History Literature / Evolution

* ColonyDrop: Earth is hit by two major cosmic bodies, both causing a mass extinction -- the comet that killed the dinosaurs and Eros in the future.

* ApopheniaPlot: Mother is one of the first humans to develop an understanding of cause and effect, and a lifetime spent cogitating about complex causal chains eventually leads her to believe that there is a direct intent behind everything. Even if doesn't know the specific mechanisms by which something happened, ''nothing'' happens by chance -- after all, just because an antelope skewered by a spear doesn't see the hidden hunter, its death was still planned and determined by a hidden intelligence. As the story puts it, she essentially becomes the first conspiracy theorist. This is portrayed as a mixed blessing overall -- while it leads her to becoming incredibly paranoid and deluded (she sees possible traitors everywhere, and murdered her own aunt out of a belief that she caused the illness that killed Mother's son), it also allows her to create relatively complex technology, develop sophisticated survival strategies, and order her tribal society in a manner much more complex than her less mentally adapt tribemates could.

''Evolution'' is a novel by Creator/StephenBaxter spanning 645 million years of Earth's history, with most chapters focusing on 65 million years ago to 30 million years in the future. The book is split into three parts: Ancestors, which focuses on various director ancestors to humans, starting with a ratlike animal that coexisted with the dinosaurs; Humans, which depicts various turning in human development; and Descendants, which is set AfterTheEnd.

* AdamAndEvePlot: Subverted in "The Long Shadow." The sole female member of the reawakened squadron runs away because she knows the men want to enact this with her.

* AlasPoorYorick: Mother digs out her child's skull and cradles it, later she starts using it as a totem to gain influence over her tribe.
* AlienSky:

** Earth's sky in Ultimate's time has also an Andromeda Galaxy that appears larger and brighter as it has moved towards the Milky Way and a brighter Moon thanks to a more luminous Sun.

* AmbiguousTimePeriod: It's not stated exactly when "A Long Shadow" (the first chapter in the Descendants section) takes place. The characters can only speculate that it must have been more than a millennium since civilisation ended and they were put into cryostasis.

** Class 3a: Natural Human Extinction: Begins to happen in the 2031 segments, when a supervolcano explodes before the humans get a chance to undo the damage done to the environment.
** Another 3a happens to the intelligent dinosaurs from "The Hunters of Pangaea". It may have been hastened by the decision of the protagonist to kill the matriarch of the ''Diplodocus'' herd that they depend upon, but at that point she was aware that they were doomed.
** Class 4: Biosphere Extinction: Several. The extinction of the dinosaurs is described in detail, as is the effects of humans on biodiversity. There is also mention of the asteroid Eros impacting 30 million years from now.

** Class X: Planetary Annihilation: Mars gets it from some self-replicating robots that humans sent to Mars soon before dying out. The robots go on to create a civilization that lasts much, much longer than humanity did. In the flash-forward mentioned above, the Earth is also destroyed by the dying Sun.
* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: Implied with "Cata Huuk", the in-story name of the Proto-Indo-European town located in present-day Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Possibly the idea is that Cata Huuk was the original name, but this is certainly incorrect. ''Çatalhöyük'' means ''Fork Mound'' in Turkish, a non-Indo-European language.

