The reason I have adopted this field of research is that my health now
requires me to sleep downstairs, and I use the downstairs toilet, which
has an outer door to the garden. Under this door we are constantly invaded
by woodlice. I see them at all hours of the day and night (do they never
sleep?). I try repeatedly to annihilate them. Nothing personal of course,
but it is my species or theirs and I do not want them eating my papers and
books, or the paste behind my wallpaper.

The first thing I noticed about them was that they immediately head
for the far corners of the room and climb the angle between the two walls,
though there is nothing for them there. Very occasionally an individualist
woodlouse will climb the corner of the wall immediately adjacent to the
door, but the vast majority head for the farthest points. They are in fact
all committing suicide. Although they are the only crustaceans adapted to
life on land, they need to keep their gills damp if they are not soon to
die of desiccation. They eventually turn up their toes, as it were, and
roll onto their backs.

They do not usually travel singly, but at least in pairs and I wonder
if these are family groups. Sometimes it is just the baby ones that come
in, as happened when my wife sprayed insect repellant under the door. Perhaps
they had been sheltering. Had their parents not warned them that any woodlouse
that went in there never came out again? Often they bring with them tiny
fragments of wood or leaves, which I presume is what we tended to call in
the Army ‘the unexpired portion of the day’s rations’.

When I seemed to have repelled them from the downstairs loo, they tried
a different line of attack. This time it was into the room beyond our kitchen
which we call (for reasons far too complicated to explain here) the ‘outback’.
I spend some time there, also, every day as part of my ‘do it yourself’
medical treatment. Many mornings I find several of them in the sink, presumably
in pursuit of moisture. Again they usually travel in groups, not singly,
and they must be on a suicide pact, since they cannot possibly get out again.
As in the smallest room, the majority of them head for the far corners to
a particularly inaccessible spot between a bookcase, a set of steps and
the corner of the wall. When I made a great effort and cleared it out, I
found no fewer than 40 dead bodies (or to be exact 39 dead bodies and one
still alive, presumably a recent arrival).

This discovery made me think of lemmings and their alleged mass suicides.
Had life become so difficult for the woodlice that it was not worth living,
or were they in a vain search for something they could not find, such as
a woodlouse heaven?

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

At Olorgesaille in Kenya the ground surface is covered with scores of
stone axes left by generations of people who lived, for perhaps 8000 years,
on the shore of a great lake which has since disappeared over the horizon.
They lived on such delicacies as a giant baboon, now extinct, but there
were no caves. I saw no caves in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where early
men lived for so long, and there could be no caves along the shore of Lake
Turkana in Kenya, with its famous hominoid fossils.

It is not a matter of where they lived, but simply a matter of where
they and their works happen to have been preserved. This is a problem that
goes all through palaeontology. Usually we know only where fossils are preserved,
not where the creatures they represent actually lived. Human remains in
caves, often covered with stalagmite, are obviously more likely to be preserved
than if they lay on the open ground surface.

Thus the first Australopithecinae were found in caves in South Africa.
The so-called ‘first European’ was found in the Petralona Cave in Greece
and some of the first evidence of the antiquity of Homo sapiens came from
such localities as Kent’s Cavern in the Devonian limestone of south Devon
and the caves in Carboniferous limestone on the Gower Peninsula near my
home in Swansea.

It was in Paviland Cave in the southwest of our peninsula that William
Buckland, the first Professor of Geology at Oxford, caused a scientific
sensation in 1823 by finding a human skeleton that was called ‘The Red Lady
of Paviland’. My son tells me that bodies of Dogon people are similarly
placed in shallow caves today in sandstone cliffs in Mali. Buckland, however,
was also a dean of the Church of England and the teaching of the church
at that time was that, from biblical calculations, the Earth was created
on the 26 October, 4004 BC, at 9 o’clock in the morning (presumably Greenwich
Mean Time). Buckland could not accept, therefore, that his discovery at
Paviland was much more ancient than that, in spite of the bones of extinct
animals that he found with it. He assumed that it came from the time of
the Romans. In North America, too, the remains of some of the earliest native
Americans and their artefacts were found in the Marmes Rock-shelter, near
the spectacular Pelouse Falls in Washington State.

