Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America

Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Organisms and Environments)

Publisher: University of California Press
Number Of Pages: 250
Publication Date: 2005-11-07
Sales Rank: 401378
ISBN / ASIN: 0520231414
EAN: 9780520231412
Binding: Hardcover
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
Average Rating: 5

As recently as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir, Twilight of the Mammoths presents in detail internationally renowned paleoecologist Paul Martin's widely discussed and debated "overkill" hypothesis to explain these mysterious megafauna extinctions. Taking us from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon, where he finds himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to other important fossil sites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's engaging book, written for a wide audience, uncovers our rich evolutionary legacy and shows why he has come to believe that the earliest Americans literally hunted these animals to death.
As he discusses the discoveries that brought him to this hypothesis, Martin relates many colorful stories and gives a rich overview of the field of paleontology as well as his own fascinating career. He explores the ramifications of the overkill hypothesis for similar extinctions worldwide and examines other explanations for the extinctions, including climate change. Martin's visionary thinking about our missing megafauna offers inspiration and a challenge for today's conservation efforts as he speculates on what we might do to remedy this situation--both in our thinking about what is "natural" and in the natural world itself.

Review:

Thought-provoking arguments and speculation

This is one of those books that may jolt the conventional wisdom implanted in your brain, especially if you are an environmentalist. First the negative...I thought the first 5 chapters, about one-half, of this book to be a bit boring, telling me more about sloth dung than I really wanted to know. But then the book picked up -- way up -- in interest.

The true "natural" environment of the United States, in Martin's view, existed 13,000 years ago before man got here and that it has been out of balance since. Martin comes down strong on the side that human beings were responsible for the extinction of many large mammals in the Americas about 13,000 years ago and his argument is persuasive. He also makes a strong case that human beings have lived in the Americas for little more than 13,000 years. This is a hot-button issue among archaeologists, but Martin's point is: if the Indians were here more than 13,000 years ago where are the signs of their presence? Not many, if any, have been found in a hundred years of looking.

His most interesting point and new to me was his proposals to re-people (wrong word, maybe "re-animate"?) the New World with representatives of the large mammals that became extinct. For example, why is that our government is trying to kill off the burros and wild horses in national parks? Horses originated in the Americas; they became extinct about 13,000 years ago. Why not allow them to reestablish themselves as a native species?

And then he really gets off on a speculative tangent, "rewilding America." Camels and Llamas lived in the United States until 13,000 thousand years ago; why not reintroduce them as native, wild species. Similarly rhinocerous, elephant, lion, tiger and other mammal species. To be sure the species of the mammals that became extinct are not exactly the same species that now live -- but close enough, in his opinion. An Asian elephant, he says, is closer genetically to extinct mammoths than it is to the African elephant.

Smallchief

Review:

A hypothesis is just that...

Twilight Of The Mammoths by Paul S. Martin is a book I wanted to read because I wanted to see what the author had to say about the overkill idea. That Ice Age extinctions were caused by human invasion of the New World and not by germs and sudden change in the climate.
I have to say he did a good job not only of explaining and defending his hypothesis but at pointing out the weak points in the other theories of how the mass extinctions of the megamammals came about. The book is a solid read but somewhat dry. Lots of data on kill sites, pollen, climate changes and lots of dung.
He also takes a few chapters to talk about the idea rewilding the New World. In some ways that has already been going on so we may wish to take a controlling hand in the process.
Published in 2005 the information is up-to-date and hard to argue with. But who knows what will be discovered in the years to come?

Review:

A convincing argument

For years Professor Martin has been making a convincing case that mass extinctions and extirpations occured whenever people arrived at a new location, from Hawaii and New Zealand to North America and Wrangel Island. In the book he shows that arguments against human-caused die-offs do not hold up. What was interesting to me was his idea of reintroductions. It had never occured to me that it might be beneficial to the ecosystems to replace the extinct populations with new populations. I would love to see it happen but of course I'm not holding my breath. It is hard enough to convince people to live with pumas, despite the indisputable fact that you are far more likely to die in a collision with a deer than by getting eaten by a predator. But reading the book gave me a new perspective on some of our debates about wild areas. In particular, I will definately look at feral horses and donkeys in a new light.

