Quotes from “Once and Future Giants”

All of the last week’s quotes are from the same non-fiction book, Once and Future Giants by Sharon Levy. Rather than my usual “who said it under what circumstances” I’m just going to give extended quotes this week, with the part tweeted in italics.

“Conventional wisdom long held that the megafauna fell victim to a warming climate at the end of the last glacial peak of the Ice Age. According to this theory, rising temperatures led to changes in vegetation, altering habitat in ways that proved fatal to many large herbivores and in turn to the dire wolves, American lions, and saber-toothed cats that had preyed on them. Today many scientists believe ancient people were responsible for the extinctions, an idea raised with dramatic flair by paleoecologist Paul Martin.

“From the beginning, people have seen what they wanted to see in the bones of America’s extinct monsters. The devout seventeenth-century colonists who found the first pair of mastodon molars were convinced that they had discovered the remains of a human giant, proof that the David and Goliath story was true.”

“Healthy populations of giant herbivores shape the landscapes that sustain them. But the mastodon at the close of the Pleistocene was so rare it was environmentally insignificant.”

“Seeds that drop to earth beneath the parent’s canopy are doomed: easy targets for predators such as rodents and insects that swarm around fruiting trees. The few that survive to sprout will be shaded to death by the tree that produced them.”

“The clash between elephants and people is as old as our species. To hold on in the long run, elephants need that precious commodity, land.

“Cats, large or small, are the ultimate carnivores: they have lost most of their cheek teeth, except for two or three carnassials that slice against each other, ripping meat away from tendon and bone. A cat’s mouth was made to eat meat and little else.”

“Whoever back at headquarters had come up with the color-coding scheme should try to live with it.” Sue Ann Bowling, Tourist Trap. Penny’s thoughts. The color coding was applied both to the clothing of clients and to the collars, harnesses, and dogsleds – but the two sets of coding caused some major color clashes.

Once and Future Giants: Book Review

I bought Once and Future Giants by Sharon Levy after seeing a review on a science blog. It is indeed an excellent book, though at times it seems that it covers almost too many topics. All, however, have one thread in common: our present ecosystems were to some extent broken by the extinction of large mammals, which can have a profound impact on their environments. Who expected, for instance, that the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone would have a positive impact on songbirds and possibly, if the wolves spread far enough, on antelope?

The book attracted me primarily because of the debate on whether the Pleistocene megafauna (mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, and ground sloths, among others) died out because of climate change or because of overkill by humans, as proposed by Paul Martin. I have Martin’s book, and have been more than half convinced by his arguments. Certainly it has seemed unlikely to me that the warming at the end of the Pleistocene was enough in itself to trigger the extinction of a large number of animals who had survived similar transitions from glacial to interglacial repeatedly in the past. In fact, if we ignore the last fifty years, all the evidence is that it was warmer than the Recent during at least some past interglacials. But Martin very definitely writes as an advocate for his theory, glossing over the problems.

Sharon Levy has written a more balanced book, and one that tends to agree more with my own conclusions. Yes, the changes in climate at the close of the last ice age undoubtedly stressed the Pleistocene megafauna. But the major difference between the last warming and the ones that had happened before was that human beings had emerged as a major predator, and one against whom the large herbivores had no natural defenses. As she points out, the Clovis people need not have killed many mammoths or ground sloths. But human predation, unlike predation by most animals, tends to target healthy animals, often pregnant females. This disrupts the natural social groupings of herbivores, already under stress from climate and habitat change. As the herbivores are killed off, the large carnivores may well die off from starvation. Some of the environmental effects brought about by humans, such as those caused by fire, may also be partly to blame.

The idea of re-wilding, of introducing either the original species (as wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone) or a surrogate is even more controversial – but the controversies are even more political than the reintroduction of the wolf. Predators are an important part of ecosystems – but people simply do not want to live with animals capable of killing large prey. Neither do they want large herbivores, such as camels or elephants, to compete with domesticated animals for food. The mustang problem is an example of both.

A less well-known problem is certain aspects of the protection of endangered species. In some cases animals or plants stressed by the ongoing changes in climate need to be relocated closer to the poles or to higher elevations – but this is often prohibited by the very laws meant to protect them.

