Daniel Dvorkin<p>This is deeply wrong, but it’s an interesting <em>kind</em> of wrong.</p><p>Our perception of the past telescopes: there’s the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I’ve said before, a lot of Americans’ idea of <em>human</em> <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/history" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>history</span></a> seems to go roughly as follows:</p><ol> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Cavemen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cavemen</span></a>.</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Pyramids" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Pyramids</span></a>.</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Jesus" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Jesus</span></a>.</li> <li>Robin Hood and King Arthur.</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Columbus" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Columbus</span></a> and <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/pirates" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>pirates</span></a>.</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Pilgrims" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Pilgrims</span></a> and George Washington.</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Cowboys" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cowboys</span></a>.</li> <li>World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)</li> <li><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Hippies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hippies</span></a> and <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Vietnam" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Vietnam</span></a>.</li> <li>The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.</li></ol><p>Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.</p><p>So here’s an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Dimetrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Dimetrodon</span></a> is forever going to be mixed in with <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/dinosaurs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>dinosaurs</span></a>) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/mammoths" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>mammoths</span></a> and <a href="https://qoto.org/tags/sabertooths" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>sabertooths</span></a>, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that … I dunno … jellyfish or something.</p><p><a href="https://qoto.org/tags/Creationists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Creationists</span></a>, of course, turn it up to 11.</p>