** First of all, in the story about the sapient ''Ornitholestes'', he mentions that the only evidence humans had of these species is the disappearance of sauropods in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species' bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Problem is, sauropods didn't go extinct in the Late Jurassic, not even in the Northern Hemisphere. There were as many sauropods inhabiting North America in the Early Cretaceous as there were in the Late Jurassic, including ''Astrodon'', ''Sauroposeidon'', and ''Sonorasaurus''. However, there ''was'' a mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic that claimed the dominant Jurassic sauropods, and the sauropods referred to in that story were all ''Diplodocus'', which did go extinct then. The phrase was "the disappearance of ''the'' giant sauropods". It could easily have meant just those specific species, not sauropods in general, but the wording is nonetheless ambiguous.
** The story about primates coming to South America has some anachronism and MisplacedWildlife in it too. Not only does it have indricotherid rhinos (native only to Asia), camels (who were only found in North America at this time), and such, it has gastornid birds inhabiting Oligocene-Miocene Africa... even after these animals were supposed to have died out in the middle Eocene.
** In the story involving ''Purgatorius'', while Baxter does get it right by cloaking his troodonts in feathers, he leaves them off his dromaeosaurs. To add insult to injury, he makes the raptors cold-blooded, despite the fact that raptors are the very dinosaurs which ignited the cold blood/warm blood debate. In fact, even paleontologists who doubt endothermy in ornithischians and sauropods don't deny that raptors were most likely endothermic. And then there are the ''Giganotosaurus'' and ''Suchomimus'' in North America. Not only are these animals in the wrong place (''Giganotosaurus'' was from South America, ''Suchomimus'' from Africa), but they are from the wrong time, both species were from the Early Cretaceous; Baster excuses these particular issues by having the dinosaurs in question belong to different but related species whose fossils simply haven't been found.
* ArtisticLicenseSpace: While it's true the Sun gets more luminous with time and that increasing luminosity will mess so much with Earth's climate that will cause the eventual extinction of life and loss of oceans much before it goes into red-giant mode, the Sun that will shine 500 million years in the future, when the last chapter of the book takes place, will not be very different of the current one in size and luminosity and not the ferocious one Baxter describes, at least if stellar evolution models are right, even if luminous enough to begin affecting life. See [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_evolution_%28English%29.svg]]
* AscendedToCarnivorism: The Antarctican descendants of the herbivorous ''Leaellynasaura'' have learnt to eat meat and become scavengers.

* BittersweetEnding: Very much so, though which part is bitter and which is sweet may not be so clear-cut. All the primates are dead, along with all life on Earth, and all recognizable traces of humans are long gone, but they're succeeded by a mechanical civilization, and bacteria from Earth seeded life on new worlds, [[HereWeGoAgain condemning them to the same eons-long cycle of violence that once engulfed Earth]].

* ColonyDrop: Two –the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and Eros in the future.
* CosmicHorrorStory: Baxter's explanation of how human civilisation ends emphasises that we are prey to powerful forces that we cannot control. The undoing of humanity is not nuclear war, global warming or a deadly virus grown in a laboratory, but an enormous super-volcano that disrupts the planet's weather systems enough to cause civilisation to collapse. Volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, ice ages and indeed evolution itself destroy humanity's delusions of grandeur. Humans are no different from the millions of species that have come into being, thrived, then vanished into oblivion. In the eyes of Earth, we are a minor flash in the pan. In the eyes of the cosmos, we are less than a speck of dust. Look at those who have fallen before us; why should we fare any better? Are we really any different?
* ADogNamedDog: Three of the first protagonists of the story are a ''Purgatorius'' named Purga, a ''Plesiadapis'' named Plesi and a ''Notharctus'' named Noth. Purga's nemesis in the first chapter is a ''Troodon'' named Wounding Tooth (which is what ''Troodon'' means in Greek). Of course none of these characters actually call themselves by names; they are more like convenient labels used by the story to refer to them.
* DoubleMeaning: The ruler of Cata Huuk is known as the Potus. While a passable cognate for ''potentate'', this can be a humorous play on the acronym POTUS for [[OurPresidentsAreDifferent President of the United States]].

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: For Purga, Plesi and Remembrance, life is nasty, brutal and short. In "Kingdom of the Rats", Remembrace escapes her homicidal cousins in the trees, ran into a giant rat on the forest floor, and escapes into the treetops only to be plucked by a giant finch. The savage landscape of the selfish gene is their habitat.
* EverythingsBetterWithMonkeys: Or monkey-like ancestors to both monkeys and apes.

* FlyingSeafoodSpecial: Fish that fly with winglike fins are one of the creatures that populate the Earth 30 million years after humanity's downfall.

