Читать книгу Giraffe Reflections - Dale Peterson - Страница 10

CHIMERAS

ONE WINTER DAY in the third decade of the third century BC, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek king of Egypt, presented in the capital city of Alexandria the biggest parade in history.¹ This Grand Procession, as it has been called—an all-day event that began with the morning star and ended with the evening star—was intended to express to the entire world the rising power, piety, and glory of old Egypt under her new Greek ruler.

To project power was essential given that the enemies of Egypt were themselves powerful and menacing. The military message of the Grand Procession would have been impossible to miss, since its final portions included a fully armed and armored display of close to 48,000 foot soldiers and more than 23,000 cavalry mounted on prancing steeds. A middle portion of the parade displayed ninety-six elephants marching four abreast and harnessed, in that formation, to twenty-four enormous chariots. These would have been just a portion of Philadelphus’s war elephants, barged downriver from their training quarters in Memphis for the parade. Armored with quilt-wrapped metal or fire-hardened leather, armed with sharp metal blades affixed to their tusks, taking onto their backs skilled javelin throwers, and emotionally fortified at the last minute with buckets of red wine, the parading pachyderms could readily be transformed into fearsome battle tanks supporting phalanxes of Egyptian infantry and cavalry.

Yes, it was a military parade. But the Grand Procession was also a religious one, an unfolding projection of pious obeisance to the deeper powers of the universe—powers, of course, as the Greeks understood them, and in this instance concentrating on the grape-growing, wine-making, mind-expanding powers associated with the god Dionysus, from whom the Ptolemies had begun claiming ancestral descent.

In honor of Dionysus, the parade was opened by actors dressed as the god’s companions and allies, the older Sileni (who restrained the crowds) and the youthful Satyrs (wearing artificial tails and outrageously large phalluses and carrying torches of gilded ivy). Next came incense—aromatic clouds of frankincense, myrrh, and saffron wafted into the air—followed by more costumed actors representing further aspects of the Dionysian myth. Then came a cart more than twenty feet long and a dozen wide, drawn by one hundred eighty men and transporting a fourteen-foot-high statue of Dionysus himself, dressed in a purple robe with a draped fold that was purple interwoven with threads of gold. Shaded by a fruit-laden, vine-laced canopy and standing before a golden table holding numerous gold vessels, the statue poured a continuous libation from an enormous, two-handled gold cup. Other celebrations to grapes and wine and the wine god followed, including a cart drawn by three hundred men transporting a giant wine press filled to the brim with ripe grapes. Sixty Satyrs sang stirring songs while stepping squishingly onto the grapes. Now came six hundred men pulling a bigger cart containing a double-spouted wine vessel made of leopard skins and pumping seasoned wine into the street as it passed. One hundred twenty Satyrs and Sileni followed, carrying gleaming vessels of solid gold, and they were followed in turn by a giant silver bowl on a cart drawn by six hundred men. More statues passed by, including an eighteen-foot Dionysus lying on an elephant, a golden phallus one hundred eighty feet long, a gilded thunderbolt sixty feet long, and a gilded shrine sixty feet in circumference. Thus passed the iconography representing the spiritual moorings of Egypt’s latest rulers.

The glory of Philadelphus’s Grand Procession was largely an exuberant expression of economic triumph, a day-long presentation of one gleaming treasure after the other, demonstrating—with a veritable river of jewels and silver but above all gold, gold, and gold—the astonishing wealth that the Greek king had accumulated on behalf of himself and his subjects.

But Philadelphus’s glory was also expressed more diversely in the form of a living zoological wealth, as he revealed his command over the many creatures, both dangerous and docile, he had gathered from all over the known world. Thus, the ninety-six elephants lined up in rows of four and harnessed to chariots were followed by a parade of two-animal chariots drawn by one hundred twenty goats, thirty hartebeests, twenty-four saiga antelopes, sixteen ostriches, fourteen oryxes, fourteen Persian wild asses, eight Asian wild asses, and eight horses. Small boys and girls rode in the chariots, the boys dressed up as charioteers, the girls as warriors. The procession also included twenty-four hundred dogs of various breeds and—destined for ritual slaughter—four hundred fifty sheep and forty-six head of cattle. Meanwhile, men carried trees laden with birds and animals of many sorts. More men carried cages containing guinea fowl, parrots, peacocks, pheasants, and other exotic birds. And yet more paraders guided and restrained nineteen cheetahs (three of them cubs), fourteen leopards, four lynxes, one bulky bear, one hulking rhinoceros, and one no doubt very elegant giraffe.²

