Thirteen thousand years ago, the American prairie resembled Africa's Serengeti. Mammoths and mastodon lived alongside herds of wild horses, long-horned bison, antelope, camels, giant armadillos, and monstrous ground sloths. Along with wolves, bears, coyotes and pumas the predators included American lions and short-faced bears far bigger than today's Kodiaks.
When the ancestors of the American Indians arrived from Siberia across the Alaskan land bridge, they wiped out most of North America's big game animals in a few millennia—perhaps a few centuries. The Paleo-Indian hunters were no worse than primitive peoples elsewhere—early Europeans killed off the native European lions, bison and mammoths as well.
Beginning with Columbus, European conquerors and settlers found a depopulated continent where only the short-horned bison and pronghorn remained as forlorn survivors of North America's once teeming savannah. In the words of Paul Martin, "while 'Home on the Range' commemorates buffalo, deer and pronghorns, it misses the mammoths, glyptodonts (giant armadillos) and camels."
As Martin, Burney, and Flannery point out, 13,000 years is a mere blip in geological time. Because plants evolve much more slowly than animals, the vegetation of North America is still adapted to an environment which ought to include elephants, horses and camels. Today's wild mustangs and wild burros—so these scientists argue—should not be treated as invaders, but rather as exiles that have returned home.
In a North American West that is restored to the way it was before the Paleo-Indians arrived, the now-empty place of mammoths and mastodons in the ecosystem could be taken by Indian and African elephants.
If experiments in cloning mammoths succeed, the real thing might make an American comeback. Lions, too, could be reintroduced, along with jaguars and other big cats that used to live in North America but today are found only south of the U.S. border.
Sounds crazy, right? But already in Siberia scientists are populating a new "Pleistocene Park" with wild horses, musk ox and bison. Will Yellowstone be the next Pleistocene Park?
The idea of restoring an equivalent of America's Ice Age ecological diversity in Western lands—lands that have been emptied of big animals, first by prehistoric immigrants from Asia and more recently by European settlers—is controversial among environmentalists.
But even if the herds are only those of bison and pronghorn, it is time to restore big herbivores to some of the Western lands that were, until recently, shaped by their presence. It is time to stop the century-long conversion of former buffalo country to forest—and of that forest into firewood.
Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based public policy institute.
Copyright 2001 United Press International