** By thirty million years hence, they have returned to being arboreal apes. Their nests vaguely resemble small buildings that they decorate with glass fragments to ward off predators, but they are otherwise little different from a chimp or australopithecine. Numerous other posthuman species have emerged by this point, including arboreal hunters, elephantine giants "farmed" by carnivorous rats and burrowing creatures living in underground hives.

* FutureImperfect: During the first five thousand years of the human colonisation of Australia, they have killed off all the continent's megafauna, such as giant kangaroos, which survive only as cave paintings. They are dismissed as childish doodling by people who have already forgotten what has been lost.
* FuturePrimitive: Millions of years from now, humanity's distant descendants have shed their intelligence and reverted to a simpler way of life.
* GiantFlyer: The air whale, a giant pterosaur with a 100-metre wingspan that lives in the stratosphere and leaves no fossil evidence behind.
* GroinAttack: Solo bites off a testicle from the ''Notharctus'' troop’s alpha male, the Emperor. Fortunately they seem to have much a lower pain threshold in that particular part of their anatomy than humans.
* GrowsOnTrees: The borametz Trees of New Pangaea are involved in posthuman reproduction by mixing the parents' bodily fluid, and also feed the children with the organic mechanisms in their leafy cocoons.

* HumanSacrifice: An invention of Mother to remove political dissidents, under the guise of bringing rain. Fortunately only two sacrificial victims are required before the rains come; she was quite prepared to work her way through the entire tribe.
* HumanitysWake: The Descendants section takes place in the future, about humanity's descendants after the end of civilisation.
* HumansAreBastards: Baxter's views on humanity are depressing. We are almost always represented under disastrous lights: we exhaust our resources, we exploit anything of benefit to us. We are unable to overcome our animal urge to destroy anything we do not know or understand. Selfishness and xenophobia are mankind's modus operandi.

* InvisibilityWithDrawbacks: All invisible mutant frogs are blind (a transparent retina can't trap light), have inefficient biochemistry for having to use transparent substitutes, are extremely vulnerable to cancer for lack of protection from light, heat and the Sun's radiation, and live short, wretched lives in constant agony before dying as juveniles, never reaching adulthood.

-->''And it was an irony that in former times she would surely already have succumbed to predation by now: It was the great emptying of the world that had preserved her life -- a few extra months won at the expense of uncounted billions of creatures.''
* JustBeforeTheEnd: "A Far Distant Futurity" set 500 million years into the future, when the continents of earth have merged into a hot, flat, dry supercontinent that resembles the surface of Mars, and life is on the decline. "The Last Burrow", "Last Contact", "The Dying Light" and the epilogue also count, for the end of the polar dinosaurs, Neanderthals, the Western Roman Empire, and humanity respectively.

* MadScientist: Mother understands the concept of cause and effect, and is capable of abstract thought. This enables her to invent the spear thrower, a crucial invention because her people are starving. But Mother's enhanced mental powers come at a cost; many of her ideas come to her when she is having crippling migraine attacks. She begins to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia following the death of her son, and invents the world's first religion.

* MixAndMatchCritters: The world 30 million years in the future is full of these: rat-leopards, rat-cheetahs, mouse-raptors, elephant-men, mole-men, rabbit-gazelles, goat-elephants, duck-billed goats, finch-eagles, cormorant-cetaceans and so on. Strictly speaking, however, these are simply animals that have evolved to closely resemble other, extinct lineages, rather than being actual chimeras of different creatures.

* NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished: A Neanderthal known as the Old Man looks after Jahna and her brother when they are cut off from a hunting party in a snowstorm. Does his hospitality result in gratitude, reconciliation with the skinnies? No, his generosity is rewarded by the children's father only with a brutal death.

* NotSoExtinct: One of Alison Scott's genetic creations are a living reconstruction of an ''Australopithecus''.

* PeopleFarms: The mouse-raptors 30 million years in the future domesticate, protect and farm a species of elephant-like descendants of humans for food.

