may miss how they have shaped our world. Darwin didn’t take a camera with him on the Beagle, as there were no cameras to take. Instead he took a painter and a gun, and he shot and stuffed or pickled as many specimens as he could. A nineteenth- or even early-to-mid-twentieth-century vertebrate zoologist was seldom without a gun, but a twenty-first-century zoologist might have never fired one. These differences lead to confusion. A very bright student said to me, speaking of Aldo Leopold, Well, he sure didn’t like nature. I was shocked and asked what she meant. She replied, He always seemed to be shooting something. The idea that Leopold could have a deep love and respect for a goose, the ecology of geese, and the landscape that held geese at the very instant that he pulled the trigger, and that in fact much of his love and respect had come from learning just when and how to pull that trigger, was utterly foreign to my student. At its best, history is a chain of stories and encounters through which we both gain what we regard as facts and through which we can also get context and emotion. My student talked to me. I had talked to one of Leopold’s sons and his daughter, people who had hunted and botanized with him, and knew first-hand as well as anyone could what he had felt about nature. I can tell my students stories of stories, and perhaps someday my students will tell others stories of stories of stories. The chain continues as long as we maintain the links.

Time matters, and it is important that we keep this in mind when we go to explain what people see and what they might think about history and the natural world. It is unfortunate that at the same time that members of our culture have rejected history as boring, there has also been a collapse in our sense of time: everything is either recent or ancient, whether we are talking about Nixon, Charlemagne, or Caesar Augustus. This is a mistake because it tends to undervalue or underappreciate the degree to which cultures and the land can change along any number of axes. Aristotle was born about as long after the social and ecological horrors of the Peloponnesian War as my students were after the horrors of the Vietnam War. In Aristotle’s time, the destruction of the olive trees in Attica must have seemed just as horrific as the destruction of the mangroves and jungles of Southeast Asia seem to us, but it really has been a very long time since the Spartans rode out of Decelea, and many other things have impacted the Greek people and their landscape since then.

This book is intended to introduce the reader to some of the ideas, places, and people that have been important in the development of natural history over more than three millennia. I write almost exclusively from the European and Anglo American perspective, not because that is the only sort of natural history available to us, but because, first, I feel that there is a degree of internal logic and cohesion in such an approach, while a much more massive treatment would be required to write from a global viewpoint, and, second, because it is this form of natural history that gave rise to modern ecology.

Each chapter revolves around particular individuals or groups of individuals who made key contributions to the development of natural history as a discipline. This strategy is deliberate, in part because these were genuinely interesting people, and in part because science in general and natural history in particular are both very human pursuits, done by real people with a mixture of backgrounds, motives, and intents, but linked time and again by their joy of discovery.

Until probably as late as the eighteenth century, one can find elements of most, if not all, of the modern sciences being undertaken by people whom one might also consider natural historians. Many of these people were true polymaths—working equally well in what we might now call chemistry, physics, botany, and zoology—and also were deeply concerned with philosophy and theology. The nature of what constituted science was also somewhat in doubt from our perspective. No modern science department would offer courses in astrology or necromancy with astronomy or anatomy, yet many of the founders of natural history had no trouble combining elements of each in their cosmology. This makes things somewhat confusing and lays me open to charges of playing favorites—why was this person included and that one left out? I can only plead guilty. I find some people inherently more interesting than others and some stories more informative. I do not pretend that this is a definitive history, but I hope that by the end I will have intrigued and annoyed you enough that you will go out and make your own list of heroes and heroines.

By definition, prehistoric peoples did not leave us a written record of who they were or what they did. We are forced to infer their stories from artifacts, from oral histories, or through comparative studies of more recent humans who seem to have made use of similar technologies and resources in similar environments. There are obvious dangers in all this, particularly when we must base our assumptions on what are often only fragments of a civilization or culture.¹ Some patterns, however, do seem to recur with enough frequency that it may be safe to suggest at least a working hypothesis on the role that aspects of natural history may have played in early human societies.

