The Violent Past reveals the startling earliest history of evolution from the Big bang to the formation of our solar system and its planets, like Earth and Mars, to the formation of Earth's glaciers, ice sheets, the Greenland ice sheet, asteroids and meteorites, as discussed by geologist Daniel Barringer, to the beginnings of life on Earth through micro organisms.

Snowball Earth takes Earth's evolution back more than two billion years to the first glaciers and ice sheets, the influence of Earth's magnetic field, and the creation of the early micro organisms such as methanogens, cyanobacteria, blue green algae and ediacaran fossils as well as trilobites that formed the first prehistoric complex life.

For billions of years, life existed only in the Earth's oceans, but over 350 million years ago during the Devonia period, evolution of these microbes, micro organisms and prehistoric complex life - trilobites, placoderms and prehistoric fish - led to prehistoric plant life, prehistoric amphibians, prehistoric reptiles, prehistoric mammals and dinosaurs to evolve as well as the formation of the continent Gondwana.

Before the Permian extinction, Earth's oceans were filled with primitive marine organisms, including cryonoids, brachiopods, gastropods; then an eruption of the planet's molten core released methane hydrates and created a massive, greenhouse effect causing global warming. What followed were the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods that produced a plethora of different animals from dinosaurs like Allosaurus and T-Rex to prehistoric mammals, prehistoric birds and eventually primates.

The evolution of human beings on Earth, continued after the global warming with primates who eventually developed sharp eyesight through better photo receptor cells; then about six million years ago fossil evidence in Africa's Great Rift Valley tells us that the earliest of human ancestors, such as Australopithecus began to walk upright and were forced out of the broad-leafed forests onto the grasslands and eventually stronger, smarter hominids, like Neanderthals developed, until modern humans arrived.