The take home here is that the Irish elk was been domesticated during the Early Holocene at least. This is important because this meant that while it was been hunted to extinction in the wild as was the Orox it survived as a source of milk, meat and plausibly as an important riding animal.
That also explains their disappearance. Once the cow arrived, milk was more readily supplied and the animal was possibly far more tractable. That left them as riding animals and once again tractability was shaky if reports with moose are any guidance. Thus the emergence of a more useful horse spelled the extinction of any domesticated elk.
I expect we will be able to recover the genome and from that restore the species as well.. .
That also explains their disappearance. Once the cow arrived, milk was more readily supplied and the animal was possibly far more tractable. That left them as riding animals and once again tractability was shaky if reports with moose are any guidance. Thus the emergence of a more useful horse spelled the extinction of any domesticated elk.
I expect we will be able to recover the genome and from that restore the species as well.. .
.
THE LAST OF THE IRISH ELKS? - INVESTIGATING SOME MEGALOCEROS MYSTERIES
Monday, 6 July 2015
Spectacular
Megaloceros painting (© Zdenek Burian)
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1752027331714385066#editor/target=post;postID=7168954927183704942
One of the most
spectacular members of the Eurasian Pleistocene megafauna was the Irish elk Megaloceros
giganteus. Formally described in 1799, it is also aptly known as the giant
deer, as its largest known representatives were only marginally under 7
ft tall at the shoulder and bore massive antlers spanning up to 12
ft, but did this magnificent species linger on into historic
times?
Below is an account of mine devoted to this tantalising subject and dating back to 1995, when it appeared in my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors. It is followed by various fascinating updates, including some significant palaeontological discoveries made since my book's publication but of great pertinence to the question of post-Pleistocene survival for this species.
But first – here is the relevant excerpt from my book:
Below is an account of mine devoted to this tantalising subject and dating back to 1995, when it appeared in my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors. It is followed by various fascinating updates, including some significant palaeontological discoveries made since my book's publication but of great pertinence to the question of post-Pleistocene survival for this species.
But first – here is the relevant excerpt from my book:
The Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus was one of the largest species of deer that ever lived. It was also one of the most famous - on account of the male's enormous antlers, attaining a stupendous span of 12 ft and a weight of over 100 lb in some specimens. Sadly, its common name is misleading, as this impressive species is only very distantly related to the true elk (moose), and, far from being an Irish speciality, was prevalent throughout the Palaearctic Region, from Great Britain to Siberia and China.
Nonetheless,
it is to Ireland that we must turn for the majority of clues regarding Megaloceros
- because in contradiction to the accepted view that it died out here
10,600-11,000 years ago (just prior to the Holocene's commencement), certain
accounts and discoveries from the Emerald Isle have tempted researchers to
speculate that this giant deer may still have been alive here a mere millennium
ago.
According
to accounts documented by H.D. Richardson in 1846, and reiterated by Edward
Newman in the pages of The Zoologist, the ancient Irish used to hunt an
extremely large form of black deer, utilising its skin for clothing, its flesh
for food, and its milk for the same purposes that cow milk is used today.
Supporting that remarkable claim is a series of bronze tablets discovered by
Sir William Betham; inscribed upon them are details of how the ancient Irish
fed upon the flesh and drank the milk of a great black deer.
These
accounts resurfaced two decades later within an examination of the Irish elk's
possible survival here into historic times by naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, in
which he also documented an intriguing letter written by the Countess of Moira.
Published in the Archaeologia Britannica, this letter recorded the
finding of a centuries-old human body in a peat bog; the well-preserved body
was completely clothed in garments composed of deer hair, which was conjectured
to be that of the Irish elk.
Most
interesting of all, however, was the discovery in 1846 by Dublin
researchers Glennon and Nolan of a huge collection of animal bones surrounding
an island in the middle of Lough Gûr - a small lake near Limerick.
Among the species represented in it was the Irish elk, but of particular note
was the condition of this species' skulls. Those lacking antlers each bore a
gaping hole in the forehead, which seemed to have been made by some heavy,
blunt instrument - recalling the manner of slaughtering cattle and other
meat-yielding domestic animals with pole-axes, still practised by butchers in
the mid-to-late 1800s. Conversely, this species' antlered skulls (one equipped
with immensely large antlers) were undamaged.
Did
this mean that the antler-less (i.e. female) Irish elks had actually been
maintained in a domestic state by man in Ireland, as
an important addition to his retinue of meat-producing species? Prof. Richard
Owen sought to discount such speculation by stating that the mutilated skulls
were in reality those of males, not females, and that the holes had resulted
from their human killers wrenching the antlers from the skulls.
