The call of distant mammoths : why the ice age mammals disappeared

https://www.abebooks.com/9780387949154/Call-Distant-Mammoths-Why-Ice-0387949151/plp

"From the Back Cover: Why are the great mammals that once walked the earth now largely extinct outside of Africa? Of the two suspected culprits, climate change and human hunting, Ward builds a compelling case for human hunting. Humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago, and the marsupial lions and giant kangaroos vanished soon after; they came to New Zealand 2,000 years ago, and the giant moa was quickly gone; and the American extinction coincides with the spread of the first human population there. In order to understand what happened in the Ice Age, Ward takes us on a tour of mass extinctions through earth's history. He presents a compelling account of the great comet crash that killed off the dinosaurs and describes other extinctions that were even worse. In so doing he introduces us to a profound paradigm shift now taking place in paleontology: rather than arising from the gradual workings of everyday forces, all mass extinctions are due to unique, catastrophic events. They throw a wild card into the game of evolution and start the contest anew."