Instant Genius - Ross Barnett: Why should we be interested in prehistoric animals that aren’t dinosaurs?

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast we’re investigating long-extinct animals. No, not dinosaurs, they get plenty enough coverage already. Instead, we’re going to look at creatures that lived in the Pleistocene era, a period of time that covered the last known ice age. During this period enormous creatures roamed the Earth, with some surprising animals making what we now know as the British Isles their home. What makes these often-enormous animals so interesting is that they lived side-by-side humans and other early human species, which means we have more than just fossilised bone fragments to learn from - we have cave art, sculpture, tools and even cooking utensils that we can use to build our understanding. Ross Barnett is a palaeontologist, whose recent book The Missing Lynx: The Past and Future of Britain's Lost Mammals (£16.99, Bloomsbury Wildlife) explores the story of Britain’s lost megafauna. He speaks to our online assistant Sara Rigby about Britain’s biggest beasts, humans’ role in their extinction, and what they can teach us about the future of conservation. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Samantha Alger: What can we do to save the bees? Brian Switek: How did bones evolve? Mark Lynas: Could leaving nature to its own devices be the key to meeting the UK’s climate goals? Brad Lister: Are we facing an insect apocalypse? Steve Brusatte: The truth about dinosaurs Neil Gemmell: The genetic hunt for the Loch Ness Monster Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heinz. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month.

Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. There's a moment when things start to feel uncertain, not urgent, just a quiet question in the background. What helps is finding a place where it all feels a little more clear. At Villa Gardens, life stays full, connected and meaningful, with people, with ideas, with the things that have always mattered. So instead of worrying about what's changing, you start to feel good about what's possible.

Explore your options at VillaGardons.org, a non-profit life plan senior community within the Front Porch family. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music, just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. In Britain is one of the kind of most affluent countries in the world. If we can't protect our own species, then what does that say

by the rest of the world. It's really disheartening. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara, and this week we're investigating long, extinct animals. No, not dinosaurs, they get plenty of coverage enough already.

Instead, we're going to look at creatures that lived in the Pleistocene era, a period of time that covered the last known Ice Age. During this period, enormous creatures roamed the earth, with some surprising animals making what we now know as the British Isles their home. What makes these often enormous animals so interesting is that they lived side by side with humans and other early human species, which means we have more than just fossilised bone fragments to learn from. We have cave arts, sculpture, tools and even cooking utensils that we can use to build our understanding. Ross Barnett is a paleontologist whose recent book The Missing Links explores the story of Britain's lost megafauna.

He spoke to our online assistant Sarah Rigby about Britain's biggest beasts, humans roll in their extinction, and what they can teach us about the future of conservation. So first of all, can you please give us a brief description of what your book is about? So The Missing Links is a bit about what's happened over the past 50,000 years. It's focusing on Britain as a kind of microcosm, but, hopefully bringing in some of the wider ideas about what has changed and what we've lost since the end of the Ice Age in Europe and the world, essentially. So you talk a lot about large mammals, megafauna, particularly from the Pleistocene era.

Is that right? That's right. Yeah. So the Pleistocene is basically the kind of more fancy term for the Ice Age. What we know is the Ice Age is mostly the Pleistocene, which is this kind of period from about two and a half million years ago, till only about 11,700 years ago. So it's the second most recent geological time period. Can you give a bit of context for the Pleistocene, please, in terms of human history?

Sure. Well, the Pleistocene is basically when everything happens for modern humans, for our species, homo sapiens. But it's a time where we have still other species of humans around. So it's when the Neanderthals are around. the Hobbit of Flores is around. It's when you have the Denisovans, this weird, mysterious, central Eurasian group that nobody knows much about,

but we know we interbred with. And it's also the start of our own species. So we kind of evolve in Africa 2 to 300,000 years ago, which is towards the end of the Pleistocene. And then starting at about 60 to 70,000 years ago, modern humans spread out of Africa and basically conquer the entire planet.

