 Blackstone Audio presents Origins, The Search for Our Prehistoric Past by Frank H. T. Rhodes. This book is read by Derek Perkins. All charts, diagrams, and photographs that appear in the print edition of this book can be found in the bonus PDF file that accompanies your audiobook CD or download. Preface. Scores of books have been written on origins ranging from the most comprehensive to the very specific, from Ron Redfern's superbly illustrated book on the origins of continents and oceans, to Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin's Origins, from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith's comprehensive origins, fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, for example, to Sabir Abdusami's Origins of the Bangladesh Army and Sherdau Xu's Origins of Chinese Cuisine. The list goes on. The origin of wealth, the origin of consciousness, the origin of stories, the origin of languages, the origin of the soul, the origin of geometry, the origin of ball games, the origin of the Bhutanese mask dances, the origin of Satan, the origin of concepts, the origin of Buddhist meditation, the origin of phyla, the origin of Mormonism, the origin of basketball. And then, of course, there's the best known of all, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, as well as the fervently opposed and mildly disrespectful The Origin of Specious Nonsense by John J. May. And television series, movies and e-books on origins are scarcely less common from the factual, Neil deGrasse Tyson's PBS Nova series Origins, for example, to the fictional X-Men Origins Wolverine. There are several university centers devoted to origins. NASA has an Origins of Life program. And there is at least one scholarly journal, Origins of Life, published by the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life. The Leakey Foundation is devoted to research related to human origins. This plethora of publications and associations devoted to the study of Origins reflects our profound interest in understanding how all things present have come to be what they now are. But our particular preoccupation with our own origins and relationships reflects, perhaps, something more. Our distinctive need to understand our own place in nature, and so secure a baseline, an essential starting point from which to view everything else. That, I suppose, is why...