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

An enlightening 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. 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. Th...