Vaishali Alapati
Think of history, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Just take a moment to pause and think. Does your mind wander to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, The Rise and Fall of the Aztec Civilization, The Discovery of the Americas, or maybe the Industrial Revolution.Today’s world owes an immense debt to the mighty empires and great cities of ancient history. Their inventions and ideas enabled the advancement of human society and laid the foundation for modern life. But is it possible to dig a little deeper for the full story? What happened before history? The grand story of humanity starts on Earth. The history of humans is not a clean, linear process with clear beginnings and conclusions. It constantly adds new chapters and rewrites itself. Some of the greatest evidence showing how Homo sapiens developed is shown in this evolutionary timeline. All leading up to the world we live in today with other fascinating creatures, tigers, parrots, jellyfish etc. This amazing tale explores the most profound mysteries of humankind, which merges findings from the archeological record with the most recent genetic research to find out who we are, where we came from, and what the future may hold for our existence. It is the story of a family tree whose tangled and knotted branches span several epochs and continents. Let this story immerse us into the saga of human evolution, commencing with the earliest traces of our hominid ancestors in Africa and continuing through waves of human expansion across the continents to the emergence of agriculture and the explosive growth of the world’s population. Many hominin specimens belong not in our solid line of ancestry but on side branches of humankind—evolutionary experiments that ended in extinction. We now realize that the human saga is far more nuanced than the scholars of yore could have ever envisioned. There is no single missing piece binding apes and humans, and there is no smooth drumbeat march forward towards a preordained destiny, shattering the neat clichés of our prehistory. Our tale is blurred, jumbled, and random, but it is one that needs to be told. There are myriad questions unanswered, evolutionary dead ends, and a spirited cast of ancient ancestors of early hominins. This does not imply that scientists have everything completely figured out. Many questions remain. The evolution of humans, however, is today one of the best-documented evidence of evolution’s empowering force, whereas it was previously an unnerving conjecture in Darwin’s grand theory. We humans are strange creatures. We have supersized brains, can stand upright on two legs, design tools to fill every want and need, speak through symbols and traditions, and have conquered every corner of the planet. Scientists have been attempting to explain how humans came to be and our role in the natural world for centuries. The vibrant setting of this story is influenced by adaptation, survival, innovation, creativity and mortality. If we could travel back in time, we could find common ancestors between ourselves and every other living organism. We could find prehistoric humans, who were curious, inventive, passionate, emotional and power hungry. Nobody, least of all the first humans, had any notion that their descendants would one day reach the moon, split the atom, achieve and master flight, build electrical gadgets, fathom the genetic code, form languages, and write history. Questions like "When did speech evolve?" and "Why did the Neanderthals become extinct?" are just a few of the many that need to be answered, and we will answer these many questions in this volume of "Evolution Unraveled". "The Humans Lost in Time" will take you on an adventurous tour through time, and more.
