Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"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)

As a student of the Quaternary, I was excited about this book from the acknowledged near time expert, Dr. Paul S. Martin. I was not disappointed. Dr. Martin does a great job of building a pyramid of background information so any new student to Ice Age Extinctions will have a firm foundation. He even parenthesizes definitions behind terminology that might be new to the lay reader. For those new to Dr. Martin's angle on Ice Age Extinctions, he attributes all of the near-time megafaunal extinctions to pre-historic hunting. He dismisses climatologists' assertions that changing weather patterns contributed or were solely responsible for the end of so many large terrestrial animals in North America. Following his logic, Dr. Martin proposes a "rewilding" of America with not only wolves and horses, but with similar species of those animals no longer in existence, such as elephants and African antelope. Whether you agree with his assertions, assumptions or conclusions, you will find this book provocative and full of good science.

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

I enjoyed the content of Twilight of Mammoths and see it as a fascinating topic. However I have some issues with it, including:

1. While the content was fascinating (I have admitted little background in the topic), the writing technique was far less inspiring. Enough said on that.

2. The author fails to adequately discuss the lack of kill sites for mammoths and sloths and only mentions it in passing (he actually acknowledges the distinct lack of kill sites, having only found bison and other such kill sites with verifiable Clovis points). Shouldn't this be of primary importance?

3. The author talks at length of problems with the overchill theory (climate change). This is good. However why doesn't he discuss the overill theory (disease)? This seems to me quite feasible. Neglect of the topic undermines his desire for thoroughness.

4. The author fails to address the question (even though he quotes a student who once asked it): If humans catalyzed so many extinctions, what about slow moving bison, bears, etc.? How could humans find and kill American lions, but not brutish bovids?

5. The author fails to address how humans could be so thorough in their killing, extinguishing species from the most distant jungles in Central America. Even with advanced technology, this endevour would be most challenging today.

6. I like the anecdotes, but his thoughts seem scattered.

Please don't mistake my criticism for disapproval. The book is definitely worth the read, and I enjoyed it - I'm just trained to critique (an exercise exacerbated by the level of frustration with a text).

Paul Martin makes a strong arguement for human caused extinctions of ice-age mammals including the mammoths through human overkill hunting behavior. Insted of presenting an idea without support, Martin provides extensive documentation to support his position. However, as intriguing as his ideas about human involvement in the loss of ice-age and post ice-age mammals are, it is difficult to believe that humans spread to every nook and cranny of north, central and south America causing the extinction of every large mammal grouping present. Questions also arise regarding the type of animal they might have hunted versus other available animals. Why would early humans decide to hunt to extinction the giant bison when smaller and presumably less dangerous bison were available? Why would they possibly hunt the American lion, sabertooth tiger or dire wolves when there was, according to Martin, a wealth of animals available for food, skins and bone? Obviously, something happened toward the end of the last advance of continental ice sheets and the early peopling of the Americas, but I do not believe overkill is the sole cause of the disappearance of large mammals of the Americas. A combination of factors including human most likely is the cause of their loss.

Unlike some recent shots at global warming and human history by Flannery and Diamond, Martin doesn't have to boil his Overkill model down to layperson-ready nuggets and force you to swallow them on every page. While those texts were certainly brilliant, Martin knocks the wind out of you with a more up-tempo pace and a far more exciting mystery to solve. While certainly readable for non-scientists, Martin doesn't wait for you to catch up. But no matter, with the seeds of ancient 5-ton sloths and wombats as big as Volkswagens planted in your head, Martin has you by the tusk on page one. By the end, he's demolished overkill's opponents, and has you singing the songs of North American elephants--the centerpiece of the bold, impossible dream called the Rewilding of America.

This book falls somewhere between a popularization and a monograph. Written to be accessible to the non-scholar, it is also extensively endnoted.

While there has been an on-going debate about the role humans expanding throughout the world played in the extinction of the largest mammals, Martin makes a strong case that no other proposed explanation can account for the fact that large mammals died off at different times on different continents, consistent with the arrival of modern humans, but not with global climate conditions nor other events that can be identified. This book probably has more information on dating ancient dung than most people ever need to know!

One open question is the timeline for human habitation of the new world. Supporting the primacy of the Clovis culture certainly suits the author's timeline for megafauna extinction, and he presents the arguments against pre-Clovis sites. I'm less convinced on this topic. It may be that, for currently unknown reasons, the earliest humans in the new world managed only a tenuous existence, and that it was with the Clovis culture that people became continent conquerors. I expect this to be a topic of dispute for years to come.

The final section of the book is on "rewilding" America. Horses were native to North America before humans arrived. Escaped horses from the Spanish arrival repopulated parts of America. Bison, which hung on through the original period of extinction, have expanded and contracted with human activity, but seem to be expanding again. California condors now soar over the Grand Canyon. Why not other animals? There are no more mammoths, but elephants are close relatives. Giant sloths are gone for good, but rhinoceros can fill a similar ecological niche. So why not?

While it is an intriguing idea, and an idea in which I see merit, I just don't see it happening. Given their druthers, ranchers would have the Marines sent into Yellowstone to kill every last wolf. Just stopping that is about all we can hope for. Allowing elephants, which can be very destructive, to roam freely is a step too far to realistically contemplate.

Overall, this is an interesting book, and worth reading if the topic is of interest to you. It is not light reading, and won't pull the casual reader in and along. But it doesn't have the mind-numbing, hopeless density of many scholarly works, either.

I have read this book several times, as well as a number of other books on the subject and independent research as well, and to me, the author pts together in one volume just about all of the most cogent arguments in favor of human-caused extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. While there is certainly much more that can be said on the subject (the 'mammoth steppe' being a CREATION of the mammoth, not the other way around, etc), here are the soundest and best proved discussions. For those interested in the 'Pleistocene Park' project, I refer you to Sergei Zimov, and his marvelous work in Siberia (cehck him out on google).

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.

Dr. Paul Martin, the foremost proponent of the overkill theorem regarding Pleistocene/Holocene megafaunal extinctions, presents here the basics of the argument, along with anecdotes from his own career, and his suggestions for refilling some of the ecological niches vacated by the extinct megafauna.
Most of the book focusses on Dr. Martin's work in the American Southwest, in particular, his study of pack rat middens in the Grand Canyon and the remarkable Rampart Cave, one of the truly amazing paleontological sites in the United States. There are interesting discussions of the tantalizing clues that point in the direction of overkill as the cause of extinction - clues left both by the living and the dead - mammoth butchering sites; ecological "orphans" (osage orange, Kentucky coffee); pronghorn antelope speed needed to escape long-vanished American cheetahs; analogous disappearances of megafauna worldwide immediately upon human arrival (New Zealand, Madagascar et al).
The final parts of the book discuss how a truly natural American landscape might look, and suggests that a reintroduction of species we would view as exotic - elephants, camels, lions, etc - would in fact be a restart of evolution with guild members only recently absent.

Well worthwhile, as is all of Dr. Martin's work.