HISTORY OF LIFE

1. The Origin of Life
   
2. Earth's Earliest Life
   
3. Sex and Nuclei: Eukaryotes
   
4. The Evolution of Animals
   
5. Life in a Changing World
   
6. Extinction
   
7. The Early Vertebrates
   
8. Leaving the Water
   
9. Amphibians and Reptiles
   
10. Reptiles and Thermoregulation
    
11. Triassic Takeover
    
12. Dinosaurs
    
13. Warm-Blooded Dinosaurs?
    
14. The Evolution of Flight
    
15. The Origin of Mammals
    
16. Marine Reptiles
    
17. Why Flowers are Beautiful
    
18. The End of the Dinosaurs
    
19. Cenozoic Mammals
    
20. Geography and Evolution
    
21. Primates
    
22. Evolving Toward Humans
    
23. The Ice Age
    
24. Humans and the Ice Age
    

The Pleistocene Ice Age

• Introduction to the Ice Ages
• Ice cores used for reconstructing recent climate patterns
• North America (and the world) during the last 150,000 years

Climate and Geography During the Ice Ages

Ice Sheet Maximum and Ice Sheet Melting

• The Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America
• Cool maps of the Pleistocene (18,000 Years Ago)
• and the Modern World.

There were bizarre consequences of ice-sheet melting, more than one of which may have altered human history: here is one recently discovered example:

The Black Sea Flood

• News article from the San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1999.
• A summary of the discovery , written by Brian Fagan for Discovering Archaeology magazine.

Ice Age Vertebrates

The Overkill Hypothesis (and others)

• The Blitzkrieg hypothesis, an October 1999 summary by Paul Martin.
• Diagram of Martin's overkill hypothesis for the Americas.
• A 1997 talk by Paul Martin at the Museum of American History.
• A 1997 talk by Vance Haynes on elephant hunting then and now.
• Here is a photo of a mammoth bone from Florida WITH CUT MARKS ON IT.
• How do you keep mammoth meat fresh? Dump it in the lake. News item on the work of Dan Fisher, from the University of Michigan. From the Discovering Archaeology site, March 9, 2000.
• Major feature on Pleistocene extinctions, Discovering Archaeology, Sept/Oct issue, 1999.
• Megaherbivores. Text of a 1997 talk by Norman Owen-Smith on the role of megaherbivores in the great extinctions.
• Environmental change. Text of a 1997 talk by Russell Graham arguing that environmental change was a dominant factor in the great extinctions, at least in North America.
• Climate Change. The Climate Change Hypothesis, which could work for North America (but only North America, I suspect). October 1999 summary.
• Hyperdisease.
  • Text of a 1997 talk in which Ross McPhee talks about his hyperdisease hypothesis.
  • The hyperdisease hypothesis, which I do not like one bit. It is extraordinarily difficult to kill off SO MANY different animals, with such different ecologies, and on so many continents, in this fashion. In Discovering Archaeology, October 1999.
  • From ABC News, October 2000. Yet another new story, but no new evidence. Paul Martin calls it a damn fool idea, and I agree. I would cynically add that a perfect way to detect cold viruses in a mammoth sample is to let schoolkids snort into your sample jars!

The Americas

The La Brea Tarpits

• UC Berkeley page about the La Brea fauna. Californian life before human arrival.
• What it's like to dig fossils at the tar pits. From ABC News OnLine, August 28, 2000.
• How the La Brea animals were trapped
• The Page Museum at the La Brea Tarpits, Los Angeles. Some of the La Brea animals featured at that site and elsewhere:
  • Mammoths and mastodons:
    • Mammoth
    • Mastodon
  • Big cats:
    • Discovery Channel's Sabertooth site
    • American lion
    • Sabertooth cat
    • Mural featuring the sabertooth cat
    • Sabertooth cat, from the Web page of the Illinois State Museum.
    • The biology of sabertooth cats. Article from Discover magazine.
    • The smile of a Smilodon
  • Sloths:
    • Ground sloth
    • Harlan's ground sloth
    • Shasta sloth
    • Studying DNA from sloth dung. Press release, July 1998.
  • Other mammals:
    • Horse
    • Bison
    • Bison latifrons, the very large extinct species
    • Camel
    • The bear Arctodus, the largest carnivore at La Brea
    • Dire wolf
  • Birds:
    • A teratorn skeleton
    • Teratorn
    • Teratornis merriami
    • The La Brea condor Breagyps