Besides the natural caves there are those that were dug out by man in
soft sediment, such as the house extension installed by Robinson Crusoe
(without planning permission). In southern Tunisia, south of Foum Tatahouine,
there is a whole line of caves along the outcrop of soft Cretaceous shales,
in which they were easily excavated. Small caves were also dug in similar
Jurassic strata. The shales come between harder limestones, they weathered
away fairly quickly and had to be dug out afresh.

My colleague Chris Walley, who worked there as a research student with
me, tells me that he thinks a few of these caves were still inhabited 15
years ago, but they are now chiefly a tourist attraction. The same is true
of the caves excavated by gypsies near Granada in southern Spain, though
they chose younger Miocene sandstones and chiefly use the caves today to
entertain tourists with their dancing. Along the River Loire in France,
besides the famous chateaux, there are many caves dug out of the river cliff
of chalk and now chiefly used to provide suitably cool wine stores or to
grow mushrooms, though I believe a few are still used as homes.

Not far from the Loire, at Rochemenier, there is a small troglodyte
village excavated in the soft, shelly sand known as falun, which is very
like the Pliocene-Pleistocene ‘Ccags’ of East Anglia. The reason here was
purely economic. Evidently the land was so valuable for farming that they
did not want to waste any of it for building, so they went underground.
Near here also is the caverne sculptee of Deneze-sous-Doue where the secret
society of masons, suffering persecution in the Middle Ages, took refuge
and expressed themselves by carving hundreds of figures in the rock, some
of them making fun of the authorities.

We probably associate prehistoric men with caves chiefly because of
their art. The caves in Cretaceous limestone at Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne
region of southern France, contain marvels of representational art. Cro-Magnon
Man, probably the first true Homo sapiens, came from below the garage of
the hotel named after him in the village and a statue of the more primitive
Mousterian Man stands below his rock-shelter nearby.

The long, deep cave of Rouffignac, farther north, contains scores of
drawings of mammoths, and the (Grotte de Niaux, near Tarascon at the foot
of the Pyrenees, displays drawings of horses with bristling manes, remarkably
like the living Przewalski’s horse, the just-surviving wild horse of Mongolia.
Best of all are those at Lascaux in France, now closed to the public (unless
you happen to be the Prince of Wales) due to the destructive spores brought
in by visitors and Altamira in north Spain with its marvellous paintings
of bulls. But were they homes? I doubt it.

I know that archaeologists have argued for years about the function
of the paintings. Were they pure art? Were they magical or religious symbols?
Were they instructional? I like the one of a bison with arrows sticking
in it. Was this invoking the death of the vital prey or was it perhaps showing
the young hunters where to aim?

What strikes me is that each cave tends to have a theme. Rouffignac
has its mammoths, Niaux has its horses and Altamira its bulls. Is it too
fanciful to suggest that these were the holy places of the Mammoth Tribe,
the Horse Tribe and the Bull Tribe respectively? Whatever they were they
were probably not the homes to which the cartoon image of cave men regularly
dragged cave women by their hair.

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

They had the same problem at Aigues-Mortes on the Rhone delta in Provence.
The town (its name means ‘dead waters’) is set in what the Michelin guide
calls ‘a melancholy countryside of marshes, small lakes and salt-marshes’
(my translation). I found it a fascinating place, a perfectly preserved
medieval town with complete walls, set with towers at intervals and long,
colourful pennants blowing in the prevailing wind of the flat Camargue.

Its problem arose in 1418, during the Hundred Years’ War, when the Burgundians
took the town by surprise. It was then besieged by a friendly force from
Armagnac (where the best brandy comes from). The population rose during
the night and slaughtered the occupying force before gladly opening the
gates to the besiegers.

