1. Isaak
Isaak Eijkelboom is a vertebrate paleontologist and PhD candidate, studying late Quaternary megafauna at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden.
Isaak and I met to talk about his work in the Ice Age gallery at Naturalis on Tuesday 28th March 2023.
Isaak - Most of what we find in the Netherlands and from this part of the North Sea is from the last Ice Age, so it will be from around 40,000 years ago until a couple of thousand years ago, but also from some of the warmer periods. Here we see some of our more important finds, and this is like towards the end of the last Ice Age which in the Netherlands we call the Weichselian. I think time-wise it’s kind of back and forth actually…
Matt - It’s I guess the nature of glacial covering and retreat, a back and forth – you might find something one day on the shore that’s 3,000 years old and then right beside it, or in a trawlers net the next there’s something from 20,000 years ago being pulled up.
I
In the early days, back like I would say before 1950, maybe back in 1920, they would just throw those objects back overboard again, because they didn’t really know what they had. It wasn’t fish, so they couldn’t sell it. But then I think from around 1950 it all kind of started. This collection at Naturalis really took off in the 1950s, so 50s, 60s, 70s - that’s when most of this stuff was collected from mainly fishermen but also from companies that dredged in the rivers, when they were digging for gravel for example, but those were the two main sources.
M
I feel like maybe there is a better public awareness or understanding of this time period and stories surrounding it in the Netherlands – so for example if a private collector or an individual finds something on the beach they might be more likely to take that to a research facility or a local museum – is that broad engagement around this topic here kind of increasing? I’m not convinced that in mainstream education in the UK there aren’t significant and significantly powerful stories being completely overlooked, almost it feels as if history begins with the Romans and follows this linear – ‘and then – and then’ kind of path…
I
I think what’s happening here that makes a large difference is that in a lot of other countries, I’m not sure about the UK, but if you find something that’s paleontological, it’s sort of protected and it officially belongs to the state, whereas in the Netherlands if you find something paleontological then it’s yours. When it comes to archaeology then actually it is protected so if you find something of value officially you should report it, but if you have something like this then you can just keep it. I think this really helps with engagement, because I know for example I did a project in Portugal, and I know a lot of it there is protected – people find stuff there too on the beaches and in the cliffs, but they don’t report it because they might be afraid it’s taken away from them. So then you sort of beat down people’s enthusiasm I guess, whereas here it’s actually lifted up, and that’s a really important factor. And then additionally what helps is that there are a couple of authorities of collectors – of people, professionals and citizen scientists who are really just so passionate about it, and they create this community as well, by organising excursions for example.
M
When you find something it’s almost completely open-ended isn’t it – open to interpretation, before you read around it – ‘it might be this’ or this is where it might fit in history or in any chronological framework.
I
Yes – and that really activates your imagination. If you find something, like a jaw, you might think you know something of that, you might recognise it as a bone but not sure what animal it belong to… I think museums like Naturalis try to also be a place where people can come with those questions, so sometimes they organise an afternoon where people can bring their finds, be it fossils or also stuff they might find in the forests – whatever it is – something in nature, or they can take a picture and send an email for example.
M
What is the forest coverage like today in South Holland? In terms of what is there and especially what is publicly accessible in the UK it almost feels non-existent – just to imagine what it might have been like which is what I seem to spend more and more time doing, what it might have looked like around me 8,000 years ago, meandering stretches of marsh and woodland…
I
Here the same, very deforested. It is either city or farmland, mostly. There are little spots of nature, but even then most of it is manmade. Actually here in South Holland basically everything is manmade. There are a few patches here and there. Even within national parks in the Netherlands people sort of question whether it is ‘the real thing’ –
M
Everything is usually an idea of nature. A few weeks ago I learned a little bit about State Zero projects in river restoration, in which industrial areas are cleared for river systems to return to a ‘natural’ state, or create their own channels uninterrupted, which is quite a radical thing I think. But one of the criticisms of that comes back to the same question – the idea of returning to something… is what we imagine to be the natural state, like the idea of a ‘clean’, green wilderness not necessarily a healthy landscape but just the earliest description of a default environmental state we can remember in our own individual lifetimes?
I imagine being on the ground, on this map – there is so much danger! Wild animals, no tree coverage, no architecture – but what a complete devastation has occurred over the past several thousand years… radically different, but similar challenges in relation to climate?
I
I think that especially in the colder periods the river channels were much broader than they are now, but where you see the rivers here that were created then, those are the same basic channels we have now but they would have just run wild with all of the seasonal vegetation in that time. They often divided species from species. Different elements in different arrangements.