from, you know, cover all the continents except Antarctica and all the major island groups as well. So it's a really kind of dynamic time for hominids as a whole. So when people think of extinct prehistoric animals, most people would probably first think of dinosaurs. So why should we be interested in these much more recent animals? That's a great question. I mean, you know, dinosaurs are very much the kind of the gateway to be interested in the life of the past for sure. I mean, that's what I started off being interested in as a child. And, you know, I still love dinosaurs. But I think what makes the Pleistocene Megapala so much more interesting is just the fact that, you know, we live with them. So unlike the dinosaurs, if we discount birds,

which are dinosaurs, but the kind of non-avian dinosaurs, they lived 66 million years ago before humans, before primates, before really most modern mammal groups. But the giants of the ice age, the kind of Pleistency Mengabon are the mammoths, the wally rhinos, the saber-toothed cats, the giant wombats, the ground slots, all these kind of crazy animals that are only just gone. We lived and interacted with them, and we have lots of evidence of how humans hunted, used their kind of fur and tusk and all these other kind of products that they had. And so we've kind of only just missed them. They're kind of just yesterday in geological time.

and we kind of saw them, we drew them, we sculpted them. They're a very intimate part of the human story that we don't really think about very much because they're not around anymore. In terms of what lives in Britain, we would usually think of the mammals that we have as things like, you know, badgers and deer and generally quite small things,

but that wasn't always the case, was it? Yeah, yeah, we're really kind of, we're dealing with what is a very artificial situation in Britain that we don't have any large carnivores. We don't have anything bigger than a badger, which is essentially a really small carnivore that occasionally scavenges and takes small mammals. But if we go back, say, 20,000 years ago,

we had lions, we had savored tooth cats. Of course, we had wolves and bears and links, these other species that went extinct slightly more recently. We had a whole heap of things, hyenas. I mean, who thinks of hyenas as being native to Britain? But they are. So where did they go? Well, this is the big question.

And it's the kind of major theme that people have been exploring ever since we sort of figured out that these bones came from things like hyenas and lions and bears. Where did they go to? And there's been really a lot of work done over the past century and a half to try and get a handle on this question. And at the moment, there's sort of two quite different camps that have kind of sprung up. So there's a group that really kind of puts this down to climate change. We know that the Pleistocene itself was a very dynamic period that you had times when it was very incredibly cold, like frigid, kind of glacial deserts in parts of Eurasia, and times when it was kind of moderate temperatures and climate like it is today.

And it switched between these kind of two phases in time periods called glaciales and intradicals. And so climate has been one of the things that people have sort of tapped onto is something that was changing and possibly could have had an effect on these species. And definitely, I don't think anyone would disagree that changing climate has a big effect on species that live in the wild. But the other camp, the one that I'm in myself, is the idea that modern humans are species as we kind of travel out of Africa encountering these naive large animals. We basically hunted them, destroyed their habitats, and put other kinds of pressures on them that meant that they were driven to extinction directly and indirectly by human causes. What evidence do we have of human influence in these extinctions? Well, lots. I mean, what's important to realize is that these extinctions happened,

well, different species went extinct at different times. but the kind of window of overlap that varies between different species so for some there's thousands of years of overlap between humans and for instance mammoths and for others there's very little for instance humans and grounds loss

so we can be talking about a time period between humans arriving and extinction that's only a couple of hundred years and then 15,000 years later we're trying to find evidence of this very short time period when humans and extinct animals are interacting. But we do have a lot. So if we look at one example, say the cave bear.

So the cave bear was a relative of the brown bear, much bigger, about a ton. So these are animals that have been hunted by humans and then processed, and the kind of bone wreck who's left behind still had evidence of the hunting in them. A really interesting site is Montespan in France, where they have found inside a cave, what seems to be. a kind of clay epigy of a cave bear, which has holes in it, like you would get if you kind of poked a big pointy stick into it. And it had a skull there in front suggesting that it'd been covered in the kind of skin and head of a bear and been used as essentially target practice.

So we have some really quite suggestive evidence that hunting of most of these species was something that was occurring. Right. And one of the first of these species was occurring. Right, and one of the species that we quite clearly hunted is the mammoth, and that's one of the sort of typical examples of ice age mammals. Yes, definitely. So mammoths, we overlap with quite a long time period. So mammoths went extinct in sort of mainland, North America, mainland Eurasia, about 14,000 years ago.

And that is nearly 50,000 years of overlap with modern humans. But what's interesting about mammals is we have a lot of evidence for their hunting, but we also have evidence of them surviving in really isolated habitats. So there's an island just north of Siberia called Rangel Island, where we think the very last mammoth on Earth lived. So they were around until about 4,500 years ago. So 10,000 years after they went extinct in mainland Eurasia, they were surviving on this small, and it's only about 100 kilometers square island.

