Wooly bully and the Neanderthals

Facing down a 3500-pound mammal with a five-foot horn. Mother Goose never looked so good. And a holiday sale.

and

Nov 25, 2024

I TOOK THIS PHOTO of Mt. Rainier with my iPhone from the window of an airplane. According to my software, the equivalent shutter speed was 1/10,500th of a second. Any doubts I may have had about whether the new iPhones are “real” cameras have now officially vanished.

ON EVOLUTION

30,000-year-old charcoal drawing of a wooly rhinoceros, Chauvet Cave, France.

The other wooly beast

By Barbara Ramsey

WE ALL KNOW about the wooly mammoth, one of the extinct, charismatic megafauna of the most recent Ice Age. They are as familiar as cats and dogs. We imagine them waving their long noses while being charged by fur-clad humans waving spears.

But I’ve recently become intrigued with a related but lesser known critter, the wooly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). Here’s a little background: The wooly rhino evolved from earlier, rhino-like creatures about half a million years ago. At the time of its first appearance in the fossil record, our genus, Homo, was well established, but neither Neanderthals nor Homo sapiens had yet emerged. As the wooly rhino made itself at home in northern Eurasia, our early ancestors were spreading out over Africa. For a few hundred thousand years, these two very different mammals never encountered one another. The first meeting was almost certainly between a rhino and a Neanderthal, at least 180,000 years ago—the date of a site in the British Isles that contains both wooly rhino bones and Neanderthal hunting tools.

We don’t know whether Neanderthals actively hunted these rhinos or simply scavenged them. Neanderthals were the apex predators of their era and we know they hunted mammoths, so it’s hard to believe they didn’t hunt rhinos, too. But what must it have been like to hunt such a thing?

Let’s tackle their most obvious feature. The adult rhinos, male and female, had two huge horns sprouting from the middle of their faces. The front one could be up to five feet long. Oh, and did I mention that they were pointed? As horns, not antlers, these were permanent features of their facial landscape.

Next, their size. They were ten to twelve feet long from head to tail, up to six feet tall at the shoulder, and weighed anywhere from 3,500-6,500 pounds. Their lower jaws were up to two feet long. While they were herbivores, they could spear a human more easily than a human could spear them.

Wooly rhinos were well adapted to northern cold, with extra thick skin and a dense furry coat that could run from brown to red to blondish. They also had shorter ears and tails than the African rhinos we’re used to seeing, giving them a smaller surface-to-volume ratio that also protected against the cold.

And here’s my favorite part: they had a humongous hump right behind their heads. For many years, paleontologists weren’t sure this hump was a real thing. The only evidence was in prehistoric art.

Early humans in present-day France depicted wooly rhinos quite clearly at Chauvet cave (about 30,000 years ago), Lascaux (20,000 years ago), and multiple lesser known cave sites such as Rouffignac and Margot. These artists drew the rhino’s profile in an utterly distinctive way, with a characteristic rhino-shaped head, two big ole horns, and a large hump behind its head. But no wooly rhino remains had confirmed that a hump ever existed. Given the lack of fossil evidence, some scientists speculated that the humps could have been exaggerated by the artists to make their prey animals appear more fearsome.

Then, four years ago, paleontologists in Siberia found a 32,000-year-old frozen wooly rhino mummy in the permafrost— a big hump behind its head! The body had frozen before it could decompose. Analysis revealed the hump was made of fat, which may have been a source of calories and insulation against the cold. To me, this Siberian discovery is a vindication of artists everywhere.

Sadly, the wooly rhino left the planet about 14,000 years ago. Its demise coincided with a sudden temperature increase, the Bolling-Allerod warming. The rise in temperatures meant that their favored environment, low-growing grasses and herbs, was replaced by trees and shrubs. Their extinction may have been accelerated by humans—the evidence is too scanty to say for sure. Perhaps humans drew more rhinos than they killed and the epoch’s own version of global warming was enough to end the rhinos’ reign. RIP you hairy, horny, humpy beasts.

FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE

Ms. Fili

BY ANY MEASURE, Louise Fili is one of the great graphic designers of her generation, which is to say my own. She is best known for the book covers she designed for Random House, two thousand in all. A love of typography, particularly Art Deco fonts from Europe, infuses her work, which includes typefaces of her own design. Her most recent book is A Typographer’s Mother Goose, wherein the famous tales are illustrated with gorgeous letterforms and told in both English and Italian—her heritage and another important cultural influence on her designs. Researching her work, I learned of the Frederick W. Goudy Award, which she received along with many of the most distinguished type designers of the twentieth century, including Herman Zapf (featured in a previous Wild Things), Ed Benguiat, and Herb Lubalin, one of her early mentors. Not being a New Yorker, I only recently learned that she is married to Stephen Heller, a contemporary historian of graphic design that I’ve followed over the years. He is the co-author of the recently recommended book, The Moderns, whose bright red cover now greets me in my office. They have a son, Nico, who does video interviews with New York characters and recently produced a guide to the city’s hidden gems.

EXHIBITS

My photograph of a Redhead is among those shown at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. Click on the image to see a framed version.

LAST SATURDAY, I drove to Portland for a special event featuring fellow photographers chosen this year for the Pacific Northwest Drawers program at Blue Sky Gallery. Great fun—I was happily surprised by visits from a friend-of-a-friend from high school and by another friend who I worked with in San Francisco over forty years ago. I also appreciated and enjoyed conversations with the other photographers. (The night drive home in pouring rain and heavy traffic on I-5 was a doozy, though.) If you’re in the area, please drop by the gallery in the Pearl District at 122 NW 8th Avenue.

YOU’RE INVITED to an artist opening scheduled for December 7 at Meadwerks in Port Townsend. I have a piece in the group show there sponsored by the Print Night group. And December is the last month to see Brian Goodman’s extraordinary portraits of Chemakum tribal members in The Commons at Fort Worden State Park.

Snippets

YASCHA MOUNK, whose book and Persuasion substack I recommend, writes on why it will prove daunting for Democrats to change course, despite their defeat:

It is so difficult for Democrats to coalesce around a real course correction in part because many of their most unpopular positions are downstream from their fundamental view of the world. For decades, Democrats have conceptualized the country in a way that is deeply suffused in identity categories. Rather than addressing voters who happen to be Latino, they believe that they need to mobilize “the Latino community.” Rather than recognizing the fluidity of American identity, they believe that the country is fundamentally divided between whites and “people of color.” And rather than believing that the solution to the undeniable fact of persistent discrimination and disadvantage lies in the realization of universal ideals, they increasingly assume that the rights and responsibilities of each citizen should fundamentally depend on the identity group into which they were born.