Evolution is a collection of short stories that work together to form an episodic science fiction novel by author Stephen Baxter.

Her species is now fully bipedal and omnivorous, as well as surviving past their reproductive age to take important social roles.

Forced by a grassland fire to take refuge in a jungle, she survives an attack by pithecines and eventually joins another hominid tribe, who use axes much to her amazement.

She invents body painting while playing with ocher, allowing her to court Ax, a young male, and be accepted by the rest of the group.

Schizophrenia allows her to understand causality, invent the spear-thrower and form simple sentences, which are quickly learned by the rest of her tribe.

Ejan carves a canoe with his sister Rocha to sail to the southern landmass, becoming the first humans to set foot in Australia.

However, a team led by their father eventually finds them and bludgeons Old Man in his sleep, amidst the children's protests.

She accepts to become the slave of Cahl, the beer trader, to save her unborn child from being killed at birth.

When tribute-collector Keram arrives, Juna learns about the city of Cata Huuk, and convinces him that she was kidnapped from there long ago.

Along the way, Keram brings Juna to the ruins of her original and now measles-struck village, where she finds her sister as the sole survivor.

Visiting a Rome that is just a shadow of its former glory, the Persian trader Papak convinces them to join a Scythian collector in Petra.

There, Honorius becomes so excited after acquiring a Homo erectus skull that he invites the entire group to a museum in Rome, where they misidentify a Protoceratops as a griffin.

Away on a cave expedition, Athalaric asks Honorius to become a priest on his father's request, to lead Rome away from decay.

As protesters from the "Fourth World" disrupt the conference, the Rabaul caldera erupts, setting the sequence of events that collapse civilization.

In the epilogue, set in 2049, a 52-year-old Joan and her 18-year-old daughter Lucy rescue feral children left behind in the Galápagos Islands due to the ensuing wars and toxic rain.

During the post-Rabaul wars, the United Nations deploys military officers in suspended animation worldwide to deter international invasions.

Centuries later, officers Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, Bonner and Moon wake up and soon realize that human civilization has long collapsed.

Internal conflicts distance Sidewise and Bonner, Moon disappears, Ahmed succumbs to mercury poisoning from fish, and Snowy chooses to spend the rest of his life following the feral people.

The descendants of feral children have diversified into many non-sapient species, from everything resembling arboreal primates (Remembrance's kind), eusocial moles, and elephants, the latter being "farmed" by rodents.

Due to the harsh climate, the tree begins consuming Ultimate's child, and she takes her to the desert, accompanied with her friend, Cactus.

A few days later, Ultimate arrives to the shores of a drying inland sea, where she finds the hardened footprints of one of her kind, both of them being the last "human" explorers.

In the following eons Earth is consumed by the Sun, but hibernating bacteria are hurled into space and end up on the seas of a habitable exoplanet, setting up evolution again.

Unlike most animals in the book, they are fully sapient, with complex language, leather belts, whips, and a culture that revolves around Diplodocus hunting.

Starvation and thirst nearly kill them, but Roamer and two other survivors eventually land on the rainforests of Yucatán and their descendants give rise to a new line of monkeys.

Ice caps completely bury the remains of Dig's ecosystem and humans never discover that non-avian dinosaurs survived 55 million years longer than previously thought.

Although its original purpose is to construct bases for human habitation, it stops receiving orders due to the chaos unleashed by Rabaul's eruption on Earth and continues replicating itself unchecked.

Peter Cannon reviewing for Publishers Weekly stated "here is a rigorously constructed hard SF novel where the question is not whether humanity will reach the stars but how it will survive its own worst tendencies.

"[2] Jackie Cassada said in her review for Library Journal that "spanning more than 165 million years and encompassing the entire planet, Baxter's ambitious saga provides both an exercise in painless paleontology and superb storytelling.