The townsfolk then had the problem of disposing of all the bodies. Besides
the matter of the water table, there were too many bodies. So they dumped
them all in one of their towers, still called the Tour des Bourguignons.
In an early spirit of conservationism and to avoid the rotting corpses becoming
too obnoxious, they packed them with plenty of salt, of which they had an
ample local supply. Thence arose the saying in France ‘un Bourguignon sale’
(‘a salted Burgundian’), which survives to this day in a popular song.

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

For 20 years I was the editor-in-chief of the international journal
with the impossible name Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology and Palaeoecology.
I was always impressed by the number of authors writing about countries
other than their own. In the latest issue, I see that there are two Germans
writing about India, two Americans writing about Saudi Arabia and Yemen,
three Americans writing about Kenya, an Italian writing about Israel, two
Swiss writing about France, a Dutchman writing about Indonesia and Australia,
two Swiss writing about Spain, a Frenchman writing about the US and two
Americans writing about Africa.

In this year’s issues of the Journal of the Geological Society of London,
there have already been papers about Zambia, Norway, France, Nepal, Tibet,
Pakistan, Ireland, Greece, Fiji, Spain, Japan, Turkey, Greenland, China,
North and East Africa, Malaysia, India and Italy, plus the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans and the North Sea.

In my own time as a geologist I have written about two areas of France,
Italy, Turkey, the US and Morocco. I also, perhaps foolishly, tackled the
whole of Europe as far as the Urals. My department has had students (both
undergraduates and graduates) working in France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain,
Andorra, Norway, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and the US. Members of staff have
worked in many other countries, especially in the Third World.

I suppose this could be called geological imperialism, but one thing
that worried me in my editorial duties was the number of papers that came
from the developing countries that were of purely local interest. With the
developed world it was easy; one just recommended that the authors sent
their papers to a local journal, but with the poorer countries one knew
that such local journals did not exist. The same problem must face other
subjects, especially in the biological sciences.

Such work is essential for specialists in particular fields of geology.
There is no political control on the distribution of rocks, fossils and
other geological phenomena. However, it does illustrate the constant and
vital need in geology (not always recognised by universities and grant-giving
bodies) for the financing of field work. The field is the geologist’s chief
laboratory. We do not live in luxury hotels, we usually camp; we do not
always use vehicles, we commonly have to depend on our legs. We have to
adjust to the local climate, food and language. Our needs are very simple!

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

When I was first married, my wife knitted me a woollen waistcoat with
four pockets. In each pocket she put a little homily to help me in my career.
One of these said simply, ‘Have the courage of your convictions’, and I
have tried to hold to that principle. But the most outstanding example I
know of someone who had such courage was Bretz, whom I had the honour of
meeting in 1959.

In 1923, Bretz put forward the hypothesis that between 18 000 and 20
000 years ago a great flood of water swept across the northwestern states
of Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, through the Cascade Mountains
to the Pacific. The flood removed all the superficial deposits leaving the
raw topography known by the ugly name of the ‘Channelled Scablands’ over
an area of some 40 000 square kilometres. It also cut canyons or ‘coulees’
through the solid basalt of the region, notably Grand Coulee, which is up
to 275 metres deep.

The remarkable thing about this theory is that Bretz published it before
he had any idea of a possible source for the water. It was then suggested
that there was a great lake known as ‘Lake Missoula’ in southwestern Montana,
blocked by the ice of the last glaciation. When the ice dam eventually gave
way, it liberated a great mass of water to sweep across the northwestern
states.

It has been estimated that the water travelled at a rate of up to 70
kilometres an hour and that the whole event was completed in a few days.
The maximum rate of flow was estimated as about 10 times the combined flow
of all the rivers of the world.

The geological establishment, including the United States Geological
Survey, bitterly opposed this hare-brained idea, but Bretz stuck to his
beliefs with a whole series of papers over the next 50 years. Slowly, more
and more geologists came to accept the idea and argued about the details.
Thus some postulate not one break in the dam, as implied by Bretz’s original
theory, but many.

