History, as encountered in textbooks and the classroom, is 1066 and
all that, chivvied along by dusty scholars and the occasional beheading.
An exclusively human affair. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it
as ‘A relation of incidents . . . professedly true.’ Voltaire said history
‘is no more than accepted fiction.’

Stephen Boyden adds a biological prefix and puts the study of human
affairs where it belongs-in the biosphere, the natural world. Homo sapiens
has never lived anywhere else, which makes it puzzling (to say the least)
that the species should seem so determined to trash the place, rather than
look after it for future generations.

Biohistory is an account of the human species’ interactions between
humans and the biosphere from earliest times to the present. These have
wrought profound changes in both the biophysical environment and the human
condition. Initially the changes were local, and there is little comfort
in reading of concern even 2400 years ago, when Plato wrote ‘what now remains
(of forested lands in Attica) is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the
fat and soft earth having been wasted away, and only the bare framework
of the land being left’. Nowadays the changes are global and very disturbing.

Boyden is a long-serving associate of the Centre for Resource and Environmental
Studies at the Australian National University. Twenty years ago he coordinated
a pioneering study of the ecology of Hong Kong. Researchers monitored a
range of biological and cultural factors, showing how they affected human
wellbeing and the life-supporting properties of the biosphere.

Decades of research in environmental studies have left Boyden convinced
that humanity simply will not survive if current rates of resource depletion
and environmental abuse persist. This conviction motivates the book, but
Biohistory is not a polemic, wrapped in lurid green and appealing for bottle
banks. This is a calm exposition of cause and effect, beginning with the
structure of the Earth and the fundamental processes that created the biosphere,
and ending in modern times with consequences which are demonstrably biological
in origin. The author is a seasoned academic with authoritative facts at
his fingertips, a fistful of memorable models (to quote just one: the amount
of solar energy heating the roads of the US in one day is double the fossil
fuel energy used by the entire world during the same period), and a gift
for marshalling his material into an easily assimilated narrative. The effect
is cumulative, compelling and sobering.

Boyden describes four ecological phases of human existence: hunter-gatherer,
early farming, early urban and modern high-energy. Solar energy powers the
biosphere, and is available to humans through photosynthesis. During the
hunter-gatherer phase humanity utilised no more than 0.0001 per cent of
the available photosynthesised solar energy. Modern agriculture uses more
energy than it produces.

The key moment on this continuum occurred around 12 000 years ago,
with what Boyden calls the domestic transition, when humanity began manipulating
biological systems to its own perceived advantage. Thereafter populations
grew and proliferated. Cultural development added a technological dimension
to the metabolism of human populations – increasing food production on the
one hand, and lengthening lifespans on the other. Boyden stresses the significance
of military power; civilisations develop in parallel with the advance of
military innovation, each propelling the other towards some sort of domination,
whether it is of the local environment, other people or the globe.

How many people can the Earth support? Boyden quotes estimates ranging
from 4000 million if all are on a typical North American diet, to 50 000
million if global ecosystems are exploited to the maximum. He notes that
it may be possible to double global food production, but not to treble it.
Does this imply an ‘ideal’ human population about double that of today?
Who will decide, and how will the decision be enforced? Will military means
be employed, with action in the Balkans and Somalia as a preview of things
to come?

Biohistory does not bristle with startling new facts, but Boyden’s approach
offers fresh perspectives on even the oldest of them. It also allows his
thesis to emerge of its own accord-far more effective than stating it baldly
every few pages. The narrative maintains a steady pace even as disturbing
facts accumulate ever more rapidly. The twinge of concern becomes a shudder
of dread, and its lesson could not be more clear. History enshrines the
ethic of local self-interest; Biohistory teaches mutual interest, on a
global scale. Time for some cross-curricular revision?

In the hothouse of palaeo-anthropological debate the credibility of
Homo habilis has been questioned for years. ‘Who is the ‘real’ Homo habilis?’
ran the headline of a review in Nature in 1987, which fairly summed up the
prevailing state of play – then and now. Well, if these elusive representatives
of early hominid evolution should ever choose to provide indisputable evidence
of their existence, they will find that Phillip Tobias has provided a very
large plinth on which their true nature may be displayed.

