Chapter 1: Prologue- The Ways we Were



Our history is a big history in the sense that it began at the time of the big bang, or in other words day 0 of earth, and spans to today; a time frame currently considered to be around 13.7 billion years. To put it in perspective, the big bang is thought to of happened around 13.7 billion years ago, while the earliest life on earth was found to be around 4 billion years ago, first sign of oxygen around 1.3 billion years ago and dinosaurs around 329-164 million years ago. Geologists have been able to learn an immense amount of information from the earth just by looking at things such as the formation of rocks to the movement of the continents, things that no only happened 4 billion years ago, but are still happening today. From these studies we have been able to determine that for around 3 billion years the only ‘life’ on earth were the single celled prokarya that can still be found in many fossils today. Scientists were also able to determine that ‘natural disasters’ such as a massive influx of volcanic eruptions and increasing heat of the global climate have led to massive extinctions of life forms during the development of modern day era; they even believe that this is what led to the extinction of dinosaurs. Some scientists even believe that the recent influx of high temperatures, natural disasters and melting of the ice burgs can even be indicative of another upcoming ‘wipeout’ of all life forms. It is believe that 5-6 billion years ago homo sapiens began emerging from chimpanzees, which later resulted it 20-30 different species emerging. These 20-30 species all shared a common factor: bipedalism. Because of their bipedalism, it is believed that they slowly evolved to form larger brains which in turn increased their ability to adapt to their surroundings, which in the long term resulted in what is now the modern day homo sapiens. An example of this early adaptation could be the Paleolithic inhabitants: the went from only gathering fruit and dead animals, to slowly evolving as their brain  grew, which led them to develop rocks into ‘tools’ which greatly aided their ability to go after animals and hunt for game. This newfound knowledge of more ways to obtain food resulted in a longer lifespan for the individuals. I find this information the most interesting from what I read as I had never learned these things in depth. I had learned that it was believed from chimpanzees but no one ever really went into the logistics of the mass die outs that occurred along the way, and how we were actually able to track that descendant patterns from chimpanzees two homo sapiens through the research of bipedalism and brain size. 

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