The giraffe may have been Ptolemy Philadelphus’s most singular surprise. That animal was, as far as the historical record reveals, the first giraffe to reach Egypt for nearly a thousand years—with the closest known predecessor harking back to the time of Ramses the Great, who, according to a painting on a temple wall, received a giraffe as tribute from Egypt’s southern neighbors along the Nile during his reign as pharaoh from 1279 to 1213 BC.³

A thousand years may seem like a long time—approximately the remove between ourselves and such hoary historical events as, say, the Norman Conquest of England. Why so long? And what were the consequences of such a distance in time?

The first question has a simple and obvious answer. It took so long because it was so difficult. Giraffe ancestors originally came from Asia, and they moved into Africa during a migration that happened around seven million years ago. This event could have occurred gradually, perhaps over hundreds or thousands of years. From a forgotten, mysterious place far to the north and east, so we can imagine, they migrated, moving, always moving, through life and birth and death, following not a vision but the scent of steady moisture and the food it would foretell. They ambled across the Arabian land bridge and on to the very edge of Africa where, through an open door, there appeared the promise of sufficiency.

Through the open door they passed. But then, over time, the door began to swing shut behind them. The rains, in other words, began to fail. The monsoons that had once pulled endless clouds of water away from the seas, carried them overland and into the northern reaches of a continent, lost their energy. The weather and then the climate changed. The welcoming wet lands of northern Africa, that great green cap of a continent, turned drier. Rivers became seasonal, then unreliable, then nonexistent, leaving a faint feathery trace across the sandblasted land. Vegetation turned brown, withered, became sparse. It died or survived by adapting to this far less merciful world. The earth turned barren and hostile, becoming a seething wilderness of sand piled against rock, with a ragged palisade to the north and west. In the west, the wilderness broke at last into cliffs that slipped into the boiling ocean. To the east, it descended finally into the shallows of a warm salt sea. The great green cap of Africa became a great brown cap. At 3.32 million square miles, this impossible wilderness now approaches the size of the United States. It is what you and I, harkening back to the Arabic word for desert, call the Sahara.⁴

So the Sahara was once wet and green. In fact, it was several times wet and green, that condition occurring in a slow and steady oscillation with dry and brown, with the latest wet period receding some six to eight thousand years ago.⁵ That is recent enough that we can examine the cultural evidence of teeming wildlife in a vast plateau of southeastern Algeria, the Tassili n’Ajjer. Here, in one of today’s most unforgiving environments, we can contemplate a gallery of some 15,000 rock paintings and etchings, many of them drawing us back to a time when the place was a grassy savanna washed by rivers and streams, when such water-dependent species as crocodiles and hippos were abundant, when the many game species included large mammals such as giraffids and giraffes.

Giraffes are capable of surviving in very arid environments. Karl and I sighted them foraging along dried-up riverbeds and running past giant sand dunes in the deserts of northwestern Namibia. They can endure for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, without actually drinking water, as long as they find food that includes enough moisture. In that sense, they resemble dromedary camels: famously tolerant of extreme aridity and used for transportation in the Sahara. Both giraffes and camels have slit-like nostrils, which may be an evolutionary adaptation to windblown sand. And again like camels (and only a few other large-bodied, warm-blooded species), giraffes have a thermo-regulatory system that allows their body temperature to drift. Giraffes thus have less need to expend energy keeping themselves cool on exceptionally hot days and warm on very cold nights.

Nevertheless, as that latest shift in climate began transforming the Sahara from grassy savanna to barren desert, the giraffes and a number of other large mammals living in the Sahara went extinct or began retreating south. The door, as I say, was closing.

