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 past to the birth of civilization some 10,000 years ago.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; 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. Read Less