14 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019Archaeology WildlifeColin Barras Michael Le PageTHE only parrot once common
in the US may have gone extinct
more recently than thought.
The bright green Carolina
parakeet was once found in much
of the US, with its range stretching
from the east coast to Nebraska in
the Midwest, and as far south as
Florida. “The stacks of grain put up
in the field are resorted to by flocks
of these birds, which frequently
cover them so entirely, that they
present to the eye the same effect
as if a brilliantly coloured carpet had
been thrown over them,” wrote JohnJames Audubon in his 1827 book
The Birds of America. He also noted
that its numbers were declining
rapidly. The species (Conuropsis
carolinensis) was thought to have
gone extinct in the wild in 1915.
By analysing records and
modelling the bird’s extinction,
Kevin Burgio at the University
of Connecticut has found that an
eastern subspecies of the parakeet,
which was mainly found in Florida,
may have clung on until the 1940s
(bioRxiv, doi.org/dd8c).
The study may reveal when
the parakeets went extinct,
but it doesn’t reveal why, says
Paul Reillo of the Rare Species
Conservatory Foundation.
“The parakeets’ extinctions are
a fascinating mystery,” he says.
There is no doubt many were
killed for food, fun or to stop them
eating crops, but some biologists
think habitat destruction or a
disease dealt the final blow. ❚American parrot
went extinct not
once but twiceANCIENT occupants of Europe
had a strange fixation on
equines. Almost one in every
three animals they depicted on
cave walls was a horse, and the
images are often larger and in
more prominent positions in
the caves than those of other
animals. However, why the
horse loomed so large in ancient
minds remains a mystery.
Since the 1990s, Georges
Sauvet at the University of
Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France,
has been compiling a database
of European Stone Age (or
Palaeolithic) art. That database
now contains information on
more than 4700 drawings,
paintings and engravings of
animals found in caves across
France and Spain. The oldest
image may be more than
30,000 years old and the
youngest 12,000 years old.
Sauvet has begun analysing
the information and has
realised something odd: no
matter where or when artists
were at work in Stone Age
France and Spain, they were
very likely to put horses intheir pictures. Some 29.5 per
cent of all the animals in
Sauvet’s database are horses,
with three-quarters of all sites
across his study area containing
at least one image of a horse.
Impressive though these
raw numbers are, they don’t tell
the whole story. Sauvet has alsolooked at the way Stone Age
artists portrayed horses and
found additional evidence of
their special status. For instance,
the ancient artists tended to
depict all animals – including
lions, mammoths and bears – in
profile with the head to the left.
The horse is different: it is the
only species that is mainly
oriented to the right.
Even the location and size
of horses in the ancient murals
stand out as special. Artists
often chose to depict horses
on high surfaces, writes Sauvet.
For instance, in Lascaux cave,
France, there is a pair of large
horses on the ceiling, one of
which is 2.5 metres long. Sauvet
writes that they are above anddominate the hundreds of
smaller animals drawn on
the walls below. A horse in
Rouffignac cave, also in France,
is even larger, at 2.7 metres
long. There are 65 animals
drawn around it, including
mammoths and rhinoceros,
but all are far smaller (Journal
of Archaeological Science:
Reports, doi.org/dd8b).
What makes this focus on
horses particularly striking is
that the animals weren’t all that
abundant in Stone Age Europe,
says Randall White at New York
University. And in some regions,
horse flesh seems to have made
up only a small part of diets.
This tells us that artists didn’t
choose to draw and paint horses
because they were an important
food resource, says White.
There was clearly more going
on. Sauvet suspects horses had
cultural significance to Stone
Age European communities. He
argues they had a belief system
in which animals were arranged
in some sort of hierarchy, a bit
like the pantheon of Ancient
Greek gods. In the same way
that Zeus ruled over the other
Greek gods, Sauvet suggests
the horse reigned at the top
of this Stone Age hierarchy.
That is pushing the evidence
too far, says April Nowell at the
University of Victoria in Canada.
“We don’t know that [horses]
were thought of as gods or
that one animal ‘reigned’
over another,” she says.
Although we can’t be
sure exactly why horses
were culturally significant,
Sauvet’s data is important
for demonstrating that this
significance was shared across
a geographically wide area and
for a long time, says Genevieve
von Petzinger, also at the
University of Victoria. ❚Horses reigned supreme
among Stone Age artists
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Horses are numerous
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Percentage of cave drawings
of animals that were horsesCarolina parakeets are extinct but
can been seen in museum collections