Books in Review 
A Sad Reflection 
of the Outside World 
by Ian Tattersall 
A World Like Our Own: Man and 
Nature in Madagascar, by Alison 
Jolly. Yale University Press, $29.95; 
272 pp., Ulus. 
Madagascar, as the title of Alison 
Jolly’s new book elegantly hints, is 
another world; if any place deserves 
the much abused title of “unique,” 
this is it. The thousand-mile-long mi- 
crocontinent possesses almost every 
type of biological community found 
elsewhere in the tropical world. But 
on Madagascar, which has been sep- 
arated from its parent continent, Af- 
rica, for upward of a hundred million 
years, each community is strikingly 
different. Rates of endemism — of 
uniqueness of species — are extraordi- 
narily high, and in the aggregate, this 
translates into a remarkable singular- 
ity of gestalt. 
Way back, the great island formed 
part of ancient Gondwanaland, the 
vast landmass that broke up to give 
us the southern continents we know 
today. At that time Madagascar 
shared the same pantropical flora and 
fauna with its neighboring regions. But 
since the breakup, which took place 
before the great periods of diversi- 
fication of many important biological 
groups, including the flowering plants 
and the mammals, the flora and fauna 
of Madagascar have been free to 
evolve in relative isolation from the 
outside world. I say “relative” isola- 
tion because not all the plants and 
animals in Madagascar today are de- 
scended from those living on the island 
at its separation from Africa. Immi- 
grants have crossed the water barrier 
from time to time, although most of 
these apparently did so at an early 
stage; recent arrivals such as the now 
extinct pygmy hippo seem to be the 
exception rather than the rule. 
The upshot of this history of iso- 
lation and highly selective invasion is 
an extraordinary natural experiment 
that tells us, in Jolly’s words, “which 
rules would still hold true if time had 
once broken its banks and flowed to 
the present down a different channel.” 
The founding species of the modern 
Malagasy biota were presented with 
virtually all of the ecological oppor- 
tunities available at similar latitudes 
elsewhere, and the descendants of this 
restricted spectrum of species have 
radiated to fill this vast ecological 
space. There are relatively few major 
animal groups living in Madagascar, 
but most of those present are rep- 
resented in great adaptive variety, pro- 
ducing, from different roots, entire 
ecological communities that parallel 
those existing outside. Take, for ex- 
ample, the lemurs, the subjects of 
Jolly’s own specialized studies in Mad- 
agascar. These primates, members of 
a suborder represented elsewhere only 
by a handful of small, nocturnal gen- 
era, display in Madagascar a full and 
fascinating adaptive spectrum within 
which remarkable parallels to other 
animals are found. For instance, not 
only did the lemurs evolve baboonlike 
diurnal ground-living quadrupeds and 
a large, orangutanlike arboreal 
hanger, but they also produced their 
own ecological equivalent of the wood- 
pecker, the Malagasy aye-aye. 
Sadly, however, Madagascar re- 
flects the outside world in another 
way, too, and this is what A World 
Like Our Own is essentially about. 
Although it was the last major in- 
habitable landmass to have been in- 
vaded by humans, Madagascar is al- 
ready one of the most devastated. Less 
than two thousand years ago, teeming 
forests covered virtually the entire 
face of the island. Now, thanks to 
the twin assaults of ax and fire, the 
forest protects a mere few percent of 
the land area, and the island’s life- 
blood, its soil, bleeds steadily away 
to the sea. Already entire vegetal for- 
mations have disappeared; many of 
the most fascinating animal species 
of Madagascar are gone forever. The 
pseudobaboon and the pseudoorangu- 
tan, for example, are known today only 
from their subfossil bones; the “wood- 
pecker” hangs on by the merest of 
threads. It is easy to separate those 
species still living and those now ex- 
tinct into separate compartments of 
the mind. But in Madagascar the di- 
vision is an unreal one; both the living 
and the extinct are participants in the 
same process: human destruction of 
nature. And it is with this process 
that Alison Jolly is above all con- 
cerned. Individual species, even those 
most lovingly described, appear al- 
most as incidental characters in her 
book; the conflict between man and 
nature is the predominant theme. 
Jolly recounts the story of a five 
months’ journey through Madagascar. 
She has done almost everything, been 
almost everywhere. She has climbed 
mountainsides through dripping rain 
forests in the company of cut-and-burn 
farmers and has contemplated ruffed 
lemurs bouncing through the treetops; 
she has held earnest conversations 
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