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Ice Ages: Their Social and Natural History
What causes Ice Ages? How did we learn about them? What were their affects on the social history of humanity? Allan Mazur's book tells the appealing history of the scientific 'discovery' of Ice Ages. How we learned that much of the Earth was repeatedly covered by huge ice sheets, why that occurred, and how the waning of the last Ice Age paved the way for agrarian civilization and, ultimately, our present social structures. The book discusses implications for the current 'controversies' over anthropogenic climate change, public understanding of science, and (lack of) 'trust in experts'. In parallel to the history and science of Ice Ages, sociologist Mazur highlights why this is especially relevant right now for humanity. Ice Their Social and Natural History is an engrossing combination of natural science and social glaciology and sociology writ large.
- GenresScienceNonfictionHistory
272 pages, Hardcover
Published April 21, 2022
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September 9, 2025
A terrific book, notable for Mazur's concise presentation of a range of important ideas relating to our knowledge of ice ages.
1 - In the Beginning
In the eighteenth century, European and American savants had no notion that life had a far longer history than told in the Bible or that humans were late arrivals on the scene. They believed that Earth’s surface was shaped primarily by a Great Flood and occasional volcanoes.
Surveys show a third of Americans believe the Bible with its 6,000-year-old universe is literally true.
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher-farmer-physician James Hutton, a deist often called the “father” of modern geology, ignored biblical stories about a Creation and Flood, instead postulating that the past history of the globe must be explained by processes that we can see happening now, or to have happened recently. Hutton did not only speculate at his desk but, like others at the time, went into the field, examining the landscape first-hand,
For Hutton, the world was in a steady state, changing gradually with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”
2 - Bursting the Limits of Time
Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) inspired the Enlightenment and the new spirit of science: Do not trust traditional authority; seek truth through logic, observation, and experiment.
The Industrial Revolution resulted in much digging through stone layers. Small "stones" were found which Nicolaus Steno in Denmark and Robert Hooke in England, recognized as being remnants of living organisms.
Once fossils were recognized, it became clear that many did not look like anything known in the living world. The fact of extinction was gradually established.
The English mineral surveyor William Smith associated characteristic fossils with each stratum.
In his 1841 catalogue of fossils from southern England, John Phillips, a nephew of William Smith, described three great eras of life - Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.
Modern paleontologists and writers see the history of life punctuated by five great extinctions.
3 - Darwin's Revolution
Within a decade of the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s views were widely accepted among British literati. Publications and private correspondence of 67 British scientists, written between 1859 and 1869, show three-quarters accepting Darwinism, at least in the sense that each species evolved from another
Darwinian evolution made sense of the various transmutations seen in the fossil record and how the many kinds of life, both living and extinct, are related to one another.
4 - Discovering an Age of Ice
Agassiz introduced the idea of ice ages. While locals had realized that erratics had been transported by glaciers was accepted by locals, academics had difficulty with the idea. It was largely thought that the Earth had been warmer in the past, not colder.
By 1875 geologists had completed their initial survey of what the world of the last ice age was like. They had also discovered that the ice age was not a unique event – that, in fact, there has been a succession of ice ages, each separated by warmer, interglacial ages similar to the present one.
5 - Why Does Climate change?
In 1874, the Scottish geologist James Geikie (1839–1915) recapped geological evidence for an extensive ice epoch. Shortly afterward Scotsman James Croll, son of a stonemason and lacking formal education, produced the first serious theory of climate change based on variations in Earth’s orbit.
Serbian Milutin Milankovitch did extensive mathematical work of climates on Earth, Mars, and Venus, comparing the sun’s effects on planets with different orbits. The important factors turned out to be the precession of
Earth’s rotational axis on a 22,000-year cycle; the change in axial tilt on a 41,000-year cycle; and the change in the eccentricity of the ellipse on a 100,000-year cycle.
Milankovitch went on to estimate how much ice sheets would respond to a given change in solar radiation (insolation), and how the latitude of the margin of the ice sheet moved during the past 650,000 years.
