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In this lyrical and engaging exploration, Colin Tudge undertakes
an ambitious task: to place the narratives of human and planetary coevolution
within the same frame, to expand our perspective on our own history, and to tell
the story of the human impact on planet Earth. Our sense of history, the author
argues, has become so truncated that it is measured in months and years, occasionally
decades, infrequently centuries. The Time Before History is a corrective,
a record of the preface to modern life -- of the period known as the Plio/Pleistocene,
from 5 million years to the birth of civilization some 10,000 years ago.
The Plio/Pleistocene was one of the most turbulent and also
one of the most dramatic periods in the 4-billion-year-long history of the planet.
This is true measured both by the extravagance of the physical forces in play
-- including the many ice ages, the continuing clash of continents -- and in the
diversity of mammals, birds, and modern reptiles to which this turbulence gave
rise. It is also the period in which human ancestors started as a group of singularly
undistinguished neo-apes occupying a small slice of Africa and ended up as people.
For, by 10,000 years ago, humanity was already inventive, already organized, had
already invaded most of the world, and had laid the foundations of modern life
from which all else has followed. Tudge paints a broad
canvas of our last 5 million years with fascinating descriptions of
- The waxing and waning of species and populations because of
climate changes and plate tectonics, including massive migrations around the planet
- The
fabulous animals that covered the earth when our ancestors first emerged, for
example, the giant short-faced bear Arctodus simus, "the biggest true
land carnivore that ever lived -- almost half as tall again and at least twice
as heavy as a modern grizzly"
- The unique and
exquisitely destructive characteristics of the first neo-apes, from their ability
to exploit the savanna while living safely in the trees to the advantages of the
rotating shoulder joint, which permitted missile throwing and thus changed the
risk-reward balance of hunting forever
Drawing
upon the disciplines of geology, anthropology, archaeology, earth science, and
climatology, The Time Before History is the first popular account of this
critical period and is a truly original contribution to the intertwined narratives
of humanity and its planet. Colin Tudge started
writing for a living in the mid-1960s after graduating in natural sciences from
Cambridge University. Over the years, he has contributed articles to many publications,
such as New Scientist, Nature, and Wildlife Conservation,
and to newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian. He also
spent five years with the science unit of BBC Radio and had his own science program
on Radio 3. Since the 1970s, he has focused on writing books -- with his latest
two, Last Animals at the Zoo and The Engineer in the Garden, shortlisted
for the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book of the Year Award. He is currently a Visiting
Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of the London School of Economics. |