Two books, 921 pages of text, 104 pages of photographs, 4075 grammes
of paper, thousands of measurements, a superfluity of exclamation marks,
and £110 of your hard-earned cash. This two-part volume concludes
three decades of meticulous application to the task of establishing the
credibility of Homo habilis.

The author’s enthusiasm for the proposition bounds through his text
with the same verve and imagination that I have seenhim apply to a game
of table tennis. The range of knowledge he brings to the study is astounding.
His capacity to define a problem, tease out the data and present his conclusions
in lively prose is little short of humbling to anyone grazing on the verges
of the same field. And yet, the question remains: will the monumental plinth
that Tobias has constructed support Homo habilis, or will it simply make
a more visible target of the taxon?

As a non-academic whose metrical talents extend only slightly beyond
the capacity to mark up a respectable dovetail joint, I am not qualified
to judge the measurements and statistics which constitute such an impressive
element of this volume; nor, though I know my distal from my proximal, can
I comment meaningfully on the anatomical observations made by Tobias. Nonetheless,
as someone who has been observing palaeoanthropology for more than 20 years,
I may perhaps allow myself the privilege of a few general observations.

Homo habilis was the name given by Louis Leakey and his two coauthors,
anatomists John Napier and Phillip Tobias, to a collection of hominid fossils
which were excavated from 1.7-million-year-old deposits at Olduvai Gorge,
in north Tanzania, during 1960. The dig extended over an area of 209 square
metres. A total of 2158 fossils were recovered, including those of pig,
antelope, horse, catfish, tortoise – and early man. The latter accounted
for less than 2 per cent of the total: 13 footbones, 22 handbones, a collarbone,
three pieces of limb bone, a mandible, sundry skull fragments and a pair
of parietals that together formed the central arch of a skull. Forty-eight
stone artefacts were also recovered from the site.

At the time of this discovery, two fossil hominid species were the most
secure (though not unchallenged) candidates for the role of human ancestor
– Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus. The new fossils from Olduvai
showed strong affinities with the former (and more ancient) species but,
after due consideration, Leakey and his coauthors concluded that their fossils
were the remains of a creature who represented an intermediary stage of
hominid evolution – the ‘Last Missing Link’, wrote Tobias in 1965.

In the present volume, Tobias gives an enlightening account of the procedure
by which Leakey and his coauthors arrived at the conclusion that the fossils
in question should be assigned to a new species of the genus Homo. Leakey’s
method was ‘intuitive, arbitrary, prescient and perspirational’, says Tobias,
while his and Napier’s method was ‘statistical, functional anatomical and
±è±ð°ù²õ±è¾±°ù²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô²¹±ô!’.

Slender cheek-teeth lacking the ‘australopithecine bulge’, locomotor
and manipulative patterns indistinguishable from those of modern man and
– above all – brain size, were the crucial factors which finally persuaded
the anatomists that these ‘gracile Olduvai pygmies had stridden manfully
across a generic boundary – from Australopithecus to Homo’, says Tobias.

The late Raymond Dart, whose talents included a predilection for inventing
tongue twisters such as ‘Australopith-ecus’ and ‘osteodontokeratic’, was
asked to suggest a name for the new species. Noting that the fossils constituted
the earliest evidence of manipulative skills in hominid evolution, and had
been found in association with stone tools, he came up with the apt (and
mercifully pronounceable) Homo habilis, ‘Handy Man’.

But however intuitive and perspirational the attribution of Homo habilis,
and however apt his name, the poor fellow was not much welcomed when Leakey,
Napier and Tobias introduced him to their colleagues through the pages of
Nature. He was denounced as a pretender who simply could not be accommodated
in the ‘morphological space’ which separated Austra-lopithecus and Homo
erectus. A majority said that he should have been assigned to Australopith-ecus,
and some even suggested that he represented not one, but two distinct taxa.

Since 1960 a number of additional specimens from Olduvai Gorge have
been attributed to Homo habilis, and specimens from elsewhere in Africa
(Sterk-fontein and Swartkrans in South Africa, the Omo delta in Ethiopia
and, especially, the excavations directed by Louis Leakey’s son Richard,
at Koobi Fora in Kenya) have contributed substantially to the sample. But
the doubts persist.

