Sections An alien evolution Capital’s companions The pace and direction of change The climatic shock of the Younger Dryas seems to have arisen from the freak spillage of a huge glacial lake into the North… More| Stepping Stones
Sections The roots of modern people Human superhighways Humans’ impact on their world Apart from their occupation of Dmanisi in Georgia around 1.9 to 1.8 Ma, Europe as a whole was not the prime destination… More| Stepping Stones
Sections The walking tool users The burdens of being bi-pedal East Africa begins to break and rise We are what we eat Cutting loose from climate stress Nine-month old babies placed in front of a… More| Stepping Stones
Sections Astronomical signals Evidence for the climate engine Conspiring influences Many people from high latitudes have heard about ice ages, but don’t necessarily know much. Relics of the last one glitter menacingly in high mountains… More| Stepping Stones
Sections Three evolutionary bushes Evolution in the seas and the carbon cycle The continents go green Wounded from time to time by the appearance of some kind of grim reaper, life’s record since proper fossils… More| Stepping Stones
Sections An extinction timetable The K-Pg boundary event Almost Armageddon – the end-Permian event Whatever the scale, no matter the fineness of time divisions that we examine, the geological record throws up evidence for sudden,… More| Stepping Stones
Sections Changing shapes, changing currents Tectonics, wind and weathering Planetary atmospheres move in complicated patterns even one as featureless as a pool ball, especially so if the planet spins (Figure 2.2). Solar warming varies with… More| Stepping Stones
Sections Geology and the ‘greenhouse’ A proxy for tectonics and climate Volcanic super events Parisian summer months of 1783 were heady days in more ways than one, as Benjamin Franklin noted. The f…| Stepping Stones
Sections Big, soft things Surviving mass poisoning Evolving hard parts: the Cambrian Explosion Once they became established organisms, their deaths and funeral rites have been central players in th…| Stepping Stones
Sections Precambrian ‘Snowball Earth’ Break-up, warming and polar glaciations in the Palaeozoic Era Nice weather for reptiles Cooling sets in A coalition of background events during the Cenozoic Ea…| Stepping Stones