The final crack of that closing door was the Nile Valley. Giraffes lived along the lower Nile as late as 3800 to 3400 BC, when early Egyptians were producing pottery and carving ivory knife handles that sometimes depicted them. In the fifth dynasty (2750 to 2625 BC), a hunting scene that included a giraffe was carved in bas relief on the tomb of King Unas at Sakkara. The tomb of Ukt-Hop in the twelfth dynasty (2000 to 1780 BC) portrayed, alongside the hunting dog and the arrow-pierced antelope, another hunted giraffe. But that was the last. Giraffes may have gone locally extinct in Egypt around four thousand years ago.⁶

Giraffes were still alive, of course, enduring in richer and less settled lands to the south. But contact between Egyptians and their southern neighbors along the Nile Valley was limited by the difficulty of passing through the river’s cataracts and the forbidding deserts and mountains surrounding them.

Queen Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty (1508 to 1458 BC), overcame that limitation by organizing trading voyages on the Red Sea. Hatshepsut sent five large ships, each around seventy feet long and crewed by more than two hundred men, down the Red Sea to what was called the Land of Punt at its southern end, thereby enriching the Egyptian treasury with such coveted items as gold, ivory, ebony, and myrrh. The ivory came from elephants, but Egyptian records of the expedition indicate that Punt was also a land of baboons, hippopotami, and leopards, while carvings on Hatshepsut’s tomb indicate a live giraffe brought back from Punt as a gift or tribute to the queen.⁷ A few other pharaohs received giraffes as tribute from lands along the southern Nile, including King Tutankhamun and, as I mentioned earlier, Ramses the Great. Then came the thousand-year gap.

In Egypt, giraffes may have simply ceased to exist, even as lonely captive animals kept alive in some pharaoh’s garden, after the death of Ramses. How much longer would it take before that absence of physical fact would become an absence in memory? And as Egypt was drawn, during the next millennium, into the orbit of a larger Mediterranean culture, how would that amnesia come to affect the Western world of classical times?

The Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BC) traveled extensively in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and he spent time in Egypt around 454 BC. Herodotus regularly included in his nine-volume History the often strange and sometimes fanciful accounts of travelers to and from exotic places. Herodotus had nothing to say about giraffes.

A century later, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote with astonishing catholicity and an often impressive precision about zoology and natural history, producing the world’s first zoological encyclopedia. Firsthand knowledge about elephants arrived in the Mediterranean basin during Aristotle’s lifetime, brought from the east by his erstwhile student, Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s extended and detailed commentary on elephants was generally accurate enough to remain relevant until well into modern times. He, too, failed even to mention giraffes.

By the time of Herodotus and Aristotle, giraffes may simply have ceased to exist for the Mediterranean world, physically or conceptually. Neither whispered nor speculated about. Not remembered or dreamed about. Not even imagined as, say, a fantasy creature of many parts, a strange and mythical chimera rising out of some wavering obscurity at the far end of the Nile.

Ptolemy II Philadelphus reopened the door to giraffes not so much out of curiosity or a sense of adventure, although such inclinations surely were part of the equation. He did it, perhaps primarily, out of an ordinary, old-fashioned fear: the reasonable fear of being annihilated in war.

Elephants had come to the Mediterranean in 325 BC, when Alexander the Great returned from India trailing, as tribute extorted in peace and booty seized in war, around two hundred fearsome war elephants. Establishing his imperial capital at Babylon, the young man settled down to rule his empire from a golden throne in a tented pavilion, surrounded by a bodyguard of Persian and Greek soldiers and a central corps of war elephants. He appointed an elephantarch, a commander of the elephants, and he moved to integrate the animals more fully into his own forces. Elephants would be an essential part of his new war machine and would lead him to future conquests and even greater glories . . . or so the young man may have dreamed. Unhappily, he died of a sudden illness at the age of thirty-two, before any such dreams could be realized.

Alexander’s death was also the death of an empire. In a series of campaigns waged south into Palestine and Egypt, west into Turkey and Greece and Italy, his several former generals and viceroys fought each other ferociously, using the latest and most impressive weapon anyone from the West had ever seen: elephants, the battle tanks of the classical world.⁸

Among the competing inheritors of the shattered empire were Seleucus and Ptolemy I. Seleucus established his military headquarters in northern Syria, where he stabled his own trained corps of about five hundred elephants recently acquired from India. A glorious image of elephants pulling Seleucus on a chariot was stamped onto a coin of the realm, while the real Seleucus and his real elephants in Syria must have disturbed the sleep of Ptolemy I in Egypt, who could marshal only a few dozen of the creatures with which to defend himself and his piece of empire.

