The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene

by Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne

An enlightening investigation of the Pleistocene’s dual character as a geologic time—and as a cultural ideaThe Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. It’s 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.
Ultimately, it is the story of how the dominant creature to emerge from the frost-and-fire world of the Pleistocene came to understand its place in the scheme of things. A remarkable synthesis of science and history, The Last Lost World describes the world that made our modern one.

Genres: Science, History, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Environment, Evolution, Nature

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

While reading this book I felt like I had fallen out of a drift boat in rough water and was being tossed in the foaming current. There were parts of the book that were excellent and peaked my interest and made me feel like I had come to the surface for an instant of clear air only to be sucked back down into the cold, confused and contorted world of a simile, followed by a metaphor, on top of another metaphor, next to a simile, connected to an obscure reference, and topped with the use of an extremely rare word that in some places I thought should have been followed by the authors' writing "(great word huh! bet you never heard of it!)". My response to most of the book: What???? Totally overwritten, the authors must be almost incoherent in common conversation if they speak anything like they write. The material is good in places and I love the idea of the book but it was lost at sea, or to stick with the metaphor, or should that be allegory (uughh!!), lost in a whitewater of words.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a great deal of respect for what the writers were trying to do, unfortunately as brilliant as they seem to be, they are overwhelmed by the weight of the work. As others have commented, this book is more about the history of science than the Pleistocene. Some have criticized the writers for sneaking so much philosophy and recent scientific history into a book about the humanity's ancient past, but I think many of these criticisms are unfair because the book's jacket synopsis clearly states that the book will be half about the pleistocene and half about how the modern history of science developed with the understanding of the Pleistocene.

This is not a survey book. You have to go in with a decent understanding of not only the historical record of the Earth, as it currently stands, but degrees in philosophy, art history, the history of science, musicology, and literature would not go amiss. Henry James is quoted more often than Stephen Jay Gould.

In short, the book reads like a 19th century philosophical science treatise, and this would be great except that the authors lose control of it and end up trampling over the same philosophical grounds until it all turns to mud. Meanwhile it has been 10 pages since they mentioned one fact about the Pleistocene...

You get the picture. Just too much of a lot of everything.

[Brian Beatty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Chapter 2, "Ice", ends with comments that the author doesn't see value in the way science reevaluates reality in the context of new data, but instead values the way in which stories that don't change have power. This sort of preference of a good story, now matter how much it ignores new data, makes me ill.

I've always loved the humanities because it helps me keep an open mind to alternate interpretations of aspects of reality and human experience that are hard for science to address. Poorly applied work in the humanities, in my opinion, are when authors have the idea that only their interpretation can be the right one, despite the universal inability of anyone to find out the absolute truth of it.

The attitude presented here makes me feel like the author is taking the worst part of humanities, the authoritarian opinion, and is applying it to something we can actually study with science. It is similar to preferring being a young earth creationist instead of trusting geological means of dating strata.

I'm only partly through this book, so I hope further reading will change my opinion. But right now, I'm working hard not to be frustrated.

[Shae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m sort of amazed at how low the community ratings are for this book. I would have thought the portion of the subtitle “the invention of the Pleistocene” would have tipped off other readers that this book dwells a great deal on how various disciplines and intellectual schools/eras have thought about and defined the Pleistocene…which is most of what the authors do. And I think they do an interesting job of it. I listened to this as an audiobook, which perhaps made some difference?

Anyway, take heed, potential reader, this book will not tell you fun facts from the geologic record, but it will tell you how people have thought about the geologic record and how that has influenced (and been influenced by) the sciences, the humanities, philosophy, etc over time.

[Teressa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly well written book about a topic so many of us really know so little about-the Pleistocene. This is so much more than a rehash over what megafauna lived & died during that time. This is about what constitutes the Pleistocene as we humans define it. It's about what possibly makes humans different from other intelligent species. It's about the philisophy of science and how it has influenced and changed over time how we view ourselves and our place on Earth. I am deeply impressed by the writing of this daughter-father team. The language used is not only some of the most lucid I have ever read in both nonfiction & fiction, it is also not packed with terms that require a dictionary to be consulted every other page. For me, this is that rarity of nonfiction books, a book that I can learn something new from each time.

