Crows Read Free Page A

evidence does not looking promising. According to the paleontologists, birds and mammals are the products of two distinctly different branches of the tree of life. Their most recent common ancestor was a vaguely amphibianlike creature that lived in the swampy tropical forests of the late Carboniferous Period, at least 280 million years ago. At that point, the most advanced life-forms on the planet were aquatic or semi-aquatic organisms, such as fish and frogs, that were obliged to spend all or part of their lives in water. The progenitors of birds and mammals, by contrast, produced eggs with hard, mineralized shells that could be laid right out on dry land and thus marked an early, tentative step in the conquest of terra firma.
    From that imponderably distant starting point, evolution followed two divergent paths. One lineage—known as the Synapsida, or “beast faces”—eventually gave rise to the earliest mammals, furry, scurrying, shrewlike creatures that appeared on the scene about 220 million years ago, during the late Triassic Period. Meanwhile, the other line—the Sauropsida, or “lizard faces”—evolved into all manner of reptiles, notably, the dinosaurs. Birds either descended from some anonymous reptilian ancestor and evolved alongside the mighty dinos (as witness a fragmentary but seductively birdlike fossil from Texas called Protoavis, which dates to about 225 million years ago) or else, as most experts contend, are descendants of the great beasts themselves (as witness the delicate fossil remains of feathered dinosaurs, dating back some
150 million years, that were recently discovered in China).
    No matter how this question is eventually answered, one fact is clear: the evolutionary gulf between birds and mammals is almost incomprehensible. This conclusion comes as a surprise to those of us who grew up on biology textbooks in which the members of the classes Aves and Mammalia were typically presented together as warm, fuzzy creatures that, despite their differences, were each other’s closest living relatives. But with insights gained from an ever-improving fossil record and advances in genetic analysis, taxonomists have recently begun to emphasize not the kinship between the two groups but their disjunction. As the only surviving members of the synapsid lineage, mammals are placed in a class by themselves, but birds are now listed as a subgrouping of the reptiles: the class Aves in the clade, or evolutionary line, of Reptilia. And if it is true that birds—crows among them—are just glorified lizards, then what is the chance we could have anything significant in common with them? Perhaps the connection that we sense with crows and ravens is nothing but wishful thinking, an expression of our own deep yearning for intelligent company.
    ➣ Birds are thought to be the direct descendants of flying, feathered reptiles.

    But remember that life, like the mythic Raven, has a few tricks up its sleeve and is not to be stymied by mere improbabilities. Just as evolution can
    The face of a Yup’ik boy, with raven tattoos, 1890s.
    RAVEN MAKES THE FIRST PERSON

    ABRIDGED FROM THE WORDS OF AN UNALIT, OR YUP’IK, STORYTELLER IN COASTAL ALASKA, AS RECORDED IN THE 1890S
     
    I t was in the time [the elders said] when there were no people on the earth. During four days the first man lay coiled up in the pod of a beach-pea (L. maritimus.) On the fifth day, he stretched out his feet and burst the pod, falling to the ground, where he stood up, a full-grown man. He looked about him,… and he saw approaching, with a waving motion, a dark object which came on until just in front of him.... This was a raven, and, as soon as it stopped, it raised one of its wings, pushed up its beak, like a mask, to the top of its head and changed at once into a man....
    At last he said: “What are you? Whence did you come? I have never seen anything like you.”
    To this Man replied: “I came from the pea-pod.” And he pointed to the plant