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A Briefer History of Time
Synopsis: World History Timeline: A review of the known world history timeline including accepted world history to date, the planet's historical periods and Darwin's Evolution theory.
The importance of these findings will not be apparent without
an overview of accepted world history to date, for simply pushing back the date
of the first known civilisation by a few thousand years or so is meaningless in
isolation.
 It is now assumed that the universe itself burst into
existence some 15 billion years ago. For the first few hundred thousand years
matter and radiation intermingled to form a thick fog. Then, around 300,000
years after the ‘Big Bang’ temperatures fell and electrons began to bind into
hydrogen and helium nuclei to form the first stable atoms. Soon the universe
began to fill with gas clouds and these eventually formed galaxies. Four billion
years after the Big Bang, these galaxies spawned the first stars and as these
stars aged and collapsed, new generations of stars were born from newly created
elements.
After a further 10 billion years, a small star ignited on the
third spiral arm of our unremarkable galaxy. This star gave light and heat to
dust and rubble caught in its gravitational pull, and from this debris four
rocks formed in gravitational eddies, each attracting other space ‘leftovers’ as
their own gravitational pull developed. The star also led to the formation of
larger ‘gas’ planets further out in its ‘solar’ system. Check out the video
here.
 The first of these rocks, Mercury, became a barren planet, similar to the size
of the Earth’s Moon. It was first photographed in
detail in March 1974 (above, left) by the Mariner 10
spacecraft and, although having craters mountains and ridges,
it’s massive temperature fluctuations, (which can be as high as 425° C on the
equator at noon, and plummeting to -180° C just before sunrise) make for the
existence of life there ‘as we know it’ being more than improbable.
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The second rock
from the Sun is Venus. This planet is
the closest to Earth and the brightest object in the sky, apart from the Sun and
Moon. This light is due to its covering of dense clouds that reflect over
three-quarters of the sunlight received by the planet. These clouds actually conceal a deadly atmosphere, for although
the main atmospheric gas is carbon dioxide, traces of other substances have been
detected, including hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide
and hydrochloric acid. The surface (above left was photographed for the first time in
October 1975 by the then Soviet Spacecraft Venera 9. This showed the planet’s
surface to be rocky with stones scattered across it with what appears to be soil
in between. Conditions on Venus also suggest that it could not support life as
we know it.
 Then there is the third rock from the Sun. A planet different
from all others in the Solar System; for it is teeming with life, vegetation,
water, and incredible scenery (– at least to human eyes.)
The blue planet is almost 8000 miles in diameter, and moves
around the sun in harness with its Moon at a distance of approximately 93
million miles.
Images from space show the familiar face of the planet, however
the continents have not always occupied their current positions. Up to 225
million years ago, most of the land on the planet was combined into one
‘super-continent’ named ‘Pangaea’ by geologists. This composite land-mass made for the easy and rapid spreading
of life forms and vegetation. Click here to see how Pangaea broke up into our
current continental structure.
 The planet’s historical periods have been broken down by geologists
into the pre-Cambrian period (4600-590 millions of years ago) when there were
few fossils. The Paleozoic (590-225 millions), by the end of which reptiles were
dominant. This period also saw a major extinction when many species of plants
and animals died out. The Mesozoic period (225-65 millions) ended with the Earth
probably being struck by a huge asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed
mammals to dominate through the subsequent Cenozoic period which ended two
million years ago with modern type animals scattered across the planet surface.
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Throughout its history, the planet has also seen many
ice-ages, with the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska (right) formerly reaching well
into the United States and as far south as present day London, England during
the last of these periods.
Until the 18th Century however, few were curious
about the planet’s history, nor did many question the tradition that all life on
it had been created in 4004 BCE; a date calculated by Archbishop Ussher, (below)
who merely added up the ages of figures in the Christian Bible back to Adam and
Eve. This orthodox Christian view demanded literal acceptance of the origin of
all things as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Each and every
thing on the planet – and only on this planet – was especially created by God,
and humankind was the crowning achievement of this rather hectic six days.
