I Asked You to Write History, Not Prehistoric Evolution!

Others write five thousand years of history. I write 4.6 billion years! Fang Yuan enters a global writing competition with the theme “Epic History.” Everyone else writes about dynasties rising and falling, and emperors and generals. He writes about a blob of cells with no eyes or mouth. Judges: What is this thing? Isn’t this off topic? Audience: That’s it? You call this history? Then they watch the blob of cells learn to devour its own kind. They witness a two-hundred-million-year-long massacre by poisonous gas. The killer isn’t human. It’s a type of algae. The weapon isn’t a sword or a gun. It’s oxygen. The death toll: 99% of all life on Earth. A fish crawls onto land. A lizard rules the Earth for 170 million years. A meteorite brings an era to an end. A crocodile survives from the Triassic to the present day, outlasting every mass extinction. No matter how much the game gets patched, it just won’t die. A monkey stands upright and learns to use fire. The judges fall silent. The audience goes wild. The whole world is asking the same question: What on Earth happened on this planet during the 3.8 billion years before humans appeared?