However,
this was swiftly refuted by Richardson, whose experiments with fully-intact
skulls of male Irish elks showed that when the antlers were wrenched off they
either snapped at their bases, thereby leaving the skulls undamaged, or (if
gripped at their bases when wrenched) ripped the skulls in half. On no occasion
could he obtain the curious medially-sited holes exhibited by the Lough Gûr
specimens. Clearly, therefore, these latter skulls were from female deer after
all, explaining their lack of antlers - but what of the holes?
As
Gosse noted in his coverage of Richardson's researches, it is significant that
the skulls of certain known meat-yielding mammals present alongside the Megaloceros
skulls at Lough Gûr had corresponding holes - and as Gosse very reasonably
argued: "As it is evident that their demolition was produced by the
butcher's pole-ax, why not that of the elk skulls?".
After
presenting these and other accounts, Gosse offered the following conclusion:
"From all these testimonies combined, can we
hesitate a moment in believing that the Giant Deer was an inhabitant of Ireland since its colonisation by man? It seems to me that its extinction
cannot have taken place more than a thousand years ago. Perhaps at the very
time that Caesar invaded Britain, the Celts in the sister isle were milking and
slaughtering their female elks, domesticated in their cattle-pens of granite,
and hunting the proud-antlered male with their flint arrows and lances. It
would appear that the mode of hunting him was to chase and terrify him into
pools and swamps, such as the marl-pits then were; that, having thus disabled
him in the yielding bogs, and slain him, the head was cut off, as of too little
value to be worth the trouble of dragging home...and that frequently the entire
carcase was disjointed on the spot, the best parts only being removed. This
would account for the so frequent occurrence of separate portions of the
skeleton, and especially of skulls, in the bog-earth."
Although
undeniably thought-provoking, the case of Megaloceros's persistence into
historic times in Ireland as
presented by the above-noted 19th Century writers has never succeeded in
convincing me - for a variety of different reasons.
For
instance, there is no conclusive proof that the large black deer allegedly
hunted by the ancient Irish people really were surviving Megaloceros.
Coat colour in the red deer Cervus
elaphus is far more variable than its common name suggests; and, as is true
with many other present-day species of sizeable European mammal, specimens of red
deer dating from a few centuries ago
or earlier tend to be noticeably larger than their 20th Century counterparts.
Similarly,
the Lough Gûr skulls' ostensibly significant contribution to this case rests
upon one major, fundamental assumption - that they are truly the skulls of Megaloceros
specimens. But are they? Precise identification of fossil remains is by
no means the straightforward task that many people commonly believe it to be.
Perhaps
the greatest of all mysteries associated with this case, however, is that
subsequent investigations of Megaloceros survival in Holocene Ireland as
specifically inspired by the researches of Gosse and company, and formally
documented in the scientific literature, are conspicuous only by their absence.
(In September 1938,
A.W. Stelfox of Ireland's National Museum, in Dublin,
did consider this subject, but without reference to any of the above accounts.)
Yet if the case for such survival is really so compelling and conclusive, how
can this investigative hiatus be accounted for?
Seeking
an explanation for these assorted anomalies, I consulted mammalian
palaeontologist Dr Adrian Lister [then at Cambridge University, England, now at London's Natural History Museum] - who has a
particular interest in Megaloceros. Confirming my own suspicions, Dr
Lister informed me that it is not unequivocally established that the female
Lough Gûr skulls were from Megaloceros specimens, and he suggested that
they might be those of female Alces alces, the true elk or moose, which
did exist in Ireland for a time during the Holocene (though it is now extinct
there). Certainly in general form and size, female Alces skulls seem
similar to the Lough Gûr versions.
In
contrast, Lister agreed that the enormous size of the antlers borne by the male
Lough Gûr skulls indicated that these were bona fide Megaloceros skulls;
but as he also pointed out, although their presence in the same deposits as the
remains of known domesticated species is interesting, without careful
stratigraphical evidence this presence cannot be accepted as conclusive proof
of association between Megaloceros and man.
During his Megaloceros account, Gosse included some reports describing discoveries in Ireland of huge limb bones assumed to be from Megaloceros, which were so well-preserved (and hence recent?) that the marrow within them could be set alight, and thereby utilised as fuel by the peasantry, or even boiled to yield soup!
Yet
once again, as I learnt from Dr Lister, these were not necessarily Megaloceros
bones - especially as the limb bones of red deer, moose, and even cattle are
all of comparable shape and form, and can only be readily distinguished from
one another by osteological specialists (who do not appear to have been granted
the opportunity to examine the bones in those particular 19th Century
instances, and the bones were not preserved afterwards). Furthermore, on those
occasions when exhumed bones used for fuel purposes have been professionally
examined, none has been found to be from Megaloceros.
