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

by Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne

Overview

An enthralling scientific and cultural exploration of the Ice Age--from the author of How the Canyon Became Grand

From a remarkable father-daughter team comes a dramatic synthesis of science and environmental history--an exploration of the geologic time scale and evolution twinned with the story of how, eventually, we have come to understand our own past.

The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. The Last Lost World is an inquiry into the conditions that made it, the themes that define it, and the creature that emerged dominant from it. At the same time, it tells the story of how we came to discover and understand this crucial period in the Earth's history and what meanings it has for today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143123422
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/30/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	670,879
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lydia V. Pyne, a lecturer and visiting fellow at Drexel University, has done extensive fieldwork in archaeology and paleoanthropology. She lives in Philadelphia.
Stephen J. Pyne is the author of Voyager, Year of the Fires, The Ice, and How the Canyon Became Grand, among many other books. He lives in Glendale, Arizona.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Mossel Bay, South Africa 1

Part 1 How the Pleistocene Got Its Ice

Chapter 1 Rift 7

African Rift

Renaissance Rift

Past Imperfect

Chapter 2 Ice 16

Ice Age

The Ice Cometh and Goeth

Eiszeit and Zeitgeist

Chapter 3 Story 40

The Geographic Narrative: From Big Chill to Spark Within

The Genomic Narrative: Not in the Stars, but in Ourselves

The Cultural Narrative: The Gloss of Temperament

Part 2 The Great Game

Chapter 4 Footnotes to Plato 61

True to Type

Antecedents and Analogues

Origins: The Beginnings of the Ends

Chapter 5 Out of Africa 87

Parallel Paths of the Past

Erectus Unbound: Quest for Fire

The Orthogenesis of an Idea

Chapter 6 Missing Links 114

Forging the Chain

From Chain to Tree

Links Found, Lost, Invented, and Written

Method, the Modern Synthesis

Extinct Links and Eternal Verities

Chapter 7 New Truths, Heresies, Superstitions 154

Ice, Fire, and Giants: The European Pleistocene

The Last Made First

Founding Fathers

Places of Refuge, Sites of Revelation

Dwarves on the Shoulders of Gyants

Chapter 8 The Ancients and the Moderns 190

Sapients in the Looking Glass

Battle of the Books, Battle of the Bones

Ochre and Aurochs

Part 3 How the Pleistocene Lost its Tale

Chapter 9 The Hominin Who Would Be King 223

The Geographic Narrative: The Great Realignment

The Genomic Narrative: The Great Himself

The Cultural Narrative: The Great What-If

Chapter 10 The Anthropocene 239

Humanity's Planetary Presence

Behaviorally Modern Disciplines

Epilogue: Rift Redux 255

Appendix: Figures 264

Authors' Note 271

Notes 273

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

Praise for THE LAST LOST WORLD

"Daughter-and-father historians of science pretty fully justify their profession in this brilliant explanation of the most recent geological epoch [...] For science mavens of a philosophical bent, this may be the book of the year, a font of knowledge and, what's more and better, intellectual exercise." -- Booklist

"Written in clear, supple prose, this title will interest historians, anthropologists, and anyone fascinated by the Ice Ages, human evolution, and the history of science and culture."
-- Library Journal

"Lasting from about 3 million to 10,000 years ago, the Pleistocene is both a geological epoch and an idea, write science historians Stephen Pyne (Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery, 2011, etc.) and his daughter Lydia, who proceed to deliver a perceptive account of both."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"[Pyne] and his daughter dig right into the subject of the tumultuous, fascinating Pleistocene and do [...] a lively, bang-up job of it."
-- Open Letters Monthly

From the Publisher

Father and daughter historians Lydia Pyne (Drexel University) and Stephen Pyne (Year of the Fires) argue that, in the 19th century, with the development of the notion of the Pleistocene era—from 2.6 million years ago to about 10,000–12,000 years ago, toward the end of which Homo sapiens emerged—science split from the humanities because scientists became interested only in collecting data and not constructing narratives, which supply the meaning and moral purpose most people crave. Lydia Pyne, whose first-person account opens the book, lets her background in history color her approach to science. After a brief scientific account of the Pleistocene, the book launches into a historical and philosophical look at how we have articulated the meaning of this geological period. But the analysis fails due partly to academic writing (“The instinct, that is, is to turn evolutionary opportunism into narrative surety and to stiffen phylogenic uncertainty into the crisp lines of story”). But it’s also hampered by a confusion between the intent of scientists and the human need for moral understanding of, for instance, what makes us human. This is a difficult book, not well suited to a general audience. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Stephen Pyne (history, Arizona State Univ.; Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction) and his daughter Lydia (lecturer, history of science, Drexel Univ.) reveal how Africa served as a continental refugium during the Pleistocene era. Least affected by ice, most adapted to hominids, Africa lost less than 25 percent of its megafauna. In contrast, South America, whose relatively recent link to North America helped trigger the Ice Ages, lost more than 85 percent. The world that resulted was shaped by climate and by the hominids that came out of Africa. The Pynes then hold a mirror to the history of scientific thought on the Pleistocene era. Influenced by the culture of their time, scientists created then discarded evolutionary tropes such as the great chain of being, the tree of life, the missing link, etc. Using examples from Plato to philosopher Karl Popper, they show how culture shapes science and our view of the world. VERDICT Written in clear, supple prose, this title will interest historians, anthropologists, and anyone fascinated by the Ice Ages, human evolution, and the history of science and culture.—Michal Strutin, Santa Clara Univ. Lib., CA

Library Journal

Lasting from about 3 million to 10,000 years ago, the Pleistocene is both a geological epoch and an idea, write science historians Stephen Pyne (Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery, 2011, etc.) and his daughter Lydia, who proceed to deliver a perceptive account of both. The geological story opens as the unusually wet, warm and homogenized Earth of the Miocene and Pliocene epochs segued into a cooler, drier and more fragmented Pleistocene. Rising mountains and new land bridges (Panama, the Bering Strait) forced a realignment of planetary climate. Ice ages waxed and waned. Many hominid species wandered Africa; several wandered north, but by 50,000 years ago, all except ours had vanished. The idea of the Pleistocene began in the 17th century with the first natural philosophers ("scientist" was a 19th-century invention). Rocks and fossils had been known for millennia, but these men looked with a critical eye. By the 1700s it was obvious that the Earth was old. During the 1800s, this age lengthened and subdivisions proliferated as scientists deciphered sedimentary rock strata, precisely classified fossils, and uncovered the effects of glaciation. After 1900, they argued over African climate change and proliferating hominid species, reveling in a flood of new information from fossil discoveries, plate tectonics, deep ocean cores and vastly improved chemical and radiometric dating. The idea is still evolving. Readers with a good introduction to the subject under their belt--e.g., Ian Tattersall's Masters of the Planet (2012)--will be best prepared to absorb this rich but often dense flood of geologic, geographic, anthropologic and philosophical analyses of recent evolution.

Kirkus Reviews