M
Do you feel like there are certain animals, where we might for example look at a Woolly Rhino and remember a news article we read last year about the White Rhino going extinct… I guess there is that kind of bias we have towards charismatic megafauna and sometimes that presents a problem… but really I guess in this particular stretch of time maybe that can be quite useful, because much of what is being found is bone – it’s very nearly all bone…
I
Yes so something else that is quite interesting is that what they found in those fishing nets which is mainly what you can see here is typically bigger stuff, because of course the smaller stuff will fall through, and if fishermen find a skull or something they will recognize it and take it to shore, but if it’s a little bone that’s caught between the mess in the net they might not see it. From before, much of what we know and have is thanks to the fishing industry but now the fishing industry has almost died completely, just in response to changing EU regulations and stuff, to preserve the North Sea and the current ecosystem there. So now what we find is mainly on the beaches, swept up in sand from the seafloor and transported with the wind element onto the beach, and actually the bigger stuff gets crushed up. On the beach you find tiny pieces. Here we have quite a large collection here, of the little phalanges and tiny teeth, which gives you a pretty good overview and which is complimentary to the older stuff.
From the fisheries we of course knew about mammoth and rhino, but now we are also learning from the smaller remains that there would have been little rabbits and hedgehogs for example wandering around back then at the same time.
M
What do you imagine the kind of everyday survival effort might have been and also what might have been the key differences in terms of human-animal interaction in a landscape like this?
I
I mean maybe there are certain parallels today with sub-Saharan Africa – of course it’s a different landscape and it’s much colder here, but maybe a combination of what we might still find in North America and Siberia, with what we now see in Africa we can use in kind of comparison, and it’s also I think valuable the work that is being done using these in these kinds of reconstructions and research into how these ecosystems were in real life compared to modern analogues.
These are similar to what you were referring to earlier, they are actually tropical shells. These you also find a lot of.
M
I took a drive recently with my secondary school English Lit teacher. We drove the coast road and as we drove she was pointing out the window and telling me about how “there was a club here I used to go to when I was a teenager, and now that little post is all that’s left”. She pointed to this field with hoardings around it, and said “national heritage don’t really know what to do with this…” – there are a lot of Roman markers and remnants around East Yorkshire, but around closer to where I am there are beds of oysters from Roman oyster farms, and this was one of them. So people are always finding shells of one age or another – glacial and Scandinavian erratics falling from the cliffs, oyster shells cast off by farmers a thousand years ago. There is this odd chronology of shells. Maybe they are like a convenient marker, because of their kind of defiance as a material.
I
Yeah. I think right now you probably find similar ones to these on the Atlantic coast, in the south of France for example. And with a lot of other species now as well we see them creeping up north, with climate warming. In these warmer periods we also see evidence of forest elephants… these here are all from turtles, and this is hippo, so we just had forest elephants and hippo roaming around here in the Netherlands and also in the UK.
M
Not many of us I guess everyday think about what is beneath our feet, what we are walking over. On the ferry last night drifting over the North Sea again my mind was trying to unravel this – like, how many layers of stuff are beneath me right now – in the water, in the seabed, joinings of matter from places how far apart, beneath the seabed…
I
At one point we just have sort an abstract idea of what is down there you know, like if you look at old geography illustrations of the centre of the earth, it’s just a hot mess!
Over here we have quite a lot of stuff from the very start of the Pleistocene, so we’re talking around 2 million years ago. There’s a small town in the south of the Netherlands called Tegelen, and this time period is named after the town because there is a large excavation site there and they find lots of fossils from that period. Jaguar and monkeys for example lived here, in mainland Netherlands. These crates up here are the original crates with which fishermen handed over the fossil bones for research.
M
What are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned in your research?
I
There is a lot! I’ve been spending quite a lot of time now photographing all of these things so of course you’re holding them one by one. You literally get a better feel for what it all looks like and you start to recognise things more quickly, so that’s interesting in itself. Some of the archaeological finds are also very impressive. We have a collection which was a private collection but that person passed away so it in this case came to us, with arrowheads and sculpted bone works that are really impressive. Some of these private collectors have collected for tens of years, like 40 or 50 years and they might have their whole house filled to the brim.
M
And from those acquisitions with each tool, or every piece of carved deer antler, we learn more from the design work but also the scrapes and incisions about how people lived side-by-side and interacted with the animals we’re finding here.
I
So we have the Giant Deer, or Irish Elk – this skeleton is actually from Ireland, because we find them in the Netherlands but to find a skull with full antlers does not really happen because they get bumped around in the sea, whereas in Ireland they are found in bogs, well-preserved, often as complete skeletons. Here, mostly fragments or isolated bones.
