Endlings

Gísli Pálsson

Related terms: extinction, biodiversity, habitat, animals, species, museums, Anthropocene

The focus on “endlings” and the last of a kind – a popular theme in the current age of the Anthropocene – usefully draws attention to the dramatic climax of mass extinction. While important, such a narrative should not blind one to the larger picture of species relations and their habitats. The genealogy of endlings is only the tip of the iceberg, one node in a web of life, a network of organisms in reciprocally influential relationships that continues until the very end. Species extinction, I suggest, is never exclusively a matter of a single event that is over quickly, like an execution by the guillotine’s blade or at the end of a rope. Usually, it is the result of a long and complex process involving broader histories. Tracking that process is an important aspect of the many emergent fields of environmental humanities (Pálsson 2024).

What set the idea of endling, and its conceptual siblings of “species” and “extinction”, on the agenda, reshaping natural science and natural museums? In the 1990s, American physician Robert Webster launched the notion of an “endling”, defined as the last person, animal, or another individual in a lineage (Jörgensen 2017). The idea came up because of patients who were dying and thought of themselves as the last of their family line. “Endling” seems to have stuck, outlasting competitors such as “terminarch,” “lastoline,” and “relict,” and has seeped into popular culture. In some ways, the problems of tracking the endlings of natural history mirror those of kinship diagrams in early ethnographies and anthropological theory. Family trees, we now know, necessarily distort and simplify complex networks, evading the formations of person, and substance, and being often highlighted in indigenous accounts.

On the other hand, stories of the death of the last exemplars of a species touch people and are told and retold. Sometimes people are haunted by them, sparking new and exigent questions. In a sense the periodic, if not constant, presence of the endling in modern popular culture and the attention it attracts is an indicator of the collective grieving response of our species. Natural history museums often feel a need to memorialize endlings. The specimens become collectors’ items, carefully noted and sold for high prizes, much like paintings and other pieces of art. Ironically, while they may be deliberately acquired for exhibits, they are sometimes deemed too valuable for public presentation. This is the case of the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) – a flightless bird captured in Iceland in June 1844; now the last male is in permanent storage in a museum in Brussels (the whereabouts of the last female are unknown).

‘Extinction’ has a longer history than ‘endling,’ but it too has a base in kinship, notably the need to establish family lines. The English noun ‘extinction’ has been in use since at least the fifteenth century; it meant “annihilation” (Beer 2009). The related verb ‘to extinguish’ meant (and still means) ‘to quench,’ in the context of fires, or, figuratively, to wipe out a material thing, such as a debt. Extinction was primarily associated with the history of landed families, and the succession of property, but until the mid-nineteenth century, there was no name for the loss of a species – particularly not for a loss that might be detected and studied in the here and now.

Eighteenth-century taxonomer Carl von Linné was among those to protest that biological extinction was flatly impossible. Life forms, it was implied, somehow remained intact since the theological Big Bang. While the Linnaean classification system became firmly established in scientific realms, people worldwide invented their systems. Anthropologists of ethnobiological bent have been documenting and analysing them for a century (Alves and Albuquerqu 2017). In the early nineteenth century, then, most scholars, believed that all the species of the living world had been created once and for all, that existing organisms could not vanish, and that new species could not appear. Following on from early fossil hunters Mary Anning and Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace demonstrated that the story of life on earth was far longer than had been believed. When a species became uncommon or rare, Darwin argued (1859), this was an indication of impending extinction. The fossils spoke for themselves.

For Darwin, extinction was inevitable and taken for granted. Natural selection would inexorably thrust some species aside. In his early manuscripts he doesn’t hesitate to use terms such as ‘extirpation’ and ‘annihilation.’ Yet rather than dwelling on extinction, he almost seems to avoid it in his magnum opus, The Origin of Species. At first, biological extinction was seen as primarily natural, independent of human activities. It was John Wolley and Alfred Newton’s 1858 expedition to Iceland, looking for ‘remaining’ great auks, that added the vital concept of unnatural extinction to modern language and thought, sparking a crucial conceptual development. The great auk was one of the first species pushed ‘off the cliff’ by humanity, its extinction observed by scientists more-or-less in real-time.

