Picture this: it’s the tail end of the last ice age. The gargantuan ice sheets that cover Europe and North America are rapidly receding. It’s quickly become warmer than at any point in the previous hundred thousand years in the northern hemisphere, which has caused the ranges of plants and animals to change rapidly. Then, […]
A study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that the fossils of Late Pleistocene big cats once believed to have been tigers were actually cave lions. The fossils were, for the first time, analyzed genetically as opposed to morphologically, which led to these intriguing conclusions. It’s well known that
There are few places in this world more captivating than the Amazon. While the Amazon biome includes the famous Amazon rainforest as well as adjacent ecoregions, the term “Amazon” usually refers principally to the rainforest itself. Located within the Amazon basin, it is home to the mighty Amazon River—the largest river by water discharge and either
Apple TV has just released Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, the third season of the franchise (Link). This time the series jumps tens of millions of years forward—from the Mesozoic landscapes of the first two seasons to (as the name implies) the much more frigid and turbulent world of the Pleistocene. I write and read way
In the previous sections of this three-part series, we explored why humans, not climate, played the much larger part in the extinction of Late Quaternary megafauna. However, this rather obvious reality has been obscured by a swathe of scientific papers with questionable conclusions. In this final piece of my series, I will aim to foster
In the first section of this three part series, we examined the background and defining characteristics of the Late Quaternary Extinctions and explored the nuances of climate change and ecology. In doing so, we showed that the support for climate as the central driver of the disappearance of so many species over the past few
Like many other people, the natural world has fascinated me from a very young age. I spent countless hours in my childhood drawing, reading about, and watching documentaries on animals such as tigers, brown bears, lions, various species of deer, buffalo, and so much more. I learned about the diets, physical attributes, and geographic distributions
On this blog, we’ve explored key aspects of the Pleistocene across multiple regions—South America, North America, Australia, and part of Asia. Today, we turn to Europe, a continent that has received perhaps the most attention in paleontological and Paleolithic research. The disproportionate wealth of information we have about Europe’s history is not only because of
When someone thinks of Slavic people, Russians are probably the first group that comes to mind. Given the fact that they are the most populous Slavic-speaking ethnicity by a wide margin and the one with the greatest visibility in history and politics, this is hardly surprising. Therefore, it might be shocking for some to find
Pleistocene Ice Ages conjure up notions of intense cold, massive glaciers, and an endless wilderness hosting a large and diverse community of animals. Most people understand that it was a very different world. Yet, if a layman were to go tens of thousands of years back in time, the landscapes they would encounter would not