01-How Humans Came to Dominate Earth

How Humans Came to Dominate Earth

The extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago left niches on Earth, in which the ancestors of humans could flourish. 

Yet, from the time the dinosaurs were wiped out it took 64.8 million more years before humans first appeared on Earth about 200,000 years ago.

About 99% of the 3 billion species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct, mainly because they did not adapt to changing conditions. You are here today, because your ancestors in every one of the past 10,000 generations figured out how to survive against such very long odds. They survived because each generation figured out how to adapt to the changing conditions in which they found themselves. Now it's our turn to figure out how to adapt to the changing conditions in which we find ourselves, thus insuring the survival of coming generations.  

In The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward Wilson describes how human domination of Earth today resulted from a series of adaptations by our earliest ancestors. Those ancient adaptations became deeply ingrained instincts in us that today determine many of our automatic responses and behaviors. Many of those instincts still serve to keep us alive, but some instincts from those caveman days now threaten our survival. But we're getting ahead of our story. Let's start from the beginning.  

Of the many adaptations that got us here, we owe our appearance on Earth largely to having learned to control fire and to our highly unusual instinct to build and defend an established nest.