Ptolemy I acquired some of the imperial charisma by stealing Alexander the Great’s body as it was being shipped back to Greece, then installing the rotting corpse in a gold sarcophagus inside a grand mausoleum at Alexandria, the newly founded city at the Mediterranean tip of Egypt. But charisma was no substitute for elephants, and, for Ptolemy, the big problem with elephants was how difficult they were to acquire. Indeed, the fact that all war elephants came from India and were members of the Asian species now put Ptolemy and his pathetic pack of pachyderms at a terrible disadvantage, since Seleucus controlled the route east to India.

Ptolemy’s solution was to look south, to the shady glens and shadowed forests of deeper Africa, Africa south of the Sahara, and to acquire African elephants. After Ptolemy’s death, his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus took up the cause. It was already known that such animals could be found to the south of Egypt, but Philadelphus sent military and diplomatic expeditions down the Red Sea and up the Nile to discover more precisely where they were and how to get some. Some of those expeditions returned with reports on the geography, people, resources, and mercantile opportunities in lands south along the Red Sea, while others reinforced the long-standing ties between Egypt and the people living along the southern Nile, particularly in the kingdom of Meroë, in today’s Sudan.

To Meroë, Philadelphus sent teams of Egyptian soldiers and Indian elephant trainers (mahouts) who, working with the local experts, began to capture, tame, and train elephants.⁹ Meroë maintained its regular trade with Egypt, going north by way of the Nile, but the river’s cataracts meant that the captured elephants could not be sent directly north on river boats. Instead, once they had been trained well enough to walk under the command of the Indian mahouts, they were marched east for several days until they reached the Red Sea, loaded onto specially designed (sturdy, flat-bottomed, shallow-drafted) elephant boats, then sailed north for several days to a few weeks, then marched west across the desert for about twelve days until they reached the Nile in Egypt. At the great river, the elephants were walked onto barges and floated downstream to Memphis, where they would be trained to serve in war.

Had he been a warrior like his father, Philadelphus might have been satisfied with the growing size and power of his new elephant corps in Memphis. But Philadelphus, for all his emotional and physical weaknesses, was imaginatively ambitious in ways his father was not. In the words of the first-century Greek geographer Strabo of Ephesus, the young Ptolemy was “of an inquiring disposition, and on account of the infirmity of his body was always searching for novel pastimes and enjoyments.”¹⁰

The father had established the great museum and library at Alexandria, but the son brought in scholars and expanded those institutions until Alexandria was the center of learning for the Western world. Likewise, Philadelphus was not content with the acquisition of elephants, or even with the southern expeditions’ secondary effect of opening new gold mines and expanding Egypt’s trade and influence into Arabia, India, and sub-Saharan Africa.¹¹ Philadelphus encouraged the capture and transport of all sorts of exotic animals, bringing them back as specimens for his growing menagerie in Alexandria.¹² None of these animals would be useful in the way he expected elephants to be, of course, but for Philadelphus they were parts of a living zoology and at the same time impressive collector’s items that would contribute to the charisma any great ruler strives to maintain.

The Greek historian Diodorus wrote that Philadelphus was “interested in capturing elephants” and “gave liberal rewards to those who engaged in the strange hunts for these powerful animals. He spent large sums of money on this hobby, and collected a considerable number of war elephants; moreover he acquainted the Greek world with other strange and unheard of animals.”¹³ Philadelphus’s giraffe, exhibited before the world that winter’s day in the third decade of the third century before Christ, was one of those “strange and unheard of animals.”

Giraffes, in truth, were so strange and unheard of that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians knew what to call them, and so the Greeks were forced to invent a name.

The difficulty of choosing a name for this creature was like that of naming anything that appears strikingly outside the usual categories—like, for example, naming an unusual sound or a peculiar smell. Without the guidance of comparative examples or rational categories, one resorts to creative metaphor.

The namers of Philadelphus’s giraffe could have been the leaders of an early capture expedition to the south. Perhaps they were Greek translators chatting casually with Egyptian crew members on an elephant boat transporting the just-captured animal north on the Red Sea. Whoever they were, the namers would have had the same problem—what do you call something that defies the known categories?—and so they named him using the most telling associations they could think of. The creature had a rather camel-like face, and he seemed tall and lanky like a camel. At the same time he had those peculiar spots. Not at all like a camel. More like a leopard.