I’m fond of the large megafauna, and would love to see a mammoth in person. In fact the terraformed landscape of Falaron in my own novel Tourist Trap, based on ice-age North America, reflects that wishful thinking. But I have to confess I’d have my doubts about living with the creatures of the Ice Age, or with introduced African lions.

Death of Blue Babe

(“Blue Babe” is a steppe bison that was killed by a lion, frozen and buried by silt some 36,000 years ago. He was found by a placer miner near Fairbanks, and rests today in the museum at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.)

The bison sniffed the frosty air, his head swinging back and forth as he scanned the snow-covered steppe. Vigilance was part of life, but within the herd it was a shared duty. Here, alone, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He lowered his head and pawed at the wind-crusted snow, uncovering a batch of browned grass, but he took only one bite before jerking his head up to look around.

The dead grass was harsh on his tongue, but it would be the only food available for months. And how could he feed, without others to keep watch? In the herd, at least one or two individuals at a time were always looking around, ready to sound a warning if danger approached. He swallowed the first bite, and lowered his head briefly to snatch more of the poor feed.

The wind tugged at his thick coat, but could not penetrate to his skin. He spread his nostrils and swiveled his ears, seeking warning of any predator, but the hiss of the blowing snow covered other sounds. Again he turned. Where was the rest of the herd? Sheltering from the wind? Perhaps in the valley to his left?

The narrow stream valley provided little shelter from the biting wind, and no other bison. Instinctively he knew the danger of being alone, but until he found the rest of the herd, he had little choice. Again he paced in a tight circle, seeking the source of every imagined sound.

What was that? One eye caught a blur of motion, and he bolted farther into the little valley. But the snow had drifted deeper here, and as he started to turn back, a sudden weight almost collapsed his hindquarters. Bellowing wildly he bucked and spun, the musk of lion rank in his nostrils. For an instant he was free, plunging though the snow for the mouth of the valley, but out of the thickening storm came another lion, leaping for his head.

His nose was pulled down, and again weight came on his hindquarters. He hardly felt the pain of claws and teeth. All his attention focused on the demands of his lungs for air. He tried to shake his head, to throw off the weight clamped to his muzzle, but his legs would no longer support even his own weight, and buckled under him. Redness fading to black washed across his world. He never knew when the lions began to feed.

Alaskan Mesozoic 3

One of the problems faced by teachers at any level is questions.

Very young children are full of questions – the problem is keeping a class from disintegrating into chaos. Somehow parents, school and adults in general manage to turn that questioning off, at least in the classroom. In teaching college courses, I found that it was very difficult to get students to ask any questions. And a good teacher relies on student questions, if only to provide feedback on whether he or she has gotten the point across.

I recall a math class at Harvard where the professor was totally stunned by the abysmal results of the first test. Most of us hadn’t had the least idea of what he was talking about, but were so confused we didn’t even know what to ask. If some of us had just spoken up and said “I don’t understand that,” he might have realized what we only understood in retrospect – he had not bothered to find out exactly what the preceding class had covered, and a large and essential chunk of the necessary background to what he was teaching had never been covered. In this case, I think we were all afraid of looking stupid in the eyes of the other students.

I’m not talking about huge lecture classes, of course. But in smaller groups, often with a graduate assistant, questions do need to be asked – and frequently are not. As a result, those who teach in college settings generally plan their lectures assuming there will not be many questions.

Many of our local OLLI classes, for adults over 50, are taught by college professors, often retired. These lecturers plan their courses as if we were college students, with a typical student’s reluctance to ask meaningful questions. It doesn’t work, at least not in Fairbanks. We older students are full of questions, especially when our instructors are active researchers of what they are teaching.

The final lecture of “The Mesozoic of Alaska” was supposed to cover marine reptiles and pterosaurs. Well, the marine reptile – an ichthyosaur discovered on the North Slope – was indeed covered, in the last five minutes of the two-hour class. I had to ask about the pterosaurs after class.

I think that Pat (who is not retired) intended to give a brief overview of what kinds of dinosaur fossils have been found in Alaska, followed by the story of the excavation of the ichthyosaur (which turned out to have co-discovered by Carl Benson, one of my dissertation advisors) and the trace fossils of pterosaurs. He passed around casts of fossils of numerous types of dinosaurs found along the Colville River, told stories of floating the Colville hunting for dinosaur bones in the thawing banks, and showed artists’ conceptions of the living beasts. And he had to field tons of questions.

