American Serengeti

Dan Flores fills many gaps in the big history narrative of the Great Plains with American Serengeti. For those determined to understand the history of a vast North American ecosystem, there is much more than this one book to explore, but in order to explore the many layers of human and pre-human interactions of the natural world, this one book is a must read. In chapters that focus on animals species, including pronghorns, coyotes, horses, grizzlies, bison, and wolves, Flores offers separate and distinct narratives for each. Prehistoric populations of these animals and their ancestors gave rise to the more familiar forms known to the earliest humans in North America. For each species, Flores summarizes speculation about the ecological past along with more certain biological and anthropological accounts. We know very little about grizzlies, it seems, which becomes an opportunity to recall long, descriptive passages from the earliest English-speaking explorers. Flores takes what may be lacking in documentary evidence beyond those passages, however, and offers a sense of the vastness of the unknown that matches the space of the Great Plains over the long stretch of time.

Archaeology · Art · Biology · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Prehistory · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Ecology · History · History of Science and Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research