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| Pablo Escobar and his South American collection of Hippos. |
By Thomas Shess
Sometime in the distant future, when Wikipedia has vanished, Google is an archaeological curiosity and Pablo Escobar is no better remembered than the fellow who invented the Bronze Age doorstop, a paleontologist digging along what once was Colombia’s Magdalena River discovers a very large bone. Then another. And another.
Eventually, alien scientists exploring this vast uninhabited planet deliver a verdict. Hippopotamus.
There is only one problem.
What the hell is a hippopotamus doing in South America? The fossil record, assuming our future scientist has one, insists that hippos belong to the Old World. Africa, certainly. an area once known as Colombia, certainly not.
Yet there they are.
Not one unfortunate hippo, either. That could perhaps be explained away by some prehistoric maritime mishap involving a remarkably buoyant animal and an accommodating current.
No, our paleontologists discover evidence of generations of them. Suddenly, somebody has a dissertation. Perhaps the continents were connected later than previously believed. Perhaps an unknown land bridge once crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps hippopotamuses were magnificent long-distance swimmers.
Perhaps some forgotten African civilization possessed oceangoing ships and an inexplicable desire to transport three female hippos and one male to South America. Careful, Professor. You're getting warmer.
The truth, of course, is considerably less dignified.
During the late 20th century, the late bullet riddled Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar once stocked his private estate, Hacienda Nápoles, with exotic animals. Among them were four hippopotamuses—one male and three females.
Escobar died rather violently in 1993.
The hippos didn't. They wandered away, discovered that Colombia suited them rather nicely and began doing what one male and three female hippopotamuses left largely to their own devices are biologically equipped to do. They made more hippopotamuses. And the offspring made more.
Eventually, descendants of Pablo's original quartet established themselves in the Magdalena River basin, creating a population of wild African megafauna approximately 7,000 miles from where any sensible paleontologist would expect to find them.
Which raises an unserious question containing a serious one: How much of what we believe about the ancient world depends upon explanations that disappeared before anyone could write them down?
Consider our alien-based future scientist. She or he or it has the bones. Let's stick with a he.
He has the sediment. He can date them. He can measure them. He may even establish that these Colombian animals were closely related to African hippopotamuses. What he doesn't have is Pablo. And without Pablo, the evidence is begging for an explanation that geology alone cannot provide.
Now take the absurdity one planet farther. Suppose someday extra terrestial explorers digging on Mars find fossils. Real fossils. Not suspicious squiggles in a meteorite or something microscopic that requires six committees and an electron microscope to decide whether it was ever alive.
Imagine bones. Leaves. Shells. Something unmistakable.
Science would properly go berserk.
Ergo, Mars once supported complex life.
Then comes the dangerous question. Did it originate there?
Perhaps.
Did Earth and Mars independently produce flourishing biospheres?
Possibly.
Did primitive organisms travel naturally between the planets inside rocks blasted into space by enormous impacts? Century 21 scientists already consider versions of that possibility. But what if something moved them deliberately?
That sounds preposterous.
So does an African hippopotamus grazing beside a Colombian river until somebody explains Pablo Escobar.
This is where the pathways of the mind become deliciously inane. Imagine Earth and Mars millions of years ago as flourishing sisters. Imagine some civilization—or some natural mechanism we haven't dreamed of—moving life between them.
Then erase the civilization. Erase its machines. Erase its records. Wait long enough for cities to become sediment. Leave only the bones. Future scientists would be forced to reconstruct an event from its surviving consequences. Which is precisely what paleontology does. Usually brilliantly.
But Pablo's hippos offer a small warning from our own time: sometimes the craziest explanation happens to be the correct one. No land bridge carried those hippos across the Atlantic. No evolutionary branch of South American hippopotamuses has been discovered. No prehistoric herd swam heroically from Dakar to Cartagena.
No, even though it should have, it didn't happen that way. An omnipresent godlike entity knows the truth: A drug lord wanted a private zoo. Four hippos arrived. Humans lost control of them. The hippos took it from there.
So perhaps our distant visiting paleontologist eventually publishes his monumental work, The Transatlantic Hippopotamus Migration of the Late Anthropocene, complete with charts, isotope studies and a computer reconstruction of courageous hippos island-hopping across the Atlantic. And, of course yawns from the hoi polloi, but his colleagues applaud. Universities teach it. For three centuries it becomes settled science.
Then some future archaeological Aquarian intern from Trappist-1e digging through the remains of an ancient Colombian building finds a miraculous surviving photograph. There stands Pablo Escobar. Behind him stands a hippopotamus. Professors stares at it. On the back is the name of the civilization where this mysterious photograph came from: Kodak Paper.
Fifty years of research disappear before lunch. And somewhere in the great faculty lounge of eternity, Pablo is laughing. Science wasn't foolish. It simply didn't have all the evidence. Which leaves us with a useful thought the next time we stare at Mars—or at any ancient mystery—and announce with great confidence what absolutely could or could not have happened: Sometimes the bones survive. The punch line doesn't.
Thomas Shess is the author of two short story collections available online on Barnes & Noble: "Cantina Psalms" and "Tough Love." Other free samples of his work are posted on his website ThomasShess.com
