A Most Improbable Journey by Walter Alvarez

Author:Walter Alvarez
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HUMANITY

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE GREAT JOURNEY

A SLOW-MOVING BUT UBIQUITOUS SPECIES

OUR HUMAN BODIES give us the ability to move around. We can walk, run, and swim but can do none of them very fast. Our two-legged walking is rather clumsy, and many animals can run much faster than we can. We swim, but rather slowly, and always with the danger of drowning, and our natural bodies are quite incapable of flying.

It may thus be surprising that we occupy pretty much all the habitable places on Earth. How did we get there? In the twenty-first century we can go to an airport and fly almost anywhere on the planet in a few hours, and except for remote and difficult wilderness areas, there will always be people living there. Very few other species have such a broad range of distribution.

The present chapter explores this remarkable aspect of the human situation and how it ties into the deeper history of our planet. We can start by asking what the explorers found, a few hundred years ago, as they gradually reconnected the people living all over Earth.

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