ANDRZEJ KRAUZEPlants are far older than most people realize. Although exact dates are hard to pin down, scientists suspect that a single group of green algae colonized terrestrial environments somewhere between 630 million and 510 million years ago. Before that evolutionary leap, photosynthetic microbes in freshwater lakes were likely churning out oxygen as long as 1.2 billion years in the past, a labor that started to make Earth’s atmosphere more hospitable to life about 850 million years ago.
Fast forward through the epochs, and plants evolve into a dizzying kaleidoscope of form and function, while some species that look remarkably similar to the ancestors of all plants still survive. As plants did their evolutionary thing, animal life arose and struck up an eons-long love affair with the plants that preceded them. Then, just a hot second ago geologically speaking (about 6 million years ago), a curious creature climbed down from its perch in the canopy and took its first tentative steps on two legs toward an uncertain future.
From our ancestors’ departure from their arboreal swinging grounds, to the grassy savannahs where yet more forebears would rise and fall, to the first agriculturalists, whose toil would bend plant life to human will, plants ...