[Coan Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was much impressive work here, but the treasures of information and vision were buried beneath a mountain of verbiage and overblown prose...it might have been easier to just go and hunt down some Pleistocene fossils.

This was a pity since there was much erudition on display, and informing scientific method with the sensibility of the Humanities promised much. Ultimately, I was impressed with the intelligence and grasp of the author(s) but struggled to sustain interest as the focus shifted through so many subjects and used so many metaphors and allegories.

If there were a "'The Last Lost World' for dummies" I would be right there.

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

More like "Lost World of the Thesaurus"...
Such a promising topic: the Pleistocene, man's origins and the era's ice age....yet the author's pedantic, self-absorbed writing style and arcane word usage detracts from the interesting subject matter. If the authors had reined in the "high-falutin" vocabulary designed for the ivory tower set and remembered their audience, perhaps it would have had a chance. Disappointing, and a book has to be pretty poor to get a low rating from me.

[Vagabond Geologist · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a geologist so I thought this would be an interesting book, and it was at some level. I thought the writing was atrocious. Science writing can be dense and, often opaque. This author has taken science writing to new heights and not in a good way.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to think about this book.  The authors show an incurable love of irony and paradox, and express it in strange ways.  While the authors seem to look at a great deal of the scientific world and attempts to harmonize science and art/humanities/religion with a strange sense of humor, the authors themselves engage in paradoxical reasoning.  The authors seem to think, for example, that appealing to design make something an art rather than a science but also seek for legitimacy for the humanities in helping to provide narrative elements to science.  They mourn the spread of scientism but paradoxically are a part of that at the same time by their continual failure to recognize the insufficiency of combinations of chance and necessity or the overwhelming need of naturalist philosophers to have a continuous nature that nowhere exists because of the paucity of fossils as well as intermediate forms [1].  This book has a lot of spark to it, but it is a contradiction wrapped up in a paradox inside of an enigma.  

In terms of its contents, this book seeks to discuss a variety of riddles relating to the penultimate (it depends on the measurement) period of geological history, the Pleistocene, whose ambiguous origins have depended on the contrary forces of ice and fire, both in its characteristic and repeated ages of long glacial periods with intermittent and brief interglacial periods and in the way that increasing human culture and capability meant that this period was the prelude to the contemporary handwringing over the power of human beings over creation.  Throughout the book, the authors tell interesting stories about art, about scientific ideas and their short-lived hold in the face of contrary evidence, over the fossil record, over questions about scientific legitimacy, over climate change worries and questions about the soul and reason, about hoary concepts like the great chain of being and the continuity of creation.  The first part of the book looks at the rift, ice, and story to point to the narrative aspects of the Pleistocene that have captured the public imagination.  After this the authors look at the "great game" of species competing for ecological niches during the Pleistocene and how humanity tipped the scale in our own favor.  The book the ends after about 250 pages on a melancholy note of concern about the fate of the world in the hands of humanity and the fate of humanity in the face of our own intellectual and moral divides.

At its heart, this book tries very hard to be all things to all people.  It wants to be up-to-date on questions of the philosophy and history of science as well as the ever-changing theories about the origins of mankind and the way that having legitimacy as a field in the face of contemporary scientism is a difficult task.  The book wants to give a place for narrative and urge the moral development of mankind and point out how scientists fall particularly short of objective when examining putative human history as well as the present and recent past.  The existence of the Pleistocene, and even more the Holocene and Anthrocene, become problematic in the face of their short lengths relative to other geologic eras and their reliance on subjective human factors.  Yet the authors are not thoroughgoing enough in their critique of science.  This book reads like a not-very-cool kid trying to appeal to the cool kids while subtly criticizing them in the hope of sitting at the cool kids' table.  It is entertaining and endearing but hopelessly muddled in its approach and unaware of the larger moral stakes at risk in the debate over names and philosophies and education. 