So this kind of very much ties into the... that humans are a major factor in their extinction. So, you know, Randall Island's only about, you know, 80 kilometers away from the mainland duration coast. Yet these animals survive for 10,000 years here. And we only see them disappearing from the fossil record at about the time that we have archaeological evidence for humans arriving on the island, which is very strongly suggested to me that they would have been fine if humans weren't around. Like with the Cape Bear as well, we have lots of evidence of hunting at mammoths. We have lots of bones that have been processed by humans,

have cut marks and things on them. We have bones that still have bits of flint stuck in them from when they were hunted. We have shoulder blades with holes kind of punched through them, which were obviously done by spears. We have cave art which sort of is suggestive of arrows and spears kind of sticking out of mammoths where they've been drawn. You know, all these kind of really, it's all kind of circumstantial,

but it builds up to very clear evidence that humans were targeting mammoths and hunting them quite heavily. But we didn't just hunt them for meat, did we? No, no. So, I mean, mammoths were everything for humans, especially in the kind of northern latitudes where you have very difficult terrain to live in if you're a human. But for mammoths, they got meat, of course.

but also ivory. I mean, ivory, when you don't have much wooder or tree around to work with, ivory is a fantastic resource. And we know that mammoth ivories is one of the kind of key products of the ice age that people were using. They were trading it. They were using it to sculpt, using it to sculpt sculptures. So we have kind of evidence of them puttling it essentially. They were using it to make more spearmes. point. So you have the kind of ironic case of mammoths being hunted by the remains of other hunted

mammoths. We don't have very much evidence for what they were using their skin and burr for, but obviously that would have been used too. So I think mammoths were essentially, you know, everything was used, nothing was wasted with them. They were essential to the kind of high stage economy. And interestingly, you should, you brought up the weapons that we use. So can you just give a bit of a brief explanation of what sort of weaponry that our ancient ancestors would have used? Yeah, well, these are really kind of quite sophisticated tools. I mean, this is, these are modern people. These are people just like us that are making these. And so, you know, different tools are being used in different situations. But one of the most interesting tools is kind of the

hunting spear that we have evidence of as a kind of modular instrument. So it's not just a stick and a bit of stone at the end that's pointy, you have very carefully, skillfully created cutting points from Flint or whatever, or ivory or whatever tool it is they're using for the cutting point. But then you also have a kind of modular part, so a bit that can be swapped out that the stone or ivory point attaches to. And this can be made of wood, it can be made of woolly rhino horn, it can be made of bone.

and what does is you have that attached to what is your kind of throwing part, the long spear part. And what this means is to when you're hunting, you can easily kind of swap out the business end, which is more often likely to get damaged and replace it quickly with a new one, which is important when you're hunting, you know, four tons of mammoth. And then as well as this, you have the technology of things like the Atal Atal, which is basically a range extender. It's just a small bit of ivory or wood or whatever, which extends the reach of your arm. It's like those ball drawers that you see dog walkers use where they kind of put the ball on the end and then they can flick it for the dog to catch. And it's exactly the same kind of physics going on, except instead of a kind of bouncy ball, you have your spear attached to that.

And it enables you to throw it much faster, much more accurately, with more power, enough power. to kind of puncture through a mammoth skin. So one of the other sort of animals you'd have expected to see in the Ice Age is the Sabretooth cat. How much did we interact with those? Well, we have a reasonable amount of interaction evidence from them. So the Sagerative cats are my favourite mixing species and one that I've worked the most on in my professional life. But really, it's a bit of a mystery. So the saber-toothed cap we had in Europe, which is called homotherium, it is very rare in the fossil record.

So there's a huge kind of gap between when we have reasonable numbers of fossils from them about 300,000 years ago, to the very last fossils we have of them, which are only about 30,000 years old. So that big gap, there's nothing kind of going on, which is annoying because that's when we have modern humans come into Europe. And so we have a kind of big gap where we'd expect to find evidence of interaction between savour truths and modern humans. But if we go back to the kind of 300,000-year-old stuff, there's the site in Germany called Schoeningen, which has given some amazing artifacts from early humans. And these aren't our species, but a closer related hominid species. But there we see them using kind of big spears and quite complicated flint tools. but we also have bones and teeth of saber-toothes there.

