Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters (Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science)

The Americas have been the site of two distinct waves of human migration, each associated with human-caused extinctions.The first occurred during the late Pleistocene era, some ten to thirty thousand years ago; the other began during the time of European settler-colonization and continues to this day. In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them.He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna-mammoths, whales, and the North American bison-beginning with the moments that these species' extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives: transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical and scientific accounts, and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors. "If the Sixth Extinction is a hyperobject, an event so massively distributed in space and time that it canno