Pleistocene Epoch Quotes

“About thirty-five genera of mammals disappear from America, about half of them in a brief window of 500 years, 13,200 to 12,700 years ago, with Clovis hunters occupying the core of that time period. A sudden cooling, the Younger Dryas, descends on the Earth by 12,880 years ago, marking the terminal appearance of many of these animals. Suspected causes of the YD are still contentious. But it signals the end of Clovis and much of the megafauna.”
― Doug Peacock, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans, and the Terribl

“On the Larch Scape humans had never managed to extend a sizeable population across entire continents, so much of the megafauna considered to be a distant Pleistocene memory on other Scapes had lingered. The mammoths, giant sloths and woolly rhinoceroses were extinct, but there were hyenas, fanged cats and amphicyonids hunting bison, omnivorous deer, glyptodons, great boars, and wild horses too large for men to ride south of the Laurentian Sea, in what was called Illinois on Malone’s Scape. The island of Manhattan was not an island due to the lower sea level, and it was uninhabited by men, an impenetrable mass of old growth larch trees ruled by creatures thought to be related to the raccoon. The Larch ‘raccoon’ was frequently said to be too intelligent to domesticate; in groups they would destroy shelters and eat the faces of sleeping humans. The atrox cat had been genetically sequenced in cooperation with Austral scientists years ago and determined to be more closely related to the lion than the cougar, and it had enjoyed a range extending north of the Laurentian Sea up to the glaciers until very recently. It was a dark creature with a thick mane in both genders; besides the elements, their prides were the deadliest things to encounter in the far north.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita