Vanished Giants: The Lost World of the Ice Age

by Anthony J. Stuart

Featuring numerous illustrations, this book explores the many lessons to be learned from Pleistocene megafauna, including the role of humans in their extinction, their disappearance at the start of the Sixth Extinction, and what they might teach us about contemporary conservation crises.

Long after the extinction of dinosaurs, when humans were still in the Stone Age, woolly rhinos, mammoths, mastodons, sabertooth cats, giant ground sloths, and many other spectacular large animals that are no longer with us roamed the Earth. These animals are regarded as “Pleistocene megafauna,” named for the geological era in which they lived—also known as the Ice Age.

In Vanished The Lost World of the Ice Age , paleontologist Anthony J. Stuart explores the lives and environments of these animals, moving between six continents and several key islands. Stuart examines the animals themselves via what we’ve learned from fossil remains, and he describes the landscapes, climates, vegetation, ecological interactions, and other aspects of the animals’ existence. Illustrated throughout, Vanished Giants also offers a picture of the world as it was tens of thousands of years ago when these giants still existed. Unlike the case of the dinosaurs, there was no asteroid strike to blame for the end of their world. Instead, it appears that the giants of the Ice Age were driven to extinction by climate change, human activities—especially hunting—or both. Drawing on the latest evidence provided by radiocarbon dating, Stuart discusses these possibilities. The extinction of Ice Age megafauna can be seen as the beginning of the so-called Sixth Extinction, which is happening right now. This has important implications for understanding the likely fate of present-day animals in the face of contemporary climate change and vastly increasing human populations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Palaeontology, Nature

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 28, 2021

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

(310 pages in the hardcover, not 288 in the Goods stats.)

Excellent book for those wanting to know more through verbal descriptions, photos of fossils, charts of mammals, illustrations, and maps. Occasionally the copy-editor was asleep on the job, but the information gets through without becoming too technical. Stuart doesn't have Steve Brusatte's stylistic ease, but he does write in straightforward prose that easily handles a lot of learning (and arguments over, to choose two examples, the dating of fossils and what drove extinction). Recommended for anyone who wants to find out more about, say, the american lion, cave bears, dire wolves (not a GoT invention), the irish elk, south american sloths, rhinos in northern europe, or the marsupial lion. Fascinating (to me).

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! I finally finished this book. I think I’ve had it checked out from the library for about 2-3 months. I was feeling curious about extinct ice age megafauna and wanted to learn more about them. This book was significantly more academic and detailed than I had expected (or was necessarily looking for). It seems extraordinarily well-researched and the author is careful to not speak beyond what the data indicates. The overall question of the book is whether the extinctions of ancient megafauna were caused by humans (“overkill”) or climate change (“over-chill”). It is evident that there is not one global answer to this question but that the answer depends on which continent you are looking at. On some continents (like New Zealand) all megafauna went extinct within 150 years after human arrival. On other continents (like Australia) humans coexisted with megafauna for tens of thousands of years.

[Paul Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfortunately the gist of the book is buried in a short end section. I recommend you first read the first paragraph of section 13.9. Then I recommend you browse or read the appendix. Then you'll be set. At first I was a bit out of by how raw the data is, for example including lab numbers with each data points. However, it seems this may be the first place these are all compiled together so in that sense it's fine. Illustrations and graphs are good.

[Jim S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking for a general book about mega fauna, large animal (over 45 kg) and when and how they thrived. This book answered some of my questions.
They thrived about 130,000 years ago and while some are still around, e.g. elephants, hippos and rhinos, most are not, most going extinct 45,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The book does provide a good general survey of the mega fauna, going continent by continent and zooming in on some special regions, e.g. Madagascar,

I was looking for a general book about mega fauna and when and how they thrived. This book answered some of my questions.
They thrived about 130,000 years ago ( the Pleistocene era) and while some are still around, e.g. elephants, hippos and rhinos, most are not, going extinct 45,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The book does provide a good general survey of the mega fauna, going continent by continent and zooming in on some special regions, e.g. Madagascar, New Zealand and the Galapagos. And it devotes a lot of time on the extinction of mega fauna, i.e.
1. When and how extinction occurred for various species - meticulously going through species by species, continent by continent
2. How extinction was determined by the fossil record - this part was tricky, dealing with the old question of is absence of evidence (in the fossil record) evidence of absence. You also need to consider that certain species may vacate certain areas to live elsewhere. An example of this would be how mammoths retreated to Wrangel Island as there final refuge.
3. Various theories of how extinction occurred including extra-terrestrial e.g. a meteor strike (he even mentions Tunguska), climate change and the arrival of man in their environment.