Many of the questions that God asks in the Book of Job inquire into just the sort of knowledge that would have been useful to nomadic peoples, and these questions may be regarded as an allegory for the loss of contact with the wider and wilder world that seems inevitably to accompany humans’ settling down to live in one place. Today, with the luxury of precut, precooked, packaged foods, we feel this loss as primarily one of aesthetics; we can agree with Wordsworth that there is little we see in Nature that is ours, but personal understanding and experience of nature are no longer a matter of survival, at least in the short run. Hunter-gatherers are very practical people; they have to be. Game and other resources are often highly seasonal in terms of both distribution and abundance, and individuals may be faced with superabundance at one moment and near starvation at the next.² Local human population numbers may have varied widely both within and between generations.³ The traditional view of nonwestern societies as being in balance or harmony with a relatively stable nature has been challenged by more detailed analyses.⁴ Survival required the development of detailed knowledge about the habits of game species. In this sense, natural history is very old, and it may well be the oldest of our sciences. People learned to read the environment long before they learned to read the printed page, and clouds and seas and the ways of animals and plants and seasons were not just interesting external phenomena, but essential elements of everyday life.

In a hunter-gatherer society, the success or failure of a particular hunt—and, ultimately, of any given social group—was in part a function of the abilities of local experts to find and in some cases to manage game within the constraints of social taboos and tribal needs. Patterns of growth, reproduction, and movement of prey species affected the development of cultural practices around methods of harvest. There are major advantages to specializing on particular food sources and developing a high degree of knowledge of prey species, but there is also a real risk of overspecialization in a varying environment. Beyond this, if one overharvests prey, the result may be socially or biologically disastrous.

Evidence suggests that the impact of overkill is by no means limited to any one cultural or geographic group. For example, the effect of technologically advanced humans on naïve prey species has been demonstrated repeatedly in Polynesia.⁵ When the Maori reached New Zealand, they were confronted with a remarkably diverse avifauna, including some of the world’s largest flightless birds, the moas (Dinornis). The Maori had been sea peoples, capable of making long voyages and subsisting off fish and other marine organisms, although their ancestors had certainly also fed on island birds.⁶ What they found in New Zealand was a veritable hunter’s paradise: flightless birds unused to predation by organized terrestrial mammals. Flannery makes it clear in his discussion of the archaeological evidence that the resulting slaughter was enormously wasteful, with little or no attempt to consume large portions of the birds killed.⁷ Within two hundred years, the majority of the moas had been wiped out, and by the time Europeans arrived, the New Zealand avifauna was a shadow of its former self.

Someone who understood the natural history of plants and animals considered suitable for food would be in a powerful position in any society. Although it is dangerous to project the culture of one group onto others not known to us, it seems possible that some variation on the habit of identifying individuals as experts in the ecology, capture, and processing of particular foodstuffs, as seen in recent Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone cultures, may be a longstanding model. The rabbit boss or antelope boss among Great Basin peoples was responsible for planning hunts and directing other members of a social group in the capture and preparation of game animals.⁸ As such, the boss must have of necessity been highly familiar with life-history elements of his or her particular target species or other taxonomic group.

The boss was a natural historian in the sense that he or she closely studied a particular organism or taxonomic group and was recognized as the local or regional expert on that taxon. There is a distinctly different feel to this form of natural history, which we will discuss much later (see chapter 10) in Humboldt’s encounter with the poison master in Venezuela. The activities of the local expert might differ little (at least in the field) from those of a Victorian natural historian, but the ultimate ends were different. In the case of the local expert, the intent was usually supremely practical in an immediate sense: you ate well or you didn’t. The Victorian naturalist might eat well or badly regardless of the outcome of any particular study, but the intent was to satisfy curiosity and/or to gain social status elsewhere.

