|
The last lost world : ice ages, human origins, and the invention of the Pleistocene / Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne. |
| Authors: | Pyne, Lydia V. |
| Call number: | 551.792 PYN |
| Publisher: | New York : Viking, 2012. |
| Publication date: | 2012. |
| Subject: |
Glacial epoch.
Geology, Stratigraphic -- Pleistocene. Paleoecology -- Pleistocene. Human beings -- Origin. Human evolution. Paleogeography -- Pleistocene. Paleoanthropology -- Philosophy -- History. Science -- Philosophy -- History. |
| Title: | The last lost world : ice ages, human origins, and the invention of the Pleistocene / Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne. |
| Physical description: | x, 306 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. |
| Contents note: | Prologue : Mossel Bay, South Africa -- 1. How the Pleistocene got its ice -- Rift -- Ice -- Story -- 2. The great game -- Footnotes to Plato -- Out of Africa -- Missing links -- New truths, heresies, superstitions -- The ancients and the moderns -- 3. How the Pleistocene lost its tale -- The hominin who would be king -- The Anthropocene -- Epilogue : Rift redux. |
| Summary note: | An 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, 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. This story explains the place of the Pleistocene in shaping intellectual culture, and the role of a rapidly evolving culture in creating the idea of the Pleistocene and in establishing its dimensions. This second story addresses how the epoch, its Earth-shaping events, and its creatures, both those that survived and those that disappeared, helped kindle new sciences and a new origins story as the sciences split from the humanities as a way of looking at the past.--From publisher description. |
| Biography note: | Includes bibliographical references (p. [273]-288) and index. |
| Added author: | Pyne, Stephen J., 1949- |
| ISBN: | 9780670023639 (hbk.) 0670023639 (hbk.) |
| LCCN: | 2011038464 |
| Url for this record: | http://sherloc.imcpl.org/?itemid=|library/marc/dynix|1384110 |
| Bib No.: | 1384110 |
Show Available
| Item availability |
| Location | Collection | Call No. | Status |
| Central Library | Nonfiction, Adult - Non-Floating | 551.792 PYN | Checked out |