* QuestToTheWest: "The Crossing". A group of monkeys are swept out from the Congo River to the Atlantic by a flash flood. They survive the immediate peril by clinging to a raft of matted vegetation, but then have to endure weeks of thirst and starvation, during which many of them die. At length, the raft drifts ashore and the survivors find themselves in South America, becoming the progenitors of the New World monkeys that live there to this day.

** In "The Long Shadow", while preserved stuff as guns has survived, concrete has degraded, metal has rusted off, and everything else has been victim of the ravages of time.
** The end of Remembrance's part mentions the NEAR-Shoemaker probe still on the asteroid Eros, even if it having suffered the effects of space weathering.
* TheRemnant: "The Last Burrow" depicts the Antarctica ecosystem 55 million years after the Cretaceous impact, where small lemming-like primates compete with the last non-avian dinosaurs which survived the Cretaceous impact, including the descendants of ''Muttaburrasaurus'', ''Leaellynasaura'' and ''Allosaurus'', with a ''Koolasuchus'' thrown in somewhere.
* RodentsOfUnusualSize: 30 millions after the end of civilisation, the rodent survivors of the crash have diversified into rat-cheetahs, rat-leopards and mouse-raptors that hunt rabbit-gazelles and duck-billed goats.
* SceneryGorn: After many vivid descriptions of the world of the dinosaurs, both in the late Jurassic and the late Cretaceous, the destruction of that world is described just as vividly.
* SceneryPorn: The world is much more developed and interesting than the characters.
* ServantRace: At the end of civilisation, humanity was heading to this when the genriched elite inserted a whole extra chromosome full of desirable genes into their kids, which stops them from breeding with unenhanced ''Homo sapiens''. The rich have set themselves up as a separate species.
* ShoutOut: With bitter irony, the characters of "The Long Shadow" name a feral posthuman girl [[Literature/TheTimeMachine Weena]], but she could not be more different from [[Creator/HGWells Wells']] 'little doll of a creature': she is covered in fur and stinks 'like a monkey cage'.
** Dog- and leopard-rats, ungulate-rabbits, elephant-pigs, eagle-passerines, whale-seabirds, and hadrosaur-ungulates may have been inspired by ''Literature/AfterManAZoologyOfTheFuture''.
* SingleBiomePlanet: New Pangaea, a supercontinent which will reassemble 500 million years into the future, is entirely covered by a uniform desert of red dust.
-->''On this New Pangaea, there were no barriers, no lakes or mountain ranges. Nowadays it didn’t matter where you went, from pole to equator, from east to west. Everywhere was the same. And there was dust everywhere. Even the air was full of red dust, suspended there by the habitual sandstorms, making the sky a butterscotch-coloured dome. It was more like Mars than Earth.''
* SlaveRace: 31000 years ago, humans co-exist with the last Neanderthals, but despise them, calling them 'boneheads', treat them no better than vermin and have reduced them to pack-animals to haul their sleds.

* SuperPersistentPredator: A ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon Troodon]]'' pursues Purga, the protagonist of the first chapter, not because she's hungry, but because she snapped when she found Purga eating her eggs.

* TheSymbiote: The inhabitants of New Pangaea took the principle of cooperation and sharing to its extremes to survive in the dying Earth. The borametz Tree cannot survive without the insects that bring nutrients to its roots, and the mammals who bring it water, food, and salt, and plant its seeds. Even its leaves belong to another plant. Likewise the symbiotes cannot have survived without the Tree, which shelters them from predators and climate, and feeds them with its sap.

* ToTheFutureAndBeyond: The last chapters are set farther and farther in the future -- an unspecified age at least a millennium away, 30 million years in the future, and 500 million years in the future. Not to mention the FramingDevice, which is set in the near future of 2031.
* ToothyBird: Some of the marine cormorants, having taken the niches of the dolphins that went extinct alongside humanity, have regrown the teeth of their ancient reptilian ancestors.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Baxter starts the frame story in the year 2031 (twenty-eight years after the novel's publication) with civilisation at its apex, yet simultaneously threatened by the damage it has done to the ecosystem that supports it.

