“All these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seems to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours. But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe it out?”
Cuvier is a singularly important figure in the history of evolution. He was a turn-of-the-19th century biologist who was the first to assert radical concept of extinction of species, dumbfounding much of the world with his insistence that animals had existed long ago which had never been seen. Cuvier’s theories on extinction would eventually be ridiculed with another insistence on his part which claimed that the process of extinction could be sped up as the result of a global catastrophe. In the 20th century, the ridicule would come to an end with the general acceptance that exactly such a catastrophic event stimulated the demise of dinosaurs.
“The apparent mass extinction is an artifact of statistics and poor understanding of the taxonomy.”
This quote is in response to a paper published by father/son team Luis and Walter Alvarez in1980 suggesting that the debunked Cuvier theory which came to be known as Catastrophism—and which for most of the 19th century and all of the 20th century to that point had been displaced by acceptance of a theory of gradual extinction known as Uniformitarianism—had been proven possible and likely, after all.
“Crater supports extinction theory”
Just over a decade later, the ridicule directed first toward Cuvier for proposing the theory and then toward the Alvarez family for extricating it from the archives and dusting it off for modern consumption was finally accepted as a serious possibility with the discovery of a one-hundred-mile wide crater on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. Originally termed “Crater of Doom” it has since taken on a more scientifically respectable—if significantly less entertaining—name: Chicxulub crater.
If, on the other hand, people were to blame—and it seems increasingly likely that they were—then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer—to use the term of art an "overkiller"—pretty much right from the start.
The central premise of the book is that human activity is driving the earth toward its sixth extinction, but this movement would not be unique to 20th century society. Much evidence points toward the idea that some mammals which had been able to survive ice ages and various other mass environmental shocks were not able to survive the rise of humans. In other words, mankind has been a significant and challenging force in the realm of mass animal extinctions.