6 - Dating Ice Age Climates
Geological history was divided into the Paleozoic (old life), Mesozoic (middle life), and Cenozoic (new life) eras. These eras were subdivided into smaller units called “periods,” then even smaller units called “epochs.” During the nineteenth century, identification of periods and epochs was in flux with the recognition of repeated glaciations. The meaning of “Pleistocene” was wholly redefined as the epoch of successive advance and retreat of great ice sheets, or colloquially, the Ice Age.
In 1976, a report in the prestigious journal Science finally provided solid footing for the Croll-Milankovitch notion that variation in Earth’s orbit was the primary driver of waxing and waning ice sheets
during the Pleistocene. They also modeled future climate, based on their observed orbital climate relationships but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicting that the long-term trend over the next seven thousand years was toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation – another Ice Age.
Positive feedbacks are the reason that deglaciation occurs faster than glaciation.As changes in Earth’s orbit increase summer insolation, the warming sea releases CO2 into the atmosphere, strengthening the greenhouse warming effect. Rising sea levels from melting glaciers undermine the margins of ice sheets, replacing surface areas of white snow or ice with dark areas of sea, a reduction in albedo that also amplifies warming
Ice cores show irregular, shorter-term changes with abrupt warmings and coolings, unrelated to orbital variations. The best known of these, the Younger Dryas event, began 13,000 years ago, as the great
northern ice sheets were regressing. This cold snap, nearly returning Earth to ice-age conditions, ended 11,500 years ago with Greenland warming about 15 degrees F in a decade or less. Then the prior warming trend resumed, bringing our recent 11,000 years of hospitable climate stability.
There were 25 “Dansgaard-Oeschger” (D-O) events between 65,000 and 10,000 years ago, when temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet warmed between 5 and 10 degrees C within decades, then fell more gradually. Climatologist Hartmut Heinrich found six distinctive spikes in North Atlantic sediment records, not obviously related to D-O events, but again showing spikes of significant warming, then cooling. The causes of D O and Heinrich events are unknown,
There has been a major alteration in the timing of glacial cycles from the early to the late Pleistocene. The changeover point, termed the Mid Pleistocene Transition (MPT), is dated approximately one million years ago. Since then, the dominant glacial cycle was 100,000 years, corresponding to the orbital period for eccentricity. Before the MPT, the dominant cycle was 41,000 years, corresponding to the orbital period for
obliquity). The reason for this transition is unexplained.
7 - Why Does Climate Change? Carbon Dioxide
The author reviews the history of the CO2 hypothesis for global warming, and the role of the IPCC which concluded in 2021 that "Human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s ..."
Mazur is convinced that the CO2 hypothesis is correct. While he acknowledges that many do not agree that the human impact on climate is significant, he notes that "the weight of evidence for human-caused global warming is substantial" and groups doubters with those that question vaccines or evolution.
8 - Why Does Climate Change? Continental Drift and Ocean Currents
The Global Conveyor Belt, or Thermohaline Circulation, is the movement of seawater around the world. There is speculation that rapid cooling events resulted from interruption pf this circulation.
There were three earlier periods of extensive glaciation during the Paleozoic era: the Late Ordovician Ice Age, the Late Devonian Ice Age, and the Carboniferous Permian Ice Age.
The current Late Cenozoic Ice Age (LCIA) began 34 million years ago when the present Antarctic ice sheet
formed. The Pleistocene, the focus of this book, is the tail end of the LCIA, when extensive ice sheets spread over the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes waxing, sometimes waning. We are still in it, though in a
mild interglacial episode that has lasted for over 10,000 years.
9 - Ecce Homo
There were at least five Homo species (or subspecies) alive during the late Ice Age, as recently as 100 kya: modern Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, floresiensis “hobbits” and the last of the long surviving Homo erectus.
10 - How Did Extinct Hominins Behave?
Living chimpanzees seem a suitable model for the common chimp-human ancestor. It appears that progress, at
least in tools, requires evolution to a higher mental ability, which only then allows a better tool kit to take over.
11 - Life in the Paleolithic
Of the hominin species to appear around two million years ago, Homo erectus became the most widespread throughout the Old World and is probably ancestral to both Neanderthals and ourselves as well as other species of the genus Homo. The author examines the tools, art and culture of early man, that is now known to have advanced steadily. The question of when language arose remains controversial.
