Human extinction (or the extinction of human culture) also occurs in the book, as well as the end of planet Earth and the rebirth of life on another planet. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to develop technology, including an evolving universal constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into a mass of machinery that leaves the Solar system in search of new planets to assimilate. The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run joyously. The book follows the evolution of mankind as it shapes surviving Purgatorius into tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a (then much closer) New World on a raft formed out of debris, and confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica.
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