These breaks are recognisable by the different pebbles in the deposits
that were laid down by the successive floods. In eastern Washington alone
these deposits are at least 40 metres thick over an area of 1300 square
kilometres. It is also thought that an earlier lake, ‘Lake Bonneville’,
was responsible for older deposits. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is all that
remains of that lake.

It was not until Bretz was in his nineties, shortly before his death,
that he received the accolade he deserved. He was awarded the top medal
of the Geological Society of America. More important, perhaps, was a meeting
of the International Association for Quaternary Research in the United States.
They visited the classic area of Bretz’s theory and sent him a telegram
which concluded, ‘We are all catastrophists now.’

Never could a person’s lifelong battle for their ideas have been more
fully justified, and never could a scientist have had to battle for so long
to have their ideas accepted.

Derek Ager is emeritus professor geoglogy at the Univeristy of Swansea.

The panda’s front teeth are those of a normal flesh-eater, but its back teeth are flattened to grind its vegetable diet. The ‘thumb’ is an extra digit derived from a wrist bone and serving to strip the shoots off its favourite bamboo food. But the greater part of what it eats passes straight through its system without being digested.

The creature has poor eyesight, poor hearing and a poor sense of smell. It will eat small mammals (and the BBC says that it can be tempted with pork chops), but it is too slow-moving to hunt. The females can become pregnant on only about three days a year (hence no doubt the lack of success at breeding them from visiting males in zoos). The babies are very small and vulnerable when born and it is a long time before they can walk.

Pandas are restricted to a small mountainous area in southwestern China, at about 3000 metres, and will tolerate only such intermediate climates. Presumably their black and white coloration provides a good camouflage in the dark, snowy pine forests. Presumably also pandas were stranded here when the more efficient carnivores made use of the abundant prey lower down.

As a palaeontologist I know of many thousands of animals that have become extinct, including many that were probably much more eff’1cient than the panda. I know that it is a very attractive and ‘cuddly’ animal to our eyes and it is natural that we should Want to preserve it for our children, grandchildren and so on. But are we not resisting the inevitable? It may be the logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature, but I feel tempted to say ‘Let it go’.

The whole history of life on this planet has been one of ‘death making room for life’. If there were no extinctions there would be no new forms appearing. If the dinosaurs had not become extinct, there would have been no explosive evolution of the mammals and we would not be here today.

No doubt this article will bring down opprobrium on my head, as happened here in Swansea when I suggested in print that the Welsh language was bound for extinction. But we shouldn’t avoid what seems to be the truth just because it is unpleasant or unwelcome.

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

Waves of slaughter seem to have passed round the world following the
arrival of people with axes. It has been estimated, for example, that of
the mammal population which lived with our ancestors in the Olduvai Gorge
in Tanzania, 40 per cent are now extinct. Admittedly, the new sharp axe
was probably not much used in the actual hunting, but it was invaluable
in cutting up the bodies of animals which had, for example, been driven
over a cliff edge by the tribespeople.

The new spirit of cooperation between early humans was part of the story.
As teams they would rive herds of large herbivores over the edge of cliffs
and then cut up the carcasses down below with their new sharp axes. This
was a technique that evidently arose independently in different parts of
the world. It is best displayed at the inelegantly named ‘Head-smashed buffalo
jump’ near Fort Macleod in southern Alberta.

Here it is thought that young men of the Blackfoot tribe, dressed in
buffalo skins, ran with the herd into a funnel formed by the rest of the
tribe and so led the buffalo to the fatal fall. Other young men waited below
to kill the fallen beasts with their stone axes so that they should not
warn the others. So a great pile of ‘buffalo’ (actually bison) accumulated
here over the centuries. They provided almost everything the Blackfoot needed,
from food to clothes and particularly the dried meat that saw them through
the difficult months when prey was short.

