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The Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and the Rewriting of Global Environmental History

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Abstract

Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists speculated that the Pleistocene megafauna—species such as the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and saber-tooth cat—perished because of rapid climate change accompanying the end of the most recent Ice Age. In the 1950s, a small network of ecologists challenged this view in collaboration with archeologists who used the new tool of radiocarbon dating. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis imagined human hunting, not climate change, to be the primary cause of megafaunal extinction. This article situates the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in a broader history of the emergence of historical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline of paleoecology. Tracing the work of the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and an interdisciplinary research network that included Paul Sears, Richard Foster Flint, Edward Deevey, Kathryn Clisby, and Paul S. Martin, it reveals how both the methods and the meaning of studying fossil pollen shifted between the 1910s and 1960s. First used as a tool for fossil fuel extraction, fossil pollen became a means of envisioning climatic history, and ultimately, a means of reimagining global ecological history. First through pollen stratigraphy and then through radiocarbon dating, ecologists reconstructed past biotic communities and rethought the role of humans in these communities. By the 1980s, the discipline of historical ecology would reshape physical environments through the practice of ecological restoration.

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Notes

  1. New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, “Pleistocene Rewilding: Endangered Tortoises Land in New Mexico,” January 8, 2007, https://rewilding.org/pleistocene-rewilding-endangered-tortoises-land-in-new-mexico/ Accessed 23 February 2023.

  2. The article was covered by the Associated Press, USA Today, the New York Times, The Economist, National Public Radio, the British Broadcast Service, ABC’s Good Morning America, and elsewhere.

  3. On the history of ecology between 1890 and World War II, see Moore (1920), Worster (1987, chapters 10–11), Egerton (1977), Tobey (1981), Cittadino (1990), Croker (1991), Nicolson (1996), Kohler (2002), and Kingsland (2005, chapters 1–5).

  4. Sears’s notes on Gleason (1922) can be found in box 5, folder 2, MS 445, Paul Bigelow Sears Collection, The University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona [hereafter Sears Papers]. Gleason elaborated on the relationship between migration and succession in Gleason (1917).

  5. Among historians of biology, Gleason is best known for rejecting Clements’s 'superorganism' theory. See Barbour (1995). Around the same time, E. Lucy Braun came to the same conclusion: succession theory was not only a tool to predict the future, but also a tool to envision the past. E. Lucy Braun to Frederic Clements, October 23, 1929, subseries 1, box 12, folder 1-3, 1929 to 1935, Annette and E. Lucy Braun Papers, MS 1064, Cincinnati History Library & Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.

  6. Sears mentioned this connection in notes for a lecture he delivered before the Mexican Society of Natural History, June 3, 1955, box 3 folder 27, Sears Papers.

  7. Paul Sears, “Climate in Northern Hemisphere Since Ice Ages,” Literary Digest, January 6, 1934, clipping in box 5, folder 6, Sears Papers.

  8. Clipping in Paul B. Sears to Johnny Erp, May 25, 1934, box 1, folder 6, Sears Papers.

  9. Paul B. Sears to Johnny Erp, May 18, 1934, box 1, folder 6, Sears Papers.

  10. In emphasizing the importance of the Dust Bowl to paleoecology, I am in agreement with Melissa Charenko’s recent article, “Reconstructing Climate: Paleoecology and the Limits of Prediction during the 1930s Dust Bowl.” Charenko (2020) argues that Frederic Clements’s and Paul B. Sears’s “distinct notions of climate emerged from the particular way each reconstructed past climates” (p. 93). While Clements analyzed tree rings and argued for regularity to climatic change, by the 1940s, Sears rejected the cyclical nature of climate. See also Christophe Masutti (2006).

  11. The logbook with the codes for Sears’s peat collections is in box 6, folder 82, Sears Papers.

  12. “Sears Reads Dust History in Peat Bogs: Pollen Grain May Give Clue to Dust Bowl’s Fate,” Associated Press, March 17, 1937, clipping in box 5, folder 6, Sears Papers.

