Fred Flintstone must DIE...

An interesting conversation popped up recently in which I was made painfully aware that far too many people on this Earth are under the odd impression that humans walked with dinosaurs, like in the Flinstones. This is unacceptable. As such, I have decided it worthwhile to construct a brief timeline of the glorious history of Earth for the benefit of those unclear on the matter.

Chinami ni, sessha wa kinou no kurasu no toukyuusei tachi ni sumimasen to hanashitai. Kinou no setsumei wa zenzen chigau! 'Man' toka, 'sen' toka ni touwaku sareta no de, ano setsumei o mushi shite kudasai*.

Note: In the course of this entry I will use terms like "turn up" or "appear" in relation to species within a stated geological period. In case this is isn't obvious, I state now that this does NOT mean angels/aliens/gods flew down and put them on Earth, like some sick game or some such. I use such terms as shorthand to say that fossil evidence for the stated species has been observed at such-and-such a time. This will make more sense if you have a rudimentary understanding of how evolution works, which was also covered in this blog, a long, long time ago...

The drastically abbreviated history of Earth is as follows:

~4.5 billion years ago - Earth forms. Somewhere between now and the Cambrian period life happens. The proper term for it is abiogenesis, and it's details are still hotly debated. Many theories have been put forth, some are quite plausible, but you can bet your life that it didn't happen in 7 days. In any case early life on Earth spent a long, long time figuring out how to form cells, then multicellular organisms and such.

~600 million years ago - Beginning of Cambrian period, during which life on Earth undergoes a huge increase in biological diversity. Those happy little trilobites turn up. Some time between now and the Triassic (see below), the earliest amphibians start appearing.

~235 million years ago - Beginning of Triassic period, Mesozoic era. Early (small) mammals and reptiles make their appearance.

~205 million years ago - Beginning of Jurassic period. Seriously large reptiles, i.e. dinosaurs claim the top spot on the food chain. Mammals are still small. Contrary to what that fanciful, if a bit misleading movie/book tells you, T Rex did not make his appearance until...

~65 to 68 million years ago - End of Cretaceous period, and hence the Mesozoic era. Sometime around here, there was a mass extinction event, wiping the Earth clean of the dinosaurs, and opening up new oppurtunities for whatever survived (including, obviously, our ancestors). Geological evidence suggests a cataclysmic meteor impact was to blame, and this is presently the most popular theory, though others, equally plausible, exist. Whatever the case may be, life goes on, and now it's the mammals that gain the upper hand, and we start seeing early horses, elephants and a freaky huge sloth. Things continue in this vein until the arrival of the most diabolical freak of nature of them all around...

~3 million years ago - Earliest known signs of the branch of interesting apes that would later become homo sapiens. Kindly note that the gap from here to the last known traces of dinosaurs is so huge that there is no way at all that anything even vaguely resembling a human had ever had any dealings with what we'd know in popular culture as dinosaurs. From there, some other interesting points in human history are...

~2.5 million years ago - Homo habilis, descendant of abovementioned clever monkeys, starts using stone tools.

~1.9 million years ago - Homo erectus, the upright man. Earliest known hunter-gatherer societies form.

~1.3 million years ago - A split occurs, with homo sapiens on one side, and Neanderthals on the other. On both sides we find the earliest known displays of burial rites. Homo sapiens display their proficiency in the art of genocide, wiping out the Neanderthals.

~450 thousand years ago - Humans figure out fire, and every other organism on Earth knows fear...

~13 thousand years ago - End of most recent Ice Age. From this point on, the history of the human race is best captured in Jared Diamond's singularly magnificent book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Or, if you can't be arsed to read it, you can peek at the light version, The Third Chimpanzee.

And that, in a nutshell is where humans are relative to dinosaurs, i.e. far, far away. As always, comments and criticisms are welcome. And this post now ends here, because there is a cat rubbing herself on my face...

* Oi, wakatteiru ka? Wakaranakereba A2 o hontou ni sanka dekiru ka? Nihongo o naraitakunai no ka??? Orokamono! Of course, if you actually did understand all that, I'm especially willing to hear out any corrections to my Japanese. Onegaishimasu!