** The ''boneheads'' (Neanderthals) once Homo sapiens sapiens takes over.

* {{Xenofiction}}: Only a few chapters are about humans, the rest count as this.

* YouGottaHaveBlueHair: Children with unusual hair colours like blue and green are only one of the products of genetic engineering undertaken by the rich elite to create perfect-looking kids.

* OneGenderRace: The last of humanity's descendants 500 million years in the future are all functionally female, there are no males any more, and gender is meaningless.

* AdamAndEvePlot: Averted in "The Long Shadow." The sole female member of the reawakened squadron runs away because she knows the men want to enact this with her.

* NiceMice: ''Thoroughly averted'' with the future mouse-raptors. The combination sounds ludicrous, but they are among the most dangerous and unnerving creatures in their ecosystem as intelligent and social predators.

* NoPreggerSex: Averted; one of the stories deals with a pregnant 17 year old girl that offers herself sexually to a DirtyOldMan with a [[{{Squick}} fetish for pregnant women]] in exchange for sparing the life of her child.
* NobodyPoops: Averted. Boy, do they ever. There are few chapter where the author does not go into [[TooMuchInformation gratuitous detail]] [[{{Squick}} about excrement, urine and/or raging erections]].

* ArtisticLicenseAstronomy: While it's true the Sun gets more luminous with time and that increasing luminosity will mess so much with Earth's climate that will cause the eventual extinction of life and loss of oceans much before it goes into red-giant mode, the Sun that will shine 500 million years in the future, when the last chapter of the book takes place, will not be very different of the current one in size and luminosity and not the ferocious one Baxter describes, at least if stellar evolution models are right, even if luminous enough to begin affecting life. See [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_evolution_%28English%29.svg]]

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Baxter starts the frame story in the year 2031 (twenty-eight years after the novel's publication) with civilisation at its apex, yet simultaneously threatened by the damage it has done to the ecosystem that supports it.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: For Purga, Plesi and Remembrance, life is nasty, brutal and short. In "Kingdom of the Rats", Remembrace escapes her homicidal cousins in the trees, ran into a giant rat on the forest floor, and escapes into the treetops only to be plucked by a giant finch. The savage landscape of the selfish gene is their habitat.

* HumanSacrifice: An invention of Mother to remove political dissidents, under the guise of bringing rain. Fortunately only two sacrificial victims are required before the rains come; she was quite prepared to work her way through the entire tribe.

* NobodyPoops: Averted. Boy, do they ever. There are few chapter where the author does not go into [[TooMuchInformation gratuitous detail]] [[{{Squick}} about excrement, urine and/or raging erections]].

* OneGenderRace: The last of humanity's descendants 500 million years in the future are all functionally female, there are no males any more, and gender is meaningless.

* SpeciesLostAndFound: One of Alison Scott's genetic creations are a living reconstruction of an ''Australopithecus''.

* ToTheFutureAndBeyond: The last chapters are set farther and farther in the future -- an unspecified age at least a millennium away, 30 million years in the future, and 500 million years in the future. Not to mention the FramingDevice, which is set in the near future of 2031.

* ArtisticLicenseAstronomy: While it's true the Sun gets more luminous with time and that increasing luminosity will mess so much with Earth's climate that will cause the eventual extinction of life and loss of oceans much before it goes into red-giant mode, the Sun that will shine 500 million years in the future, when the last chapter of the book takes place, will not be very different of the current one in size and luminosity and not the ferocious one Baxter describes, at least if stellar evolution models are right. See [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_evolution_%28English%29.svg]]

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Eros crashes into Earth causing an extinction-level event because of the dissasembly of Mars by the robots sent there having eventually changed its orbit with time.

** In "The Long Shadow", while preserved stuff as guns has survived, concrete has degraded, metal has been rust, and almost everything else has been victim of the ravages of time.
** The end of Remembrance's time mentions the NEAR-Shoemaker probe still on the asteroid Eros, even if having suffered the effects of space weathering.

