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As for those who prefer books with illustrations, here's my advice: Take your time reading the book slowly.
However, as we became able to start and manage fire and eat a range of foods and digest for long periods and became a predator, we eventually adapted but remained in a warm climate. Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an alluring, up-close intimacy. The earliest lifeforms were involved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere, essentially without free oxygen. Illustrated with words beautifully, the cosmos and how it works are explained eloquently and in a way that makes such ideas as physics and astronomy easy to understand.
Along with various biological phenomena, including the “extravagant consumption” of carbon by trees, such events have contrived to undermine the greenhouse effect and propel the Earth into a series of protracted ice ages. For a primer on evolution, readers might prefer Andrew Knoll’s A Brief History of Earth (2021) for one reason: illustrations. All dinosaurs came from eggs but as they slowly began to evolve they began to move beyond laying eggs and began new ways of reproduction.
Core to Gee’s narrative is the way in which life’s history is a tale of continuous change and transformation, driven and underpinned by the Earth’s geological fluidity. Millions of years later, the gravitational shock wave of the supernova explosion passed through a cloud of gas, dust, and ice. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. At times I have felt unable to fathom how insignificant our troubles and tribulations are in the grand scheme of things. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind.We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have and to make the best of our brief existence. But as life forms emerged, as single cellular bacteria, they began to give up oxygen and through the process of photosynthesis began to acquire energy. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
In this way, it is akin to the mythical phoenix, which is regularly consumed in a fiery inferno, only to rise again from the ashes. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years.The scale is apparent from the first of a set of mind-boggling timeline graphics: this runs from the birth of the universe to ‘Extinction of life on Earth’, alarmingly close to the dotted line indicating ‘NOW’. We didn't live long lives and many of the hominoids wouldn't live to beyond 20 and Neanderthal an average lifespan was probably around 30. My favourite chapter of all, even though it's inevitably speculative, was the one titled The Past of the Future, where Gee takes us through what is likely to happen to life on a future Earth, including its our and its eventual extinction - this has a slightly wistful, but inevitable feel to it and is quite remarkable.
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