I won’t go into the classifications of Saurischia and Ornithischia, you can look at Wikipedia if you’re interested. Here in Alaska, we had Edmontosaurus (a duck-bill) chowing down on the vegetation, accompanied (not always on the Colville) by ankylosaurs,  Thescelosaurus, hadrosaurs and Pachyrhinosaurus. They were eaten by large and small two-legged predatory dinosaurs: big-eyed Troodons, the Tryannosaurid Albertosaurus, and another small, pack-hunting killer, Sauromitholestes.

The pterosaurs? They were here, as shown by a trace fossil of the “hand” of one. Their bones are so delicate that it is no surprise fossils have not been found yet in Alaska, but they were here. At least there is no problem with their possible migration, which is still hotly debated for the land-dwelling dinosaurs.

Don’t forget to comment for the drawing — I’m including all relevant posts.

Mesozoic Alaska, Part 2

The Saturday OLLI class was on the plants of Mesozoic Alaska – not much like today! Right now the North Slope is moist tundra, with low shrubs, sedges, grasses, lichens and ice wedges. The current latitude of the fossil locations is under 70 °N.

The Mesozoic landscape was very different. It was a forested area, with rivers draining the rising Brooks Range and flowing to an Arctic ocean that never froze, and had surface water temperatures estimated at 15° C – around 60° F. Quite a difference from the ice cover of today! The latitude at the time, inferred from sediment paleomagnetism, was 85° — a mere 5° from the pole. Yet the land was forested, with conifers, ginkgos, metasequoia, with an understory of ferns, mosses, lichens horsetails and flowering plants. No grass, though – it hadn’t evolved yet.

Most of these plants, including the conifers, dropped their leaves in the winter. After all, plants cannot photosynthesize without sunlight, and at 85° N, the winter night was over 5 months long. There would have been about 25 days in spring and another 25 in fall when the sun rose and set, but basically it was continuous daylight in the summer and continuous night in the winter. No wonder some of the predatory dinosaurs whose fossils have been found in northern Alaska had enormous eyes!

What did the herbivores eat? Most likely twigs, dormant buds, bark, possibly roots and even wood. Some may have migrated to warmer climes, but this is being debated.

The mean annual temperatures of the time can be estimated from the fraction of smooth-edged leaves versus toothed leaves. Yes I am dubious too, and no one has come up with a good explanation. But the fact remains that this measure in modern leaf litter all over the world correlates extremely well with mean annual temperature. Using this, mean annual temperatures were likely around 10°C (50°F) compared with modern mean annual temperatures well below freezing.

My suspicion is that winters were also cloudy, possibly foggy, and had at least occasional snowfalls. That warm ocean would have stayed warm – water has to lose an enormous amount of energy to cool very much. With water that warm, the cooler water would be denser and sink, and the whole depth of the ocean would have to be cooled to cool the surface. Warm water evaporates into colder air, and given a cold land breeze near the surface, and the warm, wetted air coming back inland at height, I’d certainly expect clouds, which in winter serve to keep the ground warm. Not much precipitation, but possibly a fog forest. Could fog have allowed the herbivores to hide from the predators?

Next week we’ll be looking at marine reptiles (I know some have been found in Alaska) and those that flew. For more references, check here. There’s also a DVD of the Colville dig, and a neat story about filming it.

Don’t forget the drawing!

The Four Horemen Revisited

I don’t often repeat posts, but with the projection of the  world population passing 7 billion this week, I thought it was time to bring this one out again.

Domestication is a mutual process—the plants and animals domesticated historically have met us halfway.

We and our domesticates have entered a kind of symbiosis—both we and they benefit, at least in numbers.

Plant and animal domestication was the first step toward civilization.

There are only two ways of increasing agricultural yield: Increase the amount of food produced per acre, or increase the amount of land farmed.

Once domestication occurred, we were locked into a positive feedback loop between food production and population. But a positive feedback loop is inherently limited and unstable. Are we approaching a crash?

I’ve been taking a Teaching Company course on DVD for the last couple of weeks, and I have to say it’s one of the best I’ve taken so far. I’ve always been interested in the process of domestication, especially since it became clear that the early agriculturists were generally less healthy than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. How did wolves become dogs? Who first thought of riding a horse? Did riding come before or after driving? And are cats really domesticated, or did they domesticate us?

