The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

mysterious collapses of ancient civilizations, like those of Easter Island or the Maya Indians?

Before we can answer these controversial questions, we need to understand the new evidence belying the assumed past Golden Age of environmentalism. Let's first consider evidence for past waves of exterminations, then evidence for past destruction of habitats. When British colonists began to settle New Zealand in the 1800s, they found no native land mammals except bats. That was not surprising, for New Zealand is a remote island lying much too far from the continents for flightless mammals to reach. However, the colonists' ploughs uncovered instead the bones and eggshells of large birds that were then already extinct but that the Maori (the earlier Polynesian settlers of New Zealand) remembered by the name moa. From complete skeletons, some of them evidently recent and still retaining skin and feathers, we have a good idea how moas must have looked alive: they were ostrich-like birds comprising a dozen species, and ranging from little ones 'only' 3 feet high and forty pounds in weight up to giants of 500 pounds and 10 feet tall. Their food habits can be inferred from preserved gizzards containing twigs and leaves of dozens of plant species, showing them to have been herbivores. They thus used to be New Zealand's equivalents of big mammalian herbivores like deer and antelope. While the moas are New Zealand's most famous extinct birds, many others have been described from fossil bones, totalling at least twenty-eight species that disappeared before Europeans arrived. Quite a few besides the moas were big and flightless, including a big duck, a giant coot, and an enormous goose. These flightless birds were descended from normal birds that had flown to New Zealand and that had then evolved to use their expensive wing muscles in a land free of mammalian predators. Others of the vanished birds, such as a pelican, a swan, a giant raven, and colossal eagle, were perfectly capable of flight.

Weighing up to thirty pounds, the eagle was by far the biggest and most powerful bird of prey in the world when it was alive. It dwarfed even the largest hawk now in existence, tropical America's harpy eagle. The New Zealand eagle would have been the sole predator capable of attacking adult moas. Although some moas were nearly twenty times heavier than the eagle, it still could have killed them by taking advantage of the moas' erect two-legged posture, crippling them with an attack on the long legs, then killing them with an attack on the head and long neck, and finally remaining for many days to consume the carcass, just as lions take their time at consuming a giraffe. The eagle's habits may explain the many headless moa skeletons that have been found. Up to this point I have discussed New Zealand's big extinct animals. But fossil-hunters have also discovered the bones of small scampering animals of the size of mice and rats. Scampering or crawling on the ground were at least three species of flightless or weak-flying songbirds, several frogs, giant snails, many giant cricket-like insects up to double the weight of a mouse, and strange mouse-like bats that rolled up their wings and ran. Some of these little animals were completely extinct by the time that Europeans arrived. Others still survived on small offshore islands near New Zealand, but their fossil bones show that they were formerly abundant on the New Zealand mainland. Collectively, all these now-extinct species that had evolved in isolation on New Zealand would have provided New Zealand with the ecological equivalents of the continents' flightless mammals that had never arrived: moas instead of deer, flightless geese and coot instead of rabbits, big crickets and little songbirds and bats instead of mice, and colossal eagles instead of leopards. Fossils and biochemical evidence indicate that the moas' ancestors had reached New Zealand millions of years ago. When and why, after surviving for so long, did the moas finally become extinct? What disaster could have struck so many species as different as crickets, eagles, ducks, and moas? Specifically, were all these strange creatures still alive when the ancestors of the Maoris arrived around 1000 AD?

At the time that I first visited New Zealand in 1966, the received wisdom was that moas had died out because of a change in climate, and that any moa species surviving to greet the Maoris were on their figurative last legs. New Zealanders took it as dogma that Maoris were conservationists and did not exterminate the moas. There is still no doubt that Maoris, like other Polynesians, used stone tools, lived mainly by farming and fishing, and lacked the destructive power of modern industrial societies. At most, it was assumed, Maoris might have given the coup de grace to populations already on the verge of extinction. However, three sets of discoveries have demolished this conviction. Firstly, much of New Zealand was covered with glaciers or cold tundra during the last Ice Age ending about 10,000 years ago. Since then, the New Zealand climate has become much more favourable, with warmer temperatures and the spread of magnificent forests. The last moas died with their gizzards full of food, and enjoying the best climate that they had seen for tens of thousands of years.

