Reading: excerpt of The Sixth Extinction

- Read what you can of Chapter XI of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction at home (for 30 minutes maximum - after that it's up to you whether you want to keep on reading or not). Note that I have included chapter XII as well because I thought you might be interested in reading it.
We'll discuss chapter XI next class.

Chapter XI looks into the causes of the loss of the Pleistocene megafauna and its consequences for the lanscape.
Chapter XII explores the possible reasons for the disappearance of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo Erectus, who had populated Africa and the Eurasian continent before modern humans, and cohabitated with them for several thousand years.

 35 000-30 000 years old painting from the cave of Chauvet, France, depicting species now extinct in Europe