The whole think started with the arrival of the Malagache people in
Madagascar, and the destruction of so many harmless lemurs there. In East
Africa the effects of the arrival of the axe were disastrous. At Olorgesaille
in Kenya the whole surface of an ancient camping site is covered with thousands
of stone axes. Among the victims of the Malagache were elephants, hippos
and baboons, all larger than those known today. The giant baboons must have
been comparatively easy prey and probably provided the main food for the
human settlements.

As one moves from continent to continent, so one sees a sudden drop
in the population of large mammals following the arrival (only yesterday
in terms of human history) of the wonderful new axe. No doubt the process
was assisted by domesticated dogs, by overgrazing by domesticated cattle
and by the invention of fire.

As the wave of slaughter reached Europe, we lost our elephants, rhinos,
hippos and many other large herbivores. The carnivores, such as the so-called
‘sabre-toothed tiger’ disappeared with their prey.

So the destruction moved on to the New World. It is particularly well
documented in the American West, where it followed the arrival of the Amerindian
people from the north with their stone axes. Norman Newell has shown in
‘Crises in the history of life’ (Scientific American, vol 208, 1963, p 77)
that within two or three hundred years (in the course of 8000 and 7700 years
ago) six major species of large herbivores became extinct. These included
the Columbian mammoth, the dire wolf, the camel, the giant armadillo, the
western bison and the horse (which was reintroduced by the Spaniards). Several
other species disappeared in the adjacent centuries. None of these became
extinct before the arrival of humans. The wave of death spread on into South
America with the extinction of the giant ground sloth.

Last of all were the flightless birds on isolated islands. It is recorded
that a live dodo, from its home in Mauritius, was exhibited in London in
the 18th century. The great auk of the Atlantic islands (notably St Kilda)
survived until the last one was clubbed to death in the Hebrides in 1844.
Even the fossil Aepyornis is rumoured to have survived to human memory on
an island north of Madagascar.

The earliest inhabitants of New Zealand are often called the ‘Moa Hunters’.
They hunted the large flightless moas and extinguished them in a very short
time. They were followed by the Maoris with their beautifully made greenstone
axes, who left just just one species of the fascinating kiwi, which is now
their national symbol.

The Maoris are still famous for the ferocious looks and threats with
which they greet strangers. These are no longer representative of these
peaceful people, but once they clearly had an aggressive attitude to all
species and tribes other than their own. But we should not be surprised
at the general aggressiveness of Homo sapiens. It is natural for all species
to favour their own in competition with all others.

After the hunters and killers came the farmers with their constant demand
for land. Though they probably made use of fire too, the Acheulian axe was
undoubtedly of great value in clearing the forests of Europe, American and
northern Asia.

We may be concerned about the Brazilian and other rainforests, which
followed in their turn, but conservationists should look at a map of the
vast areas of the Earth’s surface from which the forests of the temperate
zone have long since disappeared, such as the prairies of North America
and the pampas of the south.

There is also our great contribution to desertification. Our long history
of forest clearance, overcultivation and overgrazing was only possible with
the Acheulian implement and the other tools that followed it. Of course
the coming of the steel axe speeded forest clearance considerably, but there
is clear evidence long before that of the replacement of woodland faunas
by those of open grassland.

Ninety-nine point something per cent of human history was spent in the
Stone Age, and it was really only a very short step from silica chips to
silicon chips. The stone axe has done irreparable harm to the world and
clearly should be banned. But perhaps a ban now, like one on sex or religion
would be too late.

Derek Ager is emeritus professor of geology at the University of Swansea.

Lectures;

Laboratory practicals;

Field-work in parties;

Supervision of field-work on independent projects;

Seminars;

Reading and marking essays;

Interviews;

Setting examinations;

Marking examinations;

Writing references;

Assessment of student projects;

Talks by students;

Student records;

Committee time (appeals and so on);

General correspondence.

Of all these commitments, only lecturing may be said to provide economies
of scale, because it makes no difference if one is KK lecturing to 10 students
or 100. Setting examinations may be thought to come into the same category,
but in practice larger numbers of students usually mean more options and,
therefore, more examinations.

