Via smithsonianmag.com

I read once that scientists estimate that 99% of species that have ever lived on Earth are currently extinct. We’re talking billions and billions of animal species that once lived here and no longer do.  It’s actually a staggering number to try and comprehend, and my mind runs wild thinking of all the animals that used to gallop and fly and slither through my own backyard.

As a planet, we’ve gone through five major extinctions, each caused by  some sort of natural phenomenon like volcanic eruptions or the normal cyclical shift of climate, and each responsible for completely wiping out between 75-80% of life on Earth.

Most of us have at least a working understanding of the Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T extinction (also known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction) – or, in layman’s terms: The Thing That Killed All the Dinosaurs.   Not to be a Debbie Downer, but our planet is currently in the midst of the sixth great extinction, and this time species are disappearing at up to 1,000 the rate as we’ve seen over the past half billion years.  This time, it’s not a rogue asteroid or some sort of polar shift that’s causing it – it’s us. Mankind has spent the last few centuries rapidly depleting natural habitats and hunting animals to the brink of non-existence.

A hundred and fifty years ago, there were woodland bison roaming West Virginia, passenger pigeons were one of the most abundant birds in the world, and monk seals thrived in the Caribbean Sea. Humans changed all of that, just like they changed the natural course of the Great Auk, a flightless bird that had coexisted with humans for 100,000 years.

Auks look similar to penguins and share several characteristics with them, although they aren’t closely related in terms of biology. There is evidence that they were an important part of the Neanderthal-era diet of North American people; their likeness has been found in Paleolithic-era caves.

Once numbering in the millions, the Great Auk was prized first for its down, which were used to make pillows, and then for its meat, fat, and eggs. Despite its name the Auk wasn’t exceptionally large – at under three feet, it was easily susceptible to larger enemies in the cold waters where it made its habitat.  Graceful in the water, the birds struggled to protect themselves on land, where it came to breed. As its numbers dwindled, its value went up.

The last known Great Auk in British waters was killed in 1840. The solitary bird was found on the island of St. Kilda off the Scottish coast and captured by sailors, who called it a “garefowl,” and brought it with them on their ship, bound at the arms and legs. Four days into their voyage, a storm spring up. The men attributed their bad luck to the presence of the bird,  so they stoned and beat it until it was dead.  Not only was this an act of cruelty, but also seemingly against traditional maritime superstition about the killing of birds.

The very last of a dying species, two adult Auks lived on a small rock island off the coast of Iceland called Eldey. Once part of a colony of at least fifty, these sole survivors – one male, one female, had managed to reproduce a single egg, which they were incubating against all odds.  Under the auspice of collecting skins for museum display, a merchant ordered their deaths. The adult birds were strangled to death, and, perhaps most heartbreaking: the egg was stepped on and smashed.

While the Great Auk lives on in the form of specimens, cave paintings, and the namesake of the American Ornithological Society’s newsletter, it’s also possible that we’ll see an actual Auks reintroduced to the planet. An American research institute is looking to Jurassic Park them right back into existence using DNA from preserved organs.

As of now, the process is still in the discussion stage, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see the birds make a comeback in our lifetime.

Probably.

One-hundred and seven years ago today, a member of the Yahi band of the Yana people of Northern California walked out of the wilderness and into his place in history. The man, who was estimated to be about fifty years old, was foraging for food in a slaughterhouse in the small town of Oroville. We call him Ishi, and he is unique not just for being the last of the Yahi people but for being the last native person left in the country to have lived a life without Euro-American contact – until this day in history.

Still, it would be wrong to say that Ishi was untouched by white settlement.  The California of Ishi’s youth was a relatively new part of the country, rushed into statehood after the population exploded with the discovery of gold by John Marshall on his farm in Coloma. Only a week before that discovery, modern California had been under Mexican control. The discovery of gold altered California’s trajectory forever; virtually no aspect of life was untouched. Land was plentiful and gold was a financial equalizer for many poor Americans, but increased immigration and domestic migration taxed the land and made food supplies scarce. For the rapidly industrializing west, the remaining native population stood in the way of personal prosperity and Europeanized progress.

When Ishi was just a few years old, he was one of only a few dozen survivors of a settler led massacre along the Mill Creek, which forced his family to flee into the forests and spend their lives in hiding to avoid cattlemen and prospectors who were paid by the scalp to eradicate the native population. He lived this way for most of the remainder of his life in the Western Sierra Nevadas, sometimes narrowly avoiding contact with settlers and curiosity seekers.

It’s also technically wrong to say his name was Ishi. Yahi custom dictates that a man may not utter his own name unless introduced by another member of his tribe. Having no one to beseech him that honor, he was instead reduced to adopting the moniker of Ishi, meaning “man.” He died the only person to know the name he was given at birth, which only seems appropriate.

Ishi’s interactions with the Euro-American settlers are well documented; two anthropologists from the University of California brought him to live on campus, studying him and cataloguing his transition from the “last wild Indian” to a man living in the modern world – or at least the modern world of the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology.  He was frequently ill – having no resistance to the scourge of disease brought west by settlers, yet was put on display as a living artifact, demonstrating things like hunting techniques and toolmaking.

This kind of exploitation of the exotic and different for the viewing pleasure of others wasn’t unique to the United States – France had its own infamous version of this exercise in abuse, the Jardin d’Argonomie Tropicale, and even the World’s Fair boasted a menagerie of human “curiosities” during the Victorian Era. But, regardless of the locale or the particular details, all share a common thread – the people on display tend to be part of a minority group of race, religion, or ability level and the patrons tend to be anything but. Ishi seemed to have little choice in the matter – with no community to call his own, and no means to support himself, he was forced to accept the charity of his benefactors and the gawking of the audience they brought forth to his feet.

Even in death, Ishi couldn’t escape the post-modern slavery that bound him – so close to his ancestral lands, and yet so far away. His body was autopsied and cremated, against his wishes and the custom of the Yana. His brain was held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with thousands of other physical and cultural artifacts of our nation’s first people until national law established a protocol to return remains to native tribes for proper and ceremonial burial.  He was finally returned to the ancestral lands of the larger Yana tribe,  but hundreds (if not more) native remains are still scattered in museums around the country with estimates that full repatriation may take decades more to come.

Touted in newspaper headlines as the “least civilized man,” perhaps the true lesson here is what it really means to be so. Did Ishi leave the savage world behind when he walked out of the wilderness, or was he actually walking into one?

Ishi became, in death, so much of what he was in life: a man without a home, his true name, or many choices. His unique tale also guarantees him a special place in our nation’s troubled history of interactions with its indigenous people, and perhaps a reminder of a time we never want to return to.