In his latest book, Wild New World, the historian Dan Flores follows these fraught interactions from prehistory to the present day, seeking what he calls the “particular American story” of humans and animals in North America. Flores is an emeritus professor at the University of Montana and the author of ten previous books, including Coyote America and American Serengeti (both published in 2016). He describes Wild New World as a work of “big history”—a term coined in 1991 by the historian David Christian, who wrote:
We cannot fully understand the past few millennia without understanding the far longer period of time in which all members of our own species lived as gatherers and hunters, and without understanding the changes that led to the emergence of the earliest agrarian communities and the first urban civilizations.
Flores begins his big history with the Chicxulub asteroid. When it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, he writes, “the impact wiped clean the hard drive of evolutionary life all over the planet, but particularly in America.” Chicxulub obliterated most of the dinosaurs (save the ancestors of today’s birds) and almost all North American plant life; with scarce exceptions, it reduced the planet’s animal life to small reptiles, amphibians, and an assemblage of rat-sized, ground-dwelling mammals that were lucky or resourceful enough to survive. These mammals, able to reproduce quickly, began to fill the ecological niches that the asteroid emptied.
Fewer than a million years after Chicxulub hit, some North American mammals were as large as modern-day wolves. Within 10 million years, the earliest horses appeared, followed by prototypical beavers, camels, pronghorn, seals, and sea otters. Some 17 million years ago, during the Miocene, the first mastodons crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to North America, as did the forerunners of elk and deer; toward the end of the Miocene, the rich grasslands of the Great Plains drew sheep, goats, and—belatedly, considering their current all-American reputations—mammoths and bison. This tasty bestiary, in turn, attracted bears and large cats; the famous saber-tooths began to feast on North American grazers about 2.5 million years ago. Meanwhile, our own genus was only beginning to emerge in Africa, and did not seriously set forth from its continent of origin for another two million–plus years.
This story has been told before, but Flores is a skilled raconteur, and he memorably evokes the rich, weird assortment of species that inhabited North America long before any of our direct ancestors. The bustling prairies and forests of what Flores calls “Clovisia the Beautiful” are exhilarating to contemplate—especially given that we know Flores’s tale must end with Homo sapiens giving the Chicxulub asteroid a run for its ecocidal money in the twenty-first century.