WHY WE OWE OUR LIVES TO LOCATION Origins: How The Earth Made Us Lewis Dartnell Bodley Head €16.99

When we look at the sweep of human history, it’s easy to spot trends and patterns. The fall of the Roman Empire was triggered by barbarian hordes invading from the Asian steppes, a phenomenon repeated until the time of the Mongols.

We study these events from political, cultural and military perspectives, but rarely consider the physical and material processes that govern human action. Why and how, for instance, did the Asian steppes prove such fertile breeding ground for conquerors such as Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, below? It’s questions like these that lie at the heart of Lewis Dartnell’s compelling new book, an exercise he describes as ‘big history written by a scientist’.

Earth has existed for more than four-and-a-half billion years, but all of recorded human history has been compressed into a tiny window since the end of the last Ice Age, which finished 11,700 years ago. Dartnell illuminates in fascinating detail the geographical, planetary and even cosmic factors that have shaped every step of our development.

Early humans came out of Africa, but we could only have evolved the way we did in the eastern part of the continent. The west is covered in trees, but in the arid east the lack of vegetation made hiding from predators much harder, so only the most intelligent and adaptable early hominids could survive. East Africa was sculpted by the movement of vast tectonic plates, a process central to the planet’s and our own history. Thirteen of the 15 major ancient civilisations began on the margins of tectonic plates. The other two, China and Egypt, were in regions made fertile by tectonic movement.

Dartnell has found the perfect blend of science and history. This book will challenge our preconceptions about the past, and make us think about humanity’s future.