The course is “Understanding the Human Factor: Life and Its Impact” by Professor Gary A. Sojka, but it’s really about human impact. I can’t say it answered all of my questions, or even asked them, but it did a good job of summarizing our current state of understanding, and of steering a middle course between “domestication is a sin and all domesticated animals should be returned to the wild” (most would not survive, and we probably wouldn’t, either) and “animals have no feelings and were put on this world solely for our use.” There are fewer moral problems with domesticated plants and microbes, though even here there are quandaries. How dangerous are monocultures, for instance? Or reliance on a small number of closely related varieties? (Think the Irish potato famine.)

If I have an argument with Professor Sojka, it is that he is too optimistic about the future. This may be appropriate for a college course, but I don’t feel enough sense of urgency. Yes, some people—a small minority even in the West—are beginning to think about long-term sustainability. (The politicians aren’t, by and large.) But the major problem—a population that is rapidly outstripping the carrying capacity of our planet (if it hasn’t done so already)—has become a taboo subject for serious discussion.  “The demographic transition will take care of it.” But will that happen soon enough?

Historically, our population has been kept in check by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. War. Disease. Death by wild beasts—today, accidental death of all kinds. All of these are premature deaths—death by old age simply is not mentioned.

Today, we tend to regard such deaths—those of the young—as particularly tragic. We fight them in every way we can—and in many ways, we’ve succeeded. What we’ve forgotten is that every person born dies eventually, and to reach sustainability we have to reduce the number of people being born until it balances the number who die. Otherwise the four horsemen will eventually increase the death rate to match the birth rate—or more.

Food and energy both rely on sunlight—the sunlight that falls on the earth today and the sunlight that fell hundreds of million years ago, and is now stored in fossil fuels. I group food and energy for several reasons. Fertilizer. Biofuels. Pesticides. Transportation. Pumping water to where it is needed for crops, in some cases pumping down water that has been in storage since the ice age. All of the advances that have allowed us to hold back that horseman, Famine, ultimately rely on those fossil fuels and fossil water, or plan to replace them with agricultural products. And fossil fuels are becoming increasingly risky to exploit—look at the BP oil spill.

But an increase in agricultural output to match the increase in population means more efficiency—which we are obtaining today largely through fossil fuels—or more land in agricultural production. There is only so much land suitable for agriculture, especially if we want to keep the ecosystem services we depend on going. And one of the oldest causes for war is the desire for more land. Desire for more energy, often perceived as a need, is a rising cause of wars today.

Disease? In part that ties back to our methods of food production, as well. Certainly much antibiotic resistance can be linked to the widespread use of antibiotics in animals, and many diseases that started out in animals have crossed over to human beings. I find it interesting that all of the great world religions, many of them very pro-natalist, trace their origins to early city dwellers. Disease can spread rapidly among city-dwellers. In fact until the last century or two, urban areas were dependent on immigration from the countryside to maintain their populations. Having many children was important to these early city-dwellers—most of their children would die before having children themselves. That’s not true today, thanks largely to public health improvements—but the mindset and the religious imperative remain.

All living things—plants, animals, and human beings—are driven to reproduce. In our case, that deep-seated drive is reinforced by religious and social pressures. We claim we have a right, even a duty, to reproduce. But do we? Not in nature. Nature says the “right” to reproduce must be earned. It’s a lesson I hope we can learn before it is enforced by the Four Horsemen.

This is Post 486. Comment to join the drawing.

The Alaskan Mesozoic

The OLLI classes are on again, and my favorite teachers are back – this time, with a course on the Alaskan Mesozoic.

What’s that? Well, the Mesozoic is the “Middle period” of multicellular life on earth, lasting roughly from 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago. It is probably better known as the age of dinosaurs, although many of the animals of the time often looked on as dinosaurs – weren’t. And the fossils of many of these animals are indeed found in Alaska – which has led to a new look at dinosaurs.

I missed the first class of the series, on the paleogeography of Alaska, but a good deal of it was put together at the Geophysical Institute, where I used to work. I already knew that the mountain ranges that make up most of Alaska were originally island chains, carried into the state on the moving Pacific and Arctic plates and crushed against it. The north slope was actually at a higher latitude than today during the Mesozoic, and while the world (and Alaska) were a good deal warmer then, the sun was still below the horizon 24 hours a day in midwinter. Plants cannot grow without sunlight, herbivores would have a lean time of it in winter, and carnivores need herbivores to survive. It is difficult to imagine cold-blooded reptiles managing this (there are no crocodiles or snakes in mainland Alaska today) so the discovery of dinosaurs, but not fossil crocodiles, at these high latitudes has forced some reconsideration of their cold-bloodedness.

