This book was a joy to read: it was engagingly written and felt securely anchored in the understanding of science and history. I don't think there was much I didn't already know something about already, but the book did an excellent job of showing those things in context, and from a new angle. I could have easily read for another 300 pages. ( )

Lower quality alternative to Sapiens(by Yuval Noah Harari). ( )

Geography, geology, science,

Interesting but read like a book of trivia. ( )

In Origins, Lewis Dartnell takes a similar approach to that of [a:Jared Diamond|256|Jared Diamond|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1456487863p2/256.jpg] in [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453215833l/1842._SY75_.jpg|2138852], using a long view to explain why human development progressed in the way it did. In this case, the billions-years process of geology.



Starting with the hypothesis that humans developed the way we did in East Africa due to the climate created by the Great Rift Valley - a drying out of the land leading to the forest being replaced by savanna, amongst other factors - through the forces that raised mountains from which flowed rivers, depositing mineral rich alluvial soils in Mesopotamia and the Indus and Nile valleys, enabling the development of agriculture - extending this to show how voting patterns in US elections closely match the areas where African slaves were brought to farm cotton, and still have large black populations; how these geological forces allowed civilisation to flourish on the North and East coasts of the Mediterranean rather than the South; how the patterns of wind and ocean currents enabled European expansion and colonisation; how geological processes have given us the materials to build structures, make our technology and power our civilisations.



His arguments are well made and convincing, although sometimes written a little simplistically - an indication of this is that the footnotes sprinkled throughout the text are of the ‘fascinating aside’ variety, but I found most to be those I’d consider common knowledge. Perhaps that’s simply as I’m someone who reads quite a lot of this type of thing, of course, and a reader newer to the subject may get more out of these.



Overall, a great overview of how the unimaginably long and powerful processes of geology shape not only our world, but us as a species.
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