8

How with    this    rage    shall   beauty  hold    a   plea?

SHAKESPEARE,

Sonnet  65

IT IS GENERALLY UNDERSTOOD THAT THE ANIMAL WE

RECOGNIZE AS A tiger has been with us at least since the Pleistocene
Epoch (1.8 million to 10,000 years BCE). The oldest definitively
identified tiger fossils date to roughly two million years ago and were
found in China, which is where many scientists believe the species first
evolved and then disseminated itself across Asia. The tiger’s historic
range was vast, spanning 100 degrees of longitude and 70 degrees of
latitude, and including virtually all of Asia with deep inroads into Siberia
and the Middle East. Five hundred years ago, large predators that were
almost certainly tigers were reported in the Volga and Dnieper river
valleys, just a few days’ travel from Kiev, Ukraine.
Fossil evidence of tigers has also been found further north and east, in
Japan and on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, and it raises the
question: why didn’t this skillful and adaptable predator simply keep
going? The mixed broadleaf and conifer forests of the Ussuri valley share
a lot in common with historic European and American forests; it is
unnerving to imagine a tiger at home in such a landscape because it
implies that tigers could have infiltrated Europe and the New World.
Given time and opportunity, tigers could—in theory—have emerged from
Asia to rule every forest from the Bosphorus Strait to the English
Channel, and from the Yukon to the Amazon. But for some reason, they
didn’t. Why they failed to colonize the Americas is a mystery: something
about that northern land bridge—Too cold? Not enough cover to stage an