I have to confess I was pleasantly surprised with this book. Judging only by the title, I read it thinking I was about to learn more about the evolution of our genus, and thus enhance my understanding or our own evolution. By reading it, I was taken into a completely different journey, one that took me to the heart of the complexities of life’s dispersion, challenging my many assumptions on the subject. And this makes the book interesting in two ways.

First, if you, like me, are unaware of biogeography as a scientific endeavor, this book will not only show you the history of the discipline, but also map its controversies, its main characters, and the current state of the art as far the author goes.

The second may be implicit, and not immediately obvious, but it relates to the way we tend to think about evolution and the development of life in general on our planet. Maybe it’s something unavoidable and that it relates to the way we humans tend to think in generic terms. We tend to prefer neat explanations, preferably simple and narratively compelling. However, that’s not how things happen or have happened to life. Deep is the deep history of time, and life, having been around such a long, long time throughout that history, makes what seems impossible at some point not only possible, but factual. Elaborate way to say that life, in all its complexities and long history, has managed to find innumerable ways to keep on going, to keep on striving, notwithstanding the many geological pressures it had to cope with.

So this book had the merit of making me rethink a lot of things I thought I understood, and many of my presuppositions about how life has spread about and occupied the whole of earth. If you, like me, have any interest in these topics, maybe you’ll find it as interesting as I did.