Savanna Grassland Quotes

They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…exactly the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth. Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.

I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling--why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do.

grasslands, grazing mammals, and pack-hunting predators evolved together. So if domestic herbivores can be managed such that their behavior mimics that of their wild counterparts, the grasslands—the African savanna or the U.S. prairies and plains, terrain that represents about 45 percent of all land world-wide—will regain the state of wild land: healthy, diverse, and resilient.

our short guts mean we can’t eat grass, and this is no small thing, especially if you consider that two million years of evolutionary history occurred in savannas and grasslands. Grasslands are enormously productive in biological terms; that is, they efficiently convert solar energy into carbohydrates. But that energy is wrapped in the building block of all grasses, cellulose, and humans cannot digest it, not at all. Our primary method for overcoming our

It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grasslands of East Africa some six million years ago were remarkably weak and vulnerable creatures. They stood less than five feet tall. They walked upright and could run on their two legs, but nowhere near as fast as the swift predators on four legs that pursued them. They were skinny—their arms could not provide much defense. They had no claws or fangs or poison to resort to if under attack. To gather fruits, nuts, and insects, or to scavenge dead meat, they had to move out into the open savanna where they became easy prey to leopards or packs of hyenas. So weak and small in number, they might have easily become extinct. And yet within the space of a few million years (remarkably short on the time scale of evolution), these rather physically unimpressive ancestors of ours transformed themselves into the most formidable hunters on the planet. What could possibly account for such a miraculous turnaround?

When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, they adopted an upright stance. Possessing already this powerful visual system, they could see far into the distance (giraffes and elephants might stand taller, but their eyes are on the sides, giving them instead panoramic vision). This allowed them to spot dangerous predators far away on the horizon and detect their movements even in twilight. Given a few seconds or minutes, they could plot a safe retreat. At the same time, if they focused on what was nearest at hand, they could identify all kinds of important details in their environment—footprints and signs of passing predators, or the colors and shapes of rocks that they could pick up and perhaps use as tools.

Australia had mallee, a semi-arid ecosystem with grasses, shrubs and small trees. Retallack’s research demonstrates that African grassland soils contain significantly more carbon than do Australian mallee soils, even when mean annual precipitation is the same. Retallack attributes the difference to the wealth of hoofed mammals in Africa’s savanna. “Australia presents us with a view of what the world was like before the evolution of grasslands,” says Retallack.13

These landscapes aren’t exactly native. Instead, they bear a striking resemblance to another part of the world, one that most of the designers and artists creating them had never visited: the African savanna. Much of East Africa is covered in savanna, an ecosystem consisting of rolling grasslands punctuated by clusters of trees. While there’s some debate among paleontologists about just how much of hominid evolution took place on the savanna, there’s little doubt that it was a significant habitat for early humans.

The deepening chill that had started when mud buried the redwoods continues to the modern day. Like the Eocene’s climate, the temperature of the intervening years has staggered up and down. We owe the origin of our own species to this cooling trend. When Africa’s forests retreated in a particularly cold and dry spell, our prehumen ancestors strode into the emerging savannah and grasslands. Homo sapiens evolved from these apes of the open country, and all our species’ history has unfolded in relatively cold times. The calm that I feel as I survey the scenery around the Big Stump- open vistas of grasslands and tree copses, created by cool aridity- is perhaps a judgment of the landscape wired deep in my human mind. An affinity for savanna-like grasslands is one of the neurological quirks that we humans carried with us as we spread across the world. Another is the desire to collect curios, especially pieces of the past. We’re a storytelling species, so perhaps these artifacts are anchors and touchstones for the tales from which we find our reality.

The notion of grasslands progressively replacing forests is a myth, and the environmental context of our evolution far more complicated. The savanna saga serves as a reminder of a human foible—trying to describe an entire forest when we can see only a few trees.