Origins: How The Earth Made Us by Lewis Dartnell
It all began with the tectonic processes that created the East African Rift —a narrow zone that runs from Somalia and Ethiopia down to the coast of Mozambique – a geological wonder where the earth’s tectonic forces are creating new plates by splitting apart old ones. East Africa’s rift valley unique geological setting, and the uplift of the mountains may have altered the local climate and warmed East Africa, turning jungle into a savannah which in turn caused the first hominids to leave the trees and develop the skills that allowed them to become hunters and runners and develop culture and technology and eventually to build cities and empires. It is because of that that the East African Rift is considered by many to be the cradle of mankind.
“We have profoundly altered the world, but we only recently acquired such overwhelming dominion over Nature,” argues Lewis Dartnell, a Professor of Science Communication and an astrobiology research scientist at the University of Westminster. It was the Earth the set the stage for the human story, with its tectonics and its landscapes. As species we are still inextricably linked to the Earth’s history. It is the Earth’s resources that continue to direct human civilisation.
In Origins: How The Earth Made Us Lewis Dartnell explore what our environment has done to us. How has nature shaped the human story and influenced the development of civilizations.
“The roots of our modern world stretch far back in time, and if we trace them across the changing face of the Earth, we uncover lines of causation that often take us all the way back to the birth of our planet.”
Origins range over a staggering span of time and topics. Dartnell delves into geology, astronomy, anthropology, geography, chemistry and history, he looks into the development of life on Earth, the evolution of humans, the progression of civilization and the age of exploration, as well as the most recent trends of industrialization and globalization, and why people vote the way they do. It’s extraordinary. With such a vast range, one would expect that this is a difficult and chaotic book. On the contrary. Origins is organised by specific, overarching themes, making reading accessible, engaging and quite often, fun.
Today, we’re seeing largest physical structures on our planet -ice-caps, rainforests, coral-reefs, to disappear before our eyes. It is perhaps the greatest emergency humanity has ever faced. Knowing our ultimate origin story, and what caused the evolution of humanity, we might be able to appreciate the vast web of connections that shaped our history of civilization.