The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

the most recent catastrophe: a “revolution on the surface of the earth” that took place just before the ...

first sign said. Other signs pointed to a campsite, a lake, a gift shop, a minigolf course, a mu ...

plastic vulture, and some scattered plastic bones completed the grisly tableau. Farther on, I came to Big Bone ...

Mammalia is actually due to man’s agency.” The whole thing, he said, was really “very obvious.” Diprotodon ...

far as the Renaissance. It’s hard to see how such a sequence could be squared with a single climate chan ...

Sporormiella counts dropped almost to zero. Following the crash, the landscape started to burn. (T ...

misplaced. In their view, nothing has been proved about the event, “categorically” or otherwise, and ...

therefore probably remained plentiful even as the number of mammoths dropped: “Mammoth became a luxury ...

introduction of modern technologies—turbines, railroads, chainsaws— that humans became a world-altering force. ...

CHAPTER XII THE MADNESS GENE Homo neanderthalensis The Neander Valley, or, in German, das Neandertal, lies about twenty ...

lived in Europe for at least a hundred thousand years. For the most part, this was a time of cold, an ...

made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region dis ...

over the floor. Pääbo, who is Swedish, is sometimes called the “father of paleogenetics.” He more o ...

with Neanderthals, that made a difference,” Pääbo told me. “What made it possible for us to build ...

found the bones perplexing. Neanderthals had very large skulls—larger, on average, than people today. This ...

A Neanderthal as depicted in 1909. In the nineteen-fifties, a pair of anatomists, William Straus a ...

partially blind. His injuries had healed, which suggested that he must have been cared for by other mem ...

consists of molecules known as nucleotides knit together in the shape of a ladder—the famous double helix. ...

another would materialize. “It was an emotional roller coaster,” recalled Ed Green, a biomolecular engineer ...

Gradually, the other team members started to come around. In a paper published in Science in May 2010, they ...