  13. Aldo Leopold, “Science Attacks the Game Cycle,” Outdoor America (1931), p. 25, Box 1, Series 9/25/10-6, Leopold Papers. Leopold’s notes from the conference can be found in Box 5, Folder 2, Series 9/25/10-2, Aldo Leopold Papers, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Madison, Wisconsin [hereafter Leopold Papers]. See also Elton (1933). On Elton and population ecology more generally, see Kingsland (1985), Crowcroft (1991), Anker (2001), Erickson (2010), Bocking (2012), and Jones (2017).

  14. Letters between Deevey and Hutchinson can be found in box 11, folder 194, series I, G. Evelyn Hutchinson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, Connecticut [hereafter GEH Papers].

  15. See also series I, box 11, folder 194, GEH Papers.

  16. Edward S. Deevey to Paul B. Sears, October 31, 1939, box 1, folder 5, Sears Papers; Edward S. Deevey to Paul B. Sears, April 9, 1937, box 1, folder 5, Sears Papers.

  17. Series I, box 11, folder 194, GEH Papers. “The Philosophers’ Stone,” TIME, August 15, 1955. On carbon dating see Libby (1946), Anderson et al. (1947), Arnold and Libby (1949), Libby (1955), and Libby (1972).

  18. Willard Libby to G. Evelyn Hutchinson, as cited in Deevey (1984). Hutchinson describes this meeting in “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Ecology of the Yale Biology Department,” c. 1966, box 50, folder 50, series 2, GEH Papers. See also Deevey (1949), “Program of the New York Meeting” (1949) and Deevey (1952).

  19. Libby as quoted in Hutchinison, “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Ecology of the Yale Biology Department,” c. 1966, Box 50, Folder 50, Series II, GEHP. See also Edward Smith Deevey, Jr., “Biogeography of the Pleistocene. Part 1. Europe and North America,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 60 (1949): 1315-1416; “Program of the New York Meeting with Abstracts of Papers, Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 30 (1949): 45-72; Edward Smith Deevey, Jr., “Radiocarbon Dating,” Scientific American 186 (1952): 24-28.

  20. Hutchinson probably learned about radiocarbon dating at the National Academy of Sciences in 1946 or 1947, as he was connected to a group who discussed 'cosmochemistry.' Edward Deevey attended a meeting of archaeologists and radiochemists in 1952 on the refinement of radiocarbon dating; see Deevey (1951). Deevey’s notes from “Conference on Radiocarbon Dating: Meeting of Society for American Archaeology at Columbus, Ohio on May 3, 1952,” can be found in box 11, folder 194, series 1, GEH Papers.

  21. “Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Program of Study of the Past Million Years,” 1954, box 58, folder 51, series 2, GEH Papers.

  22. Sears became chairman of the Conservation Program at Yale University in the 1950s. Prior to that he had taught botany at the University of Oklahoma and Oberlin College. He authored, among other works, Deserts on the March (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935), This Is Our World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), Life and Environment (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1939), and Charles Darwin: The Naturalist as a Cultural Force (New York: Scribners, 1950).

  23. “Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Program of Study of the Past Million Years,” 1954, box 58, folder 51, series 2, GEH Papers.

  24. Paul B. Sears to Warren Weaver, May 25, 1950, box 1, folder 23, Sears Papers.

  25. Warren Weaver to Paul B. Sears, May 31, 1950, box 1, folder 23, Sears Papers.

  26. C. C. Furnas to Admiral C. M. Bolster, September 19, 1952, box 1, folder 3, Sears Papers.

  27. John N. Adkins to C. C. Furnas, October 6, 1952, box 1, folder 3, Sears Papers.

  28. Untitled manuscript, n.d., Box 1, folder 7, Sears Papers.

  29. Kathryn Clisby to Paul B. Sears, November 1, 1951, box 6, folder 30, Sears Papers; “Climate Scientist: Wellington Woman Reads Story of Past in Samples of Earth,” newspaper clipping without publication information, box 6, folder 31, Sears Papers.

  30. Clisby’s methods for studying “non-calcareous silts and clays” in box 6, folder 1, Sears Papers.

  31. Copy of Chas V. Theis to L. G. Mohr, August 9, 1950, box 1, folder 21, Sears Papers.

  32. Clyde S. Conover to Paul B. Sears, June 10, 1952, box 1, folder 4, Sears Papers; Paul B. Sears and Kathryn H. Clisby, “Two Long Climatic Records,” Science 116 (1952): 176-178.

