The story of human evolution (according to the most prominent theory proposed by Darwin) traces our biological origins across seven million years, from the split with chimpanzees to the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago.

The story of human origins rests on evidence so fragmentary that all of prehuman evolution could fit into the back of a pickup truck. Every fossil hominin ever discovered, representing millions of years and countless generations, would barely fill a small room.

The classical period of Japan, culminating in the Tokugawa Pax (Shogunate), bequeathed to modernity a set of unresolved dialectics: the tension between imperial sacrality and military governance; the syncretic entanglement of kami and Buddha; the latent violence of a warrior class stripped of war; and the suspicion of foreign ideologies that nonetheless proved irresistible.