The wolverine to me has lately become not just iconic regarding wilderness but it also is a reminder of just how narrow has been our perspective on our northern hemisphere’s long natural history. I believe the speculation by some evolutionary biologists that the wolverine seems to have been adapted for the kind of landscape that used to be very common across the boreal and temperate north, but is now very rare. I’m referring to the periglacial edges of the continental glaciers. Now alpine glaciers are reduced in scale and continental glaciers non-existence except in the polar north and south, but not too long ago, and sure enough one day again, the really big continental glaciers dominate the landscape. When we are presented modern images of the ice age we are invariably shown images of Greenland or Antarctica, all white and forbidding. But those are polar climates and not quite like the glaciers would have been as they extended into the temperate continental zones. The glaciers as the spread out like melting ice cream would have had a perched surface of dirt and debris (it is afterall what a glacier does best), melted and melting, leaving the erosional products to form a kind of surfacescape that occurs in only rare instances now, for example the snout of the Muldrow Glacier on the Alaska Range’s north slopes that flow down from Denali. Instead of the vertical wall of hundreds if not thousands of feet often portrayed we see a relatively low-aspect array of hills supporting small drunken forests, meadows, wild water features like moulins, and waterfalls, and disappearing torrents of meltwater. Ideal habitat for lots of animals especially in light of the fact that the broad forelands of these glaciers would have been dominated by strong winds and almost no surface water due to the gravelly, sandy sediments that would form a wide stretch of almost desert like conditions. On the glacier itself the glacier produced high pressure system would mean that during the spring summer and fall there would be abundant sunlight.

A landscape like that is not stable, of course and a certain number of animals big and small would find themselves trapped. Their carcasses under boulders and debris piles would be a powerful attractant to a carrion eater who could trundle boulders and dig diligently and fearlessly to extract this resource, the wolverine fits that bill.

And today where they occur it is likely to be in remote alpine settings, seeking something to dig out from under scree or talus field, dead or alive.

Prior to the introduction of commercial hunting populations of wolverines still roamed in the temperate regions, northern Michigan, the Allegheny Plateau, The Black Hills and across the northland where these post glacial contitions still existed to a degree or as some thin echo, the wolverines having adapted to sharing the resources with other predators, stealing a cache or doggedly running down its prey.

The talk these days is all about global warming yet it is an undeniable fact that our geography if nothing else suggests that for whatever reason warming is not the norm for our current geography, nor will it be until the tectonic forces push/pull the continents into an arrangement that precludes the creation of persistent cold regions. The movement is slow but the earth is patient.

The not so distant past of the ice ages is still mysterious to us and so different its hard to imagine what it must have been like, but rest assured it wasn’t much like how we see it imagined in most books and on popular tv.

Of course understanding wolverines gives us a window into the past and maybe into the mystery of how our own ancestors (those H. erectus in Zhouchoutien, China, recently determined to be living 700Kya and of course the rumor of giant hominins across the same habitat where wolverines are sometime seen) were molded into modernity by the relentless climate change that still goes on all around us.