Human civilisation occupies the final seconds of Earth’s day.
A 350-page narrative book about Earth’s deep history and the human story within it.
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What is this book about?
Continents have torn apart and fused again. Seas have risen, vanished, and returned. Life has endured each upheaval by transforming, adapting, colliding, and beginning again against the certainty of extinction.The Bones Beneath Us traces the chain of catastrophes and renewals that carried life from its first spark to this fragile age of humans. It reveals how existence was never guaranteed, how chance and consequence shaped every world that led to our own.From that long succession emerged an unlikely species. A social primate capable of bending the planet that gave birth to it. On timescales measured in centuries, it has altered air and ocean, rewritten climates, and set in motion changes that once took millions of years to unfold. Our future now depends on how long that ingenuity can outrun the forces it has unleashed, and how long the species that named extinction can escape becoming part of it.
About the author
George Wakeman writes about deep time, extinction, and the history of life. He created the @extinctanimalsfacts Instagram page, a project followed by more than half a million people.He has been in the history of life on Earth since childhood, but only began writing about them seriously later in life. He spent two years researching and writing The Bones Beneath Us independently, outside traditional academic routes.The Bones Beneath Us: Extinction, Evolution & The Fragile Age of Humans is his first major work.
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