M
Fragments are a bit like memories I think – a stitching together of these isolated bits create stories, broken up over and again, open to interpretation…
I
What is actually very interesting is that when we look at these borehole samples from the North Sea it’s always isolated material, always just loose bones – there is like no way you can say that any two belong to the same individual, but in collecting a lot of material over the years museums can compile skeletons, matching bones based on size and they sort of reconstructed a full mammoth skeleton here. There are about 300 bones in this skeleton, so most likely from 200 different individuals, reconstructed into one. You can see here in the colouration of the foot that with each bone being fossilised in different locations or situations being differently coloured. We find a lot and we find beautiful stuff. It’s all isolated but in totality it creates a picture.
M
It puts things in perspective as well. It sounds silly but looking at this reconstructed environment here like we were saying in some ways it just looks so remote, like animals almost being separate by default today – being at all times a comfortable enough distance away.
I
Totally, like through a screen, through your TV screen…
M
What do you think the future looks like?
I
I’m afraid for the planet. I think we can get along okay for a little bit but it’s a matter of time before we have to relocate everybody.
M
Maybe relocations are already happening too across the world. Today maybe the term climate refugee is still fairly new to the public imagination, or more public reality. I wonder if en-masse people are forced to relocate, then, in a broad sense, where to?
I
Exactly because that’s all you have, this is all we have. Of course countries that are a little higher up might be at an advantage.
M
I understand that maybe further north, for example in Scandinavia there is a more continuous but more noticeable fluctuation between the land being much higher than the sea and more level?
I
Yes also a lot of Scandinavia is moving upwards, because of how the glaciers that were there during the ice age pushed everything down, and then melted away and there is still this rebound happening.
I think in 200 years or so for sure we will start moving. But also maybe you have to sort of give up parts of what we have, let bits of land flood during high tide – there is a dynamic way of dealing with it which might keep cities dry for a bit longer, but in the long term it’s going to be tough. There are some outlandish plans to put up a dam across the full North Sea from the UK to Scandinavia and down to France…
M
So we’re back in Doggerland again!
I
Well basically yeah! It’s going to be the most outlandish, expensive project in history but if the alternative is that everything is going to drown…
M
So you’re photographing for a database?
I
Yes to build a database but we’re also trying to use it as a dataset to train an algorithm to identify fossils. So we’re trying to combine datasets from different museums but also from citizen scientists, sort of trying to explore what we can do with AI. There are lots of apps nowadays where you can take a picture of a plant for example, and it will tell you what species it might be, something like that we are trying to work out for fossils. To have a platform that serves that community and for people that look for fossils, because there are hundreds of people doing this.
M
So if I find a molar it might tell me it’s a mammoth tooth, and then contributing to that dataset reinforces that connection?
I
You have to validate it but yes, else if it’s wrong but it thinks It’s right then it keeps reinforcing that wrong identification, so we have to validate as we go through it but yes it is also a way of accumulating more information.
More and more what we find is mostly mammal, and mostly larger mammals, so myself I hope we start to collect and can place some focus more on smaller animals like for example reptiles and fish, which were obviously around as well, and then we will gradually get to more of a place where we can see what things actually looked like.
M
There’s something very different about holding something isn’t there than just seeing it.
I
Yes – the weight, the texture… this is the whole thing with fossils, I mean most of the classical morphological research is focused on looking at shapes.
M
It’s really deeply ingrained I think. The tableaus and this model landscape stretching out in front of us here – one of the things that works about it I think is that it reaches back into childhood a little bit – a type of fundamental world-building. It would be very different if it was fully digital.
Thinking about technology and certainly within a visual context, my lecturer on day one of my masters course pointed out something that I immediately took or adopted a bit as a kind of fundamental principle, that the physical and the digital are two different languages, rather than just two sets of tools - that the digital is not necessarily or doesn’t have to be an alternative to the physical hand – the best work I really believe particularly today comes out of meaningfully interrogating or actually embracing that line, a relationship between the two. We’ve always had and made technologies obviously, and I’m interested in the ways in which we moderate relationships between different technologies to facilitate new ways of seeing and understanding. I’m pretty struck by something here in this gallery that resonates with that – the positioning of archival physical material but also the ‘containers of the containers’, beside the time-based digital elements in the lighting through the cloud models and the way the tableaus on the map model become those animated sequences through the viewfinders. The way these models and the display mechanisms here play with scale and time is quite inventive, it encourages you I think to imagine yourself inside the landscape, inside the past.
I
Our toolkit is definitely expanding. I saw this in your website actually and in your work and feel like I really understand that.
