SO THIS WAS LONDON

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 181, 2 May 1925, Page 18

SO THIS WAS LONDON

WHAT THE SPADE HAS REVEALED

(By

F. Chapman, A.L.S.)

By the news lately cabled that “remains of the mastodon and woolly rhinoceros have been dug up in Leadenhall Street,” in the heart of London, we are reminded that Arctic conditions ( prevailed there in the “wurm” age of late' palaeolithic times, a matter of fort}’ thousand years ago. To be accurate it was the mammoth, not the mastodon, that was contemporaneous with the woolly rhinoceros, .and; their remains are often found together in excavated ground in and around London. The mastodon had already disappeared from the scene before the woolly rhinoceros had a chance to figure as one of the'oldest inhabitants. The mammoth and woolly rhinoceros evidently followed up the retreat of the glaciers from sonthefn England, when the eliminate was returning to the milder condtions which it had enjoyed in previous interglacial times. The retreat of this . English glacier is marked by the thick deposit -of chalky boulder clay which is found at Finchley, to the north of London, where fossils such as sharks’ teeth and "devil’s toe-nails” from Flamborough and other places in Yorkshire are found scattered through the sticky glacial mud or till, having found a resting place after a journey of nearly 200 miles' in the grip of a prehistoric ice sheet. . The Thames Valley, at the time of ’ the invasion of Aurignacian man from Europe, was a region of swamps distantly bordered with sheets of. gravel worn from the chalk downs, and in all probability draining into the great' valley of the Rhine. There was then no . English Channel, but a wide areai of marshland with innumerable low islets of London - clay not yet removed by denudation, and thus its conditions were not unlike the country between Tasmania and the mainland of Auslralia before the final formation of Bass Strait. Across this land bridge from Central Europe , the Magdalenian- and Cro-Magnon tribes came later on, and along with them was established file Old Forest Fauna, including woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, reindeer; • steppe horse, saiga, wild ass, bison, and steppe rodents/ The story of the latter part.of the succession of glacial epochs is one. of more, than ordinary interest, as it tells ‘of some remarkable changes of climate, of* surface conditions of the land, and of the apimals and plants then existing. In Europe the Cave period was entered upon, and probably the neolithic. in 7 habitants of Britain constructed shelters in the form of dugouts and cave dwellings. The. valley of the Thames ■ had been forming for a long time previously. From the Pliocene to the present it has been almost entirely’ carved -out -by the mechanical erosion of its bed through the water-borne sand and sediment. During that period there were probably. some slight subsidences, particularly near the mouth of the river, and mdre especially at the time when it was severed from its trunk connection with the old Tertiary Rhine River. This sinking of the estuary accounts f6r the considerable thickness of alluvial muds and valley drifts near the Thames mouth. In the city of London “made ground” is found to have accumulated over the alluvial sands at the rate of about six Inches to one foot in a centurv, and below this, often to n depth of 20 to 30 feet, mammoth bones and Implements of human manufacture are found.

, At the close of the last ice age or “wurm? period, when the climate of Europe and Great Britain was changing to a, more temperate one, while in Central Europe it was comparatively warm, in Britain it was still cold. .The European fauna migrating .over to England found in the district of the Thames estuary conditions eminently suited, by the dense growth of herbage, to support large animals like the mammoth; whilst the rjiinoceos could bask to its heart’s content in the undergrowth of the" low-lying swamps. Both .the'mammoth and the woolly rliinoceos lived on into the early Cave period oUtlie iMagdalenian stage, when Central Europe enjoyed a warmer climate. In the rock shelters of that time are found the wonderful wall paintings of contemporary animals by early neolithic artists. The mammoth and rhinoceros were later associated in Europe with the reindeer, which came from the north, and a steppe fauna. The horse of this period is still represented by the Mongolian' • wild horse., The bison exists even now in Lithuania in protected herds, but it has

lately been attacked by the deadly trypanosome 1 In North America it) was found until quite recently in considerable numbers, until it was wiped out by the larger and more deadly enemy 'the “Buffalo” hunter. The< origin of the name mammoth is somewhat obscure, but if, as sometimes stated, it is a corrupted form of the Arabic “behemoth,” this would imply something gigantic. As a matter of. fact, however, the mammoth is quite a small elephant, never more than 91t in height, whilst the Indian elephant to which it is related, measures ,10ft. 6in. at the shoulders. It was clothed with reddish brown wool and black hair, the tail also having a large tassel of hair as seen in the many instances where frozen, carcasses ,of, the mammoth occur in the Siberian tundras. Where the contents of the stomach of these* frozen animals have been examined, they have been found to contain re cognisable plants and seeds of -kirids which are actually found living in the same locality at the present day. This food consisted of grasses sedges, wild thyme, bean, seeds of the alpine poppy, and' a northern variety of the upright crowfoot. Other Siberian mammoth are said to have fed on coniferous trees; whilst the North American mammoths of Kentucky and . Alaska browsed on a temperate to Arctic flora.

That the mammoth was one of the most highly specialised of. elephants is apparent in the structure of its molar teeth, which have more numerous parallel ridges of enamel and cement than other elephants, and thus they ■were furnished with most excellent grinders. A fine example of a mammoth molar is seen in the wall case at the National Museum, from the. Barnwell Gravel, Cambridge, collection by Professor Griffith Taylor. On the other hand, the mastodon, which became extinct earlier in Europe than, in America, has the more primitive teatshaped cusps on the grinding surface of the molars, and in this and other, ways they show a relationship to the ancestral piglike forms found in the Eocene of the Fayuni. Besides its similar dentition, an interrelative fact with regard to the mammoth and the living elephant or India is the discovery in cold, mountainous, regions of taint remnants of » woolly"' fur on the latter which point? to its descent from an elephant such as the mammoth living in a colder climate That, the mammoth was once more abundant than any other known elephant is apparent from distribution and from the frequent occurrence of it? remains, for in Great Britain alone it has been found in 191 localities, whilst teeth are constantly being dredged up from-' the muds <sf the Dogger Bank, off the Norfolk coast, where we have the sunken remnant of portion of the east of England, where formerly was a wild forest country. Siberia also has exported for the last 200 years about 100 pairs of mammoth tusks per annum. 1 One of the best known of the geological finds in London was that of a couple of skulls of the woolly' rhinoceros (R. antiquitatis), dug up beneath the office of the “Daily Chronicle,” 'in Fleet Street. Some have supposed that the woolly character of this animal is not authenticated, but in tlfe . British Museum there is an actual specimen of the skin, which shows the-fine?curly wool and coarse hair. The two species that often accompanied the woolly rhinoceros (R. Leptorhinus and R. megarhinus) were smooth-skinned, and this may account for the confusion. Although not so abundant as the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros was also widely distributed, for it has been recorded from no fewer than- 85 distinct localities in England, and several times in London, whilst its remains are found all over Europe and Asia.. This rhinoceros of the late palaeolithic and neolithic periods is closely related to the square-mouthed rhinoceros of Africa. • The structure of the teeth of the woolly rhinoceros show’s that it w r as normally a , grass-eater, though fragments of vegetable remains found between their molar teeth in the Siberian specimens prove that ’t sometimes fed on branches of conifers.

All. this goes to show how changeful is the face of nature, and emphasises at the same time the marvellous adaptability of animal types to their' surroundings. But for their enemy man, many animals now extinct, including the dodo and the mammoth; might still be in existence, even if only in our zoological gai lens.