  33. Paul B. Sears to the Committee in Charge, Geochronometric Laboratory, May 14, 1952, box 2, folder 8, Sears Papers.

  34. Paul B. Sears to Atomic Energy Commission, March 24, 1954, box 2, folder 1, Sears Papers.

  35. D. L. Anderson, “Appendix: Report on Exploratory Investigations on Radioactivity of Core Samples,” 1953, box 6, folder 4, Sears Papers.

  36. D. H. Clewell to Paul B. Sears, April 28, 1955, box 1, folder 3, Sears Papers. See also Paul B. Sears to W. H. Burke, April 22, 1955, box 2, folder 2, Sears Papers; Paul B. Sears to Kathryn Clisby, July 5, 1955, box 2, folder 4, Sears Papers.

  37. Sears and Clisby, draft manuscript, n.d., box 6, folder 23, Sears Papers.

  38. Box 6, folder 22, Sears Papers.

  39. Final Program for Third National Pollen Conference, Oberlin, May 18-20, 1956, box 6, folder 23, Sears Papers.

  40. Carl Sauer to Paul B. Sears, July 8, 1949, box 1, folder 19, Sears Papers.

  41. See, for example, Phil C. Orr to Paul B. Sears, June 1, 1955, box 1, folder 16, Sears Papers.

  42. Translated from Cuvier, “Espèces des éléphans,” 1796, in Martin J.S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 24.

  43. Quoted in Mark Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, x.

  44. Quoted in Mark Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 27.

  45. The Extermination of the American Bison initially appeared in 1889 as part of the annual report of the U.S. National Museum and was later published separately. William Temple Hornaday, The Extermination of the American Bison (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).

  46. Sears and Martin had corresponded since at least 1952. See Paul S. Martin to Paul B. Sears, April 28, 1952, box 1, folder 14, Sears Papers. Many felt that Martin overreached with his hypothesis. One student wrote to Sears of Martin’s paper, “It is an impressive documentation, but again he wields a sharp axe. In some instances, I don’t think he has justification, unless it is just to stir up argument.” See Pete J. Gordon Ogden II to Paul B. Sears, December 6, 1958, box 2, folder 16, Sears Papers.

  47. A copy of the paper Martin presented at the AAAS Program on Unsolved Problems in Biology can be found in box 6, folder 53, Sears Papers. See also Burney and Flannery (2005).

  48. R.M. Fano, Review of Pleistocene Extinctions, Scientific American, vol. 218, May 1968, pp. 157-159, clipping in folder 9, box 16, Paul S. Martin Papers, MS 442, The University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona [hereafter Martin Papers].

  49. George Wilson, “Giant Sloth Perished with Arrival of Man,” The Arizona Daily Star, January 15, 1959, clipping in MS 442, folder 1, box 22, Martin Papers.

  50. G. B. Corbet, “Review of Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause,” Journal of Animal Ecology (1969), clipping in folder 9, box 16, Martin Papers.

  51. Herman F. Becker, Review of The Last 1,000 Years, Garden Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, July-Aug 1964, 160, clipping in Folder 7, Box 16, Martin Papers.

  52. Wolfgang Breed, “Review of Pleistocene Extinctions,” Clear Creek 2 (1967): 65, clipping in folder 9, box 16, Martin Papers.

  53. See also Day (1953), Lutz (1959), Swain (1973), Ogden (1964), and Russell (1980, 1983).

  54. Walter Sullivan, “’Overkill’ of Animals Laid to Huntsmen in 9000 B.C.,” New York Times, February 13, 1972, p. 62.

  55. A handful of papers in the 1950s describe predatory fish as superpredators. I have found one use of the term earlier than Martin’s and journalists’ descriptions of Martin’s research: Frank C. Hibben, “Notes and Comment: The Mountain Lion and Ecology,” Ecology 20 : 584 (1939), “No one will deny that man, as the superpredator, has become an ecological factor himself. Few killing factors are as important a predator as the rifle.”.

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Funding

Funding was provided by National Science Foundation (Grant Number 1329750) and Social Science Research Council.

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  1. Center for Environmental Studies, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA

    Laura J. Martin

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Martin, L.J. The Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and the Rewriting of Global Environmental History. J Hist Biol 56, 35–63 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-023-09704-0

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