For the past 12,000 years, the earth has experienced a relatively stable climate. Today, that predictability has ended, and global warming is our new reality. Yet such shifting weather patterns threatened Homo sapiens once before, right here in North America as the continent was first being colonized. About 15,000 years ago, the weather began to warm, melting the glaciers of the Late Pleistocene and driving the beasts of the Ice Age toward extinction. In this new landscape, humans managed to adapt to unfamiliar habitats and dangerous creatures in the midst of a wildly fluctuating climate. Are there lessons for modern people lingering along this ancient trail?
Renegade naturalist Doug Peacock’s thrilling narrative explores the full range of climate change, from the death of the Pleistocene megafauna to the disappearance of today’s ice. In the Shadow of the Sabertooth is a deeply personal odyssey that follows Peacock from archeological digs in Michigan and Montana, to the tiger haunted forests of Siberia, along the wild coast of the Pacific Northwest, into the rugged arroyos of Mexico and the American Southwest.
Author, Vietnam veteran, filmmaker and naturalist Doug Peacock has published widely on wilderness issues: from grizzly bears to buffalo, from the Sierra Madres of the Sonoran desert to the fjords of British Columbia, from the tigers of Siberia to the blue sheep of Nepal. Doug Peacock was a Green Beret medic and the real-life model for Edward Abbey’s George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