So what are dinosaurs? That was the Saturday lecture.

First, they are diapsids. That means they have two holes (other than those for eyes, nostrils and ears) in their skulls. In contrast we mammals have one on each side and are called synapsids, and turtles have none and are called anapsids. Don’t think you have one? It’s behind your cheekbone, and your jaw muscle passes through it. Feel above your cheekbone and clench your jaw, and you can feel the muscle. Well, dinosaurs, crocodiles, lizards and birds have two such holes.

In order to be a dinosaur, however, something else is required. Diapsids (think reptiles) started out sprawling. At some point some brought their hind legs under themselves – somewhat earlier than we mammals learned the trick – and began to use their forelegs as grasping hands. The first dinosaur probably looked like a large (but not too large) featherless (we think) bird.

And dinosaurs, as defined by being diapsids with upright rear legs and three-toed grasping forelegs, include birds. Furthermore, discoveries over the last ten to fifteen years have made it clear that many perfectly good, classic dinosaurs had feathers. After all, feathers make excellent insulation, as demonstrated by the down parka I wear.

So far, we’ve learned also that some creatures often lumped with dinosaurs are in fact not dinosaurs. The sail-backs often included with dinosaurs, for instance, are in fact synapsids and are our own distant relatives. Pterosaurs and marine reptiles, though flourishing at the same time as dinosaurs, were not dinosaurs, though they were diapsids.

I know there were marine reptiles in Alaska, but I’ll be fascinated to hear about pterosaurs in our long, dark winters. Did they live here, even in the summer? Did their wings allow them to migrate?

Next week we’ll focus on plants, but the final week is scheduled to cover the marine reptiles and pterosaurs. If you can’t wait, there is some information on a PBS NOVA program.

(P.S. That’s a Pterosaur skull that Pat Druckenmiller is holding.)

It’s Class Time–Even for Adults.

It’s sign-up time for OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) classes again, and how I missed the ice cream social signup a couple of weeks ago I don’t know. I always take a few science classes, just to keep up with things, and since I write science fiction I have to keep up with changes in what we think we know. (I also have a weakness for ice cream, and thanks to the insulin pump and lots of blood sugar testing I can occasionally indulge.)

Of the five classes I wanted to take, though, two were wait-listed – my fault for being so late. I’d hoped to take the one on using  iMovie because I’ve been thinking of making video trailers for my books, but that one’s full. The other wait-listed class is on evolutionary biology, and I really hope I can get into that one. Looks like the origin of life, current atmospheric research, and Mesozoic Alaska are all still available, and I’m especially excited about Mesozoic Alaska. Sarah Fowell and Patrick Druckenmiller have taught two previous classes on paleontology, and they are marvelous instructors. I’ll have to do some blogging on Alaskan dinosaurs. (Yes, they were up here, and yes, Alaska was at an even higher latitude than today, so they had to cope with long, dark winters and probably with temperatures that at least occasionally dropped below freezing. How? I’m hoping to learn more about the latest thoughts.)

I’m tempted by “Falling and Not Falling,” but it’s wait -listed too, and I’ve already taken it once. It really wasn’t very helpful for my type of loss of balance, which I’m pretty sure is related to the stroke I had some 13 years ago. It was a brainstem stroke, and I think it affected the part of my brain that controls balance.

You know the test they use to determine sense of balance? Stand on one foot (I’m hopeless) stand with one foot directly in front of the other (I can manage about 3 seconds) stand with your feet side by side but touching (only with my arms out for balance.) For me the main point is knowing how to avoid falling (difficult, since I can’t see my feet and where I’m going at the same time) and getting up once I have fallen. (Roll over, walk my feet up to my hands, and slowly and carefully stand up. It probably looks pretty funny, but it gets me back to my feet.)

