Disappointing book about an interesting topic. The Call Of Distant Mammoths is ostensibly about the extinction of the North American Pleistocene large mammal fauna; instead Ward wanders all over the terrain. There are annoying personal anecdotes and name dropping (if you’re going to claim first name acquaintance with “Greg Retallick” you should at least know that his last name is spelled “Retallack”). He uses a time machine to describe ancient environments – an unfortunate affectation I also noted in Simon Conway Morris’s book on the Burgess Shale fauna. A whole chapter tries to use Monopoly as an analog to evolution; it doesn’t work at all. Ward devotes an inordinate amount of text to the KT extinction, with the comment that it “holds the key” to Pleistocene extinctions – then never explains why he thinks so. There’s an annoying geographical error – Ward describes Folsom, New Mexico, as being “near the Four Corners area” – which is like describing Reno as “near the Pacific Ocean”. The book is further handicapped by horrific choices for illustrations. Most come from an 1864 book, La Terre Avant Le Déluge, with quaint etchings of dinosaurs and mammals (the wooly mammoth is especially weird, with all the hair concentrated on the spine, so the animal appears to have a giant Mohawk). These bear little or no relationship to adjoining text, and are usually dramatically incorrect based on current knowledge. About all I can imagine is the editor decided the book needed some spicing up with illustrations and grabbed some from a copyright-free source without (I hope) bothering to tell Ward until it was already in print.


Although he drops little hints here and there, Ward doesn’t get around to detailed discussion of Pleistocene extinctions until almost two thirds of the way through the book. At this point, things finally straighten out into a reasonably clear presentation. I wonder if the original work was much shorter – perhaps a magazine article – and was expanded into a book by adding a lot of extraneous material? Anyway, at the time the book was written (1997) the competing hypotheses were Clovis Overkill and Climate Change.


Although Ward favors overkill, he does a fair job of presenting the strengths and weaknesses of both hypotheses. In favor of overkill, every time humans showed up on a new landmass (Australia, North America, Madagascar, New Zealand) almost all the large fauna (adult body mass > 50 Kg) immediately disappear (to within the time resolution limits of the fossil record). The climate change idea is mostly supported by default – i.e., by objections to overkill.


Problems with overkill are acknowledged but explained (unfortunately, usually not rigorously but this is a popular book, not a scientific text). For the most common objection – where are the kill sites? – Ward notes that fossils are rare enough that kill sites would also be rare; at the time the book was written, there were about a dozen sites Clovis butchery sites for mammoths or mastodons, but only one unequivocal mammoth kill site. AFAIK, there are no sites where any other large extinct North American mammal – stag moose, horse, giant camel, ground sloth – was killed by Clovis technology, and there are no known kill sites for any of the other areas (Australia, etc.) proposed for overkill extinction. The original overkill model estimated that a population of around 1 million Clovis people could kill off the North American mammoth population in 1000 years – various newer models have refined that, noting that all you really have to do is kill the animals more rapidly than their intrinsic growth rate – for modern African elephants, about 2% per year.


Both climate change and overkill advocates use negative evidence – climate change doesn’t work, therefore overkill must have occurred, and vice versa. There’s a point to this for climate change though; the climatological record indicates that there had been climate changes more dramatic than the end of the Pleistocene numerous times during the period, yet 10 times as many genera went extinct after the appearance of humans in North American than in the entire million years before. Climate advocates counter by saying that despite vastly improved hunting technology, no large mammal has been driven to extinction since the Pleistocene (they seem to have overlooked the quagga and Stellar’s sea lion, but the point remains).


Unfortunately, after this reasonable but too short discussion – there’s a lot more detail and evidence than I’ve summarized here – Ward goes off track again with a couple chapters of environmentalist litany – we have to decrease the population, we have to make larger wildlife preserves, we have to press forward with genetic engineering (which was still politically correct in 1997), and the US has to stop using more than its “fair share” of world resources. The last chapter has Ward in his time machine again, this time visiting Kenya in the year 3001. All whites are extinct (skin cancer – remember when Freon was more deadly than carbon dioxide?), automobiles are nonexistent, everybody eats genetically engineered food, and all wild animals – in fact, all domestic animals – are gone. Shades of Paul Ehrlich and his predictions for the future that were falsified within a few years.


Can’t recommend this one for anybody; the only really well presented section is now out of date and the rest of the book is to meandering to be useful. ( )

A lucid and even handed attempt at explaining the disappearance of the Pleistocene mega fauna, although it was not able to dissuade me of the belief that these extinctions were human-caused. However, if you favor either climate or disease as the culprit, this book will provide support for those causes also. If you come to the discussion with no prior knowledge of the subject, this is a good place to start your journey. ( )