12 - Extinction of Large Animals
Continents suffering the greatest losses were Australia and the Americas, less in Eurasia, and least in Africa. North America lost 32 of 85 genera of mammals that weighted more than 40 kg. Europe lost only 7
of 23 genera. Sub-Saharan Africa escaped with its megamammals largely unscathed; only 2 of f44 genera were gone by the end of the Pleistocene. South America lost 47 genera of its large mammals
Just south of the great Pleistocene ice sheets of North America and Eurasia were belts of unglaciated land, snow covered in winter but exposed tundra in summer. Vegetation in boggy tundra soil is mostly grasses, sedges, dwarf shrubs, mosses, and lichens, all low growing. There were also drier belts of land, the steppes, essentially treeless grasslands. Tundra might change to steppe and vice versa, depending on variations in temperature and precipitation. Still farther south began conifer forests, their margins moving northward or southward with changes in climate. The vast steppes between the ice sheets and boreal forests, wider in Europe and Asia than North America, provided abundant forage and firm ground, amply supported grazing animals and their predators.
When Beringia was dry land, animals and eventually humans could walk between Siberia and Alaska. Asian species such as the mammoth, bison, and scimitar cat immigrated to America, while the American fox, ground squirrel, horse, and camel went the other way. Even at the height of the last Ice Age, much of Siberia and interior Alaska were ice free because there was insufficient moisture for snow to accumulate. Oddly from today’s perspective, ice free Alaska was at times functionally part of Asia, being connected to it by Beringia while isolated from America by great Canadian ice sheets to the south and east
The steppe-tundra habitat, between ice sheet and forest, was enormous in east-west extent, running across Eurasia from the Atlantic to Siberia, over the Beringian land bridge into Alaska and Yukon, and when not blocked by ice reaching below the Laurentide ice sheet. Called “the Mammoth Steppe,” after its most iconic
creature, it was then Earth’s most extensive biome, having a cold dry climate, vegetation dominated by palatable high-productivity grasses, forbs and willow shrubs, animals dominated by bison, horse, and woolly mammoth. It thrived for about 100,000 years without major changes until the end of the Pleistocene.
By some estimates, its animal biomass and plant productivity were similar to today’s African savannah
Mazzur provides an excellent review of the the arguments for and against the overkill theory and the climate change theory
13 - Agrarian Transformation
Since the Holocene started 11.7 kya, the climate has become warmer, generally wetter with higher sea levels, and less variable. There is good evidence of independent agricultural beginnings in central China, the New Guinea highlands, Mesoamerica, the central Andes, the Mississippi basin, western Africa, and southern India, occurring at various times between about 10,000 and 4,000 years ago
Sedentary community life preceded agriculture. 14,000 years ago, the Natufian people of the Levant lived in well built dwellings.
Due to a lack of suitable plants, Egypt did not have agriculture - it was introduced from Greece and Italy
After the Ice Age, the nearly complete adoption of agrarian life within about five millennia became the substrate upon which towns grew into cities, kingdoms and empires
14 - Rise of Civilizations
The Indus civilization, dated 2600 to 1900 BC, occupied more area than Egypt or Mesopotamia, covering most of today’s Pakistan and northwestern India.
Harappa and another city, Mohenjo-Daro, lack monumental works, palaces or temples, suggesting a more egalitarian population. Yet they showed advanced urban planning, with well-built mud-brick houses and other
structures lining straight streets, and provided elaborate water supply, drainage, and waste disposal systems.
For four centuries the Roman and Han empires were the two greatest powers in the world, yet were only dimly if at all aware of each other. Rome was founded earlier but did not reach full dominance of the Mediterranean until decisively defeating Carthage in 202 BC, the same year the first Han emperor came to power. Both empires eventually failed due to external threat, internal dissension, economic collapse, new religious movements, and endemic disease. Mazur sees a certain inevitability to this course of development.
The author investigates the question of "What if the Chinese had “discovered” the New World before
Columbus?"
