The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene

From a remarkable father-daughter team comes a dramatic synthesis of science and environmental history—an exploration of the geologic time scale and evolution twinned with the story of how, eventually, we have come to understand our own past.

The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. The Last Lost World is an inquiry into the conditions that made it, the themes that define it, and the creature that emerged dominant from it. At the same time, it tells the story of how we came to discover and understand this crucial period in the Earth’s history and what meanings it has for today.