Origin Story Book Summary - Origin Story Book explained in key points

Listen to the Intro

00:00

Origin Story summary

Name: Origin Story
Rating: 4.3 (129 reviews)
Author: David Christian

David Christian

A Big History of Everything

4.3 (129 ratings)

31 mins

Topics

Anthropology

Table of Contents

Origin Story
Summary of 12 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? Learn the epic story of our universe and humanity’s place in it.

Throughout history, humans have tried to make sense of our world and our place in it. People from different ages, races and religions have told stories to explain, with grandeur and awe, the origins and existence of humans, animals, Earth, the stars and the universe.

Globalization and our intensely dynamic modern knowledge economy have eroded faith in traditional origin stories. But the reality is that current scientific knowledge means humans have never been better placed to explain our origins and development.

These blinks tell the grandest story possible. How, from nothing, our universe, stars and planets emerged. How the right conditions came together to enable the formation of life. How life-forms harnessed the energy of the sun to make great leaps forward, and how millions of years later humans harnessed energy from farming and fossil fuels to leap forward again.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how stars are born and why their deaths helped enable our existence today;
why walking on two legs made humans more sociable; and
why human’s dominance of Earth is now threatening its, and our, stability.

The Big Bang created the Universe 13.8 billion years ago, the first of a series of key events in our history.

The tale of our origins is told through thresholds – key transition points when more complex things appeared. These moments happen under what’s known as goldilocks conditions – when things are not too hot or too cold, but just right.

For most of the thresholds in our story, we can explain what those goldilocks conditions were, and why the threshold was reached. But what about the Big Bang?

We simply don’t know the conditions that allowed our universe to emerge. Perhaps the best way to explain what happened is to use the words of science fiction author Terry Pratchett: “In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

What we do know is that the Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago – the first of a series of key events in our history. And we know what happened next, a fraction of a billionth of a second after that moment.

At this point, the universe was smaller than an atom. It’s hard for human brains to comprehend the size of things like atoms, but you could comfortably fit a million of them into the dot of this “i.”

To begin with, we only had energy, which quickly split into different forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism. Within a second, simple matter emerged and was followed by more complex structures, while protons and neutrons – extremely tiny particles – teamed up to become nuclei. All this happened within minutes, but as the universe cooled things slowed down a bit. 380,000 years later, electrons became trapped in orbit around protons, pulled together by electromagnetic forces, and the first atoms of helium and hydrogen were formed.

The universe began as something unimaginably small, with all the energy and matter present in the universe today packed into it, and it’s been growing ever since.

The appearance of stars 12 billion years ago – and the way they die – were important steps forward for the universe.

Looking at the night sky, it’s easy to think of stars as having always existed. But stars only came into being a hundred million years after the Big Bang, when gravity and matter provided the goldilocks conditions for stars to form.

At this point, the universe was a bit like a mist made up of tiny pieces of matter. In some areas – you could think of them as particularly cloudy areas – the volume of matter was denser than elsewhere. Here, gravity pulled atoms together, making them collide and speed up, raising the temperature. Over time, these clouds of matter grew denser and hotter.

The earth was formed by the accumulation of debris about 4.5 billion years ago.

We have a lot to thank the sun for: heat, light and energy for a start. We also have it to thank for the earth’s creation.

The formation of planets is a messy by-product of star creation, which takes place in areas of space rich in clouds of chemicals.

Earth had the right conditions to allow life to flourish.

What is life? Life is built out of billions of tiny molecular machines working inside protected bubbles, or cells. It can tap into energy, adapt to its environment, reproduce and evolve.

In the right conditions, the molecules from which life is built can emerge spontaneously.

Photosynthesis was an energy bonanza for early, single-celled life that helped spark a biological revolution.

Early life-forms, known as prokaryotes, are single-celled organisms created in chemically rich volcanic vents on the ocean floor.

Prokaryotes are tiny – a punctuation mark could hold a few hundred thousand of them. But they are still able to detect information, such as heat, and respond to it.

Evolution and the extinction of dinosaurs helped the big forms of life develop that would eventually lead to humanity.

With the right conditions, as well as benefiting from the energy boost of photosynthesis and the ability to deal with oxygen, single-celled organisms were able to evolve into much more complex, multi-celled beings.

Plants, fungi and eventually animals developed and spread from the oceans onto land. The emergence of photosynthesizing plants on land – which consumed vast amounts of carbon dioxide and released oxygen – created the high-oxygen atmosphere that is essentially what we live and breath today.

Humans evolved from primates and made a major breakthrough with the development of language.

How old are we as a species? By the standards of the universe, we’re extremely young.

In just the last six million years (remembering that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the first large living organisms arrived 600 million years ago), we humans have gone our own way, evolving separately from primates.

Farming was a transformative innovation for human life.

We’ve seen that certain huge innovations, such as photosynthesis, have had a major impact on the development of life. Now we get to the next innovation, farming, which evolved in response to population pressures.

Consider the Natufians – communities of humans who lived in villages of a few hundred people on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. They were initially foragers, but population pressures meant they needed more resources. With plenty of neighboring villages around, they couldn’t use a larger area of land. Instead, they had to use whatever techniques they could to increase the productivity of the land they already had.