In less than 400 years, the industrialized societies had become separated from the agrarian ones and not only separate but in control. This division remains the most important one in the world today.
1 - In the Beginning
In the eighteenth century, European and American savants had no notion that life had a far longer history than told in the Bible or that humans were late arrivals on the scene. They believed that Earth’s surface was shaped primarily by a Great Flood and occasional volcanoes.
Surveys show a third of Americans believe the Bible with its 6,000-year-old universe is literally true.
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher-farmer-physician James Hutton, a deist often called the “father” of modern geology, ignored biblical stories about a Creation and Flood, instead postulating that the past history of the globe must be explained by processes that we can see happening now, or to have happened recently. Hutton did not only speculate at his desk but, like others at the time, went into the field, examining the landscape first-hand,
For Hutton, the world was in a steady state, changing gradually with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”
2 - Bursting the Limits of Time
Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) inspired the Enlightenment and the new spirit of science: Do not trust traditional authority; seek truth through logic, observation, and experiment.
The Industrial Revolution resulted in much digging through stone layers. Small "stones" were found which Nicolaus Steno in Denmark and Robert Hooke in England, recognized as being remnants of living organisms.
Once fossils were recognized, it became clear that many did not look like anything known in the living world. The fact of extinction was gradually established.
The English mineral surveyor William Smith associated characteristic fossils with each stratum.
In his 1841 catalogue of fossils from southern England, John Phillips, a nephew of William Smith, described three great eras of life - Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.
Modern paleontologists and writers see the history of life punctuated by five great extinctions.
3 - Darwin's Revolution
Within a decade of the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s views were widely accepted among British literati. Publications and private correspondence of 67 British scientists, written between 1859 and 1869, show three-quarters accepting Darwinism, at least in the sense that each species evolved from another
Darwinian evolution made sense of the various transmutations seen in the fossil record and how the many kinds of life, both living and extinct, are related to one another.
4 - Discovering an Age of Ice
Agassiz introduced the idea of ice ages. While locals had realized that erratics had been transported by glaciers was accepted by locals, academics had difficulty with the idea. It was largely thought that the Earth had been warmer in the past, not colder.
By 1875 geologists had completed their initial survey of what the world of the last ice age was like. They had also discovered that the ice age was not a unique event – that, in fact, there has been a succession of ice ages, each separated by warmer, interglacial ages similar to the present one.
5 - Why Does Climate change?
In 1874, the Scottish geologist James Geikie (1839–1915) recapped geological evidence for an extensive ice epoch. Shortly afterward Scotsman James Croll, son of a stonemason and lacking formal education, produced the first serious theory of climate change based on variations in Earth’s orbit.
Serbian Milutin Milankovitch did extensive mathematical work of climates on Earth, Mars, and Venus, comparing the sun’s effects on planets with different orbits. The important factors turned out to be the precession of
Earth’s rotational axis on a 22,000-year cycle; the change in axial tilt on a 41,000-year cycle; and the change in the eccentricity of the ellipse on a 100,000-year cycle.
Milankovitch went on to estimate how much ice sheets would respond to a given change in solar radiation (insolation), and how the latitude of the margin of the ice sheet moved during the past 650,000 years.
6 - Dating Ice Age Climates
Geological history was divided into the Paleozoic (old life), Mesozoic (middle life), and Cenozoic (new life) eras. These eras were subdivided into smaller units called “periods,” then even smaller units called “epochs.” During the nineteenth century, identification of periods and epochs was in flux with the recognition of repeated glaciations. The meaning of “Pleistocene” was wholly redefined as the epoch of successive advance and retreat of great ice sheets, or colloquially, the Ice Age.
In 1976, a report in the prestigious journal Science finally provided solid footing for the Croll-Milankovitch notion that variation in Earth’s orbit was the primary driver of waxing and waning ice sheets
during the Pleistocene. They also modeled future climate, based on their observed orbital climate relationships but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicting that the long-term trend over the next seven thousand years was toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation – another Ice Age.
