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Author Pyne, Lydia

Title The last lost world : ice ages, human origins, and the invention of the Pleistocene / Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.

Publication Info. New York : Viking, 2012.

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Colchester, Cragin Memorial Library - Adult Department  551.7 PYNE, LYDIA    Check Shelf
 Enfield, Main Library - Adult Department  551.7 PYN    Check Shelf
 Manchester, Main Library - Non Fiction  551.792 PYNE    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  551.792 P99    Check Shelf
 Plainville Public Library - Non Fiction  551.792 PYN    Check Shelf
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  551.792 PY    Check Shelf
Description x, 306 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [273]-288) and index.
Summary 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.
Contents Prologue : Mossel Bay, South Africa -- pt. 1. How the Pleistocene got its ice. Rift ; Ice ; Story -- pt. 2. The great game. Footnotes to Plato ; Out of Africa ; Missing links ; New truths, heresies, superstitions ; The ancients and the moderns -- pt. 3. How the Pleistocene lost its tale. The hominin who would be king ; The Anthropocene -- Epilogue : Rift redux.
Subject Glacial epoch.
Geology, Stratigraphic -- Pleistocene.
Paleoecology -- Pleistocene.
Human beings -- Origin.
Human evolution.
Paleogeography -- Pleistocene.
Paleoanthropology -- Philosophy -- History.
Science -- Philosophy -- History.
Added Author Pyne, Stephen J., 1949-
ISBN 9780670023639 hardback $26.95
0670023639 hardback
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