As farming improved, it generated surpluses which enabled the development of more complex agrarian societies.

Today, most of us take for granted that we don’t have to spend our days producing food. But that’s the product of a great change in human society.

As the productivity of farming improved over time, farmers began to generate significant surpluses – more food and goods than they needed for day-to-day survival.

The exchange of ideas and discovery of fossil fuels accelerated the advance of human progress.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus became one of the first men to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Farming had taken 10,000 years to spread around the planet.

Now, in just a few hundred years, humans had made vast leaps forward as information and ideas traveled over oceans and were exchanged more rapidly than ever before.

The earth has entered a new age: the era of humans.

For the first time in the history of the universe, one species – humans – had become the dominant force and changed the earth’s environment forever. Without always knowing what we’re doing, we found ourselves in the planetary driving seat.

Since the Second World War, we’ve experienced the greatest burst of economic growth in history, driven mainly by the exploitation of fossil fuels and technological innovation. This is the dawn of the Anthropocene – the era of humans.

The future is ours to make.

What will eventually happen to Earth? Well, in the really long term – many millions of years – Earth will become sterile and eventually be swallowed by the sun. On a more human timeline, the future still remains in our hands.

The story of humans is in large part a story of acceleration. Things are now happening so fast that our actions over the coming decades will have huge consequences for both us and Earth for thousands of years.

Want to see all full key ideas from Origin Story?

Key ideas in Origin Story

More knowledge in less time

Read or listen

Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.

Find your next read

Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.

Shortcasts ^New

We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.

What is Origin Story about?

Origin Story (2018) tells the story of our universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. It traces how the right conditions have allowed the development of forms, organisms and ultimately societies of incredible complexity. From the emergence of single-celled organisms to the development of agriculture, it tells the epic story of our origins.

Who should read Origin Story?

Anyone interested in the history of natural and human innovation
Anyone with an interest in popular science
Those seeking to understand our place in the universe

About the Author

David Christian is a professor of history at Macquarie University, Australia, and cocreator of the university’s Big History School. He also cofounded the Big History Project with Bill Gates, which provides schools with resources to teach the history of the universe. His 2011 TED Talk, The history of our world in 18 minutes, has been viewed more than eight million times.

Categories with Origin Story

History Science

Books like Origin Story

The Grid

Gretchen Bakke

The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future

Past, Present and Future

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

The Ultimate Origin Story

17 min

4.4

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari

Future proof yourself against the 21st Century

How the Modern World Was Made

23 min

4.3

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

From the Big Bang to Black Holes

A Brief History of Humankind

28 min

4.4

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Intuition or deliberation? Where you can (and can't) trust your brain

A Historical Novel on the Irrationality of Human Behavior in War

Create a Life You Really Love with Less Stress and More Flow

16 min

4.3

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan

Science as a Candle in the Dark

A Four Thousand Year History

The Everything of its Two-Thousand-Year History

One small step toward understanding the greatness of the universe

The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

24 min

4.0

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

Lisa Randall

The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

23 min

4.4

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

The New Science of Sunlight and How it Shapes Our Bodies and Minds

17 min

4.2

The Sleep Prescription

Aric Prather

Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest

17 min

4.3

The Success Principles

Jack Canfield

How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

19 min

4.5

12 Months to $1 Million

Ryan Daniel Moran

How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven-Figure Entrepreneur

Discover the Shocking Truth with This New York Times Bestseller

18 min

3.6

How the World Really Works

Vaclav Smil

The Science of Our Past, Present and Future

22 min

4.5

When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

Brianna Wiest

Inspiration to Begin Your Journey of True Transformation

How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything

27 min

4.2

Mighty Be Our Powers

Leymah Gbowee with Carol Mithers

How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War

20 min

4.7

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

George Orwell

A Dystopian Classic on the Dangers of Totalitarianism

22 min

4.8

Love Your Life, Not Theirs

Rachel Cruze

7 Money Habits for Living the Life You Want

15 min

4.4

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

17 min

4.2

Merchants of Doubt

Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

18 min

3.8

The Imperfectionists

Robert McLean and Charles Conn

Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times

23 min

4.5

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard P. Feynman

Adventures of a Curious Character

7 min

3.3

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

Adam Rutherford

The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage

13 min

4.3

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

A journey into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer

38 min

4.5

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh

An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

20 min

4.7

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Gabor Maté

Close Encounters with Addiction

How We Know What’s Really True

26 min

4.4

The Procrastination Cure

Jeffery Combs

7 Steps to Stop Putting Life Off

A Guide for Occupants

29 min

4.5

Reality Is Not What It Seems

Carlo Rovelli

The Journey to Quantum Gravity

16 min

4.5

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

23 min

4.7

Things No One Else Can Teach Us

Humble the Poet

Turning Losses Into Lessons

14 min

4.6

People ❤️ Blinkist

Sven O.

It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.

Thi Viet Quynh N.

Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.

Jonathan A.

Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.

Renee D.

Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.