Persistent doubt is a hard cross to bear. On page 49 Tobias has ‘made
so bold as to liken this time of conceptual solitude, the habiline pre-revolution,
to the terrible and unutterable solitariness that Charles Darwin faced after
he published (On) the Origin of Species’ and I suspect it is this terrible
burden that has imbued the present volumes with a crusading tone of righteous
determination.

The effort to be thorough is prodigious. Though the fossils which constitute
the subject of his study are not numerous, Tobias has found among them a
total of 344 morphological traits. A wealth of supporting metrical data
is provided, and each trait is compared with its incidence (or otherwise)
in four other fossil hominid species.

The conclusion drawn from all this is that the 1964 description of Homo
habilis was valid and remains so. But with such a plethora of facts and
figures attached to such a small body of evidence I do begin to wonder if
the professor with the eloquent pen doth protest too much. A candid answer
to a simple question would have been helpful: is the Olduvai sample big
enough and informative enough to support one conclusion and refute all others?

The history of palaeoanthro-pology is peppered with arguments whose
duration and intensity was inversely proportional to the quantity (and quality)
of the evidence. And each has been resolved by the strength of more evidence
– not more words. The fossil footprint trail uncovered by Mary Leakey (Louis’s
wife) and her team at Laetoli, for example, ended at a stroke the long-running
debate about the antiquity of hominid bipedalism.

Similarly, it will be evidence not eloquence which resolves the Homo
habilis question once and for all. And as we read that genetic material
from long dead animals has proved that the quagga was not a distinct species
of zebra, and that DNA allegedly has been recovered from 17-million-year-old
fossils (The Economist, 27 July), we might ask whether calipers and ruler
are still the most effective tools available to modern palaeo-anthropological
inquiry.

But let us hear three rousing cheers for Phillip Tobias. The professor’s
indomitable spirit enlivens every page – indeed, this is probably as good
an autobiography as he could ever write. As such, the work confirms the
observation that palaeoanthro-pology tells us as much about contemporary
human nature as about human origins.

John Reader wrote Missing Links and Man on Earth.

In the spring of 334 BC, Alexander the Great set off from his Macedonian
home with an army of 40 000 foot solders and 5000 horsemen. They harassed
Central Asia and India for 11 years, killing thousands and conquering virtually
every city and state they encountered. These were stirring historical events,
no doubt about that. But can it be called exploration? In 1879, Edward Whymper
scaled the South American peak, Chimborazo – 6250 metres high – which had
defeated Alexander von Humboldt when he had passed that way 80 years before.
Does being the first to reach the top of a mountain count as exploration?
In 1985 Lorenzo and Mirella Riccardi crossed Africa by boat in the way of
David Livingstone and Henry Stanley. What did they explore?

The Royal Geographical Society History of World Exploration is ill-conceived.
Its understanding of the term ‘exploration’ is undefined and inconsistent.
And the ambiguity of the title compounds this basic failing. Does it mean
exploration by people from all around the world? Or is it the exploration
of the world from one centre, such as Europe?

Since so much has already been published on the latter, I fully expected
a book bearing the stamp of the Royal Geographical Society to be concerned
with the former interpretation. I was sorely disappointed. This is a very
much a Eurocentric view of exploration. True, there is some mention of non-European
exploration, but it is couched in terms which attempt to excuse its absence
from the book. It is all qualified by the shameful disclaimer that appears
on page 201 – I paraphrase: ‘If the Polynesians had been in a position to
print and publish four fat quarto volumes complete with maps’ their discoveries
would have formed part of the history of exploration. So there you have
it: The Royal Geographical Society History of Exploration is drawn from
written sources, mostly of European origin and predominantly English. Cook
and company are the heroes of the Pacific. The genetic, linguistic, archaeological
and meteorological evidence of the peopling of the Pacific is ignored, even
though it documents one of mankind’s most impressive feats of exploration
– true exploration, to my mind, in that it was a movement into unpopulated,
and not simply unknown, regions.