While some of the details caused my eyes to glaze over at times a few things struck me.
1. Climate change - The earth, of course, goes back millions of years and for a lot of that time the climate was extreme hostile to life in any advanced form
2. The diversity of life - the book includes well-known mega fauna like the Woolly Mammoth and Sabre tooth Tiger but also monsters like, a beaver weighing 250 kg (the beaver today weighs 10 kg) and the "Siberian Unicorn" - a woolly Rhino with a horn between its eyes.
3. Changes to geography over time, many times due to changes in sea level. At one point there was a land bridge at the Bering Strait. Also at one point there was a land bridge between Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania. That is how species, including man, got around.
4. The ingenuity of those reading the fossils record. Carbon dating in only reliable up to 50,000 years. If you want to go beyond that you have to find other sources of evidence and scientists have, e.g. drilling ice cores in the arctic and investigating the atmospheric content of bubbles in the ice at various levels.

One question I had that wasn't answered was why did animals grow so large during the Pleistocene era but not now. It was mentioned that there may have been more oxygen in the atmosphere which could have been a contributing factor. Also having a low reproduction rate and slow life cycle may have made them prime candidates for extinction.
And one complaint I have - this subject matter screams for pictures and the illustrations were quite pedestrian, e.g. the aforementioned Siberian Unicorn.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite an academic text, covering key geographical regions systematically and ending with a short summary of findings. The most useful parts, that comprised the bulk of the book, were those describing our current knowledge about extinct taxa, from mammoths to moas, restricted to 'megafauna' of over 45kg. Their ecology and when the most reliable date of their last record was, compared with the timing of arrival of modern humans in the area. While it was gladdening to see an update on the subject organized in an easy to access manner, with the list of extinct animals in each region, I had issues with the author's guarded conclusions on the probably causes of the megafauna extinctions.

Stuart analyzed the evidence for rapid human driven extinction, or the 'blitzkrieg' theory in different parts of the world, and kind of absolved our role in many places due to the time lag between arrival of humans and last known date of existence of the animals. For me, the speed at which we wiped them out does not matter so much as the obvious fact that we really DID. He kept repeating that more data is needed, but I think we already have sufficient knowledge to rule out other reasons like shift in climate or diseases. It is just a matter of degree and intensity, isn't it?

Oh, and he listed the cheetah as extant in South Asia, a somewhat glaring oversight, in my book. I do agree that we need more data from this region, and was hoping for more insight here, which was lacking.

[Connor Penrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style was written much more like a textbook than something to read through casually, very information heavy. Definitely learned of some extinct animals I hadn’t heard of before.
The book seems to make a lot of mention of extinctions as they related to glacial movements during the period of 20-10 thousand years ago. My own idea on the subject of cause is a combination of several factors, sometimes definitely some human hunting impact, although I disagree with the specific idea of blitzkrieg extinction, I would think of it less intentionally and slightly slower of a process. Plant life decline during periods of glaciation perhaps causing some bottlenecks that over the several periods of glaciation set back population size to where it was too spaced out and too small to stabilize. And interesting that Africa as a whole has lost much less of its overall megafauna (although plenty is endangered currently) and how that may relate to the glaciations being a strong factor of extinction throughout other areas.

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book if you want to impress your friends by pointing out every inconsistency in the Ice Age movies.

Very interesting read with pictures of real fossils of our lost giants of the Pleistocene. Would be even better with artistic renditions, but a great book nonetheless.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed analysis and lots of facts consolidated in a comprehensive book.