Mastodons in the East

• Mastodons
• A mastodon dig in New York state, 1999-2000:
  • Press release.
  • The discovery
  • The Chemung mastodons homepage.
  • Photos of the excavation.

Florida

• A completely new genus of sabertooth cat has been discovered in Florida, dating from perhaps 1 Ma. Here are two news stories.
  • A short item from Discover magazine.
  • Press release from the University of Kansas, with pictures.
  • Column by Lee Dye from ABC News OnLine

• Eremotherium, a giant (5 ton!) ground sloth that found its way to Florida from South America.
• A glyptodont (giant armadillo) that made it northward into Florida before it died off after the last Ice Age: Holmesina.

South America

• Extinct mammals of South America: Glyptodon and Toxodon
• Charles Darwin's "Voyage of Beagle" Report on Megatherium, Toxodon, etc.

Human Arrival in the Americas

• Feature article from Scientific American, September issue, 2000.
• More critical appraisal by Anna Roosevelt, disguised as a book review. From Natural History, July 2000.
• The Meadowcroft site, which suggests pre-Clovis arrival. Feature article, October 2000.
• Discovering Archaeology featured this problem in many articles in the 7/99 issue, ?January 2000? You can get at least summaries starting here.
• The fascinating story of the first discovery of ancient humans in North America, the Folsom culture.
• The Smithsonian Institution's Web page on the peopling of the Americas. It does contain what I think is a wild suggestion (that the Americas were settled across the Atlantic, by Europeans). But other theories are well covered too.
• Snappy article by Tabitha Powledge on the maritime arrival of the first Americans. Written for the Summer 1999 issue of California Wild, the magazine of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
• Report on the offshore West Coast region, now submerged, along which the first arrivals may have travelled. Article from Science News, February 5, 2000.

Evidence from linguistics:

• Friendly article about the work of UC Berkeley linguist Johanna Nichols, who tries to infer ancient migration from modern languages. From the UC Santa Cruz scientific writing program, 1999.

The Monte Verde site, in Chile

• The Monte Verde site in Chile, a New York Times article from 1997.
• Follow-up article from August 1998, also from the New York Times.

New evidence of pre-Clovis people at Cactus Hill, Virginia:

• Earlier report, Scientific American, November 1998
• Press release from National Geographic, April 2000
• an article from the New York Times, April 11, 2000.
• Article in Science News, April 15, 2000.

Kennewick Man. On a separate page.

Australians as the first Americans?!?

Europeans as the first Americans?

Native Americans as ecological stewards of the land?

Meanwhile, Native Americans skewed the biology of seals and sealions along the California coast. News item from Davis, California, 1997.

Large North American Animals

Megaherbivores and Medium-Sized Animals

Daniel Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania has suggested that these fruits coevolved with large elephants (gomphotheres), which became extinct with the other large American mammals. I'll let Wayne have a word on the fruits and seeds involved. Meanwhile, Carlos Yamashita has suggested that macaws were involved too.

Survivors

So who killed off the buffalo?. It's not as simple as you thought.

