Life on Earth is an incomprehensible, omnipresent, orgy, teeming with millions of legs, twigs, thorns and teeth, in which we exist and from which we come. For three and a half billion years it did without us, and now, in the last moments of history, a person emerges from this intricacies of animals, plants, fungi and microbes and asks the question: who am I and what is the meaning of my, human, life? In his debut book, evolutionary neuroscientist Nikolai Kukushkin, step by step, recreates the picture of the world from inanimate matter to the human mind in order to find answers to eternal questions in the past of his species.
It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, the lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms. “Clap with one palm” is a story of a man and his inner world, which contains all the way from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language and is told as if it were a knightly novel or a mythical epic.
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