Life on Earth is an incomprehensible, omnipresent, teeming with millions of legs, knots, thorns and teeth bacchanalia in which we exist and from which we originate. For three and a half billion years it did without us, and now, in the last moments of history, a person emerges from this intricacies of animals, plants, fungi and microbes and asks the question: who am I and what is the meaning of my human life? In his debut book, evolutionary neuroscientist Nikolai Kukushkin recreates the picture of the world step by step from inanimate matter to the human mind in order to find answers to eternal questions in the past of his species. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms. One Palm Clap is the story of man and his inner world, spanning the entire journey from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language, and told as if it were a chivalric romance or a mythical epic.
