WHEELING — The Ohio County Public Library’s next Lunch With Books program will focus on “Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters” with author Timothy Sweet.

The program will take place at noon on Tuesday, Nov. 28, at the library in downtown Wheeling.

The Americas have been the site of two distinct waves of human migration, each associated with human-caused extinctions. The first occurred during the late Pleistocene era, some 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. The other began during the time of European settler-colonization and continues to this day.

In “Extinction and the Human,” Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment, and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna — mammoths, whales and the North American bison — beginning with the moments that these species’ extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives: transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical and scientific accounts, and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors.

This program will be the library’s last in a series dedicated to National Native American Heritage Month.