** The soldiers who awake many millennia of years in the future find a sky with no Mars and constellations that have changed as their composing stars have moved through the sky. The latter fact is also mentioned in Remembrance's part.

** Class 4: Biosphere Extinction: Several. The extinction of the dinosaurs is described in detail, as is the effects of humans on biodiversity. There is also mention of an asteroid impacting 30 million years from now.

* {{Irony}}: Purga survives long after menopause and lives to actually die of old age (which is normally extremely rare in the wild)... thanks to the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs and many others.

* RagnarokProofing: Averted. Very little remains of human civilization except fossils and some very durable structures such as an artificial cave or a gorge excavated to build a road.

** Dog-rats, elephant-pigs, songbird-eagles, and hadrosaur-ungulates may have been inspired by ''Literature/AfterManAZoologyOfTheFuture''.

* GrowsOnTrees: The borametz trees of New Pangaea are involved in posthuman reproduction by mixing the parents' bodily fluid, and also feed the children with the organic mechanisms in their leafy cocoons.

* {{Invisibility}}: 500 million years in the future, a species of amphibians has a chance to produce a mutant that replaces most of the body's biochemicals with transparent substances, making it almost invisible and extremely difficult to detect, looking like little more than big bags of water sitting in the desert of New Pangaea.

* AbsurdlyDedicatedWorker: The replicator robots have been designed as a precursor to human colonisation of Mars, with instructions to build homes, assemble air and water, grow food and build cars, computers,... for the colonists. No human ever arrives at Mars before their downfall, but the replicating robots keep doing their job even after they lose contact with humans. Until they were told otherwise, their only purpose was to replicate, eventually destroying Mars and spreading around the universe.

** Class 4: Biosphere Extinction: Several. The extinction of the dinosaurs is described in detail, as is the effects of humans on the diversity. There is also mention of an asteroid impacting 30 million years from now.

* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: Implied with 'Cata Huuk', the in-story name of the Proto-Indo-European town located in present-day Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Possibly the idea is that Cata Huuk was the original name, but this is certainly incorrect. ''Çatalhöyük'' means ''Fork Mound'' in Turkish, a non-Indo-European language.

** First of all, in the story about the sapient ''Ornitholestes'', he mentions that the only evidence humans had of these species is the disappearance of sauropods in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species' bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Problem is, sauropods didn't go extinct in the Late Jurassic, not even in the Northern Hemisphere. There were as many sauropods infesting North America in the Early Cretaceous as there were in the Late Jurassic, including ''Astrodon'', ''Sauroposeidon'', and ''Sonorasaurus''. However, there ''was'' a mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic that claimed the dominant Jurassic sauropods, and the sauropods referred to in that story were all ''Diplodocus'', which did go extinct then. The phrase was 'the disappearance of ''the'' giant sauropods'. It could easily have meant just those specific species, not sauropods in general.
** The story about primates coming to South America has some anachronism and MisplacedWildlife in it too. Not only does it have indricotherid rhinos (native only to Asia), camels (who were only found in North America at this time), and such, it has gastornid birds inhabiting Oligocene-Miocene Africa...yes, even after these animals were supposed to have died out in the middle Eocene.
** In addition, the story involving ''Purgatorius'' has some flaws too. While Baxter does get it right by cloaking his troodonts in feathers, he leaves them off his dromaeosaurs. To add insult to injury, he makes the raptors cold-blooded, despite the fact that raptors are the very dinosaurs which ignited the cold blood, warm blood debate. In fact, even paleontologists who doubt endothermy in ornithischians and sauropods don't deny that raptors were most likely endothermic. And then there are the ''Giganotosaurus'' and ''Suchomimus'' in North America. Not only are these animals in the wrong place (''Giganotosaurus'' was from South America, ''Suchomimus'' from Africa), but they are from the wrong time, both species were from the Early Cretaceous.
*** The ''Giganotosaurus'' in that story was no less implausible that any of the other speculations not directly supported by fossil evidence Baxter uses, namely that a giganotosaur species whose fossil remains had not been found by modern human paleontologists, descended from the known early ''Giganotosaurus'' finds, survived to the end of the Cretaceous and migrated to North America across the land bridge between North and South America when it formed in the late Cretaceous. Similarly the ''Suchomimus'' is a not implausible speculation that a member of that particular family did in fact live in North America, though only fossils from the African branch of the family have so far been found. This is certainly possible since similar pairs of "sister taxa" in North America and Africa are known for many other dinosaur families, and the origins of these families date back to when North America and Africa were connected.

