The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared

by Peter D. Ward

Book Overview

Just 12,000 years ago - at the height of the last Ice Age - saber-toothed tigers, giant ground sloths, camels, hippos and the great herds of proboscideans: giant mastodons and mammoths, extinct... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387949151
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Copernicus
• Length: 261 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 1.0" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

I Bet Al Gore read this book to: Complete Fantasy

Ok, I Will just give my thought on this book because anyone who understands Science and God will know this book is crap! Just like how the Government is trying to scare the world into Global Warming Terror (REMEMBER Y2K) To profit themsleves. We may have Global warming but anyone who has studied the history of the Ice Ages (humans didn't pollute in the mammoth days)and has also studied the melting ice caps on mars will realize that Global warming is far from being man made. We may have contributed to it, but we didn't cause it. Global warming is a cycle the earth goes through. We have been blessed the last few years with climate stability, but we live in an unstable world that does change. We are the generation that will see that change and the upcoming cycle occur. Don't listen to eveything Mr,Gore and these unresearched books try to teach you. Listen to God and learn your facts. If you wanna know what killed the Mammoths-->read up on Noahs Flood and really study it hard. Also read the Book of Job and Enoch--->Then apply some Science knowledge to it and you will have your answer to what killed the Mammoths

Ward nailed it!

Some truths are self-evident. That human beings are likely responsible for the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna is one of these truths. That we are still in the process of exterminating the remnants of the Pleistocene megafauna is another of these truths.Mr. Ward, in addition to being a fine scholar, is also a very talented writer who adds a generous touch of humanity to what could have been a very dry and intellectual read. I highly recommend this book. It's eye-opening, sometimes frightening, but largely on target. All in all, it's the best book on the disappearance of our era's megafauna since Leakey's THE FIFTH EXTINCTION, and the two books will share shelf space in my office.

The real elephant graveyards......

The extinction of ice age mammals and other megafauna is not just a periphereral topic. It is important because, as Mr Ward duly points out, in a sense WE are Ice age megafauna. The mammoths and mastodons and their extinctions are particularly interesting, not just from their romantic appeal, but because they are indeed representative of much that we can learn about what happened to other megafauna at the same time, and indeed about ourselves. A selection of both the probiscideans (elephant line) and hominids wandered out of Africa during the last few million years. Both hominids and the various probiscideans are large and adaptable to varying environmental conditions, including ice ages. Both seem wanderers by nature. Both are intelligent and social animals. Both have few natural predators. Both were very successful during climatic change, including the Ice Ages. Emphasis on WERE. What happened to the mammoths, and other megafauna? This book seeks to answer such a question- the causes, and moreover, the lessons we can learn from this about our own selves. Their extinction is not simple. Overhunting by humans is considered the most likely and significant cause, although there may well have been other contributing factors. Mr Ward contends that the end of the last ice age(s) created stress for mammoths and some other megafaunal species, which humans were then able to push over the edge through overhunting. It is true to say that without humans, they never would have gone extinct, as they survived many other climatic changes. However, the stress that was created by these climatic changes reduced their natural 'immunity' to such predators as humans in the first place, making it easier for humans to drive them to extinction. Basically, we kick other species when they are down. There are interesting discussions on wave front (killings), species threshhold and the like, stress, environmental change, elephant-and by correlation-suspected aspects of mammoth behaviour and nature, including gestation, rate of birth, mortality and its causes, and so on. Studies on modern elephants help us gain insight into what the mammoths might have been like, and so this book is also a good read for those who are interested in elephants in general. Some snippets include how elephants increase birth rates under stress, neglect their young in times of drought, the problems of poaching, their eating habits, and why they survived in Africa (they are already extinct in the wild in India). The basic thrust of the book concerns the debate between overhunting and the Clovis hunters which are suspected to account for their demise, and environmental causes. There are also some discussions on the extinction of other Ice age megafauna such as the diprotodon of Australia-a very large extinct elephant-like marsupial herbivore (there is a skeleton in the Coonabarabran Information Centre in NSW, Australia, recently found, which I have seen, with what looks like a spear point in its ribs

Some problems but Ward seems to know his stuff

I have to agree that Ward sometimes strays from topic, and gets in too much about himself -- but I read it all without getting bored, and apparently so did the more critical reviewers here. In other words, he can hold our interest even when he irritates a bit.The question in the title is: why did the ice age mammals disappear? Ward can point to a "smoking gun". I wondered about the detail, thrown in as an aside, that other predators crossed the Bering land bridge at the same time as humans: why then are humans the only possible suspects? Nevertheless, the analogy with the K-T extinctions is a compelling pointer.The anecdotes about scientific conferences and personal experiences are integral to the story, because they show why we should regard Ward as a trustworthy guide. For similar reasons, I applaud the speculative scenes where Ward describes what a time traveller might see while witnessing important turning points. As with a museum display, we lay folk know the scenes are fanciful, but generations of museumgoers will attest that this is the sort of thing that makes a story live. It would be easy to cram pure facts in, and others have done that; however, this style matches what the general public asks for.I find myself wondering at the end about other ice-age mammals, especially the sabre-tooths. I look forward to reading other Ward books now that I know he's a man with some answers.

A murder mystery

Peter Ward writes his book, The Call of Distant Mammoths, like a murder mystery (a metaphor he uses several times). The victims are the large mammals that disappeared after the last ice age. The perpetrator? Who knows? Peter Ward's thesis fingers early hunters who came across the Asian land bridge as a major, perhaps the major, cause of extinction. Like any good mystery book, Ward starts before the beginning by taking the reader on an imaginary trip in a time machine through past eras, periods and epochs as he revisits the major extinction events in earth's history and reviews their causes. The most recent, and perhaps best-known, extinction event is that at the K/T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. In all his examples, Ward makes the point that extinctions are rapid (at least on geologic time scales) events. I tend to agree, though I'd probably define rapid in terms of the speed with which organisms evolve. Ward gives some good background information regarding general points related to evolution. I especially enjoyed his clear but brief summary of human evolution, as well as the evolutionary history of elephants. With this introduction (which takes up about 1/3 of the book) Ward begins to make his case by examining the period of time around the last ice age. Ward finds more than coincidence in the emergence of human society and extinction of the large mammals at the end of the last ice age. As he puts it: "The time of the Ice Age is of utmost importance to humanity, for it is the time of our origin. We began this interval as australopithecines, ape-like forms living and dying among the other wildlife of Africa. We ended the ice Age, only 10,000 years ago, as humans, living on every continent except Antarctica. For humanity, the Ice Age was the crucible of evolution."I remain fascinated by the idea that the ice age may have somehow precipitated a crucial event in human evolution, and in doing so led both to our emergence as a species, and to the extinction of many ice-age mammals.I found chapter 5 particularly interesting. This chapter, titled "Wheel of Fortune," illustrates the problems with viewing evolution as strictly survival of the fittest, partly because the terminology is somewhat circular and self-referencing. Many organisms that seem perfectly fit for survival end up extinct because of pure, dumb, blind luck. Things like errant meteorites and other rapid changes to the environment make the process of evolution something like a roulette wheel. From another point of view, what constitutes "fit" today may constitute "unfit" tomorrow, given significant changes in the environment. It's not until the latter sections of the Book that Ward gets down to business and describes how our species precipitated the ice-age extinctions. In one explanation, human-caused fires were a major contributor. I must admit, I found this explanation wanting. Even today (with billions of