Attenborough describes how he became fascinated by the natural world as a young boy. In 1937, he is 11 years old, exploring the countryside around him and finding the fossilized remains of “sea-living creatures” called ammonites (14). The sheer wonder of it astounded him: “I revelled in the thought that the first human eyes to gaze upon [them] were mine” (14). He confesses that he was not so much interested in the intricacies of human-generated laws and politics, or of monarchical history, but rather in the elaborate rules that governed nature—without any help from humankind.

He leaps from his boyhood fascination to his university learning, where he discovered that geological history was even more complicated than he imagined: “For different reasons at different times in the Earth’s history, there had been a profound, rapid, global change to the environment” (16). These events led to mass extinctions and the necessity for new evolutionary strategies for the surviving species. The most famous mass extinction—the annihilation of the age of the dinosaur—gave rise to the age of mammals and eventually humanity.

Attenborough gives a brief history of humanity, noting that “[o]ur own evolution is also recorded in the rocks” (18). He points out that humanity is unique among the animals in one area: “the capacity to develop cultures to a unique degree” (18).