Part 2
A closer look at some of mammals,
reptiles and birds which disappeared from Eurasia, Australia,
and the New World after our species entered the regions in
which they lived.
In Part 3 we’ll talk about the way in
which African hominids evolved the power to exterminate large
animals on their home continent relatively early in their
evolutionary history, and how they took that power with them
into South Asia near the beginning of the Pleistocene 1.8
million years ago, and to Europe perhaps a million years before
the present.
We’ll continue that story in Part 4, by talking about
how Homo sapiens came into being in Africa about
a quarter of a million years ago, and how it left that continent
around seventy or eighty thousand years ago to overrun not
only the territories already occupied by the previous waves
of hominid emigrants, but to boldly go – pace trekkies – where
no hominid had gone before, to colonize all the planet’s
habitable continents. We’ll also discuss, in Part 4,
the impact sapiens had on the larger animals – including
the hominids – that it encountered in the course of this
Diaspora.
We won’t, however, be able to get a full appreciation
of how devastating that impact was, before we form an idea
of the richness and diversity of the faunal communities that
were affected by it. For that reason, we’ll defer our
discussion of how and why our species might
have destroyed the Eurasian, Australian, and American Serengetis
to subsequent Parts of this book, using this Part only to
acquaint ourselves with the extraordinary variety of mammals,
reptiles and birds that comprised each of those Serengetis.
The remarks I’ll make about Homo sapiens in
the following three chapters will be restricted, for the same
reason, to brief discussions about when it might first have
encountered each of the big-game communities we’ll be
talking about.
