Many societies developed complex webs of myth and legend; theories
of where we had come from and where we were going.
For Native Americans, with myriad fossil records exposed on vast seams
torn through history, there were cycles of life before mankind, and we were
just one more in the chain. For Aboriginal
Australians, walking alone into the wilderness was both a rite of passage and a
way of escaping linear time and thought completely and communing with one’s ancestors. For others, huge fossilised bones were
evidence of mythical creatures, or giant humans from some ideal past-time, that
had shrunken and fallen away from perfection to become modern man. For still more, history was that written
through myths in word of mouth and skin over a few millennia, with nothing
before the Word, and the assumption that we were probably halfway through
history and so had just a few millennia to go at most…
Recent estimates put Earth at around five billion years old, with
mankind a quarter of a million and life on Earth becoming unsustainable around
a billion years from now, although this Universe could potentially sustain life
for a much longer period of time.
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