If you went back in time to the site of Los Angeles as it looked 12,000 years agoat the height of the last Ice Agethe animal population might remind you of Africa. You would see saber-toothed tigers, giant ground sloths and camels, hippos, lions, and enormous scavenging condors, as well as giant bears and wolves. Most spectacular of all would be the great herds of proboscideans: giant mastodons and mammoths, extinct relatives of the elephant. Why are these splendid creatures no longer with us? Why are the great mammals that once walked the earth now largely extinct outside of Africa?

Of the two suspected culprits, climate change and human hunting, Ward builds a compelling case for human hunting. Humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago, and the marsupial lions and giant kangaroos vanished soon after; they came to New Zealand 2,000 years ago, and the giant moa was quickly gone; and the American extinction coincides with the spread of the first human population there.

Surprisingly, however, this most recent of prehistoric mass extinctions is far from the best known or most thoroughly studied. In order to understand what happened in the Ice Age, Ward takes us on a tour of mass extinctions through earth's history. He presents a compelling account of the great comet crash that killed off the dinosaurs and describes other extinctions that were even worse. In so doing he introduces us to a profound paradigm shift now taking place in paleontology: rather than arising from the gradual workings of everyday forces, all mass extinctions are due to unique, catastrophic events. They throw a wild card into the game of evolution and start the contest anew.

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