2019-11-23 New Scientist

14 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019

Archaeology Wildlife

Colin Barras Michael Le Page

THE 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 John

James 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 twice

ANCIENT 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 in

their 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 also

looked 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 and

dominate 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

in this scene in Lascaux

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29.

Percentage of cave drawings

of animals that were horses

Carolina parakeets are extinct but

can been seen in museum collections