Secondly, radiocarbon-dated bird bones from dated Maori archaeological sites prove that all known moa species were still present in abundance when the first Maoris stepped ashore. So were the extinct goose, duck, swan, eagle, and other birds now known only from fossil bones. Within a few centuries, the moas and most of those other birds were extinct. It would have been an incredible coincidence if every individual of dozens of species that had occupied New Zealand for millions of years chose the precise geological moment of human arrival as the occasion to drop dead in synchrony.

Finally, more than a hundred large archaeological sites are known—some of them covering dozens of acres—where Maoris cut up prodigious numbers of moas, cooked them in earth ovens, and discarded the remains. They ate the meat, used the skins for clothing, fashioned bones into fishhooks and jewellery, and blew out the eggs for use as water containers. During the Nineteenth Century moa bones were carted away from these sites by the wagonload. The number of moa skeletons in known Maori moa-hunter sites is estimated to be between 100,000 and 500,000, about ten times the number of moas likely to have been alive in New Zealand at any instant. Maoris must have been slaughtering moas for many generations.

Hence it is now clear that Maoris exterminated moas, at least partly by killing them, partly by robbing their nests of eggs, and probably partly as well by clearing some of the forests in which moas lived. Anyone who has hiked in New Zealand's rugged mountains will initially be incredulous at this thought. Just picture those travel posters of New Zealand's fiordland, with its steep-walled gorges 10,000 feet deep, its 400 inches of annual rainfall, and its cold winters. Even today, full-time professional hunters armed with telescopic rifles and operating from helicopters cannot control the numbers of deer in those mountains. How could the few thousand Maoris living on New Zealand's South Island and Stewart Island, armed only with stone axes and clubs and operating on foot, have hunted down the last moas?

But there would have been a crucial difference between deer and moas. Ueers have been selected for tens of thousands of generations to flee from human hunters, while moas had never seen humans until Maoris arrived. Like the naive animals of the Galapagos Islands today, moas were probably tame enough for a hunter to walk up to one and club it. Unlike deer, moas may have had such low reproductive rates that a few hunters visiting a valley only once every couple of years could kill moas faster than they could breed. That is precisely what is happening today to New Guinea's largest surviving native mammal, a tree kangaroo in the remote Bewani Mountains. In areas settled by people, tree kangaroos are nocturnal, incredibly shy, live in trees, and are far harder to hunt than moas would have been. Despite all that, and despite the very low human population of the Bewanis, the cumulative effects of occasional hunting parties—literally one visit per valley per several years—have sufficed to bring this kangaroo to the verge of extinction. Having seen it happen to tree kangaroos, I now have no difficulty understanding how it happened to moas.

Not only moas, but also all of New Zealand's other extinct bird species, were still alive when Maoris landed. Most were gone a few centuries later. The larger ones—the swan and pelican, the flightless goose and coot—were surely hunted for food. The giant eagle, however, may have been killed by Maoris in self-defence. What do you think happened when that eagle, specialized at crippling and killing two-legged prey between three and ten feet tall, saw its first six-foot-tall Maoris? Even today, Manchurian eagles trained for hunting occasionally kill their human handlers, but the Manchurian birds were mere dwarfs beside New Zealand's giant, which was pre-adapted to become a man-killer.

Surely, though, neither self-defence nor hunting for food explains the rapid disappearance of New Zealand's peculiar crickets, snails, wrens, and bats. Why were so many of those species exterminated, either throughout their range or else everywhere except on some offshore islands?

Deforestation may be part of the answer, but the major reason was the other hunters that Maoris intentionally or accidentally brought with them—rats! Just as moas that evolved in the absence of humans were defenceless against humans, so, too, small insular animals that evolved in the absence of rats were defenceless against rats. We know that the rat species spread by Europeans played a major role in modern exterminations of many bird species on Hawaii and other previously rat-free oceanic islands. For example, when rats finally reached Big South Cape Island off New Zealand in 1962, they exterminated or decimated the populations of eight bird species and a bat within three years. That is why so many New Zealand species are restricted today to rat-free