I got a bit of a shock last night from a book. I was reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and he mentioned that the aurochs, one of the last extant megafaunae from the Ice Age, was still kicking around Britain well into the Bronze Age.
Nooo... Surely not. I mean, aurochs went out with mastodons, cave bears, giant elk and the rest. Right?
Wrong. In fact, not only are aurochs mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars! He uses the Latin word urus, but they are there and he describes them as being a little smaller than an elephant (by elephant, he means the smaller African forest elephant rather than the larger savannah variety). Wow...
Ok, but aurochs' horns were prized for hunting and drinking horns, to say nothing of their desirability as an object of a hunt or venatio (animal fight) and it's reasonable to assume then that Spanish bull fights came out of this. So, along with the European lion this must be one of those extinctions which Classical Mediterranean culture ushered along. Right?
Um. No. They were still kicking around Eastern Europe as late as the thirteenth century and the last known died in 1627.
Wow... So, let's kick into some genealogical math here. My father was born in 1941. For our purposes here, let us assume that my grandparents were about thirty to mid-thirties. Follow this line of thinking back and you'll come out (roughly) with the number twelve. Twelve generations, twelve people between myself and someone who could have seen, touched, heard (smelt?!) and been in the presence of a creature which is commonly classified as "prehistoric." I dunno. Twelve people back seems pretty historical, almost contemporary, to me.
How close is your history?
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