Yes, I was expecting a different book. Perhaps it is unfair to criticise
the present offering for what it is not, but is it unreasonable to expect
that a society which was at the forefront of Europe’s exploration should
now take a fresh approach to the subject of world exploration? The ancient
inhabitants of the rest of the world were explorers too, and their descendants
must have knowledge and views worthy of inclusion in the history of world
exploration.

The imprimatur of the Royal Geographical Society will carry this book
onto many shelves it might not otherwise have reached, but how frequently
it will be consulted thereafter is a moot point. Sadly, the book does not
fulfil expectations. We are promised an authoritative and comprehensive
work, but are given only a volume of easy reading. The book consists of
ten essays by nine authors. Seven essays deal with the exploration of specific
regions of the world; one covers oceanography and two others deal with early
and present-day exploration respectively. John Hemming, the director of
the Royal Geographical Society, provides an introduction, and a chronology
running across the top of the pages attempts to keep the historical perspective
in focus (it is fre-quently out of sync with the text).

There are some good bits though. John Keay writes engagingly of the
exploration of Asia; Selma Huxley Barkam is informative on the European
exploration of North America, and Nigel Winser makes pertinent reference
to the ‘environmental Everest’ which is certainly the foremost challenge
which modern man has to explore.

Collectively, the authors might have redeemed the book, making it worthy
of recommendation on its own terms, despite the reservations noted above.
But their efforts are negated by poor design and production.

The book is profusely illustrated, but the selection and layout are
such that the illustrations distract from the accompanying text more often
than they illuminate it. To make matters worse, the pages are splattered
with textblock inserts, which are printed in a sans-serif typeface that
clashes uncomfortably with the main text and further distracts from the
narrative. Paragraph headings are set on crude grey blocks; the opening
text of each section is printed over a blue tint and full page illustration,
presumably to make a distinctive feature of the page, though the treatment
serves only to make the text difficult to read and, in the case of page
89, totally illegible.

The acknowledgments note that the copyright of the book is vested with
the publisher, not the Royal Geographical Society. This suggests that the
publisher is probably responsible for the book’s failings. Small comfort,
but this does encourage the hope that the Royal Geographical Society will
be more careful where it puts its stamp in future.

John Reader’s Man on Earth and Missing Link are now in paperback. He
is working on a major book about Africa, a biography of the continent, to
be published by Hamish Hamilton.

Kangaroo Press, pp 248, A$35

MOST OF us know that Easter Island is the most isolated place on Earth,
but did you know that by the time the Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, arrived
there on Easter Sunday in 1722, the inhabitants had already destroyed the
most valuable resources of the island? A wealth of trees, shrubs, animals
and birdlife had been squandered, much of it in pursuit of the cultural
vanities which have left hundreds of strange sculptures lying about the
island. Without timber for canoes, the islanders became prisoners of their
own devastation. Utterly alone on their blighted island, they believed that
the Moon was the nearest place to them.

Easter Island is the last place Andrew Mitchell visits in A Fragile
Paradise, and the fate of its environment is but the last in a litany of
devastation. He travels through the Pacific by plane and helicopter, on
foot, in precarious canoes, and with a scuba outfit through the corridors
of a sunken warship. The tone is often boisterous, not to say boyish, but
Mitchell’s concern, knowledge and integrity are always apparent. Easter
Island is a window through which we may see our future, he writes, and the
stark urgency of that message is heightened by the engrossing account of
evolutionary biology in the Pacific with which it is intertwined.

A Fragile Paradise is much more than a heart-wrenchingaccount of environmental
depredation. It is a celebration ofthe process by which plants andanimals
(including people) have colonised the volcanic and coral islands of the
Pacific. Mitchell outlines the geological background, discusses the theories
of colonisation and then gives exuberant detail of how evolution has exercised
life’s seeminglyinfinite capacity to adapt and thrive in the Pacific.

Barking pigeons, carnivorous caterpillars, terrestrial frogs’ eggs,
parthenogenetic geckos and monkey-faced fruit bats are just a few of the
many fascinating examples with which Mitchell entices us towards the realisation
that the Pacific is indeed a very special place, a veritable showcase of
life and evolution.

