Modernism and Reindeer in the Bering Straits
More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in the Bering Straits By Bathsheba Demuth Summer 2012 Bathsheba Demuth is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley The Scene On a modern map, the shoulders of Eurasia and North America nearly touch at the Bering Strait, a 52-mile barrier between Old World and New. During the rolling period of ice ages known as the Pleistocene, the Pacific Ocean pulled back leaving the Chukchi Peninsula connected to Alaska’s Seward Peninsula by a wide, grassy plain. Two million years ago, the animal we call the reindeer emerged along this continental juncture.1 As glaciers spread, reindeer followed them southward; by 20,000 years ago, Rangifer tarandus had moved deep into Western Europe, forming the base of Neolithic hunters’ diets and appearing, antlers lowered in the fall rutting charge, on the walls of Lascaux.2 Reindeer, like our human ancestors who appeared a million and a half years after them, are products of the ice age. They are gangly, long-nosed, and knob-kneed, with a ruff of white fur around their deep chests, swooping antlers and nervous ears, and have the capacity to not just survive but thrive in million-strong herds despite the Arctic dark and cold. Like any animal living in the far north, reindeer – or caribou, as they are known in North America – must solve the problem of energy. With the sun gone for months of the year, the photosynthetic transfer of heat into palatable calories is minimal; plants are small, tough, often no more than the rock-like scrum of lichens.
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