A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

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Da stellt sich vielleicht eine gewisse Gelassenheit an, schließlich ist alles relativ, wenn Magmablasen und giftige Gase, Asteroiden und Riesentsunamis das Leben schon ein paarmal fast vollständig von der Erde gefegt haben. We've only been around for 500,000 years or so) and even more of an existential slap in the face is his mater of fact statements that humans will be extinct in a relatively short time by geologic standards (most large animals don't seem to last more than a million years). The bony fish that became the land animals were known as lungfish, and it is for the fact that they had lungs to support movement when the fish gills were dried up and they were not able to breathe on land and not just in the sea, and these would go on becoming the first living animals that would live in land which also includes humans. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Around 200,000 years ago, the last survivors of the species were confined to an oasis on the edge of what is now the Kalahari desert.

This became the nucleus of the cell—the cell’s library, repository of genetic information, its memory, and its heritage. They spread in sheets over rocks and lawns on the seabed, only to be buried by sand in the next storm: but conquering again and being buried once again, building cushion-like mounds of layered slime and sediment. All the animals which ever existed for 150 million years in the time of the dinosaur, there were a few small creatures underground did eventually become a new form of animal that could feed on grass, and this contains silica which often required teeth cells to grind it down. Overall, this fast-paced and readable book is beautifully written, with small glimmers of whimsy and poetry peeking through the scientific scholarship. billion years ago, spreading from the permanent dark of the ocean depth to the sunlight surface waters.The atmosphere would have been to us an unbreathable fog of methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and hydrogen. Schade, dass es außer den schematischen Karten der Erdzeitalter keine Illustrationen gibt, die diese Vielfalt auch optisch verdeutlichen, obwohl die für ein Sachbuch durchaus bildhafte Schreibweise doch die Vorstellungskraft anregt. Continents have merged and broken up; massive volcanic eruptions have repeatedly reset the clock of evolution; temperatures, atmospheric gases, and sea levels have undergone big swings; and new ways of life have evolved. Book ends with the possible fate of humanity, anticipated sixth extinction and sure imminent death of our Sun and hence all life forms in earth due to lack of fuel several million years from now. This book starts at the very beginning of time back almost 14,000,000,000 (billion) years ago and then quickly moves to the time when the planet Earth was formed around 4.

To set the matter into perspective, however, when cyanobacteria were making their first essays into oxygenic photosynthesis—3 billion years ago or more—there was rarely enough free oxygen at any time to count as more than a minor trace pollutant. The text of the book is fine from what I could tell, read it and enjoy, the audiobook I would not recommend to anyone.

There was always an explanation to help the layman to understand subjects they might not have encountered. Und genau das ist sehr gut gelungen - mit ein paar Anekdoten, Fußnoten, die den interessierten Leser bei weiterem Eindringen in die Materie unterstützen und einer gewisen Leichtigkeit des Seins in dem Wissen, dass irgendwann einmal die Zeit für unsere Art ebenso abgelaufen sein wird wie für die Dinosaurier. SOUND AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE EAR: The book also looks at the evolution of sound and how animals came to hear. However, what is also remarkable is that many animals and birds that could fly, as soon as they found an island where there were no predators and they were safe they lost the ability to fly. At the same time, gases such as methane and carbon dioxide were scrubbed from the air, absorbed by the abundance of newly formed rock.

This book is like a summary of Campbell biology with a lot of lengthy walls of texts, namedrops, and NO illustrations. Gee sees human existence as a mere blip in the planet's history, which is simultaneously off putting and bracing (I mean, yeah. billion years of evolution on Earth, as are all the other living beings that occupy the planet today. To be fair, Gee tempers that later, referring to our future as a 'few thousand to tens of thousands of years' and then a little later still as 'sooner or later'.

The chapter about evolution of hominids is pretty interesting and made me realize how the human history is not even a chapter but a mere footnote in the grand book of life on earth. I read Gee's evolutionary narrative immediately after "Otherlands" by Halliday, and prefer his' over this, if only by nuances. Bacterial cells generally reproduce by dividing in half to create two identical copies of the parent cell.

Against the backdrop of geological time,’ Gee reminds us, ‘the sudden rise of humanity is of negligible significance. Yet Homo sapiens squeaked through, saved by a period of warming that turned much of the surface of the planet into rich grassland, teeming with game. There was a constant barrage of sound effects through the reading that distracted and did not add to the book.

But this chapter held some surprises for me: for example, although I was aware there was a bottleneck in human evolution where the entire species nearly died out at least several times, I was surprised to learn that a small group clung to life for tens of thousands of years, confined in an African wetland that was a veritable ‘Garden of Eden’ surrounded by inhospitable deserts. As described on the cover, this is a very concise history of the forming of the Earth and the various ages it went through; including the evolution of life and the creatures we now know today (don't worry, the dinosaurs are in here too). These whiffs of oxygen caused the first of many mass extinctions in the Earth’s history, as generation upon generation of living things were burned alive. Abundante en datos curiosos, con muy buen nivel científico (a veces demasiado, pero nunca hasta aburrir), fácil de leer, escrito con elegancia y gracia, pero lo mejor es el tema: el más grandioso y fascinante relato inventado - ¿o descubierto? There then became a very long ice age which created glaciers and salt water out of the sea and onto the land and made more landmass which then allowed more animals to start becoming land creatures.