h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Peter D. Ward's excellent book is written like a Creasey thriller which arrives neatly at a devestating conclusion:

"There will always be some doubt. But in my mind ... and in many other scientists' minds as well, this particular scientific murder mystery is solved. We know "whodunit." We did it. Our species, our kind - humanity - armed only with stone-tipped spears, caused the extinction of the great mammoths and mastodons and perhaps that of many other large megamammal species. We did it simply by killing off about 2% of the population per year, year after year. Extinction debts are bad debts, and when they are eventually paid, the world is a poorer place."

I must read the book. Is he arguing that human predation was the only reason for the extinction? Or was the eventual recovery in the mammoth population that might be expected in a classic predator-prey relationship scuppered by the additional factor of climate change?

Hello Amy. It is a good book. Peter Ward suggests up front and all the way to a chapter from the end that the mammoth's killer looks likely to be a combination of climate and us. But in the final chapter he finds 'proof' from the most recent science that most dead mammoths were as healthy as can be. The climate had little or nothing to do with their deaths - it was us.