The Oldest Relationship

The relationship between people and crocodiles is older than agriculture, older than writing, older than almost anything we would recognise as civilisation. Not one country’s story. Wherever people settled beside crocodile water, from the mangrove deltas of India and Bangladesh to the great rivers of Borneo and New Guinea, out along the island coasts to the Solomons and down to the billabongs of the Australian north, the crocodile was there first, waiting, patient and ancient and almost perfectly built for the ambush. Not every warm shore carries one; the saltie's map has gaps and edges, and some waters that once held crocodiles hold them no longer. But where it lives, it has always lived, and to be safe around it you start by seeing it clearly. This is no freak of nature and no recent intruder. It is, arguably, the most successful apex predator the planet has ever produced, and it has every bit as much right to its water as we have to ours.

Crocodilians, the family that includes crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials, have existed in something close to their current form for over eighty million years. They shared rivers with the dinosaurs. Then outlasted them. The asteroid strike that ended the age of the great reptiles did not end the crocodilians. Neither did the ice ages, or the long procession of species that rose and vanished while the crocodile just kept going. The saltwater crocodile you might glimpse on a riverbank in Kakadu is the descendant of an unbroken line of survivors stretching back into a world we can barely imagine. When people call them “living dinosaurs,” it is not quite accurate, but the awe behind the phrase is entirely earned.