Alfred Wegener spends decades trying to convince geologists that continents move, and the film uses his fight over continental drift as the spine for a wider story about the earth and life sciences catching up to evidence they had long resisted. Radiodating pushes the age of the earth back far enough to provoke real outrage among scientists trained on older estimates, and the film tracks how plate tectonics eventually explains mountain ranges like the Himalayas as the product of continents colliding rather than standing still. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake opens the account of a planet in motion, and the discovery of DNA's structure marks the point where the life sciences gain their own moving parts. Louis and Mary Leakey's fieldwork and Donald Johanson's 1974 discovery of the fossil skeleton known as Lucy carry the human-origins half of the film, tracing fossils and cells back toward the primate ancestors that reshaped ideas about mutation and adaptation.