Positive feedbacks are the reason that deglaciation occurs faster than glaciation.As changes in Earth’s orbit increase summer insolation, the warming sea releases CO2 into the atmosphere, strengthening the greenhouse warming effect. Rising sea levels from melting glaciers undermine the margins of ice sheets, replacing surface areas of white snow or ice with dark areas of sea, a reduction in albedo that also amplifies warming
Ice cores show irregular, shorter-term changes with abrupt warmings and coolings, unrelated to orbital variations. The best known of these, the Younger Dryas event, began 13,000 years ago, as the great
northern ice sheets were regressing. This cold snap, nearly returning Earth to ice-age conditions, ended 11,500 years ago with Greenland warming about 15 degrees F in a decade or less. Then the prior warming trend resumed, bringing our recent 11,000 years of hospitable climate stability.
There were 25 “Dansgaard-Oeschger” (D-O) events between 65,000 and 10,000 years ago, when temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet warmed between 5 and 10 degrees C within decades, then fell more gradually. Climatologist Hartmut Heinrich found six distinctive spikes in North Atlantic sediment records, not obviously related to D-O events, but again showing spikes of significant warming, then cooling. The causes of D O and Heinrich events are unknown,
There has been a major alteration in the timing of glacial cycles from the early to the late Pleistocene. The changeover point, termed the Mid Pleistocene Transition (MPT), is dated approximately one million years ago. Since then, the dominant glacial cycle was 100,000 years, corresponding to the orbital period for eccentricity. Before the MPT, the dominant cycle was 41,000 years, corresponding to the orbital period for
obliquity). The reason for this transition is unexplained.
7 - Why Does Climate Change? Carbon Dioxide
The author reviews the history of the CO2 hypothesis for global warming, and the role of the IPCC which concluded in 2021 that "Human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s ..."
Mazur is convinced that the CO2 hypothesis is correct. While he acknowledges that many do not agree that the human impact on climate is significant, he notes that "the weight of evidence for human-caused global warming is substantial" and groups doubters with those that question vaccines or evolution.
8 - Why Does Climate Change? Continental Drift and Ocean Currents
The Global Conveyor Belt, or Thermohaline Circulation, is the movement of seawater around the world. There is speculation that rapid cooling events resulted from interruption pf this circulation.
There were three earlier periods of extensive glaciation during the Paleozoic era: the Late Ordovician Ice Age, the Late Devonian Ice Age, and the Carboniferous Permian Ice Age.
The current Late Cenozoic Ice Age (LCIA) began 34 million years ago when the present Antarctic ice sheet
formed. The Pleistocene, the focus of this book, is the tail end of the LCIA, when extensive ice sheets spread over the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes waxing, sometimes waning. We are still in it, though in a
mild interglacial episode that has lasted for over 10,000 years.
9 - Ecce Homo
There were at least five Homo species (or subspecies) alive during the late Ice Age, as recently as 100 kya: modern Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, floresiensis “hobbits” and the last of the long surviving Homo erectus.
10 - How Did Extinct Hominins Behave?
Living chimpanzees seem a suitable model for the common chimp-human ancestor. It appears that progress, at
least in tools, requires evolution to a higher mental ability, which only then allows a better tool kit to take over.
11 - Life in the Paleolithic
Of the hominin species to appear around two million years ago, Homo erectus became the most widespread throughout the Old World and is probably ancestral to both Neanderthals and ourselves as well as other species of the genus Homo. The author examines the tools, art and culture of early man, that is now known to have advanced steadily. The question of when language arose remains controversial.
12 - Extinction of Large Animals
Continents suffering the greatest losses were Australia and the Americas, less in Eurasia, and least in Africa. North America lost 32 of 85 genera of mammals that weighted more than 40 kg. Europe lost only 7
of 23 genera. Sub-Saharan Africa escaped with its megamammals largely unscathed; only 2 of f44 genera were gone by the end of the Pleistocene. South America lost 47 genera of its large mammals
Just south of the great Pleistocene ice sheets of North America and Eurasia were belts of unglaciated land, snow covered in winter but exposed tundra in summer. Vegetation in boggy tundra soil is mostly grasses, sedges, dwarf shrubs, mosses, and lichens, all low growing. There were also drier belts of land, the steppes, essentially treeless grasslands. Tundra might change to steppe and vice versa, depending on variations in temperature and precipitation. Still farther south began conifer forests, their margins moving northward or southward with changes in climate. The vast steppes between the ice sheets and boreal forests, wider in Europe and Asia than North America, provided abundant forage and firm ground, amply supported grazing animals and their predators.