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[Helene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Phew! I did make it through this despite having to look up words, people, theories, and philosophies. This was an education BEYOND the book.

I felt like I needed to be a paleontologist, a scientist, or philosopher to really get this book. Though it provided interesting theories and facts about the Pleistocene era, I felt the vocabulary way too esoteric (now there's a word!) and the references much beyond my knowledge. Instead of just saying horses, wolves, and bears they constantly use equids, canids, and ursids. They use forms instead of algae. And I have no idea what squiggle-O- 18 refers to. OK. I get up. I felt I should have had a whole college course on the scientists and the period.

I did learn a lot but not having the background or context, I doubt I will remember much. Hopefully the 4 sessions of discussion will help me to understand this better.

[Alena Kalinina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book quite messy a difficult to read. I am not a native speaker, but still feel like i have decent level of English. Nevertheless, it was practically impossible to understand most of points without a dictionary by my side. I am also not sure whether it is supposed to be a semi-academic text because it is filled with so many metaphors and unnecessary philosophical thoughts

[Tim Milligan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is 50% about the Pleistocene and 50% about the history of science, particularly the history of science as it relates to the Pleistocene, and particularly the Pleistocene as it relates to human origins. It is a strange mashup at times, but fairly interesting.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

It didn't work for me on any level.

[JodiP · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to listen to this book. It was written it in a very stiff boring and meandering style. The premise sounded interesting to me but I didn't want to invest the time.

[Graham Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, informative, but lacking in coherent focus on a number of levels.

[MrsAReader · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF
I was really intrigued by this book, and thought that some of the chapters were engaging and well-written. It was much less avout the Pleistocene than I expected or hoped for it to be.

[Nancy McQueen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay. Seemed to have a lot more philosophy and conjecture than hard fact.

[Laurel Heebsh]

DNF

[Riversue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written if dated in its material.

[Robert Koslowsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never studied anthropology, but the Pines’ book, The Last Lost World, made me appreciate the field and helped me shape my perspective on humanity’s origins and ongoing evolution. The authors focused on the Pleistocene era, which lasted from about 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago, a time of many extinctions and new beginnings. As the Pines wrote, the era “includes an ice age, a shakeout of seas and lands, Earth’s fifth great extinction event, and the appearance of the hominids. It’s a world of mammoths and woolly rhinos, erectines and Neanderthals, ice sheets and warm spells . . .”

The book is written for the layperson who doesn’t care about the science. He or she wants to know “who we are, how we came to be, and how we might act now and in the future.”

The Pines poke fun at their own field regarding the location of many fossil finds, “The geographic narrative presents our early ancestors as marginal, even hapless creatures ever vulnerable to the whims of climate and geology, yet creatures who could transcend the challenges of their environment through luck and pluck. The genomic narrative imagines powerful but imperfect creatures whose instincts could drag them to ruin but whose divine spark, however secularized, pulled them toward something like salvation; it tends to argue for the difficulties of overcoming inherited traits.”

Humans are curious; it’s inherent in our makeup. A larger brain and curiosity provided a competitive advantage for humans over all other living creatures in the past few thousand years. As I recently wrote in my second book, “the story is the thing. The narrative provides meaning.”

“Humans are interested in history where matter and mind fuse or where plot and fable fuse in a narrative,” the Pines write. “Plot gives figuration, or a particular ordering in time, to events, characters, and places. Fable endows the story with moral meaning, in that it instructs, in the process of unfolding revelations, about universal aspects of the human condition. It makes us care about the outcome. Depending upon the genre, it allows laughter, catharsis, knowledge.”

Early humans created technology and then applied it, an ability that makes humanity unique. It’s not our appearance that makes us human, it’s what we do that makes us human. Hollywood explores this theme often. Case in point, in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the writers explore the notion of humanity with Spock’s death. Can a Vulcan be the most human of us all? The audience is left to ponder.