Any suggestion that living things could change through time inherently
suggested that they were
 imperfect, and God would
not have created something imperfect unless s/he was imperfect as well.
Creationists also argued that God would not create an animal or plant only to
let it become extinct later.
Yet the fossil record throughout the world could not be
ignored. Shells, teeth, coiled ammonites, and bones, all made out of rock, were
constantly being unearthed to provide a challenge to the creationist theory.
Early ideas on their origin were vague and diverse. Some believed that the
fossils were the workings of a life force in the Earth, straining to make images
of the creatures of God’s creation. Others suggested that the eggs of real
animals had lodged in the rocks and developed as rocky tumours (1). In order to
explain these findings in religious terms, the fossils were said to be the
remains of creatures drowned in the flood, a theory which also explained how the
fossils of sea creatures were found on the top of mountains. (2)
Whilst this remains the position of many Christians throughout
the world, others recognised that living things do change, and the concept of
‘evolution’ was born. This theory has generally been credited to Charles Darwin,
although, in fairness, others made significant contributions to the idea: They
just didn’t happen to be English so were, in the main, forgotten about.
Eight years after publication of Darwin’s book, naturalist
Ernst Haeckel made one of the first attempts to deal with the specifics of
evolution. Although his genealogical chart (below), starting with a blob of
protoplasm and continuing to a ‘modern’ Papuan is filled with misconceptions and
fictitious characters, the concepts were broadly accurate considering the
paucity of knowledge in his day.
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 The general concept of Darwin’s evolution is that there is
a continuous struggle for existence and those species which adapt (evolve) are
the most likely to survive.
This is no longer an accepted view of the theory. Many now
agree that some changes are merely random mutations, which happened to suit the
environment and survived. However such mutations would only have taken hold if
they occurred in small, isolated populations. (3)
Whatever its process, evolution has led to the development of
approximately 30 million separate species on Earth at the present time and it is
estimated that a further 3 billion species may have previously existed
but become extinct (4).
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Evolutionists contend that small living organisms first
appeared on Earth 630 million years ago and some 500 million years later a tiny
shrew-like creature appeared on the planet’s surface. About 60 million years
ago, after the dinosaurs’ extinction, the early primates on the planet
diversified rapidly and by 50 million years ago monkeys and apes had evolved.
 The ape-human divergence happened relatively recently,
between five and eight million years ago (5) and the first members of our genus,
Homo, evolved from the African australopithecines approximately 2
to 1.5 million years ago.
The number of skulls and skeletons that have been
found indicate that most Australopithecus died before they reached the
age of 20 suggesting a large number of orphaned children who would have been
raised by surviving ‘elders’. (6)
It is generally recognised that "two million years ago, this
first certain ancestor of man walked with a foot which is almost
indistinguishable from the foot of modern man. The fact is that when he put his
foot on the ground and walked upright, man made a commitment to a new
integration of life…" (7)
 This first real man is known as a maker of simple stone
tools and the upper cavity of his skull suggests a brain volume of only half
that of a modern human, but with a zone of the cerebral cortex known to be
responsible for speech production (8). This man could walk upright and talk.
Then one million years ago, Homo erectus appeared and
spread far beyond Africa. One find of this kind was made in China and called
‘Peking Man’; a 400,000-year-old creature that was the first to use
fire.
 By this time a ‘brain explosion’ had occurred with the
human brain inexplicably expanding by another third, with most of that growth
occurring in the cerebrum, the area of the brain used for thinking.
Neanderthal man (right) then appeared some 150,000 years ago,
however this line of man died out to be replaced (or displaced) as Cro-Magnon
man established himself as the enduring human life form on the planet some
100-90,000 years ago. (Some have speculated that Cro-Magnon man, Homo
sapiens, actually destroyed Neanderthal man.
It is an unattractive thought that our race may
have survived because we were prepared to kill our fellow man.
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TAGS: World History Timeline, Review World History Timeline, Known World History Timeline, World History Timeline to Date, Planet's Historical Periods, Darwin's Evolution Theory 
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