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. 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." The way the book is formatted you move forward through time with the Earth as it starts out in the earliest and then move forward. Each chapter is nicely grouped and none stand out as being overwhelming or unnecessary. I loved that as he moved through the evolution Henry Gee didn’t just focus on the animal life, he looked at the plant life as well. There were interesting facts I didn’t know and none of the science was too technical. There was always an explanation to help the layman to understand subjects they might not have encountered. 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! Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh paleontologist and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs 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

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.Terrifying. As described on the cover, this is a very concise history of the forming of the Earth and the various ages it went through; including the evolution of life and the creatures we now know today (don't worry, the dinosaurs are in here too). The book was over before I knew it, but I can still say I learned way more than I knew before; in a very easy to understand way. Gee is talented when it comes to breaking down the science into general terms. The Earth’s heat, radiating outward from the molten core, keeps the planet forever on the boil, just like a pan of water simmering on a stove. Heat rising to the surface softens the overlying layers, breaking up the less dense but more solid crust into pieces and, forcing them apart, creates new oceans between. These pieces, the tectonic plates, are forever in motion. They bump against, slide past, or burrow beneath one another. This movement carves deep trenches in the ocean floor and raises mountains high above it. It causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It builds new land. 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.’

Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose." 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. Dinosaurs, meanwhile, are animals that every child has heard of. These hugely successful creatures filled every evolutionary niche, leaving little room for much else, including the early mammals; it wasn’t until the dinosaurs died out that mammals could ‘burst forth like a well-aged champagne, shaken beforehand, and inexpertly corked’. A profusion of fast-evolving and diversifying mammals took over from the dinosaurs. They included what Gee calls ‘a group of leftovers … an assortment of scrappers that included rats, mice, rabbits, and, seemingly almost as an afterthought, the primates’. These small, swift creatures with forward-facing eyes, inclined to curiosity and exploration, would eventually give rise to Homo sapiens. But the emergence of modern humans could so easily not have happened. Around 200,000 years ago, the last survivors of the species were confined to an oasis on the edge of what is now the Kalahari desert. Yet Homo sapiens squeaked through, saved by a period of warming that turned much of the surface of the planet into rich grassland, teeming with game. 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.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. 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.

Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer' - The Times 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. As forests became more and more fragmented owing to climate changes linked to continental drift, primates started to venture into the open grasslands, from where the earliest hominins arose 7 million years ago. Their bipedal stance, notes Gee, made them “almost preternaturally maneuverable.”Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’

Some even experimented with multicellular life, such as the 1,200-million-year-old seaweed Bangiomorpha26 and the approximately 900-million-year-old fungus Ourasphaira.27 But there were stranger things. The earliest known signs of multicellular life are 2,100 million years old. Some of these creatures are as large as twelve centimeters across, so hardly microscopic, but they are so strange in form to our modern eyes that their relationship with algae, fungi, or other organisms is obscure.28 They could have been some form of colonial bacteria, but we cannot discount the possibility that there once lived entire categories of living organisms—bacterial, eukaryote, or something entirely other—that died out without leaving any descendants and that we should therefore find hard to comprehend.

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."