That epic era once derided as "prehistory" accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making – the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history – look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climat catastrophe.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 198)