In
conclusion: far from being proven, the case for post-Pleistocene survival of Megaloceros
in Ireland is
doubtful to say the least. Nevertheless, this is not quite the end of the
trail. As noted by zoologist Dr Richard Lydekker, and more recently by
palaeontologist Prof. Bjorn Kurten, the word 'Schelk', which occurred in the
famous Nibelungenlied (Ring of the Nibelungs) of the 13th Century, has been
considered by some authorities to refer to specimens of Megaloceros
alive in Austria during historic times; other authorities, conversely, have
suggested that a moose or wild stallion is a more plausible candidate.
Irish elk statue at Crystal Palace, London, originally created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins during the 1850s (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Whatever
the answer to the above proves to be, far more compelling evidence for such
survival was presented in 1937 by A. Bachofen-Echt of Vienna. He
described a series of gold and bronze engravings on plates from Scythian burial
sites on the northern coast of the Black Sea.
Dating from 600-500 BC and now housed at the Berlin Museum, the
engravings are representations of giant deer-like creatures, whose antlers are
accurate depictions of Megaloceros antlers! Undeniable evidence at last
for Holocene survival?
The
enigma of these engravings has perplexed palaeontologists for decades, but now
a notable challenge to their potential significance has been put forward by Dr
Lister, who has provided a convincing alternative explanation - postulating
that the engravings were not based upon living Megaloceros specimens,
but rather upon fossil Megaloceros antlers, exhumed by the Bronze Age
people. This interpretation is substantiated by the stark reality that out of
the hundreds of Holocene sites across Europe from
which fossil remains have been disinterred, not a single one has yielded any
evidence of Megaloceros.
True,
absence of uncovered Holocene remains of Megaloceros does not deny
absolutely the possibility of Holocene persistence (after all, there are
undoubtedly many European fossil sites of the appropriate period still awaiting
detection and study). Yet unless some such finds are excavated, it now seems
much more likely that, despite the optimism of Gosse and other Victorian
writers, this magnificent member of the Pleistocene megafauna failed to survive
that epoch's close after all, like many of its extra-large mammalian
contemporaries elsewhere.
That was where the matter stood back in 1995 – but not
any longer!
On 15 June 2000, a paper published in the scientific journal Nature and co-authored by Dr Lister revealed that a near-complete Megaloceros skeleton uncovered in the Isle of Man (IOM) and a fragmentary antler from southwest Scotland had recently been shown via radiocarbon dating to be only a little over 9000 years old, i.e. dating from just inside the Holocene epoch – the first unequivocal proof that this mighty deer did indeed survive beyond the Pleistocene.
Intriguingly, however, as also disclosed in this
paper, the Isle of Man's Holocene specimen's skeleton was statistically smaller
(by over two standard deviations from its mean) than all Irish Pleistocene
counterparts also measured in this study, indicating a diminution in body size
for Megaloceros as it entered the Holocene, at least on the Isle of Man.
Conversely, the antlers for this specimen and also the Scottish antler were
well within the Irish size range for adult males.
The Isle of Man
separated from the British mainland around 10,000 years ago. Consequently, it
may be that the decrease in body size recorded for the IOM specimen measured in
this study (if typical and not merely a freak specimen) is a result of this
island's relatively small size rather than a strictly chronological effect.
But that is not all. On 7 October 2004, once again via a Nature paper, a team of researchers that included Dr Lister revealed via radiocarbon dating of uncovered skeletons that Megaloceros survived in western Siberia until at least circa 5000 BC, i.e. some 3000 years after the ice-sheets receded. Age-wise, these are currently the most recent Megaloceros specimens on record, and demonstrate that the Irish elk existed during the Holocene in two widely separate localities.
So who knows? Following these exciting finds,
perhaps other Holocene specimens, and possibly some of even younger dates than
those presently documented, are still awaiting scientific unfurling?
Also of note is that on 8 June 2015, the journal Science Reports published a
paper from a research team co-headed by Dr Johannes Krause revealing that Megaloceros
remains recovered from cave sites in the Swabian Jura (Baden-Württemberg, southern
Germany) dated to 12,000 years ago. Until now, it had been
believed that this giant deer species had become extinct in Central Europe prior to, rather than after, the Ice Age. Moreover,
the DNA techniques used in identifying the remains as Megaloceros showed
that this species is actually more closely related to the fallow deer Dama
dama (as long believed in the past) than the red deer (as more
recently assumed).
One final Megaloceros mystery: On 4 July of this year (2015), Hungarian cryptozoological blogger Orosz István posted a short but very interesting item about a supposed mythological beast that I had never heard of before – the hippocerf (a name combining the Greek for 'horse' with a derivation from the Latin for 'deer'). He stated that it was said to be half horse, half deer (hence its name) and, of particular interest, that some (unnamed) researchers believed that it was based upon a Megaloceros population surviving into historic times. Orosz had obtained his information from a brief entry on this creature that appears on the Cryptidz.Wikia.Com website.
