The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

just prior to recorded history (and that the English interpreted as proof of
the Deluge) was, in reality, debris left behind by the last glaciation. The
stratigraphy of the Paris basin reflects not sudden “irruptions” of water
but rather gradual changes in sea level and the effects of plate tectonics.
On all these matters Cuvier was, we now know, wrong.
At the same time, some of Cuvier’s most wild-sounding claims have
turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Life on earth has been disturbed by
“terrible events,” and “organisms without number” have been their
victims. Such events cannot be explained by the forces, or “agents,” at
work in the present. Nature does, on occasion, “change course,” and at
such moments, it is as if the “thread of operations” has been broken.
Meanwhile, as far as the American mastodon is concerned, Cuvier was
to an almost uncanny extent correct. He decided that the beast had been
wiped out five or six thousand years ago, in the same “revolution” that
had killed off the mammoth and the Megatherium. In fact, the American
mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was
part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the
megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern
humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this
sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history
was us.