David Attenborough’s First Life

The epic story of the beginning of life on Earth from the much loved and respected naturalist, writer and broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough.

Spanning billions of years, Attenborough's time-travelling narrative brings the reader face to face with the first animals that ever existed. By using the latest technology, we are finally able to see for ourselves how these early animals would have looked like and how they would have lived. Attenborough also shows us how some of the evolutionary features of these most primitive creatures are alive today in modern animals, including us humans.

Attenborough shows us how the evolution of the first eyes, the first solid body parts and the first feet and backbones came to be. Looking at global ice ages and volcanic eruptions he also shows how evolution is heavily connected with the history of the planet.

In this groundbreaking investigation, Attenborough travels the world, from Canada to Australia and Morocco to unearth the secrets hidden in prehistoric fossils, providing a deeper understanding of the first living creatures and the origins of our evolutionary traits.

Reviews

On Sir David Attenborough:

‘Brilliant’
Guardian

‘A worthy inheritor of Alistair Cooke’
Telegraph

‘The nation’s favourite wildlife broadcaster’
The Times

About the author

Sir David Attenborough is Britain's best-known natural history film-maker. His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly five decades and there are very few places on the globe that he has not visited.

Over the last 25 years he has established himself as the world's leading natural history programme maker with several landmark BBC series, including: Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002) and Life in the Undergrowth (2005).