And weirdly, it looks like some of the bones have been used to make stuff. So they've kind of modified the bones of the saber-tooth cat 300,000 years ago and used it for knapping flint tools. So they've used it as like basically a hammer when they're making their flint spear points. So that kind of tells you something that these guys were, with saver-toothed cats, they were around. they knew of them, but they were happy enough to use their bones as tools.

What surprised me was how much we could learn about these saber-tooth cats from cave art. Yeah, well, I mean, with savour-tooth cats, we've only really got one example, which could be a saber-tooth. This is the statuette from Isturates in France. So we don't really have very much at all cave-art evidence of savagetute cats, but some of the other cats that were around at the time, things like the cave line, we have an awful lot of art of them. And we can learn stuff about how cave lions lived because the people that were drawing them understood them intimately.

They were sharing the landscape with them. And so with the cave line, we know that they lived in prides like modern lions do. And we also know that the males, so the male cave lions, didn't have a main, which is kind of quite unusual. When we kind of so much associate modern lion males with having a big kind of bouffant made, but the cave lions didn't seem to have that. So, you know, cave art is a really fantastic resource

for getting an idea of what these extinct species looked like and lived like when they were around. And cave lions, we know also a bit about what they look like from mummified examples, don't we? There's the little baby cave lion that was found in ice. Is that right? Yes, that's right. So, I mean, we've been one of the few upsides of global climate change at the moment

is that we have a lot of melting permafrost in Siberia, which is kind of spewing up some really fantastic finds. So we've kind of had an embarrassment of ridges of cave lions. After having no mummified remains of cave lions in all recorded history, in the past couple of years we've had four that popped up. So two sets of cubs popped up near the Uyndaya, Uyndina River, in Siberia a couple of years back. And then just last year,

another two cave lion cubs popped up called Boris and Spartak. So we've now got four really well-preserved cave lion cubs from the permafrost regions, which are being studied at the moment. Have we managed to learn anything from those just yet? Well, I guess we know a couple of things. We know that litters were at least two individuals, which is good to know. They seem to follow the same kind of developmental patterns as modern lions. So the cubs that have been bound have the same kind of teeth that the cubs have at the same time period approximately.

But yeah, I think they're kind of being studied quite intensely at the minute. So we haven't really heard much about what's been found about them. Yeah, and something else that interested me about the cave lions was the Lervynmensch, the little sculpture lion man. Can you tell us a bit about that, please? Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. artefact and there's really nothing else like it from the Pleistocene. It shows kind of how

important cave lines were to the people that lived with them at the time period. So the low in menches made of mammoth ivory, made it one bit of tusk of a mammoth. It's from a cave called Holobel's in Germany. And it's been put together from like 700 tiny little fragments were kind of slotted back together like the most difficult three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle you can ever imagine. And it has the head of a cave lion really incredibly done.

I mean, it has a lot of character. It's got a slight smile. The ears kind of stick up like they do in lines. You can see it's a very clear depiction of a cave lion, but its body is the body of a person. So it has arms at its side, it's standing on two feet. It looks like the person with the head of a cave lion.

And what does this mean? I mean, obviously, it means something. Otherwise, they wouldn't have spent the hundreds of hours it must have taken to carve it out of mammoth ivory. But it's a real mystery. I mean, it's kind of evidence of spirituality or some kind of cultural resonance for the cave line at this time period.

But we can only really speculate what it meant. I mean, it meant something, but it's kind of. a kind of flight of imagination captured in ivory. We just had to kind of take it as it is, really. As you mentioned earlier, Britain used to be home to hyenas, in particular cave hyenas. What are these like in comparison to modern spotted hyenas?

Yeah, well, they're pretty much exactly the same. So a little bit bigger, they're part of the same species as the modern spotted hyena. And spotted hyenas themselves are kind of amazing carnivores. they have really complex social lives. They're very, very good at hunting. And they have, you know, one of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom. They can crunch bone, no problem, digest it and excrete it on the other end. And the cave hyena that lived in Britain was part of the same species as the spot hyena.

