Paul Schultz Martin

"[18] Martin theorized that between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago newly arriving humans hunted to extinction North America's Ice Age large mammals, including ground sloths,[19] camels,[20] mammoths and mastodons.

[12] The theory, summarized by Martin for a scientific audience in 1973[3] and in his 2005 book, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America,[21] has been controversial and thus widely examined (both criticized and supported) in academic papers.

Martin proposed that as humans migrated from Africa and Eurasia to Australia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific, the new arrivals rapidly hunted to extinction the large animals endemic to each continent and thus also naive in the presence of unfamiliar primates equipped with lethal projectiles.

"[34] And in 2012 the authors of a paper published in Nature Communications concluded, "Mammoth extinction was not due to a single cause, but followed a long trajectory in concert with changes in climate, habitat, and human presence.

Isotopes of carbon and nitrogen attributable to both maternal milk and solid food most closely matched those that would have been found in the mammoth genus and secondarily elk or bison.

[43][44][45] To restore the megafaunal browsing function lost in North America when its mastodons and mammoths went extinct, "Bring Back the Elephants" was the title of a 1999 advocacy essay that he (with coauthor David A. Burney) published in Wild Earth magazine.

Prior to invention of the term rewilding and the beginnings of advocacy for it by conservation biologists, Martin had already proposed in 1969[20] and 1970[47] that large mammal equivalents from Africa and Asia be introduced into western North America.

Their ecological function would be to restore native grasslands on which shrubs were becoming dominant — especially where cattle were grazed on semi-arid and arid landscapes in which large carnivores were rare or eliminated.

The experimental introduction of modern African animals can be advocated on the grounds that many of the native American mammals were themselves late Pleistocene immigrants from Asia.

Linking the title of his essay, "The Last Entire Earth", to a phrase and sentiment expressed by Henry David Thoreau, Martin followed with:"This, then, is our birthright, a continent whose wilderness once echoed to the thunder of many mighty beasts, a fauna that eclipsed all that remains, including the wild animals of Yellowstone and Denali.

Those who ignore the giant ground sloths, native horses, and saber tooth cats in their vision of outdoor America sell the place short, it seems to me.

"[48] "Without knowing it, Americans live in a land of ghosts," Paul S. Martin wrote on the first page of his final book,Twilight of the Mammoths (2005), whose subtitle linked "ice age extinctions" with a need for "rewilding of America".

[20][47] It was the ecologist Daniel H. Janzen who, in the late 1970s, prompted Martin to apply his paleoecological knowledge and perspective to an additional form of ecological loss stemming from that extinction.

[51] The species of anachronistic fruits that Barlow featured in her book included all those (and more) of temperate climate ecosystems in North America that Janzen and Martin recommended for study in the final paragraph of their "Neotropical anachronisms" paper: "Our discussion has focused on neotropical plants and animals, but it can be generalized to the sweet-fleshed large fruits of the Kentucky coffeebean Gymnocladus dioica and honey locust Gleditsia triacanthos (Leguminaceae), osage orange Maclura (Moraceae), pawpaw Asimina triloba (Annonaceae), and persimmon Diospyros (Ebenaceae).

Wild Earth magazine published in its forum section a pair of pro and con essays debating the topic of "Assisted Migration for an Endangered Tree".

Both sides agreed that this ancient conifer was a glacial relict, having shifted southward during the glaciations but unable to disperse its large seed northward during the Holocene.

[56] And yet, a 2017 editorial within a leading international journal, Nature, characterized the group's actions in this way, "In one of the only real-world examples of assisted migration so far, campaigners have planted the seeds of the critically endangered conifer Torreya taxifolia hundreds of miles north of its Florida home.

Commenting on Martin's life-long practice of natural history and identifying as a naturalist as well as a scientist, Steadman wrote, "Even though he was one of the most avid readers I have ever known, Paul believed firmly in the need to see things first hand."

In an obituary published in PloS Biology,[58] C. Josh Donlan and Harry W. Greene selected this quotation (from Martin's 1969 essay[20]): "Perhaps the long-lauded home where buffalo roam is also the land where camel and eland should play."

The pair used a passage from Martin's 1992 essay[48] as the epigraph for the obituary: "To behold the Grand Canyon without thoughts of its ancient condors, sloths, and goats is to be half blind."

[66] The final verse is this:Many times in twenty million yearsThe elephants have journeyed here.From lands of the Old World, they did come.A capacity to change their actis an evolutionary fact.We owe them a future, bring 'em back!