Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • February 15, 2012 for them to find adequate food. Pondering the mystery a dozen years ago in the growing Ecology Age, with its frequent bias against humans, many scientists came to the conclusion that mastodons and mammoths had been exterminated by over-hunting – not by saber-toothed tigers or bear-sized dire wolves, but by human predators. Starting in the late 1960s, Paul Martin, said mammoths and mastodons had survived in the Western Hemisphere until the arrival of the PaleoIndians around 12,000 years ago. By 10,000 B.C., the continental mammoths and mastodons appear to have become extinct – though the survivors on Wrangel Island, where there is no evidence of human hunting, probably lived until inbreeding and reduced food took their toll about the time of the early pharaohs. Richard MacNeish, a scientist whose investigations began in the mid-1970s, noted that Indians and mastodons appear to have co-existed for tens of thousands of years without a major reduction in the mastodon herds. Researchers in Colorado just a few years ago found evidence that a mammoth had been killed and butchered by Stone Age hunters a staggering 40,000 years ago. The regularly incised marks on the bones indicated that humans were methodically slicing off meat while they kept the front half of the carcass stored in a cold-water mountain lake. This find pushed the presumed date of human arrival in North America back by about 20,000 years. Goodbye, Columbus! Goodbye, Vikings, too! Guess who was here first. The most recent theory is that global warming impacted so heavily on the world of the mammoth and the mastodon that the human predators merely finished off a species that was already doomed by massive climate change. “We believe that the loss of food supplies from productive grasslands was the major contributing factor to the extinction of these mega-mammals,” said Professor Brian Huntley from the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Durham University. “The change from productive grasslands across large areas of northern Eurasia, Alaska, and Yukon to less productive tundra-like habitats had a huge effect on many species, particularly the large herbivores like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth. Mammoths and other mega-mammals found it increasingly difficult to find food.” A computer simulation found that the warming of the planet – which one might have thought would be a good thing for herbivores because it expanded the grazing range at the expense of glaciers and the polar ice cap – had just the opposite effect. The change to a climate that was warmer and wetter resulted in the proliferation of trees and the reduction of grassland: the primary feeding zone for the mastodon and virtually the only feeding zone for the mammoth. “This is a model for what may happen as a result of rapid climate change over the next century linked to human activity,” Professor Huntley said. “It is food for thought in these times of global warming and human-induced habitat change. There may well be a lesson to learn.” The lesson appears to be that adaptation is the key to survival. The mammoths and mastodons missed the boat. We do not have to. The manmade climate change can be slowed, if not reversed, if humans get over a number of preconceptions. Those preconceptions include: bare lawns are more benign that green space covered with trees and shrubs, artificial turf is a mandatory necessity to game scheduling for recreational athletics, and the sight of solar panels on utility poles turns these welters of wires and transformer boxes from things of beauty to things of horror. Wind farms will not attract attack by Don Quixote. Some time after the Great Mammoth Clash ended at nap time, I attended a Ridgewood Council meeting where Council Member Bernadette Walsh asked Ridgewood Village Engineer Christopher Rutishauser if removal of a sandbar in Ho-Ho-Kus Brook would eliminate the flooding problems at Ridgewood Village Hall and the public library – not to mention many houses in Ridgewood and Glen Rock. “Unless every community in the watershed ceases development and removes its impervious surfaces, it’s not going to improve,” Rutishauser said frankly. At the time, the council was discussing the construction of masonry walls and floor drains inside village hall so the ground floor of the largest municipal building in Northwest Bergen County could avoid further flood destruction. Council members agreed that the kind of disruption that used to occur during floods that seem to occur every few years, and may occur every few summer months if increased impervious construction and Georgian landscaping practices consonant with flocks of sheep continue on open public and private lawns. People a few decades down the road may miss Venice, Brooklyn, the coastal rice plains of Asia, or the farms of the Netherlands if we fail to realize that the time to deal with this is right now. Let us forget issuing summonses to anyone who lets his or her lawn go to seed, and let us forget issuing building permits to anybody who wants to put up any more asphalt roofs or install more asphalt paving. This generation could be our last chance to avoid going the way of the mastodon and the