The exact nature of Paleolithic peoples’ foraging behavior—and indeed overall lifestyle—is the subject of endless debate, ranging from the timing and method of human arrival in a particular area to the extent of their impact on particular species.⁹ Although it is tempting to rely on theoretical ecological models of costs and benefits to support specialization or generalization, cultural norms and the passage of time inevitably affect what is considered valuable enough to harvest—and hence to study. Gender roles, for example, affected understanding of the landscape and environment,¹⁰ although one should avoid being too glib in applying modern notions of men’s work and women’s work to societies very different from our own. It has been popular to focus on dramatic ideas of big-game hunting as being the centerpiece of prehistoric lifestyles, but few human cultures are likely to have lived exclusively off the products of large animals. Foraging, processing, and manufacture all required an increasingly intimate knowledge of the environment and set the groundwork for more abstract ideas of natural history that emerged millennia in the future.

As human culture changed from nomadic hunting and gathering to animal husbandry and finally to a sedentary, agrarian way of life, attention shifted from the immediate demands of the hunt to longer-term issues of controlled production and harvest. It seems likely that many hunter-gatherer societies appreciated complex systems of land management that enhanced access to game or the growth of desirable fruits and berries. There is plenty of evidence, from both oral histories and core stratigraphy, of regular cycles of burning in order to produce desired mixtures of trees, shrubs, and open grasslands. Many of the supposedly natural landscapes of the Americas and eastern Africa that were reported by early explorers appear, on further examination, to have been the products of sophisticated application of fire as a clearing agent and cultural practices, including patterns of migration, that maximized productivity in available food supplies.

Farming requires a new relationship between humans and the land. The more that one invests in a particular plot of earth, the more reluctant one is likely to be to give it up and move on. If one has taken a great deal of effort to clear a particular region, put up a substantial dwelling place, and select particular types of plants and animals that one wants to encourage (or discourage), a drop in local productivity is likely to be met with innovation, rather than simply migration to a new area. Tillage agriculture called for more immediate attention to particular locations than did a wandering existence, and it also had the potential to smooth out some of the variance that an otherwise uncontrolled environment might impose.

The transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a more sedentary existence seems essential for the development of a more abstract and less applied natural history. The ecological economics of this transition have been discussed by a variety of authors,¹¹ and it has occurred repeatedly in different times and places. For the purposes of this book, I concentrate for the moment on the history of the Near East: the region between India and Syria that contained the Fertile Crescent.¹² This region in general, and particularly that between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, has long been regarded as the birthplace of western civilization.

Unlike in the Americas, there was a wealth of small to medium-sized mammals in Eurasia that could be transformed into domestic livestock. Domestication of goats and sheep occurred between nine and ten thousand years ago in the Near East.¹³ Breeds of domestic cattle were developed from wild species at roughly the same time.¹⁴ Oxen provided both meat and draft labor as agriculture became more intensive. Horses do not seem to have been incorporated into the domestic landscape until much later—perhaps as recently as 3500 BCE.¹⁵ The first horse cultures developed in what is now Kazakhstan and other areas of Central Asia, rather than farther south, in the Fertile Crescent. Initially horses were used both as milk animals and for riding and drawing sledges. Eventually the advantages of mounted cavalry made the armies of Asia nearly invincible against their opponents to the east and west. It is no surprise that Europeans adopted horses as soon as they became available to them.

The practical natural history of the early hunter-gatherers must have morphed over time into a form of what we would call today agroecology. Successful farmers developed techniques for cultivating particular soil types and had deep knowledge of water requirements, the correct timing of sowing and harvest, and the types of crops that could and could not be grown together. They were also familiar with pests, plant diseases, and other potential sources of loss. Successful farmers, like successful hunter-gatherers before them, passed on useful techniques and abandoned efforts that took too much work or failed to yield a dividend. They might also have been regarded as having an in with the gods, or as being just plain lucky, but even today you can find racehorse breeders who shake their heads at too much science and say, Breed the best to the best and hope for the best. One suspects that similar feelings have been common for as long as there has been organized agriculture and livestock rearing. Such early natural history was still not knowledge sought for knowledge’s sake or for a wider understanding of the world, but it provided a basis from which later scholars could work.