They called this new animal a camel-leopard—or, as the English translators more often represent it, a camelopard. And since the Greeks, like the rest of us, had trouble distinguishing a figure of speech from a figure of fact, they came to imagine that camelopards were the natural product of a camel mating with a leopard. They were hybrids in name and fact, fantastic chimeras taken from the depths of sub-Saharan Africa.

The Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus, writing around 104 BC, refers to giraffes in his natural history of human tribes and exotic animals living in the harsh regions west of the Red Sea. His original text was lost, but not before later authors extracted passages, such as the reference to giraffes as animals “which the Greeks call camelopardalis, a composite name which describes the double nature of this quadruped. It has the varied coat of a leopard, the shape of a camel and is of a size beyond measure. Its neck is long enough for it to browse in the tops of trees.”¹⁴

Strabo of Ephesus, however, writing in the next century (and citing the work of a geographer named Artemidorus, whose work has been lost) insisted that “camelopards . . . are in no respect like leopards”:

for the dappled marking of their skin is more like that of a fawnskin, which latter is flecked with spots, and their hinder parts are so much lower than their front parts that they appear to be seated on their tail parts, which have the height of an ox, although their forelegs are no shorter than those of camels; and their necks rise high and straight up, their heads reaching much higher than those of camels. On account of this lack of symmetry the speed of the animal cannot, I think, be so great as stated by Artemidorus, who says that its speed is not to be surpassed. Furthermore, it is not a wild beast but rather a domesticated animal, for it shows no signs of wildness.¹⁵

Strabo was wrong, of course, in insisting that giraffes are domestic animals. But he was right in recognizing their gentleness. And his second error, that they are not especially fast runners, confirms the already obvious fact that he never saw a giraffe running free. Still, the overall precision and self-assurance of Strabo’s description do suggest that he had either seen a live giraffe—albeit one in captivity—or spoken at length with someone who had.

If so, which giraffe might that be?

Strabo traveled widely in the eastern Mediterranean; he came to Rome around 44 BC, and he took part in a Roman expedition up the Nile into southern Egypt in 25–24 BC—just a few years after Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, committed suicide, thereby ending the rule of the Greeks. Egypt became a Roman colony. But Cleopatra, during a happier time and following the fashion that originated with Philadelphus two centuries earlier, probably kept exotic animals on the palace grounds in Alexandria. Perhaps Strabo saw one of Cleopatra’s giraffes, after she was gone and Romans were occupying the palace. . . . Or perhaps Strabo was in some way familiar with the live giraffe Julius Caesar displayed in Rome as part of his 46 BC triumph, which happened while Cleopatra was still alive: Caesar’s guest in Rome while still Egypt’s queen.

Romans had by then become accustomed to seeking live animals for their increasingly grand and fantastically bloody animal spectacles. Exotic live animals thus became part of the normal economic exchange between Rome and her colonial empire. From the colonial wildernesses, then, specimens were routinely captured, caged or otherwise restrained, placed on any available boats, and shipped to Rome.¹⁶ Giraffes, though, only came into the Mediterranean from Egypt, taken as ever from far to the south—Ethiopia, for instance—and passed as usual down the Nile, portaged across the cataracts, brought into the country as a prize for the royal collection in Alexandria. To be sure, Caesar’s soldiers could have acquired one directly, from a commercial or diplomatic exchange with people to the south of Egypt. But I agree with biographer Stacy Schiff author of Cleopatra: A Life (2011), who argues that the Egyptian queen herself was probably the original owner of Caesar’s giraffe.¹⁷

Cleopatra left for Rome in the summer of 46 BC, transported, along with her and Caesar’s one-year-old son, Ptolemy Caesar, plus essential servants, in a naval galley: likely a swift-running 120-foot trireme powered by square-rigged sails and 170 oarsmen. The royal boat proceeded out of the Alexandrian harbor accompanied by a grand flotilla of supporting vessels, enough to transport the royal retinue and bodyguard and a large personal and institutional staff—astrologers, priests, philosophers, advisors, physicians, secretaries, cooks, and so on—as well as loads of personal effects and opulent gifts of the sort one would expect from the world’s wealthiest person, the great monarch of a great civilization, an official goddess, and Julius Caesar’s lover. Those royal gifts could very well have included a giraffe.