In the 1850s, the great auk was reported to be in serious decline. The large bird had been hunted for a long time on several islands along the North Atlantic coast. Hunting had escalated due to the growing demands of collectors and expanding museums. Wolley and Newton resolved to go to Iceland to find great auks. When they set off, their ambition was to learn as much as possible about the species during a two-month stay, during which they would visit the main great-auk breeding grounds in the world: on Eldey, a small island off Iceland’s southwest coast. Bad weather prevented them from even attempting to row out to Eldey.

Stuck ashore, they occupied themselves with identifying the crew of the latest successful great auk hunting expeditions, interviewing as many people as possible who had seen the birds. Wolley carefully preserved their accounts in the set of notebooks known as the Gare-Fowl Books (Wolley 1858). Based on what the two British naturalists learned in Iceland, Newton, who outlived his friend, would become a leading figure in discussions of the new and politically volatile scientific concept: ‘extinction.’ Was it conceivable, Newton wondered on his return to Britain, that this sizable bird, known to collectors around the world, was in critical decline because of human activities? Was such a thing – unnatural extinction – possible? Icelanders imagined that their prey had simply moved elsewhere to Greenland or the Faroe Islands. Extinction was not yet on their agenda – nor on anyone else’s, anywhere in the world. Newton argued that many species were approaching extinction, arguing for policy measures informed by natural science that might halt or reverse what he called the “process” of extinction (Newton 1861).

Genetic research published by Jessica E. Thomas and her colleagues in 2019, does not indicate that any environmental factors played a crucial role in the extinction of the great auk (Thomas et al. 2019). Their sequencing of DNA from great auks from historical habitats points to considerable genetic diversity; only if genetic diversity had been low would it have been difficult for the species to adapt to environmental change. The authors conclude that hunting pressure by humans alone was sufficient to lead to the extinction of the great auk.

Tracking the genealogy of the great auk, its fate and downfall, necessarily extends the historical horizon to the early colonial era. The main slaughterhouse of the great auk was Fogo Island, Newfoundland, not European sites. On Fogo, the indigenous Beothuk had collected great auks and eggs on a small scale for millennia, partly for ritual purposes. European fishers massively hunted great auks for meat and feathers from the 16th century, making them extinct by 1800. At the same time, European settlers aggressively battled and sidelined the Beothuk; genocide and bird extinction went hand in hand (Marshall 1996). The last Beothuk, a woman named Shanawdithit, died on 6 June 1829, probably aged 28.

The history of human encounters with great auks runs much deeper, on the European side, to Palaeolithic times. In 1991, French diver Henri Cosquer announced the stunning discovery of an underwater cave near Marseille decorated with dozens of prehistoric paintings and carvings. Three images were of birds, all great auks. Crafted about 27,000 years ago, these are the oldest known images of this seabird (Clottes, Courtin, and Vanrell 2005). Soon Cosquer’s evidence convinced archaeologists that, indeed, he had discovered genuinely historic cave art. In 2022, a museum bearing Cosquer’s name opened in Marseille not far from the cave. In its first year, it was visited by one million people; clearly, it touched a collective nerve. The main attraction is a detailed reconstruction of part of the cave, made by high-precision scanning and skilful artwork, allowing visitors to travel through a virtual chamber, a digital clone while gazing at the artwork on the walls. The logo of the museum is drawn from a metallic structure on its roof, a sculpture of a slim but shiny great auk.

Now the great auks portrayed in the Cosquer cave are on the brink of a second extinction, threatened by global heating and rising sea levels. Only about a fifth of the room visited by the prehistoric artists remains above sea level; as a result, many drawings have already been lost. At times during the last decade, water levels have suddenly increased by 6 inches, depending on the air pressure inside the cave and the tides in the Mediterranean. The impending disappearance of the great auk images on the walls of Cosquer Cave, in the wake of rising sea levels, parallels the extinction of the great auk in the nineteenth century. It is tempting to think of the digital great auks at the Cosquer Museum, far above sea level, as a form of de-extinction.