Needless to say, I soon conducted some online research
myself concerning this intriguing creature, but I was not exactly cheered by my
findings. With the exception of the above-noted Cryptidz Wikia site and a few
others giving only the barest information repeated one to another ad nauseam, plus
some imaginative illustrations of it created by various artists on the deviantart.com
site, the hippocerf seemed to be endemic to fantasy fighting and other
fantasy-style game sites. On these sites, some of the fabulous creatures
featured are bona fide mythological beasts but others are complete inventions,
dreamed up exclusively for the games, with no basis whatsoever in world
mythology. Hence I began to suspect that the hippocerf might be in the latter
category, i.e. conceived entirely for fantasy fighting games.
Indeed, apart from its very frequent appearances in
Final Fantasy and other fantasy game sites and its popularity as a subject for
drawing/painting on deviantart, all that I have been able to trace about the
hippocerf online is that it supposedly has the hindquarters of a horse and the
forequarters, neck, and antlered head of a deer, and that because of its dual
nature, in heraldry it represents indecision or confusion. However, I have yet
to find any confirmation of this claim from standard sources on heraldry online
or elsewhere (I own several major works on this subject, and none contains any
mention of the hippocerf). Nor have I uncovered the names of any of the researchers
who have purportedly suggested that this distinctive creature may have derived
from Megaloceros sightings in historic times. As for a claim repeated on
several websites that the last known hippocerf sighting was in around 600 AD by
an early archaeologist called Gregor Ishlecoff, I traced this to a book
entitled The Destineers' Journal of Fantasy Nations, authored by N.A.
Sharpe and Bobby Sharpe, and self-published in 2009, which proved to be a fantasy
novel aimed at teenagers! I also own a considerable number of bestiary-type
books on mythological beasts, and again not one of them contains any information
regarding the hippocerf.
In short, not very promising at all for the
supposed reality of the hippocerf as a genuine (rather than a made-up)
mythological beast. The only hope for its credibility is if a mention can be
traced in an authentic bestiary pre-dating the coming of the internet and
fantasy gaming (preferably one of the classic works from medieval or Renaissance
times), or in some authoritative work on heraldry. If either or both of these
possibilities result in positive info emerging, then it may be that the
hippocerf was inspired by the imposing and somewhat equine form of the moose (which
inhabited much of Central Europe until hunted into extinction in many parts there
by the onset of the Middle Ages). To my mind, this seems like a more plausible
option than the survival of Megaloceros into historic times in Europe (i.e. into much
more recent times than even the circa 7000 BC date currently known for it there).
Having said that: I can't help but recall a certain
noteworthy line from the Krause et al. paper of 8 June 2015 regarding the finding of post-Ice Age Megaloceros
remains in Germany: "The unexpected presence of Megaloceros
giganteus in Southern
Germany after the Ice Age
suggests a later survival in Central
Europe than previously
proposed". Interesting…
If anyone reading this
present ShukerNature blog article has information on the hippocerf derived
directly from heraldic or bestiary-type sources pre-dating the internet and fantasy-type
gaming, I'd greatly welcome details.
Incidentally, the
hippocerf should not be confused (but sometimes is - see below) with the hippelaphos (whose name also translates
as 'horse-deer', but from the Greek for 'horse' and the Greek for 'deer'),
which is a genuine creature of classical mythology.
Attempts to identify
it with known animal species have been made down through the ages by many
authorities, including Aristotle (whose account of it recalls a gnu), Cuvier (the
Asian sambar deer Rusa unicolor), and 19th-Century German
zoologist Prof. Arend F.A. Wiegmann (the Indian nilghai Boselaphus
tragocamelus).
Another possibility
is Africa's roan antelope Hippotragus
equinus, a decidedly horse-like species, as emphasised by its taxonomic binomial,
as well as by its French name, antilope chevaline ('horse-like antelope').
In the original Latin version of
Aristotle's work, the hippelaphos is termed the hippocervus (being
renamed the hippelaphos in the English translation version), a name that
is sometimes applied to the hippocerf on various internet sites.
Indeed, I wonder if the hippocerf may be nothing more than the
hippelaphos (aka hippocervus) distorted and exaggerated by online
invention, such as the unsourced claim that some researchers believe it
may be based upon a Megaloceros population surviving into historic times. Ah well, you know what they say - I read it on the internet, so it must be true!
This ShukerNature blog article is an updated excerpt from my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors.
This ShukerNature blog article is an updated excerpt from my book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors.
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