Gary Haynes - Böcker

The diminishing populations of African and Asian elephants call to mind the extinctions of other elephantlike species, such as mammoths and mastodons, that occurred more than 10000 years ago. The purpose of this book is to examine the ecology and behaviour of modern elephants to create models for reconstructing the lives and deaths of extinct mammoths and mastodons. The sources for these models are long-term continuing studies of elephants in Zimbabwe, Africa. These models are clearly described with respect to the anatomical, behavioural, and ecological similarities between past and present proboscideans. The implications of these similarities for the lives and deaths of mammoths and mastodons are explored in detail. The importance of this book is primarily its unifying perspective on living and extinct proboscideans: The fossil record is as carefully examined as is the natural history of surviving elephants. Dr Haynes's studies of the situations in which African elephants die (sometimes in great numbers) are unique and can provide crucial insights into ancient proboscidean bone collections.

The Early Settlement of North America is an examination of the first recognisable culture in the New World: the Clovis complex. Gary Haynes begins his analysis with a discussion of the archaeology of Clovis fluted points in North America and a review of the history of the research on the topic. He presents and evaluates all the evidence that is now available on the artefacts, the human populations of the time, and the environment, and he examines the adaptation of the early human settlers in North America to the simultaneous disappearance of the mammoths and mastodonts. Haynes offers a compelling re-appraisal of our current state of knowledge about the peopling of this continent and provides a significant new contribution to the debate with his own integrated theory of Clovis, which incorporates vital new biological, ecological, behavioural and archaeological data.

The volume contains summaries of facts, theories, and unsolved problems pertaining to the unexplained extinction of dozens of genera of mostly large terrestrial mammals, which occurred ca. 13,000 calendar years ago in North America and about 1,000 years later in South America. Another equally mysterious wave of extinctions affected large Caribbean islands around 5,000 years ago. The coupling of these extinctions with the earliest appearance of human beings has led to the suggestion that foraging humans are to blame, although major climatic shifts were also taking place in the Americas during some of the extinctions. The last published volume with similar (but not identical) themes -- Extinctions in Near Time -- appeared in 1999; since then a great deal of innovative, exciting new research has been done but has not yet been compiled and summarized. Different chapters in this volume provide in-depth resumés of the chronology of the extinctions in North and South America, the possible insights into animal ecology provided by studies of stable isotopes and anatomical/physiological characteristics such as growth increments in mammoth and mastodont tusks, the clues from taphonomic research about large-mammal biology, the applications of dating methods to the extinctions debate, and archeological controversies concerning human hunting of large mammals.