The great auk images at Cosquer not only testify to an early human interest in these birds but also invite questions of what to make of the species concept – can we be sure that the three birds on the cave walls represent a particular ‘kind,’ that is, great auks? – and about the intention of the artists. As a result, it may not always be appropriate to precisely identify Palaeolithic images. Throughout the ages, humans have found it essential to broadly capture the biological diversity of their habitat, partly for mythological purposes, by subsuming family resemblances of some kind – despite the great variety – under a single type, with or without naming or rigid classification. The members of what modern science and taxonomy call a ‘species’ are not always and everywhere considered to be the ‘same.’ Interestingly, representations of some animal kinds on Palaeolithic cave walls seem indeterminate, with attributes of more than one species conflated into one image (Eastham and Eastham 1995).  

Leaving aside cultural differences, are species ‘simply’ discoverable material things, objective facts or natural kinds? Or are they something else, something more fleeting, perhaps mere constructions of the human mind (Wilkins and Zachos 2022)? After all, species are not just born and then gone; they continually unfold. It may make sense to see individual species as events rather than objects, as open systems with unsharp boundaries (Rieppel 2009). Recent works explore the histories and ethnographies of human encounters with two kinds of extinction: with endangered species, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the death of languages and cultures (Charnela 2019).

This might sound like an uncomfortably mixed (or double) bag, but after all totemism – a classic anthropological theme (Kohn 2013) – reminds us of potential and profound connections; the loss of totemic animals is liable to shatter social relations among humans. It may not count as a coincidence that the European massacres on Newfoundland implied two intimately related kinds of endlings, the great auk and the native Beothuk. Nature and culture are hard to separate keeping in mind current discourses on nature-cultures and biosocialities (Ingold and Pálsson 2013).

Perhaps studies of extinction and representations of life forms in cabinets of curiosities need reshuffling, replacing fixed categorization and naming practices with the animation of transient notions of life forms embedded in webs of life. It certainly helps, for environmental policy and governance purposes, to be able to list species on the brink of extinction and to establish escalating extinction rates. On its own, however, the idea of ‘endlings’ both reinforces an outdated understanding of the processes of life and narrows the prospect of dealing with the challenges of the Anthropocene – key concerns of the environmental humanities.

References

Alves, Romulo Romeu Nobrega and Ulysses Paulino Albuquerqu (eds.) 2017. Ethnozoology: Animals in Our Lives. London: Academic Press.

Beer, Gillian 2009. “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction.” Victorian Studies 51, no. 2.: 321-31.

Charnela, Janet 2019. “A Species Apart: Ideology, Science, and the End of Life.” In The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, edited by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 18-38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clottes, Jean, Jean Courtin, and Luc Vanrell 2025. Cosquer Redécouvert. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Darwin, Charles 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Edited with an introduction by J.W. Burrow. London: Penguin.  

Eastham, Anne, and Michael Eastham 1995. “Palaeolithic Images and the Great Auk.” Antiquity 69: 1023-25.

Ingold, Tim and Gísli Pálsson (eds.) 2013. Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   

Jörgensen, Dolly 2017. “Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World.” Environmental Philosophy 14: 119–38. ttps://www.jstor.org/stable/26894342.

Kohn, Eduardo 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marshall, Ingeborg 1996. A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Newton, Alfred 1861. “Abstract of Mr. J. Wolley’s Researches in Iceland Representing the Gare-Fowl or Great Auk (Alca impennis, Linn). Ibis: 374-99.

Pálsson, Gísli 2024. The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rieppel, Olivier 2009. “Species as a Process.” Acta Biotheoritica 57: 33-49.

Thomas, Jessica E. Gary R. Carvalho, James Haile et al. 2019. “Demographic Reconstruction from Ancient DNA Supports Rapid Extinction of the Great Auk.” eLife, 26 November.  

Wilkins, John S. and Frank E. Zachos (eds.) 2022. Species Problems and Beyond: Contemporary Issues in Philosophy and Practice. Boca Raton, FL.; CRC Press.

Wolley, John 1858. Gare-Fowl Books. Cambridge University Library.