What do you do if you unearth a pile of old bones in the back garden? Call the police if they look recent and human. Call the local museum if they don鈥檛. Or if you鈥檙e a peasant living on the island of Cyprus before the end of the 19th century, do something more imaginative. Claim you鈥檝e found the remains of some martyred saints and invite the neighbours over to be blessed.
And that鈥檚 exactly what they did. But then science turned up in the form of fossil hunter Dorothea Bate. Saints? Hardly, said she. These were the remains of pygmy hippopotamuses. Dug out and packed in crates, many of these fossilised animal bones ended up on the shelves of the Natural History Museum in London. One pile of pygmy hippo bones was even reassembled as it might have been in life. The remains of that reconstruction are now hidden behind the scenes at the museum. They still have a story to tell. Not about sainthood, but about natural selection.
FINDING the bones of martyred saints on your land used to confer many blessings. Kudos for the finder. Reassuring evidence of the works of the Almighty. And if you built a shrine, then put the word around that paying your respects to the holy relics would surely have some spiritual and health benefits, you might even see a miraculous boost to the local economy.
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Of course, even the most devout believer couldn鈥檛 claim that the skull and jaws of a pygmy hippo resemble those of a normal human. But that鈥檚 the point: a normal human. You wouldn鈥檛 expect a saint to look exactly like the rest of us, would you? QED.
The logic may be flawed but to a certain cast of mind it was persuasive. Across Europe there are Pleistocene bones being revered as the remains of saints. The unfortunate St Gregory is said to be represented in Poland by the skull of a woolly rhinoceros. Not that Christians were the first to weave myths around ancient bones. The fossilised skulls of dwarf elephants, with their small eye sockets and single, large, centrally placed nasal opening, may account for that one-eyed monster of Greek mythology, the Cyclops.
Dwarf elephants and hippos thrived on Cyprus and a number of other Mediterranean islands for at least two million years. Their remains are mostly found in caves, or what were once caves, where they stood the best chance of preservation. So when palaeontologists like Dorothea Bate came searching for fossils in the early 20th century, they headed straight for the local caverns.
Miss Bate鈥檚 field notebooks of her 1902 Cyprus expedition include this entry for 6 May: 鈥淚n aft. my men took me to another cave they had found in the cliffs . . . They called it St Elias and evidently consider it a sacred spot. A sort of entrance has been built round the mouth of the cave, and in this there is an altar where they burn a native lamp. A woman came to light it while I was there. My men laughed at the idea of the hippos being saints鈥� bones and none of them minded digging out some specimens . . . Got a few teeth and pieces of jaw bone.鈥�
Dorothea Bate was something even rarer than a fossilised pygmy hippo: she was one of few women working in palaeontology at that time. Today, almost no one outside the fossil-collecting fraternity has heard of her. But towards the end of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th, Bate won a reputation for her studies of European fossil birds and mammals in general, and the living creatures of Cyprus. The Cypriot long-eared hedgehog was even named after her. But if Bate is remembered for anything, it ought to be for the pygmy mammals of Cyprus.
It all began during childhood when the young Dorothea began collecting fossils from local caves in the Wye valley. As the girl became a woman, the hobby became a living, albeit a precarious one. She was not wealthy, and it was the Royal Society that stumped up for at least one of her collecting expeditions in Cyprus. In her notes for 15 July 1902 she writes, apprehensively, 鈥淭oday is the last day I can manage with the Royal Society money.鈥� Then, even more gloomily, 鈥淲as all day at Imboakry, but was very disgusted did not get a single E. [elephant] tooth.鈥�
Bate鈥檚 notebooks reveal a woman keen to observe and record all the natural history around her, however inconsequential. They are peppered with terse asides: 鈥渟aw a gtr. spotted cuckoo close by鈥�, 鈥渟aw an eagle feeding on a dead dog. Let me come within about a yard of it.鈥� But it was the fossil fauna that excited her real passion, and of which she had an encyclopedic knowledge.
The pygmy mammals which prompted her trips to Cyprus probably colonised their new homes by swimming from the mainland. Even when the sea level was at its lowest, that was still more than 30 kilometres away.
With no predators and a hilly terrain in which food could be difficult to get at, being large was no longer an advantage. Natural selection favoured the smaller beasts. Hence the dwarfing process which Bate鈥檚 fossil bones so beautifully illustrate. Pygmy elephants were about a metre tall, and hippos three-quarters of that. Dwarfing was not a new observation but here the miniaturisation of once-mammoth animals was on a dramatic scale. Natural selection wrought other changes too. The hippos鈥� limbs grew shorter and thicker and they lost their footpads-apparently tiptoeing around the hillsides rather than swimming in rivers like their ancestors. Their teeth changed too to suit their new diet.
Pygmy hippos and elephants both did well until people living on the mainland took to boats and crossed the water to the island around ten thousand years ago. Charred bones of pygmy hippos and elephants discovered recently in a rock shelter clearly occupied by humans suggest that the first colonists hunted and ate them, and almost certainly helped them on their way to extinction. Martyrs there certainly were, but they were animal rather than human. And as for sainthood, animals don鈥檛 qualify.
The bones of saints, even lesser ones, can usually count on a grand resting place. Most fossil bones have to make do with something less illustrious. Instead of a velvet bed in a silver casket, Dorothea鈥檚 鈥渟aints鈥� now lie buried in cotton wool and cardboard, undisturbed and out of sight. Geoff Watts