Chapter 4
3
We saw earlier that life as we know it on our planet, began with and in the water. Water has a key role in our kind of existence. Consider that we humans are composed of seventy percent of that element; we could almost say that we are sea animals adapted to the surface.
Well, we must place ourselves there and think that, the planet is cooling, the water remains liquid longer, and it is accumulating in the lowest places by simple gravity simultaneously.
This initial ocean, it seems, was just one and so were the lands -as continents.
Science calls today that super-continent Vaalbara-Pangaea [6].
Pangaea does not remain as the only continent but gets fractured and its segments drift, sail so to speak on the molten lava beneath the crust and lead to the continents we know today.
Let´s tell now tell a racconto and put all these facts in perspective.
Note that life, to evolve, develops first in the sea and then migrates to the land, while the supercontinent Pangaea-Vaalbara breaks and moves across the globe to fill the places we find familiar today.
At sea, where life generated animals, plants were also created, which moved inland and became land-dwelling vegetation, trees, grass, etc. ..
Some of the marine animals that had "come out" to land, while evolving, returned to the sea where they continued their evolution-e.g. cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.).
Other primeval animals became used to living on the surface and resulted in the famous dinosaurs, who reigned on the planet for about one hundred and sixty million years.
I do not want to overwhelm or drown you with the history of our world -many of you are certainly aware of it- but it is important we refresh what we know and try to notice certain "details" that are essential clues for understanding the topic at hand.
Let continue, (with a small remark).
Dinosaurs emerge about two hundred and thirty million years ago and disappear -go extinct- about sixty five million years approximately.
Considering that the human species, the first Homo, appears only in the last two million years, we understand that dinosaurs and humans never coexisted.
From the last dinosaur to the first Homo there was a sixty million years lapse, enough to not have ever encountered one another.
At this point I would like to focus your attention on some details of the evolution of life that will be important when we discuss the Genesis.
Interestingly, some dinosaurs could fly –like the Pterosaur-, and may have had their habitats on the beach. Consider that these animals had wings like bats and they were unfit to taxi like a plane or a duck, but they needed to jump from a high area, a high ridge to start the flight; and for that, what better than a cliff above the sea? Some of them were very large animals with a 12 meters wingspan, almost like a small plane.
It is also very important to emphasize that humans have been the last to appear in this story, the story of evolution.
Right. As you may have noticed it took about six billion years for the Solar System to form and man appeared in the last two million years.
It is common practice to compare these six billion years with one year of three hundred sixty-five days, in which the nebula begins to collapse the first of January and the human species makes its appearance at 23:00, December 31.
Mankind has his moment at the end, at the very end of the whole process.
I think this brief racconto of the history of the Earth gives us a sufficient and necessary basis of information to perform our comparison, so let's try!