When Beringia was dry land, animals and eventually humans could walk between Siberia and Alaska. Asian species such as the mammoth, bison, and scimitar cat immigrated to America, while the American fox, ground squirrel, horse, and camel went the other way. Even at the height of the last Ice Age, much of Siberia and interior Alaska were ice free because there was insufficient moisture for snow to accumulate. Oddly from today’s perspective, ice free Alaska was at times functionally part of Asia, being connected to it by Beringia while isolated from America by great Canadian ice sheets to the south and east
The steppe-tundra habitat, between ice sheet and forest, was enormous in east-west extent, running across Eurasia from the Atlantic to Siberia, over the Beringian land bridge into Alaska and Yukon, and when not blocked by ice reaching below the Laurentide ice sheet. Called “the Mammoth Steppe,” after its most iconic
creature, it was then Earth’s most extensive biome, having a cold dry climate, vegetation dominated by palatable high-productivity grasses, forbs and willow shrubs, animals dominated by bison, horse, and woolly mammoth. It thrived for about 100,000 years without major changes until the end of the Pleistocene.
By some estimates, its animal biomass and plant productivity were similar to today’s African savannah
Mazzur provides an excellent review of the the arguments for and against the overkill theory and the climate change theory
13 - Agrarian Transformation
Since the Holocene started 11.7 kya, the climate has become warmer, generally wetter with higher sea levels, and less variable. There is good evidence of independent agricultural beginnings in central China, the New Guinea highlands, Mesoamerica, the central Andes, the Mississippi basin, western Africa, and southern India, occurring at various times between about 10,000 and 4,000 years ago
Sedentary community life preceded agriculture. 14,000 years ago, the Natufian people of the Levant lived in well built dwellings.
Due to a lack of suitable plants, Egypt did not have agriculture - it was introduced from Greece and Italy
After the Ice Age, the nearly complete adoption of agrarian life within about five millennia became the substrate upon which towns grew into cities, kingdoms and empires
14 - Rise of Civilizations
The Indus civilization, dated 2600 to 1900 BC, occupied more area than Egypt or Mesopotamia, covering most of today’s Pakistan and northwestern India.
Harappa and another city, Mohenjo-Daro, lack monumental works, palaces or temples, suggesting a more egalitarian population. Yet they showed advanced urban planning, with well-built mud-brick houses and other
structures lining straight streets, and provided elaborate water supply, drainage, and waste disposal systems.
For four centuries the Roman and Han empires were the two greatest powers in the world, yet were only dimly if at all aware of each other. Rome was founded earlier but did not reach full dominance of the Mediterranean until decisively defeating Carthage in 202 BC, the same year the first Han emperor came to power. Both empires eventually failed due to external threat, internal dissension, economic collapse, new religious movements, and endemic disease. Mazur sees a certain inevitability to this course of development.
The author investigates the question of "What if the Chinese had “discovered” the New World before
Columbus?"
In less than 400 years, the industrialized societies had become separated from the agrarian ones and not only separate but in control. This division remains the most important one in the world today.
July 12, 2022
The book is supposedly an examination of the history of ice ages and our attempts to identify and understand them, and there is some good material on this. There's also a great deal of background information that is only tangentially related to Ice Ages, which might be helpful to someone who's read nothing on prehistory, but is frustrating to someone more familiar with it. Finally, the last chapter on civilization seems to literally belong to a different book. It is about the rise of civilization, and falls completely out of even the author's own stated timeline of 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago. Moreover, in the ebook, the chapter literally LOOKS as if it came from another book--the chapter heading is completely different, and the text spacing is different (see photo). The book lists for $20, doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble to make the final chapter look like the rest of the book, or at least relate to the subject at hand.
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