An especially intriguing collision of birds and Polynesians took place on Henderson Island, an extremely remote speck of land lying in the tropical Pacific Ocean 125 miles east of Pitcairn Island, which is in turn famous for its own isolation. (Recall that Pitcairn is so remote that the mutineers who wrested the H.M.S. Bounty from Captain Bligh lived undetected on Pitcairn for eighteen years until the island was rediscovered.) Henderson consists of jungle-covered coral riddled with crevices and totally unsuitable for agriculture. Naturally, the island is now uninhabited and has been ever since Europeans first saw it in 1606. Henderson has often been cited as one of the world's most pristine habitats, totally unaffected by humans.
It was therefore a big surprise when Olson and fellow paleontologist David Steadman recently identified bones of two large species of pigeons, one smaller pigeon, and three seabirds that had become extinct on Henderson some time between 500 and 800 years ago. The same six species or close relatives had already been found in archaeological sites on several inhabited Polynesian islands, where it was clear how they could have been exterminated by people. The apparent contradiction of birds also being exterminated by humans on uninhabited, seemingly uninhabitable Henderson was solved by the discovery there of former Polynesian sites with hundreds of cultural artifacts, proving that the island had actually been occupied by Polynesians for several centuries. At those same sites, along with the bones of the six bird species that were exterminated on Henderson, were the bones of other bird species that survived, plus many fish.
Those early Polynesian colonists of Henderson evidently subsisted mainly on pigeons, seabirds, and fish until they had decimated the bird populations, at which point they had destroyed their food supply and either starved or else abandoned the island. The Pacific contains at least eleven other 'mystery' islands, besides Henderson, which were uninhabited on European discovery but showed archaeological evidence of former occupation by Polynesians. Some of these islands had been settled for hundreds of years before their human population finally died out or left. All were small or in other respects marginally suitable for agriculture, leaving human settlers heavily dependent on birds and other animals for food. Given the widespread evidence for over-exploitation of wild animals by early Polynesians, not only Henderson but the other mystery islands as well may represent the graveyards of human populations that ruined their own resource base.
Lest I leave the impression that Polynesians were in any way unique as pre-industrial exterminators, let's now jump nearly halfway around the globe to the world's fourth largest island, Madagascar, lying in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa. When Portuguese explorers arrived around 1500 AD, they found Madagascar already occupied by people now called the Malagasy. On geographic grounds, you might have expected their language to be related to African languages spoken a mere 200 miles to the west, on the coast of Mozambique. Astonishingly, though, it actually proved to belong to a group of languages spoken on the Indonesian island of Borneo, on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean thousands of miles to the northeast. Physically, the Malagasy range in appearance from typical Indonesians to typical blacks of East Africa. These paradoxes are due to the Malagasy having arrived between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, as a result of Indonesian traders voyaging around the Indian Ocean coastline to India and eventually to East Africa. In Madagascar they proceeded to build a society based on herding cattle and goats and pigs, farming, and fishing, and linked to the East African coast by Muslim traders. As interesting as Madagascar's people are the wild animals that it has—and those that it lacks. Living in enormous abundance on the nearby African mainland are many species of large and conspicuous beasts that run on the ground and are active by day—the antelopes, ostriches, zebras, baboons, and lions that draw modern tourists to East Africa. None of these animals, and no animals remotely equivalent to them, have occurred on Madagascar in modern times. They were kept out by the 200 miles of sea separating Madagascar from Africa, just as the sea also kept Australia's marsupials from reaching New Zealand. Instead, Madagascar supports two dozen species of small, monkey-like primates called lemurs, weighing only up to twenty pounds and mostly active at night and living in trees.
Various species of rodents, bats, insectivores, and relatives of mongooses also occur, yet the largest still only weighs about twenty-five pounds.
However, littering Madagascar's beaches are proofs of vanished giant birds, in the form of countless eggshells of the size of a soccer ball. Eventually, bones turned up not only of the birds that laid those eggs, but also of a remarkable suite of vanished large mammals and reptiles. The egg-makers were half-a-dozen species of flightless birds up to 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,000 pounds, like moas and ostriches but more massively built and hence now termed elephant birds. The reptiles were two species of giant land tortoises with shells about a yard long, and formerly very common, as indicated by the abundance of their bones. More diverse than either of these large birds or reptiles were a dozen species of lemurs up to the size of a gorilla, and all larger than or at least as large as the largest surviving lemur species. To judge from the small size of the eye orbits in their skulls, all or most of the extinct lemurs were probably diurnal rather than nocturnal. Some of them evidently lived on the ground like baboons, while others climbed in trees like orangutans and koala bears.
As if all this were not enough, Madagascar also yielded the bones of an extinct 'pygmy' hippopotamus ('only' the size of a cow), an aardvark, and a big mongoose-related carnivore built like a short-legged puma. Taken together, these extinct large animals formerly gave Madagascar the functional equivalents of the surviving large beasts for which tourists still flock to African game parks—just as did New Zealand's moas and other strange birds. The tortoises, elephant birds, and pygmy hippo would have been the herbivores replacing antelope and zebras; the lemurs would have replaced the baboons and great apes; and the mongoose-related carnivore made do for a leopard or scaled-down lion. What happened to all these big extinct mammals, reptiles, and birds? We can be confident that at least some of them were alive to delight the eyes of the first arriving Malagasy, who used elephant bird eggshells as water containers and discarded butchered bones of the pygmy hippo and some of the other species in their rubbish heaps. In addition, the bones of all the other extinct species are known from fossil sites only a few thousand years old. Since they must have evolved and survived for millions of years until then, it is unlikely that all those animals had the foresight to give up the ghost just in those last few moments before hungry humans showed up. In fact, a few may still have been holding out in remote parts of Madagascar when Europeans arrived, since the seventeenth-century French governor Flacourt was given descriptions of an animal suggestive of the gorilla-sized lemur. The elephant birds may have survived long enough to have become known to Arab traders in the Indian Ocean, and to have given rise to the account of the rok (a giant bird) in the tale of Sinbad the Sailor.
Certainly some and probably all of Madagascar's vanished giants were somehow exterminated by the activities of the early Malagasy. It is not hard to understand why the elephant birds became extinct, since their eggshells made such convenient two-gallon jerrycans. While the Malagasy were herders and fisherman rather than big-game hunters, the other big animals would have been easy prey, since they had never seen humans before. Probably, like New Zealand's moas, they were as tame as Antarctic penguins and other creatures that evolved in the absence of humans. A hungry Malagasy could have walked up to one of those tame beasts, clubbed it, and enjoyed a quick barbecue. That is presumably why the easy-to-see, easy-to-catch lemurs big enough to be worth the effort of butchering them—the large, diurnal, terrestrial species—all became extinct, while the small, nocturnal, tree-living ones all survived.