-->''When they had committed themselves to the savannah, Far’s kind had turned their backs on the forest—which had, as if in revenge, become a place not of sanctuary but of claustrophobic danger, populated by these pithecines which, like the sprites they resembled, would inhabit nightmares long into the future.''

* FlyingSeafoodSpecial: Fish that fly with fins are one of the creatures that populate the Earth 30 million years after humanity's downfall.
* FutureImperfect: During the first five thousand years of the human colonisation of Australia, they have killed off all the continent’s megafauna, such as giant kangaroos, which survive only as cave paintings. They are dismissed as childish doodling by people who have already forgotten what has been lost.

* GrowsOnTrees: The borametz Trees of New Pangaea are involved in posthuman reproduction by mixing the parents' bodily fluid, and also feed the children with the organic mechanisms in its leafy cocoons.

* {{Invisibility}}: 500 million years in the future, a species of amphibians has a chance to produce a mutant that replaces most of the body’s biochemicals with transparent substances, making it almost invisible and extremely difficult to detect, looking like little more than big bags of water sitting in the desert of New Pangaea.
* InvisibilityWithDrawbacks: All invisible mutant frogs are blind (no transparent retina can trap light), have inefficient biochemistry for having to use transparent substitutes, are extremely vulnerable to cancer for lack of protection from light, heat and the Sun's radiation, and live short, wretched lives in constant agony before dying as a juvenile, never reaching adulthood.

-->''And it was an irony that in former times she would surely already have succumbed to predation by now: It was the great emptying of the world that had preserved her life—a few extra months won at the expense of uncounted billions of creatures.''

* KillItWithIce: The [[spoiler: very last polar dinosaurs]] are slowly frozen to death by Antarctica's glaciation.
* MadScientist: Mother understands the concept of cause and effect, and is capable of abstract thought. This enables her to invent the spear thrower, a crucial invention because her people are starving. But Mother’s enhanced mental powers come at a cost; many of her ideas come to her when she is having crippling migraine attacks. She begins to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia following the death of her son, and invents the world's first religion.

* MixAndMatchCritters: The world 30 million years in the future is full of these: rat-leopards, rat-cheetahs, mouse-raptors, elephant-men, mole-men, rabbit-gazelles, goat-elephants, duck-billed goats, finch-eagles, cormorant-cetaceans and so on.
-->''Thus there were rabbits morphed into gazelles, rats become cheetahs. Only subtleties were changed—a nervous twitchiness about the rabbits, a hard-running intensity about the rats that had replaced the cats’ languid grace.''

* NoPreggerSex: Averted, one of the stories deals with a pregnant 17 year old girl that offers herself sexually to a DirtyOldMan with a [[{{Squick}} fetish for pregnant women]] in exchange for sparing the life of her child.
* OfThePeople: Early hominid don't need to dehumanize people because it never occur to them that hominids not members of their own band are people.

* SingleBiomePlanet: New Pangaea, a supercontinent which will reassemble 500 million years into the future.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Baxter starts the frame story 30 years into the future with civilisation at its apex, yet simultaneously threatened by the damage it has done to the ecosystem that supports it.

* BittersweetEnding: All the primates are dead, along with all life on Earth, and all recognizable traces of humans are long gone, but they're succeeded by a mechanical civilization, and bacteria from Earth seeded life on new worlds.

