|
|
|
Book Review
| Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America. By Paul S. Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 269 pp. Photographs, figures, tables. Cloth $29.95.
|
| After the end of the Last Glaciation from around 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, the fossil record shows the decline and then the extinction of many species of wild animals, particularly large mammals and birds, in the Americas, Eurasia, and Australia. The great question, which has come to be known as the megafaunal debate, has been and remains whether these extinctions were caused by climatic and subsequent environmental changes on their own or whether overhunting by humans contributed to, or was entirely responsible for the extinctions. Since he began research on climatic change in 1956, Paul Martin has been convinced that the primary cause of the extinctions was the impact of human hunters. |
1
|
|
In Twilight of the Mammoths, Martin has summarized the evidence for his side of this fascinating and important debate in which he has been a leader for the past half century and which was first widely discussed following an INQUA Congress on the subject in 1965 (P. S. Martin & H. E. Wright Jr., eds. Pleistocene Extinctions: the Search for a Cause, Yale, 1967). Martin's argument, and it is hard to refute it, is that when human groups moved into a new region where the largest animals had no experience of predation, for example the giant sloths in South America, the animals were easy prey. Some extinctions, such as the giant lemurs in Madagascar or the moas in New Zealand, occurred much later and have been proved by radiocarbon dating to coincide with human immigration, and it is strange that Martin makes no mention of the notorious extinction of the dodo by European sailors in the seventeenth century. |
2
|
|
In the greater part of the book, Martin describes the species of megafauna that became extinct in North America: giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, camelids, equids, and many species of carnivores and artiodactyls. From the plant remains in the fossil dung of Shasta ground sloths and fossil packrat middens found in caves in the arid West, Martin describes how it was possible to analyze and date the floral and mineral composition of the local environment in the early Holocene. He writes, "It was magical. We found ourselves time traveling." This summarizes Martin's abiding enthusiasm for his subject and the easy style in which the book is written, although every scientific statement is fully referenced in the text and in a bibliography. |
3
|
|
In order to prove that anthropogenic activity was the primary cause of megafaunal extinctions in the Americas, it is essential to provide absolute dates that coincide for the earliest human sites and the extinction events, and at present this is difficult to do. In Table 7 (p. 153) Martin lists the remains of mammoths and mastodons that have been excavated together with Clovis artifacts (these being the earliest stone tools found in North America). The radiocarbon dates of these sites center on 11,000 years ago, but there is some archaeological evidence to suggest that the Clovis hunters were not the first people to enter North America. Although Martin is skeptical about this evidence and his arguments for the Clovis hunters as exterminators are convincing some that climatic and environmental changes were the predominant factors in the extinctions. |
4
|
|
In the final section of the book, Martin outlines a plan for restocking the Americas with living megafauna from other continents. Introducing herds of elephants on American rangelands not only would help their conservation, it also would restore to these lands close relatives of the proboscideans that lived on them for millions of years. |
5
|
|
Juliet Clutton-Brock, FSA, FZS, has more than ninety publications on archaeozoology and the history of domesticated mammals. She is now retired from a research post at the Natural History Museum, London, and is an editor of the Journal of Zoology.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|