And the Pines make us think. They cite the example of fire, which is not a technology, but rather an exothermic chemical reaction, “You don’t carry fire, you carry the conditions that permit it to happen; you can’t make it and set it aside for later use, you have to tend to it. No one invented fire. It has been on Earth for 420 million years.”

Human curiosity posed the question, “What if?” The answer led humanity’s ancestors to expand their menu and ramp up the richness of their diet by applying fire. “Biological evolution was driven by the use of fire,” the Pines argue, “and fire enabled the start of the cultural evolution.”

In my first book, A World Perspective through 21st Century Eyes, I wrote how the biological evolution spawned a cultural revolution, which led to our current technological revolution. In the context of the Pines argument, fire kickstarted the last two of these revolutions. Furthermore, our evolutionary life on Earth is not an endless series of cycles, but a linear advance occurring in fits and starts.

Our location and our biology no longer drive humanity. Use of technology has enabled a flip; humanity drives geography by shrinking distance and time and shapes genomes that it has mapped to drive biology. Humans of the 21st century have become the prime movers. As the Pines tell us, “What had been immovable now moves.”

Humans have accelerated extinctions with their geographical spread and we have engaged in artificial selection, replacing natural selection as a driver for biological evolution. The world’s biodiversity has been replaced by humanity using its technological superiority over other species and the environment to diversify its own culture going forward.

If you want to think about these heady questions, read the Pine’s book (oh, and mine too, if you get the chance).

[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know much about the subject; so i'm not equipped much to judge this work. I give it four stars because I simply and thoroughly enjoyed it. the book delivered what i expected and more. Very challenging read for me, but that was part of the enjoyment. I definitely need a second read to absorb all that.

[Melissa Embry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Show me a book with "lost world," "ice ages" or "human origins" at me and I'm hooked. However, "The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene" by father-daughter writing team Stephen J. Pyne and Lydia V. Pyne was a narrative the last great ice ages like no other I had ever seen, less a history of an age than a history of the ideas about that age and an exploration of the way science is written.

"As a geologic epoch, the Pleistocene . . . includes an ice age, a shakeout of seas and land, Earth's fifth great extinction event, and the appearance and evolution of the hominins. It's a world of mammoths and woolly rhinos, erectines and Neanderthals, ice sheets and warm spells," Lydia Pyne, an anthropologist as well as a historian of science, in her prologue. "However, the Pleistocene is also an idea. . . appear(ing) in the early nineteenth century," which also underwent an evolution of its own.

At first it may seem odd that the Pynes (Stephen is an environmental historian) begin their story of ice ages in Africa's Rift Valley, a part of the world subjected to glaciers only on its highest mountains. But the Rift is also the site of some of the earliest known remains of members of our own genus, Homo, alternately pushed and pulled by the changing climate to begin their journey out of their tropical home and around the world.

And while Pleistocene researchers tend to insist that science has triumphed by disregarding such other human activities as philosophy and art, "it is doubtful the public which supports (scientific) research) so enthusiastically" cares whether "a particular bone was scratched by a hyena or a stone flake. . . They want to know who we are, how we came to be, and how we might act in the future."

It's in that landscape whose opposite sides -- humanities on one, science on the other -- mirror the geologic stresses of the Great Rift, that the Pynes take their stand in the intellectually and emotionally challenging pages of "The Last Lost World."

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that a reader that picks this book up to read needs to realize at the outset that the book is more of a philosophical examination of how humans have considered the Pleistocene Epoch over the past couple of centuries. The book is really more a journey through the history of scientific study and interpretation associated with geology, climatology, biology, and the evolution of life on Earth, all with an emphasis on the Pleistocene that is currently defined as ranging from 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago.

It seems to me that the point of the book is to highlight and document the desire, in some of us, to better understand the Ice Age; and that this desire drove the great thinkers of the last century and a half to delve more fully into the study of geology, embrace Darwinism, and actively seek out and better understand our own human origins. This is really the story of how Man's innate curiosity has culminated in a synthesis of knowledge associated with the earth and life sciences and has resulted in not only a better understanding of the Pleistocene Epoch, but the implications of the Pleistocene ice ages upon the ecology of the planet, evolution of humans and other animals, as well as a prognosis for future climate and environmental conditions.