And so we see evidence in some of the cave sites from Britain, places like Kent's Cavern, Kirkdale Cave. hyenas living in pretty much the same kind of way that they do in Africa today. So in groups, chewing lots of bone, scavenging when they can, but also hunting as well. And so we see them as part of the British landscape from the evidence of the fossils they left behind. So have we been able to learn about cave hyenas and how they might have lived from looking at how modern hyenas live? Well, I think there's probably a very good reference point. So, I mean, people have looked at the genetics of Cape hyenas. They've kind of extracted DNA from the bones of hyenas, even hyenas from Britain,

and looked at how they relate to modern populations in various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And so we can see that there's a clear, close relationship. And so apart from them possibly being slightly bigger on average than the hyenas that we have around today, all evidence points to them being essentially the same species. And the person who discovered K Faina's William Buckland, he sounded like quite a character. Oh, definitely. He's one of the most colourful scientists of the 19th century, I think. He only had to take a little bit into his kind of backstory to see how interesting a character he must have been with all his kind of weird manias for eating animals and for collecting things like that.

And also his contribution was huge. I mean, he was as well as being a bit of a figure of fun. He was a serious scientist that really contributed to our understanding of the past. The idea that these animals, things like hyenas and mammoths, had lived and breed in Europe during the distant past, that was all pretty much down to him. And so, yeah, he's one of my favorite characters from the history of science just because he is so colourful and has had so many adventures, essentially.

There was the particularly fun story about the saints' blood in the cathedral. Yeah. So, I mean, he was one of the first people to look at archaeology and paleontology as a practical science. And so he was very much into the idea of testing your assumptions. And so he did this when looking at bones of hyenas from Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. So he fed some cow bones to hyena from a travel and menagerie to see how it processed them and was able to match the kind of gnawing that happened on the bones to the annoying that he found in the fossils. And so he's very much about testing his ideas. And so this fun story is that he was on a tour around, I think it was Italy, somewhere a cathedral that had a kind of miraculous saint's blood stain on the floor.

And being the practical man that he was, he just go down on all fours and had a taste. of it and was able through his expansive knowledge of these kind of things to say that it was actually that you're in. So it just showed you that you should always try and test your ideas before taking them as gospel. I think one thing that we often don't appreciate was just how difficult it was to make the leap for people like William Buckland, to make the leap to understanding that there were species that had previously existed that have since gone extinct. Yeah, I mean, extinction is a real difficult concept to grasp, really, if you'd not be exposed to it before. The idea that animals were different in the past that some things that were around then aren't around anymore.

And so, Buckland himself, he was a theologian. He studied the Bible. He was a reverend, as were many of the kind of giants of 19th century geology and paleontology. And so, I mean, I think it kind of makes it even more impressive that they were able to put aside their theological training. The ideas of, you know, Noah's floods and the scala mature, all these kind of ideas about nature that they've got from biblical study to put that to one side and look just at the evidence in the caves, in the ground, in the fossils. I think that says a lot about the kind of intellectual honesty of these people at that time. One animal that I think people would be a little less surprised to learn about having lived in Britain is the Irish elk or the Shelt. Sounds like quite a magnificent creature. Could you tell us a bit about what that was? Yeah, I mean, the Irish elk is something else, really. It's just the most deer like a deer. If you've ever seen a skeleton, and there's lots of them around. They're just fantastic.

impressive and a resting sites. So, I mean, there's a really nice amount in the main hall in Edinburgh Museum. They're common enough that most large museums have them. And they're the largest year they ever lived. So they're a good seven or eight feet tall up to the top of the head. They, you know, bigger than moose, which is the biggest deer that's around today. And they have these kind of 12-foot anchor, antler spans. So they have six foot on one side and six foot on the other of antler.

And it's not really like any of the antlers around today. It's a bit moose-like, a bit fallow deer-like. It's broad and palate, so it's quite thick. It has only a few times that kind of stick off from the main broad palmate parts. And it would have been an absolutely fantastic creature to see in the flesh. I mean, it's just so stately, so elegant. You get that impression just from looking at the bones. so it must have been an incredible creature.

So why was it called the Irish elk? Well, it's kind of an accident of the fossilisation process, really. So it was first positively identified from underneath peat bogs in Ireland. So underneath many peat bogs, you have a kind of clay layer, this kind of marly, sticky clay, which dates back to the last ice age, back to the Pleistocene. And this is where a lot of the bones of Irish elk had been bound. And of course, peat is a fuel source. source where many people has been in the past, still as today. And so peak cutters working down

to the bottom of the peak bogs would occasionally pick up the skulls of these incredible creatures, which are clearly not like anything around in the Irish landscape, really in the European landscape because they were extinct. And so even going back to the 17th century and earlier, people were recognizing these as interesting things that should be dug up and, well, they had some kind of value. So they were hung in houses. They were put to quite alternative uses. So they're so big and so sturdy that people use them to pen in cheap. They used them as kind of makeshub gates or small bridges across little streams.

