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

Ward (The End of Evolution), a University of Washington paleontologist, clearly loves his work, and writes about it capably and with passion. His new book, though ostensibly about the disappearance of mammoths and mastodons from the Americas, covers much more ground, delving into the extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the rise of Homo sapiens. Ward deftly summarizes a large body of scientific literature, simplifying complex ideas for the general reader without condescension and ultimately concluding that the continents' megafauna were hunted into oblivion by the earliest humans. (Late-breaking news pushing back the time of human arrival in the Americas by more than a millennium raises some questions about his conclusion but doesn't detract from the overall power of the book.) Ward winds up his book by extrapolating from early extinctions implications for modern-day conservation biology. His frequent invocation of the metaphor of time travel as a means of examining the past is the only less-than-successful aspect of his informative, enjoyable report. Illustrations. (Apr.)