Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

Man’s ability to destroy whole wildlife populations goes back even farther than this, however. Arthur Jelinek, a vertebrate paleontologist, has referred to early man in North America in very harsh terms, calling him a predator “against whom no [naturally] evolved defense systems were available” and “a source of profound changes” in the ecosystems of North America at the beginning of the Holocene. This was “an extremely efficient and rapidly expanding predator group,” Jelinek writes, with “a formidable potential for disruption.” The specific events on which Jelinek bases these judgments are the catastrophic die-offs of large mammals that began about 18,000 years ago in North America and in which he believes man played the crucial role. Collectively the events are known as the Pleistocene extinction.