Big Library Read

Join the first global ebook club

Discover the history of animals and humans co-existing in the latest #BigLibraryRead! Borrow “Wild New World” by Dan Flores from May 9-23, no waitlists or holds, through Libby.

Winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before.

 

 

 

 

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