| Description |
x, 306 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Prologue : Mossel Bay, South Africa -- pt. 1. How the Pleistocene got its ice. Rift ; Ice ; Story -- pt. 2. The great game. Footnotes to Plato ; Out of Africa ; Missing links ; New truths, heresies, superstitions ; The ancients and the moderns -- pt. 3. How the Pleistocene lost its tale. The hominin who would be king ; The Anthropocene -- Epilogue : Rift redux |
| Summary |
An investigation of the Pleistocene's dual character, as a geologic time, and as a cultural idea. The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own, a time of ice ages, global migrations, and mass extinctions--of woolly rhinos, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and not least, early species of Homo. It's the world that created ours. But outside that environmental story there exists a parallel narrative that describes how our ideas about the Pleistocene have emerged. This story explains the place of the Pleistocene in shaping intellectual culture, and the role of a rapidly evolving culture in creating the idea of the Pleistocene and in establishing its dimensions. This second story addresses how the epoch, its Earth-shaping events, and its creatures, both those that survived and those that disappeared, helped kindle new sciences and a new origins story as the sciences split from the humanities as a way of looking at the past.--From publisher description |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [273]-288) and index |
| Subject |
Glacial epoch.
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Geology, Stratigraphic -- Pleistocene.
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Paleoecology -- Pleistocene.
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Human beings -- Origin.
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Human evolution.
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Paleogeography -- Pleistocene.
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Paleoanthropology -- Philosophy -- History.
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Science -- Philosophy -- History.
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| Author |
Pyne, Stephen J., 1949-
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| LC no. |
2011038464 |
| ISBN |
9780670023639 (hbk.) |
|
0670023639 (hbk.) |
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