In my lectures on human origins, I always insert clips taken from his programmes, particularly when it concerns the origins of human behaviour as seen in the lives of our close cousins. On one occasion he brought home to us the grisly details of chimpanzees co-operatively hunting a monkey, and sharing the meat. Here, he said, we see the origins of our own co-operative behaviour. On another programme he illustrated how they make and use tools.
Archaeological research has traced the origins of the first permanent human settlement of Madagascar to about 400AD, with the likelihood that it was a few centuries earlier. Like the Maori, those intrepid explorers spoke an Austronesian language and reached Madagascar on ocean-going waka from their homeland, traced by common languages to southern Borneo.
On arriving, they encountered a strange new world, populated by massive elephant birds — even bigger than the biggest moa, weighing in at about 700kg.
David Attenborough visited Madagascar in 1960 to film and was given some pieces of an elephant bird egg by local villagers. It was later reassembled by scientists in London and became one of his most treasured possessions. In 2011 he made a documentary about the egg to find out more about it.
To find out how old it was he turned to our son Tom, then director of the radiocarbon dating laboratory at Oxford University, and Tom was invited to David’s home in Richmond to take a sample from the egg.
Some months later, David went up to Oxford to film the result being revealed. It turned out that the egg was laid about 1300 years ago. This would make it one of the last of these colossal eggs known. There is another close match with Aotearoa, for both the elephant bird and the moa succumbed to human hunting and became extinct at about the same time.
You can see Sir David’s surprise when Tom told him the date of the egg here: https://tinyurl.com/3da373eh
