The animal involved could not have been better known, nor more appropriate to Discworld: the elephant.34 As every child learns at an early age, there are two kinds of elephant, two distinct species: the African elephant and the Indian elephant.
Not so. There are three species. Zoologists have been arguing for at least a century about what they thought was at most a subspecies of 'the' African elephant Loxodonta africana. The typical big, burly African elephant lives on the savannah. The elephants that live in the forest are shy, and difficult to spot: there is just one of them in the Paris zoo, for example. Biologists had assumed that because the forest elephants and the savannah elephants can interbreed at the edges of the forest, they could not be separate species. After all, the standard definition of a species, promoted by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, is 'able to interbreed'. So they either insisted that there was just one species, or that 'African elephant' had a distinguished subspecies, the forest elephant Loxodonta africana cyclotis. On the other hand, zoologists who have had the good fortune to see forest elephants are in no doubt that they look very different from the savannah ones: they are smaller, with straighter, longer tusks, and round ears, not pointed ones.
Nicholas Georgiadis, a biologist at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, has said: 'If you see a forest elephant for the first time, you think, "Wow, what is that?'" But because biologists knew, on theoretical grounds, that the animals had to be all the same species, the observational evidence was rejected as inconclusive.
However, in August 2001 a team of four biologists - Georgiadis, Alfred Roca, Jill Pecon-Slattery and Stephen O'Brien -reported in the journal Science their 'Genetic evidence for two species of elephant in Africa'. Their DNA analysis makes it absolutely clear that the African elephant really does come in two distinct forms: the usual robust form, and a separate gracile form. Moreover, the gracile African elephants really are a different species from the robust ones. As different, in fact, as either African species is from the Indian one. So now we have the robust African plains elephant Loxodonta africana and the gracile African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis.
What of the belief that there could be only one species because of the potential for interbreeding?
This particular definition of species is taking a hammering at the moment, and deservedly so.
The main reason is a growing realisation that even when animals can interbreed, they may decide not to.
The story of the Third Elephant is not new: only the names have been changed. Before 1929 every zoologist 'knew' there was only one species of chimpanzee; after 1929, when the bonobos of the inaccessible swamps of Zaire were recognised as a second species,35 it became obvious to many zoos that they had possessed two distinct chimpanzee species for years, but not realised it.
Exactly the same story is now being played out with elephants.
As we've mentioned, Discworld recently revived interest in its fifth elephant, a story told, you will be surprised to hear, in The Fifth Elephant. According to legend, there were originally five elephants standing on Great A'Tuin and supporting the Disc, but one slipped, fell off the turtle, and crashed into a remote region of Discworld: They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere in the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains.
No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it philosophically speaking - make a noise?
And if there was no one to see it hit, did it actually hit?
There is evidence, in the form of vast deposits of fat and gold (the great elephants that support the world do not have ordinary bones), deep underground in the Schmaltzberg mines. However, there is a more down-to-Disc theory: some catastrophe killed off millions of mammoths, bison and giant shrews, and then covered them over. On Roundworld, there would be a good scientific test to distinguish the two theories: are the deposits of fat shaped like a crash-landed elephant?
But there's no point even in looking, on Discworld, because narrative imperative will ensure that they are, even if they were formed by millions of mammoths, bison and giant shrews. Reality has to follow the legend.
Roundworld has so far reached only its third elephant, although Jack hopes that some careful selective breeding might yet bring back a fourth: the pygmy elephant, which lived in Malta and was about the size of a Shetland pony. It would make a marvellous pet -except that, like many diminutive creatures, it would probably be rather bad-tempered. And the very devil to discourage from getting on the settee.
We are a gracile ape (not that you'd notice in some parts of the world, where many of us more closely resemble a robust hippopotamus). About four million years ago one gracile lineage of apes started to get bigger brains and better tools. Against all the rules of taxonomy we call this lineage, our lineage, Homo: it really should be Pan, because we are the third chimpanzee. We use this name because it is certainly our own lineage, and we prefer to think of ourselves as being enormously different from the apes. In this we could be right: we may indeed share 98 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees, but then, we share 47 per cent with cabbages. Our big difference from the apes is cultural, not genetic. Anyway, within the Homo lineage we again find gracile and robust stocks. Homo habilis was our gracile tool-making ancestor, but Homo ergaster and others went the vegetarian, robust way. If there actually is a yeti or a bigfoot, the best bet is a robust Homo. From Homo habilis's success, a larger-brained Homo spread out over Africa, into Asia (as Peking Man) and Eastern Europe about 700 million years ago.
We have labelled one variety of these fossils Homo erectus. The visiting elf would certainly have noticed this fellow. He had several kinds of tools, and he used fire. He may even have possessed language, of a kind. What we have every reason to suspect that he did, that his ancestors and cousins only occasionally achieved, was to 'understand' his world and change it. Chimpanzees engage in quite a lot of 'if ... then' activities, including lying: 'if I pretend not to have seen that banana, I can come back and get it later when that big male won't steal it from me'.
The young of this early hominid grew up in family groups where things were happening that were unlike anything anywhere else on the planet. Sure, there were lots of other mammal nests, packs and troupes, where the young were playing at being adult or just fooling around; nests were safe, and trial-and-error was rarely lethal, so the young could learn safely. But in the human lineage, father was making stone tools, grunting at his women about the children, about the cave, about putting more wood on the fire. There would be favourite gourds for banging, perhaps for fetching water, spears for hunting, lots of stones for tools.
Meanwhile, in Africa, another new lineage had arisen about 120,000 years ago, and spread; we call it ancient Homo sapiens, and it led to us. Its brain was even bigger, and in caves on the coast of South Africa it -we -had begun to make better tools, and to make primitive paintings on rocks and cave walls. Our population exploded, and we migrated. We reached Australia just over
60,000 years ago, and Europe about 50,000 years ago.
In Europe there had been a moderately robust Homo, the Neanderthal Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies. Some anthropologists consider us to be a sister subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens or, loosely speaking, 'Seriously wise man'. Wow. The Neanderthals' stone tools were well developed for various functions, but these particular hominids seem not to have been progressive. Their culture hardly changed over tens of thousands of years. But they seem to have had some kind of spiritual impulse, for they buried their dead with ceremony -or, at least, with flowers.