By Paul S. Martin, author of Twilight
of the Mammoths
Baz Edmeades was trained as a lawyer at the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he grew
up, and at McGill University in Montreal. His Canadian law
practice focused on science and technology. Since the early
Nineties, his secret life as an anthropologist, big-game ecologist,
and recorder of African natural history has gradually supplanted
his legal activities. I first met Baz in 1997, at the American
Museum of Natural History program on Pleistocene extinctions
organized by Ross MacPhee.
In my chapter in Quaternary Extinctions 1984 (University
of Arizona Press, edited by Martin and Klein) I argued that
early-mid Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in Africa were
unusually severe compared with the Americas. The generic losses
focused on (1) the Proboscidea; (2) large to giant suid pigs;
and (3) large primates besides hominids.
These early African extinctions, more drawn-out and less
explosive than those that ravaged the megafauna of the Americas
near the end of the Pleistocene, were, I speculated, what
one might expect if evolving hominids were gaining traction,
"out-competing" suids and the less potent large
primates and even elephants (Deinotherium) unaccustomed to
wily, gregarious predators.
I did not pursue that idea in my Twilight of the Mammoths.
In this online book, Baz has, however, constructed a comprehensive
and persuasive argument that these early African extinctions
were caused by the rise of hominid ingenuity, and that they
were, therefore, an integral part of a process that would
later culminate in the intense and abrupt "near-time"
extinctions that would irrupt in the Americas, Australia,
Madagascar, New Zealand and the smaller islands of the Pacific.
In making that argument, Baz has produced the best treatment
of human evolution and environmental impact over the last
few millions of years, that I have seen.
His book conveys the extinction record and its meaning in
a friendly and unpretentious, and at the same time authoritative
way. No one, academic paleontologists included, has told this
intercontinental story, so important and so long neglected,
so well. Baz's writing is splendid, subtle on occasion, seemingly
understated, pianissimo, then suddenly FF, and spot on. I
love the occasional drive-by, such as the paragraph in Chapter
1 in which he takes the measure of the environmentalist David
Suzuki, who is (I imagine), well intended, but fatally misguided
and misguiding.
Read and enjoy,
Paul S. Martin,
Tucson, Arizona,
August 14, 2006.
INTRODUCTION
Just
to absorb the fact that these great Serengetis existed...