Origins

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.

It ranges 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.

Humans are a product of the Earth we live on. In Lewis Dartnell's latest book, he explores human evolution out of the forests, into the savannah and across the globe. What made us the dominant species we are today?

I was a huge fan of The Knowledge, but I felt Origins was a little unfocused. Human history is a huge topic to squash into one book, and the lens of of "how the Earth made us" is loosely interpreted to include many factors of the Earth. It probably didn't help that I've read a few things lately that had covered the same ground.

Areas on the same latitude as East Africa are heavily forested with tropical rainforest. This is where our ape ancestors started their long journey, and Lewis explains why this region became savannah, which forced apes to evolve to adapt to a treeless environment. Then, climate change pushed them to new lands.

I did enjoy the fact that I could link some of this to the Broken Earth series, the Rift in Africa is a real thing, and orogeny is actually a real word. I was kind of a bit sad it wasn't more about the geology and climate.

It goes on to talk about the animals and plants we came to depend on, how ice ages work, how winds and ocean currents dictated later humans' paths around the globe. And of course, the impact of fossil fuels and how they were created. I loved the part explaining how the vast grasslands helped Mongolia become an empire, whilst the Americas hunted horses into extinction and crippled their progress.

Lewis has a habit of saying "we will get back to that in chapter x" or "as we saw in chapter y", which made it feel a bit textbooky. I did learn some interesting facts, and it would probably be a better introduction for someone with less knowledge on the subjects.