 The original idea involved mankind avoiding catastrophes such as overpopulation and mass starvation by inventing time travel and moving 50 million years into the future to re-establish civilization.This original "Man After Man" would have been set in the same world as "After Man" and would have focused on man-made catastrophes destroying the ecosystem established in the previous book.Dixon was reluctant to be involved in the final version of the project, which instead focused on changing climate conditions through the eyes of future human species engineered to adapt to them, and has in subsequent interviews referred to it as a "disaster of a project".