So, yeah, they're really impressive skulls that they have. And this has continued till today. So occasionally, some of the older Atler sets kind of come onto the auction houses themselves are fantastic sums. just because they're such impressive specimens. So in Britain, you wouldn't be surprised to be travelling through the countryside and see herds of cows around. And they're quite docile. They're big, but they don't really do much.

But it sounds like their ancestors, the aurochs, weren't much like that at all. No. I mean, I'm still always very wary of cows. I mean, they're supposed to be docile, but they, you know, they do kill people. we always underestimate what we're familiar with and yeah I would don't let your guard down around cows because they can turn in an instant

but definitely with the Orox it's another level entirely so the Orox is the kind of ancestor of the cow in the same way that the wolf is the ancestor of the dog and the wild boar is the ancestor of the domestic pig cows have come from Orocks and these were big big animals they were

bigger than any modern cow that's around today. They had, you know, enormous horns, like almost mammoth-tusk-sized horns. And they had a really bad reputation. So they survived until really late. They didn't go extinct during the ice age. They went extinct in the 17th century. I mean, they were around until modern times.

And so we have a lot of literate, written evidence of what these animals were like. We have some of the words of Julius Caesar himself from his writings on the conquest of Gaul, he talks about them as being young, these fearsome beasts, the size of an elephant that will hunt you down if they even see you. We have kind of later evidence as well from when they were confined to only a few places and looked after is essentially a kind of conservation hunting ground mix where they could be hunted by royalty at the time. And so we have a lot of sources about what the animal was like, a lot of written sources. And yeah, it sounds pretty terrifying. You can imagine, you know, the replication of bulls have today, imagine something

twice the size of a bull and even more angry. And that's basically what a bull orrochs could be like. So how did the aurochs sort of influence human culture? Well, in lots of ways. I mean, one of the kind of standout cultural artifacts we have from Western Europe, from the kind of Iron Age is something called the Gundistruck cauldron which was discovered under a peat bog in Jutland and Denmark

and so this is a sober cauldron which has a whole bunch of carvings on the outside which are religious possibly in nature have some really quite bizarre scenes on them

things like giants dipping people head first into cauldrons men with battlers on their head, like horned gods, people play the Carricks, this kind of Iron Age warhorn. But it also has, on the inside, the image of a hunted orochs, carved, well, sculpted out of silver in sort of three dimensions. And it's a really amazing image, which shows that these animals, as ferocious as they were, were hunted by people. And then going further back, you have lots of

art of aurochs in cave sites. So the Alaska, one of the most famous cave sites in France, has lots of Orox bowls on the walls. Shova Cave has them as well. And so all the way through, you have Orox as one of the most impressive animals in the European Bonner, which drew the attention of people that live beside them. And you can sort of argue that the Orox played a big role in human civilization itself, is that right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've somehow had the idea that these animals could be taken in and tamed and domesticated. I mean, it's a huge leap from, you know, Julius Caesar describing orcs as, you know,

the size of an elephant that will hunt you down and kill you, to taking them into kind of close proximity to human habitation, as was done in the Middle East about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, to domesticate them. And just the idea of domestication is really a mindbender, the idea that you can take these enormously dangerous animals and contain them so that you can breed them together, milk them essentially as well, and have them nearby so that it's less danger for you. So all of these animals have gone extinct arguably because of human influence. So what can we learn for the present time when extinctions are once again a big thing? threat to our ecosystem? Yeah, well, I think what I'd try and emphasize what I've tried to do with the book is just to show that

extinction is not something that just happened in the past. It's not something that you can box in with the dinosaurs, something that happens naturally. Most extinctions over the past 100,000 years, I would say, are down to human influence. If we don't learn from that, from that kind of very stark fact, then things are going to get pretty bad for us. And yeah, just the kind of idea that's, if we're not careful, if we don't emphasize the need for conservation and for a kind of better relationship with the natural world, then we're going to lose a lot more.

