我们的地球见证过猛犸象以及恐龙、冰河时代、大陆的碰撞以及分裂、彗星以及小行星撞地面，以及人类的产生。但是，地球是怎么被发现的？证据是如何被收集以及分析的？到底是什么样的人愿意重建这个没有人类见识或者记录过的历史？在这本书中，作者Martin J.S. Rudwik，世界上最权威的地球科学家之一告诉了我们人类如何慢慢意识到地球的历史不但比我们想像要长久，而且令人惊奇地多事故。
作者从十七世纪地大主教James Ussher开始，他最出名的贡献就是将宇宙的创造坚定为4004 BC时代。接着，作者到了十八世纪末以及十九世纪早期，当时有许多充满好奇心的知识分子，他们称自己为地质学家，开始分析岩石以及化石、山以及火山，把它们当作地球历史的自然档案。 作者展现这些地质性的证据（到今天依然被使用）能够帮助我们重建地球的历史，更能够证明地球的历史跟人类的历史一样复杂以及无可预测。Rudwick强烈反对这是个科学对比宗教的故事，反而透漏这个地球历史的现代解释其实保持有犹太教以及基督教的基础。
本书充满了插图，而虽然地球的历史非常长久，作者的文笔能够优雅又舒服地带着读者探究这个故事。
关于作者：
Martin J.S. Rudwick是加州大学圣地亚哥分校的荣誉退休历史教授。他同时在剑桥大学担任历史以及科学哲学部门的附属学者。
评语：
Publisher’s Weekly review:
Rudwick (Worlds Before Adam), emeritus professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, impressively demonstrates how our understanding of the age of the Earth has shifted over the course of several centuries. In the course of describing our growing knowledge, Rudwick shows how it is both possible and important to utilize historical techniques to gain insight into the history of the planet. He also argues persuasively about the historical relationship between religion and science: “In the history of the discovery of the Earth’s own history, as in the history of many other aspects of the sciences, the idea of a perennial and intrinsic ‘conflict’ between ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’—so central to the rhetoric of modern fundamentalists, both religious and atheistic—fails to stand up to historical scrutiny.” Rudwick presents a clear picture of the proponents of scientific discipline finding their way between conflicting hypotheses: a young vs. an old Earth; catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism; stability of the Earth’s surface vs. shifting continents due to plate tectonics. Throughout this rich and articulate presentation, Rudwick reveals how we have come to acknowledge an Earth far older than originally thought possible, with humans being a very late addition to the scene. Illus. (Nov.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-226-20393-5
Simon Conway Morris, University of Cambridge
“This is a gem of a book, representing a distillation of a lifetime’s achievement and providing not only a thrilling tour d’horizon but also providing a gripping historical framework that shows how we all stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Richard Fortey, author of Earth: An Intimate History
“Rudwick is the doyen of historians of the earth sciences. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read this summary of a lifetime’s research, showing how we have come to understand the intertwined narratives of our home planet and the life that adorns it. With unfailing clarity Rudwick demonstrates how scientific advances meshed or clashed with the expectations of society over the last four hundred years. It is an important story, too, at a time when human intervention promises to change the course of terrestrial evolution.”
New Scientist
“Rudwick’s book is authoritative and riveting, and its historical breadth is bound to make geology exciting for readers from both sciences and humanities.”
Times Higher Education
“Earth’s Deep History is a long and complex story. . . . Nonetheless, Rudwick succeeds in weaving together a compelling account of how Earth’s timescale expanded to magnitudes far beyond those imagined by early scholars, and of the individuals responsible for advancing scientific thinking through their ideas and actions.”
目录：
Introduction
1. Making History a Science
The science of chronology
Dating world history
Periods of world history
Noah’s Flood as history
The finite cosmos
The threat of eternalism
2. Nature’s Own Antiquities
Historians and antiquaries
Natural antiquities
New ideas about fossils
New ideas about history
Fossils and the Flood
Plotting the Earth’s history
3. Sketching Big Pictures
A new scientific genre
A “sacred” theory?
A slowly cooling Earth?
A cyclic world-machine?
Worlds ancient and modern?
4. Expanding Time and History
Fossils as nature’s coins
Strata as nature’s archives
Volcanoes as nature’s monuments
Natural history and the history of nature
Guessing the Earth’s timescale
5. Bursting the Limits of Time
The reality of extinction
The Earth’s last revolution
The present as a key to the past
The testimony of erratic blocks
Biblical Flood and geological Deluge
6. Worlds Before Adam
Before the Earth’s last revolution
An age of strange reptiles
The new “stratigraphy”
Plotting the Earth’s long-term history
A slowly cooling Earth
7. Disturbing a Consensus
Geology and Genesis
A disconcerting outsider
Catastrophe versus uniformity
The great “Ice Age”
8. Human History in Nature’s History
Taming the Ice Age
Men among the mammoths
The question of evolution
Human evolution
9. Eventful Deep History
“Geology and Genesis” marginalized
The Earth’s history in perspective
Geology goes global
Towards the origin of life
The timescale of the Earth’s history
10. Global Histories of the Earth
Dating the Earth’s history
Continents and oceans
Controversy over continental “drift”
A new global tectonics
11. One Planet Among Many
Exploiting the Earth’s chronology
The return of catastrophes
Unraveling the deepest past
The Earth in cosmic context
12. Conclusion
Earth’s deep history: a retrospect
Past events and their causes
How reliable is knowledge of deep history?
Geology and Genesis re-evaluated
Appendix
Creationists out of Their Depth
Glossary
Further Reading
Bibliography
Sources of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index