Australia

• Text of a 1997 talk by Tim Flannery summarizing the timing of Australian extinctions.
• Text of a 1997 talk by Tim Flannery summarizing the nature of Australian extinctions
• The Marsupial Lion Website
• Large Pleistocene Horned Tortoise from Lord Howe Island: Meiolania
• Tasmanian Wolf/tiger
• The The Tasmanian wolf is probably extinct.
• Proposal to clone a Tasmanian tiger (by Michael Archer).
• Dinnertime at Cuddie Springs: Human hunting and butchering Australia's native megafauna?
• Research from January 1999, implicating human-generated fire in the extinction of the Australian megafauna: Press release from Science

Island Extinctions

• Text of a 1997 talk in which Richard Holdaway summarizes New Zealand extinctions
• New Zealand: the Moa Pages
• Text of a 1997 talk in which David Burney summarizes extinctions on Madagascar.
• News article from June 2000, which suggests (without citing the evidence) that the elephant bird Aepyornis may have survived until fairly recently. Story from Independence Avenue.
• Europeans killed off the dodo on Mauritius.
• A dodo Web page
• The Gigantic Cuban Owl Ornimegalonyx

Polynesia

• Timing the colonization of Polynesia by using lizard genetics. From Nature news writers, January 21, 1999.
• Text of a 1997 talk in which Helen James summarizes extinctions on Hawaii.

Experienced Faunas

Northern Eurasia

Pleistocene Mammals in Russia, at the Russian Paleontological Institution

The most important local extinctions in the Old World took place in habitats that modern humans were invading in strength for the first time. The large mammals were hunted out of the optimum part of their range, and then the last survivors hung on in the inhospitable (usually northern) parts of their range until newly invading humans or climatic fluctuations killed them off. For example, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant deer , along with horses, elk, and reindeer, reinvaded Britain from Europe after the ice sheets began to retreat and birch woodland and parkland spread northward. Mammoths flourished in Britain until 12,800 BP at least, but then human artifacts appeared at 12,000 BP, and the largest animals of the tundra fauna quickly disappeared. The giant deer called the Irish elk survived on the island of Ireland after the main extinctions on the European mainland.

Can we clone a mammoth?

• Things look bad for cloning the mammoth. News item, February 10, 2000.
• Web site for the expedition, from the Discovery Channel.

• How do you keep mammoth meat fresh? Dump it in the lake. News item on the work of Dan Fisher, from the University of Michigan. From Discovering Archaeology, March 9, 2000.
• How do you butcher a mammoth? Try an elephant first. . From Discovering Archaeology, 2000.

• For reconstructions of a mammoth-bone dwelling on the plains of Eastern Europe, see these two pages:
  • View # 1
  • View # 2

Bring back the elephants

New Thoughts on Mammoth-Hunter Society

And what about those "Venus figurines"? Were they sex objects made for the titillation of Gravettian males? A newer and well-argued suggestion is that they were charms used by pregnant women as magic to ward off difficult childbirth.

And if you liked these last few items, you will LOVE this one! From the New York Times, December 14, 1999.

Ice Age fashions, and the origin of weaving.
Olga Soffer has a fantastic publicity machine. Here are three stories, and the research hasn't been published yet. (This comment is admiration, not criticism, because her story is really neat, and probably very important.)

Soffer argues that evidence of woven textiles revises our view of Cromagnons and their contemporaries in Eastern Europe. And she's probably right: for example, is this the long-sought secret weapon of CroMagnons in competition with Neanderthals?

My wife says that weaving doesn't mean looms, as the newest story suggests, but that's a minor point. Kids begin weaving without looms, and graduate to them.

• First hints, June 1999.
• Press release, February 3, 2000
• story on ABC OnLine, May 9, 2000.
• Story from BBC News OnLine, June 2000.
• The New York Times goes on and on about furs, December 1999.

Here are two profiles of the eclectic Olga Soffer: from Scientific American and from Discovering Archaeology. Don't you wish you could take one of her courses?

The World Today

The New World syndrome of diseases

• "A People in Peril", long story from the Arizona Republican, October 31, 1999.
• Diabetes among the Pima Indians. Shorter AP story from the Seattle Times, November 1999.

• Overview
• The genetics of the problem.

The Polynesians

HISTORY OF LIFE: By Richard Cowen