Thomas Halliday’s book is a biography of the Earth, told backwards. He starts 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of the decisive thawing of the mammoth steppe, or grassland, in Beringia, now northern Alaska and the Arctic. The steppe rings the Pleistocene world and is home to creatures such as horses, bison and the now-extinct cave lion.
As the world warms over thousands of years, seas rise and
the land fragments into islands, so these animals can no longer migrate widely.
The decisive breaking up of the area will occur about 11,000 years before the
present. Native species such as mammoth ‘will not survive for long, battered by
the warming world and… versatile new predators.’ Who are these new predators
able to move north because of the rising temperatures? Humans, of course. In
our day only the caribou, brown bear and muskox survive of the species the
steppe once hosted (the muskox as a reintroduction).
Time and space travel
The book then travels the Earth, moving backwards in time to
land at different times and places. So there are abundant giant penguins 41
million years ago, some taller than modern humans; a gorgon 253 million years
ago with a painful mouth tumour and a leg which has never been the same since
she fractured it hunting Bunostegos
(a creature looking like a stumpy, tall crocodile); and rock-eating bacteria in
the Devonian, 407 million years ago, which make the surface of the water in
which they live, intolerably hot to every other lifeform, shimmer with bubbles. The book ends in the pre-Cambrian 550
million years ago, with no life on land, a 22-hour day before friction slows
the Earth’s rotation, and a closer moon shining 15% brighter.
The climate and
geological processes are given as much space as plants and animals. Heading
each chapter are helpful maps showing how landmasses and seas have changed, as
well as illustrations of animals now unfamiliar to us. Halliday is at pains to
explain scientific terms, for example on the difference between a ‘fundamental
niche’ (the possible survivable conditions for a species) and its ‘realised
niche’ (the way its niche is actually limited by interactions with other
organisms).
In thrall to human language
In the pre-Cambrian world are the earliest creatures we can
call animals. One of these is ‘a centimetre-scale flying saucer’ with eight
arms, ‘spiralling clockwise from the tip of the cone to its base… floating
hypnotically’. This is Eoandromeda,
‘so called because when flattened in fossilisation, its eight arms resemble the
spiral galaxy Andromeda’.
Eoandromeda’s name shows how in thrall we are to our
language and ways of seeing, and also to the limited range of evidence we have.
So we discover this creature flattened as a fossil and name it after a galaxy
at the limits of our world (which we have also previously named), a charming
link between the earthly and extinct with the unearthly and infinite. So this
creature has achieved a kind of immortality, in human terms.
Drama… with no
humans? How?
How does Halliday
add drama and interest to processes that happen over huge timescales, mostly
with no humans involved?
Firstly, he picks
varied moments — differently configured landmasses and oceans, with different
climates and ecosystems, for example before or after mass extinctions. Secondly
he focuses on movement. Movement of wind, waves and water and therefore of
land; communities of animals migrating; individual creatures on the move.
Thirdly, he mixes together disparate information — so as well as watching a
short-faced bear rummaging in a mammoth carcass, we learn about Korean, Russian
and European bear mythologies.
Lastly, he embraces
human-centred ways of description. Literary quotations head each chapter (the
last has Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’, commemorating the death of a young soldier in
the Boer War — ‘Yet portion of that unknown plain/Will Hodge forever be’). He
chooses anthropomorphic language such as ‘cyanobacteria discovered the magic of
photosynthesis’, which would not get past an academic editor.
He is also happy to
translate from the academic to the literary; so the academic term ‘index
fossils’ (fossils which are so abundant they can be used to date the rocks they
are in) becomes ‘fossil timepieces’ later in the same paragraph. The book ends
with a plea to work together to stop climate change. It tells us the world will
never stop being in the making, or making.
Otherlands: A World in the Making is published by Penguin.