Evolution is a collection of short stories that work together to
form an episodic science fiction novel by author Stephen Baxter.
It follows 565 million years of human evolution, from shrewlike
mammals 65 million years in the past to the ultimate fate of
humanity (and its descendants, both biological and non-biological)
500 million years in the future.

The primary protagonist in Evolution is evolution itself (although
primates as a group constitute another protagonist). The book
follows the hero's course as it shapes surviving pre-humans into
tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a (then
much closer) New World on a raft formed out of debris, and
confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down
on Antarctica.

The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in
North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come
across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run
joyously. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to
develop technology, including a universal constructor machine
that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy
consumes Mars by converting the planet into its descendants. Human
extinction (or the extinction of human culture) also occurs in
the book, as well as the end of planet Earth and the rebirth of
life on another planet. (The extinction-level event that causes
the human extinction is, indirectly, an eruption of the volcano
Rabaul, coupled with various actions of humans themselves, some
of which are only vaguely referred to, but implied to be a form
of genetic engineering which removed the ability to reproduce with
non-engineered humans.) Also to be found in Evolution are ponderous
Romans, sapient dinosaurs, the last of the wild Neanderthals,
a primate who witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs, symbiotic
primate-tree relationships, mole people, and primates who live on
a Mars-like Earth.

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