Blame It on the Rain
How the Weather Has Changed History
Chapter One
Humans on the Brink of Extinction
We humans are an egocentric lot. We tend to look at the world and all of its history and prehistory as leading to that great moment when humans would reign supreme, the ultimate goal of creation.
As the humorist Douglas Adams once observed: "This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? . . . Must have been made to have me in it!'"
The truth, as hard as it may be for us to accept, is that our preeminence on the planet was not preordained. Our human ancestors could well have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and in fact, they nearly did.
Since the beginning of life on earth, there have been periods of mass extinction, bringing down a once-dominant species and making way for a new life-form to have its moment in the sun. The last such mass extinction, sixty-five million years ago, destroyed the di ... read full excerpt from: Blame It on the Rain: How the Weather Has Changed History ebook
