The Ice Age

by Björn Kurtén

Vad är egentligen istiden? Hur uppstod den? Och varför försvann den? I den här boken försöker paleontologen Björn Kurtén på ett enkelt vis förklara vilka mekanismer som låg bakom och hur de påverkade jorden och dess invånare. Läsaren får veta allt om olika tidsepokerna, djurens uppkomst och människans förfäder. Och hur istiden fortfarande är ständigt närvarande i våra berg, skogar och hav. Ett praktverk om istiden. Björn Olof Lennartson Kurtén (1924-1988) var en framstående finlandssvensk paleontolog och författare som skrev populärvetenskapliga verk och skönlitteratur, ofta baserade på hans forskning. Han skrev även ett femtiotal vetenskapliga publikationer.

178 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Björn Olof Lennartson Kurtén (1924–1988) was a distinguished vertebrate paleontologist. He belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. He was a professor in paleontology at the University of Helsinki from 1972 up to his death in 1988. He also spent a year as lecturing guest professor at Harvard University in 1971.
In Not from the Apes (1971) Kurtén argued that man's development has been separate from that of monkeys and apes for at least 35 million years, and that man did not descend from anthropoids, but rather the reverse.
He was also the author of an acclaimed series of books about modern man's encounter with Neanderthals, such as Dance of the Tiger (1978, 1980). When asked what genre these works belonged in, Kurtén coined the term paleofiction to describe his oeuvre. This genre was popularized by Jean M. Auel in her Earth's Children series of books. He received several awards for his books around popularized science, among others the Kalinga Prize from UNESCO.
In the 1980s, Kurtén also hosted a 6-part TV series about the ice age, co-produced by several Scandinavian TV channels.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the English version, published in the same year (1972). An excellent, quite in-depth review of the Pleistocene epoch and the associated fauna, mainly the famous mega ones, but also listing the smaller mammals and birds of certain localities. There was also a short introduction to geological time periods, the mechanisms that explain the repeated glaciations and interglacial intervals. Human evolution was covered in some level of detail, though obviously quite outdated by now, but the illustrations of stone tools were interesting . The best thing about this large format book was the many panoramas of prehistoric scenes richly depicted in the spreads. The next was that Kurten even talked about the Sunda region and how certain mammals like elephants were able to disperse almost to the Sahul due to their swimming abilities. Most books on the subject only focus on the Americas and Eurasia, so this was a surprise given the scarcity of data from Asia, especially in the 1970s. Finally, the role of humans in the extinctions was emphasized over that of climate, which was prescient as this book predates the overkill hypothesis first proposed in the 1980s, and of which we have much more evidence for today.

[E.D. Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me the biggest nerd-boner. I loved how it was laid out like a high school text book with digestible chunks of information interspersed with graphics to help me understand. Also, dude is a great writer. This is a book about hard science, but some of Kurten's turns of phrase were downright poetic.

[Jacob Dayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview, information is a little outdated now (it was published in the late 60s). But generally very good.