Twilight Of The Mammoths Summary

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Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America Imagine a world without the existence of animals. The obscure disappearance of all animal life would leave this indigent world eerily empty and silent. In Twilight of the Mammoths, paleontologist Paul Martin’s fundamental presumption is that the presences of megafauna during the “near time” of the late quaternary era are now extinct. An argument is set that the rapid expansion of humans have caused large herbivores and carnivores to go extinct worldwide. Over the course of this article Martin feels that the wild America that we know of is nothing but a shadow. With that being said, over 50,000 years ago numerous large mammals became extinct. Many theories came…show more content…
Martin throughout his article brings up climate change quite often. Using climate change, Martin goes back and forth between supporting and discrediting his own theory. Though his premise was on the human involvement, he seems to also favour the climatic change. As quoted in his article, “Climate change is frequently invoked to explain the near-time extinction spike. Geological evidence and shifting percentages of fossil pollen indicate that the late Quaternary was indeed a time of severe and rapid change” (Martin, 2005, pg.52-53). As an example he notifies us about the Galapagos tortoises. “Galapagos tortoises, died when exposed to cold weather…we cannot be certain that giant tortoises in North America did not have the physiological capacity to survive the coldest winters deep underground, like early homesteaders in the west who dug their cellars first so they could winter there” (Martin, 2005, pg.53). This quote implies that due to colder winters some animals did not have the physical capacity to survive. What I find confusing is the fact that, Martins’ main focus in this article was to produce evidence that points to human involvement as an explanation for mammal extinction, but he spends more time on climate change. Furthermore, I found Martins’ thoughts to be quite scattered, making the article hard to
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    SUMMARY & CRITIQUE ‘Twilight of the Mammoth’ by Paul Martin In the feature article “Twilight of the Mammoths”, the author, Paul martin, explains his opinions about the triggers of extinctions. Martin states that there are many causes to extinction, among such are climate change, meteor strikes, and diseases. The one cause that had made most sense to Martin, was what Richard Klein calls the ‘ecological shock of human arrival’, which means that as humans spread, many mammals of various sizes were

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