For more than four and a half billion years, Earth existed without a single human being on it. Continents collided, mountains rose and eroded to dust, and whole dynasties of life ruled the planet and vanished before our species took its first step. If Earth's history were compressed into a single day, humans would appear in the final seconds before midnight. Everything before that is the forgotten age.

This full documentary walks that timeline from the beginning - a molten world under constant bombardment, then chemistry crossing into biology in the hydrothermal dark around 3.8 billion years ago. For two billion years, life stays microscopic. Then cyanobacteria begin releasing oxygen, a waste gas so reactive it poisoned much of the living world and rusted the iron out of the seas, and the Great Oxidation Event makes complex life possible.

From there it accelerates. Soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms drift across the seafloor 600 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion arms the oceans with shells, eyes and jaws. Plants green the continents 470 million years ago, animals follow them ashore, and the age of reptiles begins on Pangaea. Sauropods over 80 feet long move through Jurassic forests while pterosaurs with 30-foot wingspans cross the coast above them.

Five times it nearly ended: Ordovician ice, the Devonian pulses, the Siberian Traps that erased roughly 90% of marine species at the close of the Permian, the Triassic collapse, and an asteroid six miles wide off what is now Mexico 66 million years ago, which handed the world to mammals.

Then came the Ice Age giants - woolly mammoths, Smilodon, Diprotodon, giant ground sloths - and at the very end a thin-limbed African primate with fire and stone tools who walked into a world of monsters and outlasted them all.

How much of the world you live in was built by species you have never heard of? And what do four billion years of extinction and recovery say about our chapter?

Settle in for the full story, and subscribe for more feature-length documentaries on the deep history of our planet.

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