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

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The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why The Ice Age Mammals Disappeared ReviewPeter 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 our species on the globe and millions of urbanites seeking outdoor recreation) lightning-caused fires far outnumber those caused by people. Perhaps these primitive societies started the fires deliberately? At any rate, it seems that climatic changes that led to drying out, with more dry lightning would precipitate more fires than our early primitive ancestors would. But that's just intuition - right? Perhaps our ancestors were more destructive than I think they were. What seems equally hard to accept is that a few million hunters managed to cause the entire extinction of the mammoths and other large North-American mammals that went extinct at the end of the last ice age.
Perhaps the strongest point Ward makes is the correlation between the appearance of people in other areas (notably Australia) and local extinctions there. I found this particularly persuasive. I must admit to being skeptical about the proposed reasons, but the fact of a positive correlation cannot be casually dismissed. The presence of our species seems to correlate well with the extinction of lots of species - then and now. There remain, however, exceptions to be explained. After all, our species emerged from Africa, and Africa today has the world's largest assortment of large animals.
I believe the weakest area of Ward's thesis remains the (nearly) simultaneous extinction of literally dozens of other large animals at the same time as the mammoths. While ancient cultures, armed with obsidian spears, might have had a penchant for mammoth flesh, and caused their extinction, would (could) they have been such voracious hunters as to do the same thing to horses camels, and rhinoceri? These other species remain relatively anonymous in Ward's book, and I think the argument Ward makes would have been far stronger had he proposed how those animals also went extinct at the hands of primitive hunters.
I found Ward's results of computer simulations, showing that even relatively minor hunting can lead to extinction in a population that is already under stress, very interesting. It wouldn't be the first time our species has caused another to go extinct. Indeed many scientists would argue that people are currently precipitating the largest extinction event since the one that killed all the dinosaurs.
Having read Ward's book was an enriching experience. For me, this book illustrates the thrill of science.Unanswered questions and the thrill of the chase are what make science such a rewarding enterprise. If natural science is your bailiwick, you'll find lots to like about The Call of Distant Mammoths. I highly recommend it.
Duwayne Anderson June 15, 1999The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why The Ice Age Mammals Disappeared Overview

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