"It's time for a new story of our origins. One reason is there a great deal of new evidence about what humans are like and the conditions that shaped human evolution. Another is that the thinking on human evolution has shifted. Evolutionists recognize that humans are very different from other animals and have been working to explain the different evolutionary path that humans took. There are still many gaps in the story, but this book describes seven points in our ancestors' tale and explains the evidence behind this description. The story begins seven million years ago, with the life of ape ancestors which were also the ancestors of today's chimpanzees and bonobos. The second point is three million years ago with an ape which walked upright and lived outside the forest. Then follows a description of the life of early humans who lived one and a half million years ago. At the fourth point, 100,000 years ago, humans lived in Africa who were physically very similar to us. The fifth is 30,000 years ago, during the last ice age, when our ancestors evolved more complex cultures. The sixth is the period of accelerating cultural evolution that began as the planet started to recover from this ice age. Finally, beginning in the 1700s, there is the transformational period we are in now, which we call Modern Times. The style of this book is unusual for a science book because it has narrative sections which illustrate the lives of our ancestors and the problems they faced"--