By 250 million years ago, evolution had produced 4-legged vertebrates that walked on land, and a diverse collection of those. Among these were lizard-like ancestors of dinosaurs, and therapsids who were squirrel-like animals roughly the size of a cat.
A severe extinction event at the end of the Permian period caused a steep decline in species diversity, and caused most species on earth go extinct. When life finally recovered from this, the land on earth was dominated by dinosaurs whose bodies evolved to enormous sizes. The dinosaurs proliferated and diversified for the next 200 million years, spanning three geological periods. Despite their incredible success, a single extinction event caused all of the larger species to go extinct in a strange event at 65 MYA. The remaining small dinosaurs underwent further changes and their predecessors are the birds of today. A cooler geological period followed where mammals dominated ecosystems, and diversified to the point of becoming apex predators on all continents.
At 4.5 MYA, conditions in equatorial Africa allowed for the evolution of a type of primate called a hominid. The defining features are no tail, grasping hands, dwelling on the ground rather than in trees. Hominids rely heavily on very sharp binocular color vision to sense the world around them -- to the point that their reliance on smell decreased. Hominid species diversified during a period in which the equatorial rain forest in Africa dried out and shrunk suddenly. From 1 MYA to 500,000 years ago, Bipedal hominids spread out of Africa into Europe, Asia, and even South Pacific islands. Homo sapiens were also migrating out of Africa at this time, and their relationship to the existing populations is a topic of heated debate among paleontologists.
Bipedal hominids were able to migrate and adapt to various environments, climates, and ecosystems on many continents. Despite this incredible success, today there exist only four species of hominid on earth. All others are extinct.
Homo sapiens had a peculiar relationship to tool use for most of their history, up to the point around 10,000 years ago, where agriculture was invented in the middle east. This gave rise to humans creating artifacts that we recognize as "technology" today. Empires rose and fell among agricultural humans up until the 16th Century AD, where the printing press was invented in Europe, right after a decline in influence of the Catholic Church in the north. "Scientists" appeared in small numbers in the next 200 years, the results of their knowledge were eventually applied to very rapidly create new technology. This rapid expansion in technology -- historians loosely refer to as the Industrial Revolution.
The main impact of Industrialization on human life was that the human population began to explode, where even the rate of growth became exponential. Starting in 1800, in a mere 210 years, human population grew from 1 billion to 7 billion. Yes. Read that again. Humans have increased their numbers by a factor of seven in 2 centuries.
For the first time in the history of the Earth, a species has created a change in itself, by itself, merely by changing their relationship to artifacts and medicine. This change did not correspond to any mutation of their genes nor of their traits. For all hitherto existing organisms, any rapid transition like this would be attributable only to evolutionary change.
The invention of electrical technology in the 20th century pushed technological progress into overdrive. Within the time of a single lifespan, rapid invention and deployment creates artifacts that are unrecognizable to older generations.
Does that mean anything?