The first evidence for an academic natural history comes from the Assyrians, an ancient people who ruled much of the Middle East under various kings until their final defeat by the Medes in the seventh century BCE. At the height of their power, the Assyrians were the masters of the lands from Egypt north into central Turkey and east to the western edge of modern Iran. With a heartland lying in the rich soils of the Fertile Crescent, the Assyrians were ideally placed to develop a complex civilization. They created a network of paved roads linking cities of their empire and facilitating trade throughout the Near East. They brought agriculture and animal husbandry into a recognizably modern condition, and they engaged in studies of astronomy, medicine, and philosophy that had a profound influence on later writers such as Pliny and Aristotle.

Assyrian reliefs illustrate torture, slave labor, and the destruction of opposing cities and armies, but they also show an increasing artistic sensibility and a growing emphasis on the depiction of nature in both a stylized and a more realistic form.¹⁶ Assyrian rulers assembled hunting parks and paradises that contained selections of plants and animals from throughout the empire¹⁷ and provided the opportunity for the study of animals in a more or less natural setting, while giving rise to stories of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

Asurbanipal, who ruled in Nineveh and Babylon from 668 to 626 BCE,¹⁸ might serve as a potential founding father of natural history as we think of it today. Other rulers in the Near East might have established a degree of scientific study of nature, but Asurbanipal provides evidence for a systematic study, drawing on the work of earlier writers in amassing texts for his library, the contents of which are the first surviving example of a broad interest in the structure of the world that goes beyond utilitarian usage.

Asurbanipal was the great-grandson of Sargon, an officer in the Assyrian army who had seized the throne in a coup d’état during the absence of the reigning king. Sargon’s son and grandsons had plotted, schemed, and murdered their way through any opposition to both retain their hold on the throne and expand their empire. Asurbanipal proved to be a highly capable military commander, and he also used the rivalries and disorganization of his enemies to extend the frontiers of Assyria into regions never before annexed or explored.

Having smashed all opposition, Asurbanipal returned to Nineveh, where he ruled for another twenty years in what was to prove to be a golden age at the twilight of Assyrian civilization. The King of Kings seems to have been a great collector and also something of an aesthete. His royal palace was much more elaborate than those of his predecessors, decorated with sculptures and friezes. Excavations at Nineveh have revealed detailed relief panels depicting Asurbanipal hunting lions, contemplating his paradises, and engaging in a variety of kingly and priestly tasks. Notable in many of these illustrations is a careful attention to detail in depictions of plants and animals that suggests that the king and his court might have been sticklers for a realistic interpretation of nature.

While the portraits of royal life alone would have made the finds at Nineveh of great importance, of even more interest was the discovery of a vast library of cuneiform tablets that must have at one point occupied a significant portion of the royal palaces. Piles of broken tablets covered the lowest floor of the palace to more than a foot deep, and their positioning suggests that they must have fallen through from an upper level, rather than simply having been consigned to basement storage. Many of these tablets have been translated, and often proved to be copies of still more ancient texts whose originals are lost to us. Among the treasures of Asurbanipal’s library was the Epic of Gilgamesh—perhaps the oldest book now available—as well as descriptions of a flood that foreshadows the story of Noah in the Bible. Here also we have for the first time evidence of a systematic ordering of natural objects, in the context of trade, commerce, and medicine, including an extensive herbal describing over one hundred medicinal plants.

We have no evidence that the king himself ever engaged in active study of natural history, so my selection of this king and this moment in history as the starting point of natural history as a form of science rather than subsistence is admittedly arbitrary. Much of what is found in the translated portions of the library relating to plants in particular is utilitarian in that it relates to medical applications. In this sense, there is little difference between what the Assyrians were doing and what medieval monks and abbesses were still doing nearly two millennia later. The library at Nineveh and the images of the royal paradises hint at broader themes: with appropriate patronage, great things could be done; knowledge could be both advanced and stored for future generations; and the written word could provide a continuity and a precision that oral tradition lacked.

Unfortunately, Asurbanipal was not only the greatest king of Assyria; he was also the last great king. After