We are made of Stardust
The History of the Universe is engraved within us. We are children of the stars from the very first moment of the Big Bang whence we came.
The universe is 12 billion years old, give or take a few million years. The world, a tiny satellite to a marginal star on the edge of this universe, is 4.5 billions years old. After an eternity of boiling gas and molten material the elements coalesced into earth, air, water. Life began in this primordial soup about 3.5 billions years ago. (Every cell of your body is a kind of commune, with once living free parts all banded together for the common good.And you are made of a hundred trillions cells. We are, each of us, a multitude) One billion years after that cellular organisms appeared and the next five-sixths of life belongs to them. Sex was invented about 2 billion years ago, enabling the exchange of whole paragraphs, pages and books of DNA code. 500 million years ago amphibians crawled onto land.
The southern hemisphere was occupied by Gondwana, a landmass which comprised Australia, Antarctica, Africa, India and South America. Adrift elsewhere were bits and pieces of North America, Europe and Asia.
About 270 million years ago (another source says 200) all the pieces stuck together to form one huge supercontinent. This is called Pangaea, and was surrounded by a vast ocean called Panthalassa. After more millions and millions of year Pangaea impercepitbly began to float apart at the rate of an inch a year - until all the pieces ended up where they are today.
75 million years ago an asteroid crashed into the world and lofted dust and debris which blocked out sunlight. This drastically altered the climate, destroyed plant life and killed of 95% of all living species - including the dinosaurs. The upside was that a very few mammals - previously dinosaur fodder - managed to survive. Without these ancestral forbears we would not be here.
Such global cataclysms have happened several times since life began, although not always due to asteroids. A catastrophic volcanic eruption took place in Sumatra some 75,000 years ago. This showered ashes all over the world severely affecting temperatures and ocean levels, and decimated the burgeoning human race which became reduced to a few thousand.
Anyway, after more millions of years, some of the small mammals mentioned ended up as gorillas. Eight million years ago the common forbear of humans and chimps twigged off that evolutionary line. And early man diverged from chimps about 350,000 generations ago. Indeed, we are more closely related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas, mice to rats, turkeys to chickens.
Indienous peoples - Oriental, African, Caucasian - were defined 50,000 years ago. Civilisations, agriculture and systematic religions appeared within the last 10,000 years, industry within the last 500 and man set foot on the moon on 21 July 1969.
A brief synopsis, but adequate to raise question : Are we pawns of destiny or wildly improbable flukes ?