Actually, it’s the helpful spectators who need instructions. I took a pretty good fall last Saturday at the Farmers’ Market. I was walking toward a display of ripe tomatoes when someone pushed  a stroller (the kind with low wheels out front) right in front of my feet. I didn’t even know what had caught my feet until I rolled over and sat up. Of course everyone was saying, “Are you all right? Do you need help?” which was fine.

What was not fine was that they wanted to pull me back to my feet at once. Not so fine. Anyone can break a bone in a fall, especially someone my age. Give a person who’s fallen time to take inventory and make sure everything’s there and unbroken. And then ask for instructions on how best to help her. In my case, people grabbing my hands and trying to pull me up from the front prevented my rolling over and getting myself up until I finally asked them to release me so I could handle the situation. Certainly they meant well, and I appreciated their efforts to help, but their actual help – wasn’t.

Anyway, I suspect I’m beyond class-work on not falling. I just have to remember and when possible avoid the situations that are most likely to land me on the ground, and how to get up without sounding ungracious when they do.

And enjoy the more academic classes.

When you stop to think about it, it all comes down to balance. Not just standing up and walking, but keeping a balance in your life. I can’t write if I don’t continue to read and learn, and the OLLI classes – two months in fall and another two months in spring – are an important part of that. Hooray for adult learning!

Madagascar: DVD Review

This DVD is not about dinosaurs, though Madagascar has been isolated almost since the time of the dinosaurs. Like the rest of the world, its inhabitants evolved from small creatures that survived the non-bird dinosaur extinction – but Madagascar was separated from both Africa and India so early that its evolution was almost in isolation. Today it has an array of unique plants and animals almost unmatched in the rest of the world, but very much under threat.

This is the latest of David Attenborough’s nature programs for the BBC. There are three programs: Island of Marvels, Lost Worlds and Land of Heat and Dust. Because Madagascar has a mountainous spine, the east and west coasts are quite different. The east coast faces the trade winds and is well-watered; the west coast is a rain-shadow desert. There is also a gradient from the north to the very dry southern tip.

Much of the program is taken up with the lemurs, the fascinating primates of Madagascar. These are forest-dwelling creatures for the most part, many with highly specialized habitats, and are threatened as much by forest clearance as by hunting. If you’ve seen the animated feature, “Madagascar” you no doubt remember the fossa – taking the place of the big cats, but related to mongooses. It turns out they are very hard to find and endangered – as are most of the species native to Madagascar.

Lemurs are far from the only Madagascar endemics. Chameleons, a wide variety of insects, and even some of the birds are unique.

In addition to the three main programs, there are two others: The Lemurs of Madagascar (which follows ring-tailed lemur mothers) and Attenborough and the Giant Egg, which combines Attenborough’s first visit to Madagascar with the present, when the giant eggshell he discovered 50 years ago is carbon-dated. At one time, it seems, Madagascar had truly giant birds.

I like David Attenborough, and the photography on this DVD is up to the BBC standards — high.  Definitely worth watching if you like nature programs.

The Animal Connection

The Bargain
©Sue Ann Bowling

Long ago and far away
We made a bargain,
Your forefathers and ours.
One could find game, sharp-nosed, keen-eared, alert to every breeze.
One had spears to kill in safety.
One too often died beneath defending hooves
One too often found no target for his spears.
So we made the bargain:
One to find and one to kill, and the meat to share.

The years passed, and the bargain changed:
Tend our flocks.
Fight our wars.
Pull our sledges.
Guard our children,
Lead our blind.
Amuse us.
Love us, when all the world has abandoned us.

And on the other side, the same:
Share the food.
Share the fire.
Share our lives.

Wolf that was, how can I break the old bargain now?

I wrote that years ago, along with an apocalyptic short story, now posted on my website. But at the time, the idea that the domestication of the dog might have been two-way, that man as well as dog had been changed by the relationship, was scientific heresy. Now at last it seems it is being accepted.

In the May 28-June 3 issue of New Scientist there is a cover article titled “How Animals Shaped our Minds.” The article is based on a book, written by Pat Shipman, which is due to be published on June 13. I don’t want to say too much until I’ve read the book. But she argues that the mindset that made domestication possible, the knowledge of animal behavior gained through careful observation, may well have been a driving force behind our development of language. And the article, at least, makes the same points that I did in my story: our relationship with another species may be an important part of our humanity.

I am looking forward to reading the book, and will probably review it here. Meanwhile, read the article — and “Death of a Dog.”