MEGAFAUNA —

First Victims of the Human-Caused Extinction

Baz Edmeades

Foreword by Paul S. Martin, author of Twilight of the Mammoths

(PDF version of this book here)

 

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Just to absorb the fact that these great Serengetis existed...

PART 1

Humans and their hominid ancestors have been exterminating big-animal species for a much longer period of time than we could, until recently, have imagined.

CHAPTER 1 — Speak out about endangered species
CHAPTER 2 — Her improbable presence
CHAPTER 3 — Time runs backward

PART 2

A closer look at some of mammals, reptiles and birds that disappeared from Eurasia, Australia, and the New World after Homo sapiens colonized those continents.

CHAPTER 4 — Lost Serengetis 1: Europe, with some remarks about Asia
CHAPTER 5 — Lost Serengetis 2: Australia and North America
CHAPTER 6 — Lost Serengetis 3: North America concluded; South America; the fact that big animals don't go into oblivion alone.
 

PART 3

The evolution of hominid inventiveness in Africa was a two-edged sword: it caused the early extinction of many of Africa's largest animals, but it also forced that continent's megafauna to evolve the behavioral defenses against our family which have enabled a relatively large number of its members to survive into the present.

CHAPTER 7 — Pithecanthropus alalus
CHAPTER 8 — Taung
CHAPTER 9 — Scary monsters can materialize out of the darkness
CHAPTER 10— Hominids as meat-eaters
CHAPTER 11— A radically different kind of faculty
CHAPTER 12— Still-marvelous but significantly reduced
CHAPTER 13— Technological evolution; bigger brains and bodies
CHAPTER 14— Fire

PART 4

Human intelligence started the current extinction-spasm; it alone can end it while there's still something worthwhile left to save.

CHAPTER 15— Spread of humans 1
CHAPTER 16— Spread of humans 2
CHAPTER 17— Deeply into the extravagant
CHAPTER 18— Metaphorical New Zealand
CHAPTER 19— The brink of full understanding

APPENDIX

The Ice Age neither caused, nor contributed to, the sudden and recent disappearance of the planet's "hugest, and fiercest, and strangest" land animals.

CHAPTER 20— An enormous, silent waterfall
CHAPTER 21— Strange, forward-leaning teeth of cold
CHAPTER 22— Explosions of warmth and moisture
CHAPTER 23— Borne along on a tide of rainforest
 
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