* CosmicHorrorStory: Baxter's explanation of how human civilisation ends emphasises that we are prey to powerful forces that we cannot control. The undoing of humanity is not nuclear war, global warming or a deadly virus grown in a laboratory, but an enormous super-volcano that disrupts the planet's weather systems enough to cause civilisation to collapse. Humans are no different from the millions of species that have come into being, thrived, then vanished into oblivion. In the eyes of Earth, we are a minor flash in the pan. In the eyes of the cosmos, we are less than a speck of dust. Look at those who have fallen before us; why should we fare any better? Are we really any different?

* GroinAttack: Solo bites off a testicle from the ''Notharctus'' troop’s alpha male, the Emperor. Fortunately they seem have much a lower pain threshold in that particular part of their anatomy than humans.

* {{Precursors}}: The ‘’Orbitholestes’’ from the second chapter could be considered this to mankind, being a civilization that existed well over a hundred million years before mankind. Unlike most examples, though, ‘’’nobody’’’ will ever know that they existed, as they only made tools out of wood, and the only evidence of their existence is the extinction of some types of sauropods in the Jurassic.

* TheSymbiote: The inhabitants of New Pangaea took the principle of cooperation and sharing to its extremes to survive in the dying Earth. The borametz Tree cannot survive without the insects that bring nutrients to its roots, and the mammals who bring it water, food, and salt, and plant its seeds. Even its leaves belong to another plant. Likewise the symbiotes cannot have survived without the Tree, which shelters them from predators and climate, and feed them with its sap.
* ThemeNaming: The chapters set in the human era, link a diverse set of protagonists named Ja-ahn, Ejan, Jo-on, Jahna, Juna and Joan Useb over a period of tens of thousands of years.

* TribalFacePaint: Early humans identify kin groups by ochre makings scrawled on their faces, hands and arms.

* MadGenius: Mother understands the concept of cause and effect, and is capable of abstract thought. This enables her to invent the spear thrower, a crucial invention because her people are starving. But Mother’s enhanced mental powers come at a cost; many of her ideas come to her when she is having crippling migraine attacks. She begins to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia following the death of her son, and invents the world's first religion

* SuperPersistentPredator: A [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon Troodon]] pursues Purga, the protagonist of the first chapter, not because she's hungry, but because she snapped when she found Purga eating her eggs.

* FlyingSeafoodSpecial: Fish that fly with wings are one of the creatures that populate the Earth 30 million years after humanity's downfall.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Baxter starts the novel 30 years into the future with civilisation at its apex, yet simultaneously threatened by the damage it has done to the ecosystem that supports it.

* CorruptChurch: Religion is depicted as the creation of a manipulative woman wielding her dead son's memory as a weapon in a bid to gain political power. On the other hand, religion is shown to have also a positive impact on the tribe since its teachings improve the quality of life of its members and bring unity to them.

* RagnarokProofing: averted. Very little remains of human civilization except fossils and some very durable structures such as an artificial cave or a gorge excavated to build a road.

* {{Xenofiction}}: Only a few chapters are about humans, the rest count as this.

* BlessedWithSuck: The transparent killers (no further taxonomy given) are blind, inefficient and ''very'' susceptible to cancer. All of them die before reaching adulthood. But that's okay, because they catch meat for their siblings.

* JustBeforeTheEnd: "A Far Distant Futurity" set 500 million years into the future, when the continents of earth have merged into a hot, flat, dry supercontinent that resembles the surface of Mars, and life is on the decline. "The Last Burrow", "Last Contact", "The Dying Light" and the epilogue also count, for the end of the polar dinosaurs, Neanderthals, Ancient Rome, and humanity respectively.

* MixAndMatchCritters: The world 30 million years in the future is full of these: rat-leopards, rat-cheetahs, mouse-raptors, elephant-men, mole-men, rabbit-gazelles, goat-elephants, duck-billed goats, finch-eagles cormorant-cetaceans and so on.