Table of Contents

Contents

1. About This Book

2. Our Bedroom

3. Microbes

4. Protists

5. Fungi

6. Animals

7. Dry Land

8. Lichens

9. Plants

10. Arthropods on Land

11. Vertebrates

12. Amphibians

13. Proto-Mammals

14. Dinosaurs

15. Pterosaurs

16. Crocodiles

17. Birds

18. Mammals

19. From Monkeys to the Missing Link

20. The Line to Homo Sapiens

21. Neandertals

22. Why Do We Look the Way We Look?

23. The San, Formerly Known as Bushmen

24. Gaia’s Rule One: Find a Source of Energy

25. Gaia’s Rule Two: Protect Yourself

26. Gaia’s Rule Three: Reproduce

27. The Present

28. The Future

Coda

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, an anthropologist and animal behaviorist, has published thirteen previous books, including the New York Times best seller The Hidden Life of Dogs, Dreaming of Lions, The Tribe of Tiger, The Old Way, and The Hidden Life of Deer. Her most recent book is Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, coauthored with Sy Montgomery. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Learn more at elizabethmarshallthomas.net.

Reviews

“A skillfully written, well-informed, and accessible reverie on the nature of life on Earth, both fascinating and highly recommended.”—Susan Waggoner Foreword Reviews

“Life comes in countless variations, yet all are based on the same biological principles. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas loves them all—from lichens to fungi and from crocodiles to primates—and puts us on a time machine to go back to the turns evolution has taken, many of them surprising, and one of them leading to us.”—Frans de Waal,author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?