This book is about humans, it is about us . and it is based on the archaeological evidence that we have at hand. It has three main purposes and is intended for those who are not specialists in archaeology. One is to present what we think we know about the past in a short narrative, one is to demonstrate the vast time scale involved in prehistory, and one is to discuss why we care about the past. Modern politicians, pundits, journalists, observers, and others love to cite the past to support their arguments, but they often do so out of context or with limited knowledge, and actually this gives us hope because it underscores why archaeology matters to so many people. The book introduces a new timeline called the "Lakh Clock" where one second on the imaginary clock equals a year in real life. By translating the real-time dates in the book to the Lakh Clock time the reader can instantly put recent and ancient dates and events into a temporal context.