While I actually enjoyed reading the book, I did think that it was a bit over-written with perhaps too much reliance upon allegory, simile, and metaphor. Clearly, the father-daughter team of Stephen and Lydia Pyne are erudite scholars and well-qualified to write about the Pleistocene. I guess I just sort of wish they'd toned down the rhetoric and just focused on telling the story--not only of the history of the study of the Pleistocene Epoch, but also the story of the Pleistocene itself. There's bits and pieces of that story here in The Last Lost World--Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, I wish there had been more.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly, over my head. but I got enough insight to be fascinated. I love to read, and I try to learn the geological eras and epochs...but there is so much more to it than I realized. The time frames are a creation of our human understanding and knowledge of science WITH the addition of our culture nuances. I naively thought that the geologic timeframes and boundaries are discernible and real. NOT. This book is about the Pleistocene Epoch: 2.8 million years of the last ice age, and the appearance and evolution of hominids (homo erectus lasted nearly 2 million years without changing!). Should the Pleistocene Epoch end when earth entered the interglacial and man transitioned to 'civilization' (both occurred around 11k years ago.) Surely, those are knowable boundaries. Well, there's debate!

There is a lot to gain insight into...the affect of fire on our human evolution; the convergence of science and humanities; the causes of the Ice Age; the parallel evolution of horses and elephants with hominids; the difference among australopithecus, habilis, erectus, neandrathal, sapiens; fitting our ancients like Aristotle into our knowledge of today; the extinction of megafauna that parallels human expansion (and so much more human change to the earth); the remarkable difference that the sequence of discovery makes to the story; the out of Africa story; etc.

Loved this book.

[Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Throughout most of the book I thought the authors didn't care whether a layman audience can understand their ornately phrased philosophical flights. The culmination, however, points out very cogently the inadequacies of science shorn of cultural context:

"By shearing away context as clutter, they can strip the meaning that setting conveys. Science can analyze what caused the scratches on a bone and what hominin skull most closely matches others and what date the first stone tools appeared, but it cannot, unaided, address what it means to live, what makes a life worth living, what purpose spans the narrative of a life or of humanity. It cannot say why a society should even engage in this kind of inquiry."

[David Corleto-Bales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very academic but enjoyable book about the Pleistocene era, from 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, detailing the rise and extinction of various plants and animals worldwide, including the Neanderthals, the tiny inhabitants of the island of Flores, (the hobbit people!) and modern people and how they are all interrelated. The Flores people could have existed far into modern times as an oral history of their existence still survives in Indonesia, perhaps going extinct as late as the early nineteenth century. Very good, very dense, huge bibliography, the authors are a father and daughter team.

[Marge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely fascinating book -- for readers of either geology or human origins. I will admit there were passages I didn't understand -- and a few I couldn't agree with -- but I'm so glad I read it. It's not the author's original research. She makes it clear this is a synthesis of much research over many decades in geology, climatology, paleontology, archaeology, which she has pulled into narrative form. Highly recommended.

[Virginia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love books about science for the layman and this book didn't fulfill that for me.
It is written about the terminology of the pleistocene, not about the glaciers and giant mammels living at this time.
I skimed through and picked out a few interesting facts, but the book seemed to be highbrow pretencious, and lost me interest.

[Curt · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected this book to cover one of my favorite subjects, the Pleistocene. It was about the formation of the idea of the Pliestocene throughout human history and spent very little time discussing actual events. If you are looking for philosophical ideas and not historical facts this book is for you. I found it prententious and unreadable and so quit halfway through.

[Alicia · Rating 1 out of 5]

It almost feels unfair to give this book 1star when I haven't finished it, but I've given it plenty of opportunities to hook m and it just wasn't able to. Higher ratings deserved from an academic point of view, I imagine, but it's not for the lay reader, even of the adventurous and science wannabe type.