Charles Darwin saw evidence of evolution on the Galapagos, on the eastern
edge of thePacific, but he would havefound much more on Hawaii, at its centre,
Mitchell writes. The Hawaii islands are older, and offer life a less hostile
environment. More species reached their shores and survived. Tiny flies
evolved into giant forms, daisies turned into shrubs and lobelias into trees,
crickets lost their sight, small birds became vampires, and 47 species of
honeycreeper evolved from one ancestral finch.

Where did the ancestors of these creatures come from? How did they reach
their isolated home? When did they arrive, and how did the genetic information
contained in their chromosomes change to meet the new conditions and selective
pressures they encountered? In short, how do new species arise and how long
does evolution really take? Darwin identified the crucial questions of evolution.
Mitchell adds a few that modern science has identified, and then demonstrates
that Hawaii and the Pacific offer unique opportunities for discovering the
answers.

But life’s capacity to adapt and thrive in the Pacific is notinfinite.
This is indeed a fragile paradise, and instances of depredation and destruction
are a sombre counterpoint to the celebratory theme of Andrew Mitchell’s
book. Rain forestsand coral reefs are under siege. Imported plants and animals
overwhelm and eliminate indigenous species. The message is distressingly
familiar, but not easily forgotten: ‘ . . . a single, haunting and persistent
(bird) call is occasionally heard. It belongs to one lonely male, the last
of the o’os, who sings each day for a mate. He sings a requiem for his species,
for no female now exists.’

Andrew Mitchell draws urgent attention to the deleteriouseffects of
human presence in the Pacific. Geoffrey Badger, on the other hand, sounds
a call of praise for the energy and ingenuity which carried people there
in the first place. The Explorers of the Pacific is a splendid book. Its
purpose is to inform, but information of this breadth, assembled with this
care, directs a glimmer of hope on the bleak prospects that Mitchell outlines
so chillingly. Surely, if mankind could achieve so much in the past, we
can achieve still more in the future? Ferdinand Magellan entered the world’s
largest single feature on a calm day in November 1520, and the Pacific Ocean
has been misnamed ever since. Neither its nature nor its history is calm,
and the European explorers were not the first people to contend with its
perversities. The dispersal of the Polynesians through thePacific began
before the Christian era. By the time Magellan sailed into the Pacific,
the ocean basin was widely populated by related groups of skilled and adventurous
navigators. In double-hulled canoes, some more than 30 metres long, they
had sailed for thousands of kilometres across the ocean, colonising island
after island. The most stupendous of their voyages took them to Easter Island,
a speck of land just 55 kilometres in circumference. Reviewing the evidence,
Badger concludes that the people who first settled on Easter Island had
sailed from either the Marquesas or the Society Islands, nearly 4000 kilometres
away. They made that voyage about 1500 years ago, when few European seafarers
dared to venture beyond the sight of land.

Badger’s opening chapters on Polynesian voyaging and navigation are
an excellent introduction to the saga of European exploration that follows.
The Polynesians had their problems too (as Andrew Mitchell indicates), but
they had conquered the ocean by the time the Europeans arrived, and that
fact alone tempers any inclination to heap unquestioning praise on European
achievement. For one thing, the Europeans could not have survived long enough
to explore the Pacific fully without supplies of fresh food from the islanders.

Hopes of wealth and fortune lured the early explorers intothe Pacific,
though the Spanish ultimately found much more in South America. During what
Badger describes as the Golden Age of Pacific exploration, from about 1760
to 1830, a more serious air of scientific enquiry prevailed, but the economic
incentive was never far away.

There was nothing romantic about sailing for years in a wooden ship.
They leaked, they sometimes sank, and even at the best of times they were
very crowded. The food was often putrid, drinking water was foul. Vermin
were a relatively minor irritant, though one French voyager complained of
the persistence with which cockroaches emptied his ink-bottle whenever he
neglected to replace the cap.

Badger skilfully deploys detail where it will serve as a mnemonic for
recalling fact (those inkdrinking cockroaches and the D’Entrecastreaux voyage
are now inextricably linked in my mind), but he does not pretend that The
Explorers of the Pacific is the whole story. Copious notes, appendices and
a full bibliography make it clear that even this substantial book is but
a window on a subject which has captivated its author for years, if not
a lifetime. Be warned: such enthusiam is contagious.