Review:

Onward with Pleistocene Park!

"Twilight of the Mammoths" is a gem of a book that traces the career work of one of America's most distinguished ecologists: University of Arizona Emeritus, Paul Martin. Martin begins the book with a crash course in Pleistocene ecology: a who's who of magnificent megafauna, from mammoths to mylodon ground sloths - most of whom vanished suddenly some 13,000 years ago ("Near Time," according to Martin). Surely readers will be surprised by how little this awareness has penetrated even the ecologically schooled. Martin aims to correct that oversight, by bringing the dimension of time - near time and "deep time" - into ecology.

Paul Martin is best known for his "Overkill Hypothesis." The great beasts of Ice Age America went extinct, he maintains, not because of climate change but because of us - specifically, the first mammals to arrive on this continent, across the Bering Land Bridge, equipped with weapons that could kill at a distance. This scientific memoir does a splendid job of helping the reader step by step engage with that issue and to acquire a deep sense of the historical twists and turns of its reception. Along the way, we are treated to sensory rich descriptions and storytelling of events and experiences that shaped Martin's outlook. The author is not only a scientist but one of the world's great naturalists - feeling and tasting his way through the landscape. And he is an elegant and sensitive writer:

"It will come as no surprise," Martin writes, "that I define 'the last entire earth' differently than did Thoreau. Prehistorians find that any given land begins to lose its wildness not when the first Europeans arrive, but when the very first humans do. In the Americas true wilderness was more than 10,000 years gone by the time Columbus reached our shores. It disappeared with the megafauna, whose calls gave voice to the forests and prairies." (p. 183)

He continues, "A great many large animals, gifts of the evolutionary gods, were destroyed before anyone drew their images on bone or stone or on the walls of American caves."

Just before "Twilight of the Mammoths" was published, Paul Martin was among a dozen authors proposing in a commentary in the prestigious journal Nature that it is not enough to mourn the near-tiime passing of the great beasts. Rather, we must embark on a kind of "resurrection." ("Rewilding North America", Donlan et al., 18 August 2005).

Martin's final chapter, "Resurrection: The Past Is Future," brilliantly and movingly establishes the argument and begins to develop the details. But it all began thirty years ago, and with just one man as lonely advocate. "Twilight of the Mammoths" revisits the highlights of those years.

To begin: In the mid-1970s, Paul Martin publishes an outlandish proposal in Natural History Magazine: "Bring Back the Camel!" Martin is advocating a return of the camel to shrubby rangelands in the western United States - in part because overgrazing of grasses by horses and cattle would be ameliorated by the browsing prowess of camels (which prefer noxious shrubs to silica-rich grasses). But he is also urging the introduction of camels as a kind of "repatriation" of a type of animal that not only used to live on this continent but whose family originated right here.

Paul Martin was, thus, bringing an evolutionary understanding to range management and conservation biology. His proposal to bring back the camel was met by a resounding silence. As decades passed, Martin kept at it: arguing (to no avail) for officials at the Grand Canyon to look upon feral burros not as troublesome aliens but as suitable proxies for the native members of the horse family that lived throughout the western United States until going extinct just 13,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, this Pleistocene ecologist was authoring and co-authoring all sorts of technical (but, nevertheless, always engagingly written) scientific papers supporting the theory for which he is best known: Overkill.

Finally, in the late 1990s, Martin published an idea that made his camel and burro advocacy look tame: "Bring Back the Elephants!" he declared in Wild Earth Journal. Well, this time, somebody was listening - several somebodies, important somebodies in the realm of conservation biology (e.g., Michael Soule) and in environmental activism (Dave Foreman). The commentary they co-published in Nature is bringing an exciting and monumental expansion in the scope of conservation biology. "Twilight of the Mammoths" is the historical foundation.

"It could be argued," writes Martin, "that taxa have an inherent moral right to continue evolving free of human intervention, or even that Earth as a whole has a right to demonstrate its fullest possible evolutionary potential. It could be argued that, as the species responsible for the extinction of so many taxa, humans have a corresponding responsibility to attempt their restoration when feasible. Like all sweeping philosophical and ethical arguments, these are open to intense debate." (p. 202)

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