My own role in the hunt for the ancient life dates from my student days in the 1960s, when active studies were nearly ready to take hold. Apparently the first to prepare at a young age for a career in this field, I have spent that career tracing life's earliest history and have had the privilege and supreme pleasure of seeing this young science sprout, grow, and blossom into a vibrant venture worldwide.
My lifelong involvement in this endeavor has led me to write parts of this book in the first person. For a science book, this is unusual. In the guise of objectivity, we who "do science" usually present our views in a more distant way, often writing in the third person ("it is reported . . . ," "the data indicate . . .") as though the claims made were someone else's, not our own. But I am not objective about this subject--it's my life, I care about it, and it would be false for me to pretend otherwise. Moreover, it seems to me a lot more fun to read about how science is actually done, and by whom and why, rather than plow through a stuffy accounting of theories and facts. "Fun" is the operative word here. To me, science is enormously good fun! There's hardly anything better than learning something brand new or having a novel idea and then following that notion and finding that it makes sense.
So, the goal of this work is to bring to light one of the truly remarkable breakthroughs in the annals of natural science, the discovery of a long-missing fossil record that, by revealing life's earliest history, tells us where we fit in the pattern. And while recounting this story, I also want to show how the science itself evolved--why it took so long for the hidden record to emerge--and convey some flavor of my joy in being part of the endeavor.
The year is 1998. The place, a dorm room at UCLA in West Los Angeles. A second-year college student sits at his desk, struggling to cram into his head pivotal facts, dates, and events for his upcoming mid-term in American History. It's good stuff, but he's perplexed--there's so much to learn, all the way back to 1963! President Kennedy's assassination, then Martin Luther King, Jr., then the president's brother Bobby . . . sit-ins, civil rights, Vietnam, flower children . . . space walks, lunar landings, computers, E-mail . . . feminists, AIDS, downfall of the "evil empire." Such a lot to sort out!An even more mind-boggling tale of new discovery unfolds in the pages that follow, but it is scaled in millions and billions of years rather than a mere two centuries, and it deals with all of life, over all of time, over the entire globe. By revealing our roots and unveiling our past, it, too, tells us where we have come from and who we are.Exhausted, he daydreams: What happened before 1963? No one seems to know. The professor once raised the question, explaining only that "a pre-1963 historical record ought to exist--something must have happened in earlier decades--but there are no facts to go on. No one knows what happened, or why the record's been wiped out. It's one of history's greatest puzzles."
As the student treks across campus to take his exam, he picks up a copy of The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper. Emblazoned in type 3 inches high is the bannner headline: "ANCIENT ARCHIVES DISCOVERED--U.S. DATES FROM 1776!" Excitedly he pours through the article. "Researchers report that conclusive evidence of the earliest 85% of the history of the United States of America--from 1776 to 1963--has been discovered. Long thought forever lost, new finds document an unknown and unimagined early history of the country . . . a Declaration of Independence from British rule, a written Constitution . . . Washington, Franklin, Jefferson . . . Lincoln, the Roosevelts, a feisty Harry Truman . . . electricity, telephones, radio, television . . . transcontinental railroad, Model T Fords, airplanes, rocket-powered flight . . . Abolition, Prohibition, women earn the right to vote . . . the Dust Bowl, a Great Depression, the United Nations, the Nuclear Age. . . ."
Astounding! For the first time, hard facts are known that can tell the student how his country began, then grew and prospered over nearly 200 years that seemed lost forever. The traditional history, the post-1963 epoch he learned so well, is only the latest chapter of a very much longer volume!