His size was about that of a camel; his skin, like that of a leopard, was decorated with spots in a floral pattern. His hindquarters and belly were low and like a lion’s; the shoulders, forefeet and chest were of a height out of all proportion to the other members. The neck was slender, and tapered from the large body to a swanlike throat. The head was shaped like a camel’s and was almost twice as large as that of a Libyan ostrich. The eyes were brightly outlined and rolled terribly. His heaving walk was unlike the pace of any land or sea animal. He did not move his legs alternatively, one after the other, but first put forward his two right legs by themselves, and then the two left, as if they were yoked together. Thus first one side of the animal was raised, and then the other. Yet so docile was his movement and so gentle his disposition that the keeper could lead him by a light cord looped around his neck, and he obeyed the keeper’s guidance as if the cord were an irresistible chain. The appearance of this creature astonished the entire multitude, and extemporizing a name for it from the dominant traits of his body they called it camelopard. –HELIODORUS, CA. AD 220

Cleopatra should have been satisfactorily ensconced in Caesar’s country estate, just outside the city walls, by the time the Roman dictator opened his eleven days of triumph, on September 21. The festivities consisted of grand parades, enormous feasts, spectacular entertainments, bloody gladiatorial contests, horse races, forty elephants lighting up the night with forty flaming torches held in their trunk tips, lions by the hundreds, leopards, panthers, baboons, monkeys, flamingoes, ostriches, parrots . . . and one giraffe.

The clearest report we have of that tall and undulatory beauty, the first of his or her kind ever to set foot on the European continent, comes from the poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC), who chided his fellow Romans as “a throng gazing with open mouth” taking foolish pleasure in the spectacle, particularly Caesar’s giraffe, which was “a beast half camel, half panther.”¹⁸ Caesar climaxed that memorable presentation, unfortunately, with blood: sacrificing the giraffe to hungry lions in an arena.

Later Roman worthies would parade a few more giraffes before the plebeian masses—ten of them together in the circus of AD 247, when the emperor Gordianus III celebrated Rome’s first thousand years¹⁹—but the essential rarity of giraffes may well account for the paucity of accurate descriptions we have. What notably remains, in the classical record, is a pair of evocative passages from two writers of the early third century AD. The first writer, Oppian of Apamea (in Syria), portrays giraffes, in his poem on hunting, Cynegetica, as animals of “a hybrid nature and mingled of two stocks,” the camel and leopard. The poem is dated by its dedication to the Roman Emperor Caracalla, meaning it would have been finished a few years after AD 210.

The second work is the Ethiopian Romance, a fictional entertainment that appeared around AD 220 and was written by someone using the pseudonym Heliodorus. Set in a North African world as imagined to have existed several centuries earlier, a giraffe appears in a grand procession marking the conclusion of a major war. Here, the triumphant Ethiopian king Hydaspes receives tribute from defeated enemies as well as congratulatory gifts from his friends and allies, the latter including the Auxomites, who offered “a marvelous animal of extraordinary appearance.”²⁰

“Chi-me-ra: 1) In Greek mythology, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. 2) Any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals” (New Oxford American Dictionary).

The ancient Greeks may have originally decided to call giraffes camel-leopards as a quick and simple reference to physical appearance: an animal with camel-like face, camel-like gait, camel-like legs, who is, however, covered with spots roughly suggesting a leopard. The name could have been nothing more than an easy shorthand for appearance. The description was sooner or later accompanied by a theory of giraffes as true hybrids: a remarkable cross leading to the rather miraculous convergence of physical features in the way that chimeras were imagined as miraculous conglomerations.

The opening photograph for this chapter shows a lone Masai giraffe standing near his reflection in a pool of water. The seguence below is a visual fantasy based on a concept of chimeras and the theme of reflections and resolutions, separations and convergences. The photographs show both Masai giraffes (in Masai Mara, Kenya) and reticulated giraffes (in the Samburu National Reserve, Kenya). Note how different the patterning is between the Masai and the reticulated: two groups of giraffes who live in the same general area of East Africa but have not interbred for more than a million years.