I am a Paleoanthropology Student, so far with two degrees, in Anthropology and Human Behavioral Science, pursuing my B.A and then my PhD I love to read (like a lot) and write, I love my family, and I adore anthropology! Remember, never stop exploring and never stop learning! There is always more to learn! A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers. As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century. His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us." Skipping ahead, we go through time, from one great extinction to another, and we learn of some of the fantastic beasts and creatures that lived in-between them. Their rise and fall. We discuss the dinosaurs, these amazing creatures, and how they evolved into the titans that they were. We explore ideas and continue on through time, viewing it all like a window passing by, we see the dinosaurs die. We see the world go through the tumult as it had never been through before. The asteroid that wiped the earth out, would be the key in setting up our deep ancestors for success, which eventually would lead to us.

Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Eukaryotes emerged, quietly and modestly, between around 1,850 and 850 million years ago.22 They started to diversify around 1,200 million years ago into forms recognizable as early single-celled relatives of algae and fungi and into unicellular protists, or what we used to call protozoa.23 For the first time, they ventured away from the sea and colonized freshwater ponds and streams inland.24 Crusts of algae, fungi, and lichens25 began to adorn seashores once bare of life. A]n exuberant romp through evolution, like a modern-day Willy Wonka of genetic space. Gee’s grand tour enthusiastically details the narrative underlying life’s erratic and often whimsical exploration of biological form and function.” —Adrian Woolfson, The Washington Post In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens. It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. The evolution of the nucleus allowed for a more organized system of reproduction. Bacterial cells generally reproduce by dividing in half to create two identical copies of the parent cell. Variation from the addition of extra genetic material is piecemeal and haphazard.

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Viewed from the kind of wide-angle perspective that Gee opens up, our human presence looks vanishingly insignificant. And yet we have huge significance as the first and only species to be aware of itself. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have and to make the best of our brief existence. For People Who Devour Books The Times This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence . . . Henry Gee makes this kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? Everybody! The bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses charts the enlightening history of humanity through the foods we eat. Henry Gee’s whistle-stop account of the story of life (and death — lots of death) on Earth is both fun and informative. Even better, it goes beyond the natural human inclination to see ourselves as special and puts us in our proper place in the cosmic scheme of things." With authority, humor, and detail, Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor of Nature, traces the progression of life on earth from its initial stirrings...readers will find this eye-opening book compelling for years to come."

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. This takes us around a billion years ahead from now - so the whole span of the book is more like 5.5 billion years. Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer' - The TimesA (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. Reader's Digest Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives In the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Simon Winchester—An entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story. With dramatic flair, Henry Gee’s sweeping new book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, tells the 4-billion-year story of life on this planet and how it has been repeatedly shaped by geological, climatic, and atmospheric forces. Trained as a paleontologist, Gee tells life’s history using the framework of the fossil record, offering insights from the related fields of ecology and physiology. Interwoven as it is with geology and climate, life evolves the way Ernest Hemingway said we go broke: “gradually and then suddenly” (1). One thought on “ A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters by Dr. Henry Gee, aReview!”

Our ancestors have ranged through some pretty… weird phases, let me tell you. All in all, a thoroughly engaging read, complete with ‘the moral of this story’ towards the end. New York Timesbest-selling author and renowned science journalist Ed Yong compiles thebest science and nature writing published in 2020. Once upon a time, a giant star was dying. It had been burning for millions of years; now the fusion furnace at its core had no more fuel to burn. The star created the energy it needed to shine by fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium. The energy produced by the fusion did more than make the star shine. It was vital to counteract the inward pull of the star’s own gravity. When the supply of available hydrogen began to run low, the star began to fuse helium into atoms of heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. By then, though, the star was running out of things to burn.The Times A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers . . . His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us. Bringing us to the third section that I have divided this book into, we see the rise of mammals, and other small creatures after the remnants of the dinosaurs’ ashes covered the Earth. And yet, as is the key idea that I believe this book is trying to convey, is Life found a way. Despite all of the challenges that it had faced up until that point, Life was able to continue, and find new ways to grow to extremes and diversify in ways it had never done before. Towards the end of the book, we finally come to where we come in, and what a small section there is about us. This is appropriate, for, in the grand scheme of geologic time, we have, to take a word from the title, left a pithy mark on this planet. From there, we go into the future, discussing how Humanity’s population will finally begin to drop in 2100, and how after a few tens of thousands of years after that, we will be extinct, like so many other organisms that have gone before us. Dr. Henry Gee, a Senior Editor at the esteemed, and one of the oldest scientific journals in the world, Nature, is coming out with a new book! This book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters,Is a wonderful telling of, well us, and everything you see around you, and how you got here. Life began in a world that was warm11 but soundless apart from the wind and the sea. The wind stirred an air almost entirely free from oxygen. With no protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, the Sun’s ultraviolet rays sterilized everything above the surface of the sea or anything less than a few centimeters beneath the surface. As a means of defense, the cyanobacterial colonies evolved pigments to absorb these harmful rays. Once their energy had been absorbed, it could be put to work. The cyanobacteria used it to drive chemical reactions. Some of these fused carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms together to create sugars and starch. This is the process we call photosynthesis. Harm had become harvest. A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers . . . His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us.

The first rumbles of an oncoming storm came from the rifting and breakup of a supercontinent, Rodinia. This included every significant landmass at the time.29 One consequence of the breakup was a series of ice ages that covered the entire globe, the like of which had not been seen since the Great Oxidation Event. But life responded once again by rising to the challenge. 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? - por la humanidad: la Historia de la vida.To the earliest life, which had evolved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere essentially without free oxygen, it spelled environmental catastrophe. 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. But oxygen is so potent a force that even a trace spelled disaster to life that had evolved in its absence. 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. 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. Wer als Kind mit Dinosauriern auf du und du war, ist hier klar im Vorteil. Der Anspruch, das zeigt schon der Titel, ist nicht, das endgültige Buch über die Geschichte des Lebens auf der Erde zu schreiben, sondern einen Abriss in für Laien verständlicher Form zu geben und eine Einordnung zu versuchen. A]n exuberant romp through evolution, like a modern-day Willy Wonka of genetic space. Gee’s grand tour enthusiastically details the narrative underlying life’s erratic and often whimsical exploration of biological form and function.”—Adrian Woolfson, The Washington Post About 2.5 million years ago, Homo erectus arose, a territorial savannah predator, deadly thanks to two traits: it was a powerful long-distance runner and a social animal. From this lineage, Homo sapiens evolved. Humanity’s first attempt at worldwide dispersal failed, shattered by the cold of an ice age 200,000 years ago. Confined to an oasis in what is now the Kalahari Desert, humankind nearly went extinct. We, as a species, are just as fragile as all the others, reminds Gee. In "A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth", Henry Gee has indeed provided the reader with a short, but broad, introduction to the history of the past "4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters". The chapters are fairly short, very interesting and have the occasional amusing observation. Nothing to snooze at in this book. Some of the commentary in the endnotes (which really should have been footnotes!) are also fairly entertaining and informative. The only unfortunate omission is the inclusion of some sketches or illustrations to show the reader what some of the fascinating creatures might have looked like. I enjoyed reading this book a great deal, and I particularly like Henry Gee's writing style.