With all the other activities the work is directly proportional to the
number of students, though in a few cases the work rises in quanta. Thus,
when a laboratory is full of students, one either has to spread into another
laboratory with additional supervisors and demonstrators, or one has to
run the practical class two or three times. In geology we have the situation
on field courses of having to use more minibuses (and lecturers/drivers)
when the first or second is filled.

I tried, for a while, to have our students giving talks to their contemporaries
on what they had found out on their independent projects. It was an excellent
training, but it soon became impractical because of the sheer time it took
for the students in a large class to report on their work individually:
it also consumed many hours of staff time, because some overseer/adjudicator
obviously needed to be there to listen to what the students had to say.

Economies of scale may operate, up to a point, in the humanities, but
I do not believe that they do in the sciences.

Derek Ager, now retired, was head of the geology department at University
College, Swansea.

OIL EXPLORATION, as with most things, has its fashions. Anticlines were
followed by salt domes, reefs were followed by overthrust mountain fronts.
Now that the land areas of the world have been so thoroughly (if not exhaustively)
explored, attention has turned more and more to the great continental shelves
of the world and their troughs filled with thick sedimentary sequences and,
hopefully, oil. The Gulf of Mexico was followed by the North Sea and active
exploration in areas such as the Falklands Shelf and the South China Sea.

Most of us probably are not aware of the huge programme of exploration
and production on the broad shelf along the northwest coast of Australia.
After an era of self-sufficiency, the country expects to be only 55 per
cent self-sufficient by 1995 and perhaps only 35 per cent self-sufficient
by the end of the century. The pressure to dev- elop new fields is obvious,
and this volume results from a symposium triggered by Elwood Horstman’s
1984 paper ‘The Northwest Shelf of Australia – Geological Review of a Potential
Major Petroleum Province of the Future’.

The resultant 48 papers have been brought together by the remarkable
husband and wife team of Peter and Robyn Purcell. The collection follows
an earlier massive Purcell tome on the Canning Basin. And, in a sense it
is a logical continuation of that work onto the offshore shelf. I am frankly
amazed that they could have produced a second great volume in such a short
time (do they discuss it at breakfast?).

Of course, the success of the Purcells has been in organising others
into writing the individual chapters, but this, in my experience, is often
more difficult than writing the whole thing oneself. So how does one review
a symposium volume of 651 pages and no fewer than 75 authors? Following
an introduction and a general survey of basin evolution, there are the case
histories, with several chapters each, on the Northern Carnarvon Basin,
the Browse and offshore Canning Basin and the Bonaparte Basin. These are
followed by detailed accounts of specific oil and gas fields and then by
general chapters on geophysics, geochemistry, palynology and the impact
of these developments on the environment.

The volume ends with brief biographies of all the contributors, who
all seem young (as everyone does these days). They are certainly actively
involved in this exciting exploration of what always seems to me the country
of the future. Apart from such obvious features as the Australians’ energy
and independence of mind, they are blessed with great natural resources,
especially in Western Australia with its gold, its vast iron ore deposits
and now the almost unbelievable potential of an oil-bearing shelf that is
larger than Texas and the North Sea combined.

This is a beautifully produced work that is vital to anyone (and any
company) that is interested in the resources of this shelf or in oil geology
generally. With its coloured gravity map of the whole shelf, its seismic
lines and its coloured palaeo-environment maps, it was not produced cheaply,
but it is a pleasure to read and to handle. If there is a criticism to be
made of this magnificent effort, it is that the ignorant pommie tends to
get lost among the various fields and place names. Thus I searched in vain
for the onshore Rough Range where, as Wilkinson put it in 1983, there was
the ‘most fantastic hole-in-one in the history of oil exploration’. The
geological gods have been kind to Western Australia, but it is clear from
this book that the people who now live there deserved it!

c/o P&R Geological Consultants Pty Ltd, 141 Hastings Street, Scarborough,
Western Australia 6019.

Derek Ager is head of the department of geology at University College,
Swansea.