On this frozen winter morning a cold fog hangs low over El Rito's farmlands. Ghostly figures take shape along the river's edge. In my mind's eye they sweep deep snow with great arcs of ivory tusks, down to vestiges of summer's grasses. Ponderous feet incise a path that shaggy horses, large Dire Wolves, the occasional camel could tread too...
Sunlight dispels my reverie of these simply magnificent elephant creatures who once made their home in this place we humans now claim as ours. Great mammoths inhabited North America from coast to coast, even venturing into the high mountains of the western U.S. For hundreds of thousands of years they dominated our Ice Age ecosystems; adults feared no predators. Cave painters recorded their presence in Ice Age Europe. How I wish I could have seen them too - wild and free in this land!
Mammoths eventually yielded their territories to human hunters and a changing climate. They all have been sadly extinct here in North America for around 10,000 years. On a few scattered and protected islands they continued for a while longer.
What about our human history here? We find remnants of Native American pueblo settlements, we dig up mammoth skeletons buried together with tell-tale earlier Clovis hunters' stone weapons. Recently we learned of the even earlier humans whose presence on our continent is only dimly recorded in North and South America.
All of this evidence, however, plus our DNA history confirms that we humans – all of us here today in this country - are only relatively recent immigrants in North America. Like the mammoth family, our Homo sapiens roots go back to Europe, Asia, to Africa where our primate ancestors evolved alongside ancestral elephants.
Perhaps that is why on this quiet winter morning, a certain sadness arises. Our familiar majestic mammoths are missing. We grew up together. We followed their immigration into North America. We survived the Ice Ages depending on their presence in our lives. But they've vanished here - all the woolly mammoths and their closest relatives. Our bonds spanned continents, millennia, in a continuous parade of life. We are diminished with their absence.
Not to give over to despair, we can still come to the aid of the heartbreaking struggle for viable habitat of their surviving kin, the marvelous African and Asian elephants. It’s the least we can do for our long-time fellow travelers on this earth.
Sunlight dispels my reverie of these simply magnificent elephant creatures who once made their home in this place we humans now claim as ours. Great mammoths inhabited North America from coast to coast, even venturing into the high mountains of the western U.S. For hundreds of thousands of years they dominated our Ice Age ecosystems; adults feared no predators. Cave painters recorded their presence in Ice Age Europe. How I wish I could have seen them too - wild and free in this land!
Mammoths eventually yielded their territories to human hunters and a changing climate. They all have been sadly extinct here in North America for around 10,000 years. On a few scattered and protected islands they continued for a while longer.
What about our human history here? We find remnants of Native American pueblo settlements, we dig up mammoth skeletons buried together with tell-tale earlier Clovis hunters' stone weapons. Recently we learned of the even earlier humans whose presence on our continent is only dimly recorded in North and South America.
All of this evidence, however, plus our DNA history confirms that we humans – all of us here today in this country - are only relatively recent immigrants in North America. Like the mammoth family, our Homo sapiens roots go back to Europe, Asia, to Africa where our primate ancestors evolved alongside ancestral elephants.
Perhaps that is why on this quiet winter morning, a certain sadness arises. Our familiar majestic mammoths are missing. We grew up together. We followed their immigration into North America. We survived the Ice Ages depending on their presence in our lives. But they've vanished here - all the woolly mammoths and their closest relatives. Our bonds spanned continents, millennia, in a continuous parade of life. We are diminished with their absence.
Not to give over to despair, we can still come to the aid of the heartbreaking struggle for viable habitat of their surviving kin, the marvelous African and Asian elephants. It’s the least we can do for our long-time fellow travelers on this earth.
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