ice age

Summer is coming, and that means robots, teleportation, antimatter bombs, dinosaurs, an elite high-tech fighting force, fictional metals with unearthly properties ... we love it!

Here’s a look at the Hollywoodified science hitting the big screen this summer, complete with our highly scientific Expected Gibberish Quotient (EGQ).

Doug Bamforth had taken calls like this one before. He studies early American plains dwellers, and his employer, the University of Colorado at Boulder, regularly sends him locals who think they've found something. He's often skeptical. Besides, it was also the middle of May. The semester was over, and he was about to leave town. But the caller, a bio-tech mogul named Patrick Mahaffy, kept insisting, and the next day Bamforth took a ten-minute walk from his office to the site. What he saw astonished him: right there, in urban Boulder, no fewer than eighty-three stone tools were spread out on a patio table.

The initial discovery, dozens of ancient tools buried in someone's yard, was surprising enough, but other surprises would follow. The tools first offered a look at when and where their owners had lived, and then, a few months later, unprecedented evidence of what they had eaten.

In middle school classrooms, the gist of the Ice Age is often explained as, "It got really cold and all the animals became extinct.” Recently, however, scientists have been taking a closer look at where and when human behavior affected the extinction of species, instead of climate change. Recent findings in Tasmania prove that certain ancient species, like the giant kangaroo and marsupial rhino and leopard, were still inhabiting the island when humans first arrived, leading the research team to conclude that the animals' extinction was due to human hunting, not the Ice Age.

A note to the reader: Certain scenes in the following account have been dramatized, Hollywood-style—entirely made up—but the description of the film, the scientific information and all the quotes are real.

Act 1: HOLLYWOOD

INT. MOVIE THEATER—NIGHT OF MAY 28, 2004