Discovering the prehistoric world. A guide to the astonishing forms of early life on Earth / Знакомство с доисторическим миром. Путеводитель по удивительным формам ранней жизни на Земле

Humankind first began to create imagery as a means of communication some 7,500 years ago. The writing, back then, was literally on the wall. It began with cave art, and then was engraved into stone blocks. These first protolanguages used pictures as literal depictions of events, and this evolved into a system of simpler symbols that were representative of the sounds used in speech. Through writing, our ancestors were able to create a lasting record— a history. What exactly they chose to record in this way varied from the mundane to the significant, and all of this diversity adds to the richness of our understanding of how humans once lived, and what they lived through. However, these 7,500 years capture only the most recent snapshot of our species’ own history, as we know that anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years. And even these earliest true humans have existed for an eyeblink of time in relation to the history of life on Earth, which stretches back another 3.7 billion years. Their history was never recorded by intention, but their existence is nevertheless revealed through the traces they have left behind—traces that have survived through all those millennia to be examined by curious human eyes today. <...>