And it's happening. You know, it's happening now. We can look at things like the tiger, which has had, you know, million upon millions of of dollars thrown at it as a conservation problem. Yet still, off the eight subspecies of tiger, three of them have gone extinct in the past century. So the tiger that lived on Bali, the tiger that lived on Java,

and the tiger that lived around the Caspian Sea, they've all disappeared despite the massive conservation effort that's gone into protecting tigers. And it's global, this idea that things are disappearing, you know, they're suffering deaths by a thousand cuts all over the place. even in Britain, our own wildcat, the largest cat that survived in Britain in small pockets in the Scottish Highlands, it's disappearing. It's got nowhere to live. It's interbreeding with domestic cats that have gone barrel. And there have been a few success stories. We have kind of brought back the beaver.

That's kind of the only positive story I can think of in terms of British conservation in the past decade or so. but that's really only a start. We need to kind of be firmer and push harder to kind of undo some of the damage that's been done to recover some of the biodiversity, some of the natural world that we've kind of exterminated from here. So if we could bring back these Pleistocene species like the Woolly Mammoth, would you? Well, that's a really great. question. I don't know. Obviously, the idea of bringing back Williamondous has a lot of cultural kind of resonance in a place where Jurassic

Park and Jurassic World are kind of box office hits. It's not going to happen for a long time. I mean, I've been involved with ancient DNA as a professional scientist for 15 years looking at the genetics of extinct species. And it's a question that gets asked a lot. But we're a long, long way away from ever resurrecting things like mammoths or cave lions or any of these other extinct species. But even then, I would be very reticent to say yes to the idea that this should be brought back. I think mammoths like elephants are complex creatures. They have their own social life.

They have their own culture, essentially. And at the moment, we're struggling to protect elephants, the species that's around today. So African elephants are in real trouble. Asian elephants the same. Where would we put in that? Would you be happy to have them back in Siberia? Do you think the residents of Nova Subursk or Vladivostok would be happy to have four tons of elephant in their backyard?

I mean, there's all these kind of questions that have to be looked at. And yes, I think ultimately responsibility for their extinction is down to us. but whether bringing them back would absolve that guilt, I don't know. I don't know. So of all the Pleistocene species that have gone extinct, which is your favourite? That's a hard question. I would say, I mean, there's different kinds of favourites. I would say that the Sabretoothothed homotherium is one of my favorites just because it's such an incredible animal.

I mean, it's just hardly words to describe it. It's a lion-sized predator, short-tailed, hugely muscular forearms. Every single tooth in its mouth is serrated like a shark. It was probably a kind of pursuit ambushed predator. It would have been absolutely terrifying. I wouldn't want to live with it, but I would like to have been able to have seen it. But I think also, you know, things like the Irish elk, I mean, they would have been just incredible to see

this enormous deer with you know bridge spanning antlers all of them had their own all of them have their own kind of unique selling points so yeah I would I would love to kind of pop back to the place I've seen to have seen how they lived and how they interacted with the environment back then but yes I don't know all of them any of them

Sabretoots yeah That was Ross Barnett, whose book The Missing Links is out now. Subscribe to our podcast if you don't already, and next week you'll be able to listen to Geneticist and BBC Radio 4 presenter Adam Rutherford explain how to argue with a racist, using science, obviously. Don't forget, if you're struggling to keep up with these new year resolutions, the latest issue of BBC Science Focus shows you how you can supercharge your willpower.

Of course, there's loads more inside, so pick up a copy at your local newsagent or supermarket. Or better still, subscribe and get it delivered to you. to your door. Find out more at sciencefocus.com forward slash subscribe. Thank you for listening to the science focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's bestselling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. Business owners in California know there's a lot to keep up with. The rules change constantly.

Guidance shifts. Even a small payroll mistake can turn into an expensive problem. And that's why so many business owners visit guardianhr.com for practical, reliable, HR help when they need it most. GuardianHR is local in L.A., so they're part of the community, and they support businesses that keep Southern California moving. You get real people, not call centers. You get dedicated payroll support and a dedicated HR specialist.

You'll understand your company, your employees, and the compliance challenges that you face every day. From wage and hour rules to meal and rest breaks to terminations and accommodations, GuardianHR guides you with the clarity and confidence you need so you can stay protected and be focused on growth. Don't wait for a problem. Prevent one. Go to GuardianHR.com. GuardianHR.com