Δευτέρα 17 Δεκεμβρίου 2012

The 12th Planet (Book I) (Earth Chronicles)

By Zecharia Sitchin

Publisher Bear & Company

ISBN 9780939680887

Published in Science Fiction & Fantasy

eBook Kindle Edition

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ENDLESS BEGINNING

Of the evidence that we have amassed to support our conclusions, exhibit number one is Man himself. In many ways, modem man -- Homo sapiens -- is a stranger to Earth.

Ever since Charles Darwin shocked the scholars and theologians of his time with the evidence of evolution, life on Earth has been traced through Man and the primates, mammals, and vertebrates, and backward through everlower life forms to the point, billions of years ago, at which life is presumed to have begun.

But having reached these beginnings and having begun to contemplate the probabilities of life elsewhere in our solar system and beyond, the scholars have become oneasy about life on Earth: Somehow, it does not belong here. If it began through a series of spontaneous chemical reactions, why does life on Earth have but a single source, and not a multitude of chance sources? And why does all living matter on Earth contain too little of the chemical elements that abound on Earth, and too much of those that are rare on our planet?

Was life, then, imported to Earth from elsewhere?

Man's position in the evolutionary chain has compounded the puzzle. Finding a broken skull here, a jaw there, scholars at first believed that Man originated in Asia some 500,000 years ago. But as older fossils were found, it became evident that the mills of evolution grind much, much slower. Man's ancestor apes are now placed at a staggering 25,000,000 years ago. Discoveries in East Africa reveal a transition to manlike apes (horninids) some 14,000,000 years ago. It was about 11,000,000 years later that the first ape-man worthy of the classification Homo appeared there.