This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchel. Here's John Batchelor.

The Earth Transform, a new book, an extensive tour through Homo sapiens and before, mankind and the ecology of the earth. We are in the

21st century, so this is a commonplace topic now, climate change. However, I welcome Professor Peter

Francapan, Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford, whose new book is the Earth

transformed and untold history. We'll begin in the Holocene with at Worcester College, Oxford, whose new book is The Earth Transformed and Untold History,

will begin in the Holocene with two violent events to show that mankind responds to nature,

responds to catastrophe, responds to climate change, and gets lucky sometimes.

Professor, a very good evening to you.

Congratulations.

We begin with the breakdown of the ice dam in the Laurentide part of North America,

which changed the ocean circulation and affected climate globally.

And then also within the same time frame, seventh, eighth, seventh millennium

before the common era, the collapse of a piece of the Norwegian coast that created a tsunami.

Those two events, what do they describe? How do they change the nature of mankind at that point responding to nature? Good evening to you.

Good evening. It's a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me come and join you, John. And thank you all for listening and watching.

Well, I guess the starting point is that we've got so used in the modern era to being masters of our own

destiny that we forget about these great forces in the human past and how important they are

in our history. And that includes things like volcanic eruptions. Of course, going back a long time

before humans, asteroid impacts that meteor impacts that got rid of the dinosaurs, amongst other things.

But sometimes single one-off events can come from dislocations of global climate patterns

that can produce cascade effects.

It's a phrase that is much spoken about today by scientists warning about, for example,

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