mammoth. Mammoths are irresistible to little kids. Maybe this is due to watching Snuffleupagus and his kid sister Alice on “Sesame Street,” but little kids have a real affinity for big hairy extinct members of the elephant family. I know this because I keep a couple of mammoths around – plastic miniatures, not the real prehistoric mammals, which would be a drag to feed – and they are always a hit with my tutorial students. Once, when I got up to make a side trip from my tutorial table, a preschooler showed up, saw the mammoths, and started to make them fight by clashing their tusks together. My tandem math tutor watched until the fight began to pose a threat to the tensile strength of the plastic tusks. Then she stepped in to restore tranquility. “It’s time for them to take a nap,” she said. The preschooler understood, and the mammoths survived to pose as models for descriptive essays another day. Unfortunately, the real mammoths have been taking a nap for several thousand years. The last living mammoths – I find this incredible – were a dwarf species and were contemporary with the building of the pyramids. The dwarf mammoth species of Wrangel Island, off the Siberian coast of Russia, left behind survivors that were still alive until 1,650 B.C., but the big guys started to vanish with the end of the last Ice Age. By 8,000 B.C., they had disappeared from both North America and Siberia. The woolly mammoths were the last link in a chain of large-to-giant hairy mammals that appear to have started in Africa, and then circulated and developed all over the globe. The earliest real giant in the clan was the mastodon, a chunkier, somewhat less shaggy, and purportedly more violent relative of the mammoth. Scientists today believe that male mastodons were very brutal dudes, who sometimes killed one another in fights to see who got to breed with the female mastodons. (They know this because some mastodon skeletons bear scuff marks from the massive tusks that would have been fatal.) Mammoths, like modern elephants, appear to have gotten into head-butting contests for breeding rights, but there is little or no evidence that these mammoth battles were fatal. The more belligerent mastodons survived about as long as the less ferocious mammoths did, and had a wider range. The skeleton at the Victorian Museum at Museum Village in lower New York State, and the partial skeleton sometimes displayed in the Bergen County Museum in Paramus, indicate that our whole region was once Mastodon County. Mastodons and mammoths apparently became extinct at about the same time. The question of why they became extinct when they were such formidable beasts, whose adults had no natural predators, has enlivened scientific debates ever since. Early explorers believed the mastodons and mammoths had drowned in Noah’s flood. Thomas Jefferson’s scientists reportedly told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for any holdouts as late as 1804. With Darwin, a new theory led to the conclusion that the mastodons and mammoths had gone extinct when their huge size made it impossible Mastodons and mammoths: Why did big guys finish first? Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Mr. Koster’s piece, “A double threat to traditional values?” was a theological travesty. His biblical exegesis and treatment of biblical history are appallingly bad and deficient. To suggest that the Mosaic Law, Jesus, and the Apostles didn’t teach monogamy is not only absurd, but doing so ignores the entire history of what both Jewish and Christian doctrine have to say on the matter. Monogamous marital imagery is the main symbol of the whole of Scripture (the Bible literally starts and ends with it), and for Mr. Koster to miss this fact is significant. He compounds these errors in the following ways: • He assumes that biblical mention of a practice or behavior is tantamount to God’s approval of same. • He looks for explicit condemnations or affirmations, but the Bible does not always approach an issue by patently stating, “Don’t do this,” or “Be certain to do that.” • Jesus clearly re-emphasized God’s original intent for man and woman when, in Matthew 19, he directed his listeners to the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. Jesus Theology teacher reacts to column notes that a man (singular) is joined to his wife (singular) and the two (not the three or four or five) "become one flesh." • He suggests that Saint Paul’s admonition for church leaders to have only one wife boils down to practicality or expediency rather than being a theological and moral consideration. • He treats multiple subjects in a given passage as being of equal weight (e.g., one wife is as important as keeping hair short). I could say more, but space is limited. If a writer is going to opine on a topic, especially one involving such important matters as the Bible and the role of marriage in our society, it would be helpful if he or she used accurate information and/or was sufficiently educated in the subject matter. Merely reading the Bible multiple times in this case does not suffice. Joel S. Peters Mahwah Note: Mr. Peters teaches theology in a Catholic high school and holds a master’s degree from Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University.