Prehistoric Paintings Can Help Track Animal Extinction

An accurate timeline of animal extinction in Egypt has been created using an unusual data source: prehistoric art scratched on rocks.

The North African country, today mostly desert, used to be a luxuriant place for big animals 6,000 years ago, home to 37 large mammals. Cave graffiti made by people living back then features hippopotamuses, lions, and elephants—all species that can't be found in the area today. As you turn to more recent artefacts, like tablets or tomb paintings, the variety of animals depicted steadily dwindles, as species after species was wiped out from the country. Only eight of them still survive there today.

Science magazine explains that Justin Yeakel, an ecologist from the Santa Fe Institute, decided to tap into the art to gather information on which species disappeared when, and to hunt for clues relating to the causes and consequences of each extinction.

In his paper published in PNAS, Yeakel wrote that he and his team "integrate[d] depictions of mammal from Egyptian antiquity with […] paleontological and archaeological evidence, to infer local extinctions and community dynamics over a 6,000 years span." That method allowed him to reconstruct a timeline of this And Then There Were None-style wildlife drama.

For example, judging from the paintings Yeakel inferred that Egyptian elephants started to get scarce around 4645 BC, the estimated date of the last recorded occurrence, and that by 4455 BC they were most likely gone for good.

The timeline also helped him pin down the causes of each extinction. Traumatic events among the mammalian communities usually occurred in periods of notable climate change—like the sudden transformation of Egypt from a quasi-tropical Eden to a sweltering sandland, some 5,000 years ago. That, or during times of rampant human development.

It's not the first time that cave art has been used to make sense of scientific fact. In 2010, a prehistoric painting found in a cave in northern Australia grabbed archaeologists' interest because it apparently depicted a giant bird that scientists believed to have gone extinct millennia before the appearance of man on the continent.

Something similar had happened the previous year, again in Australia, with the discovery of a prehistoric rendition of a marsupial lion–another animal thought to have disappeared before human beings had the chance to glimpse it.

Still, while art might be useful to challenge entrenched theories and spur new research, it can also be tricky to rely on for scientific inquiries. As creative as our ancestors were, their masterpieces are sometimes difficult to decipher with certainty. The drawing of the marsupial lion found in Australia, for example, sported a striped fur, which led some scientists to believe that it could just be a tiger after all.

More importantly, what artists paint isn't necessarily something they've seen first hand. In an interview with Science, the environmental historian Linda Evans was quite sceptical about Yeakel's findings, suggesting that Egyptian artists used to copy figures from older artefacts in their drawings so it's very difficult to draw accurate conclusions about their contemporaneous surroundings.

Indeed, if you think about how our current cultural industry, from Alice in Wonderland to Jurassic Park, is ripe with extinct creatures, Evans's warning sounds pretty sensible.

After climate change or nuclear holocaust or whatever other apocalyptic event has eventually obliterated our civilisation, perhaps some kind of future scientists will turn to our novels and movies to try to understand the animals we coexisted with. In which case, we might just end up in the history books surrounded by dodos and dinosaurs.