A genre that has never really appealed to me is “speculative history.” In my opinion, that is a recipe for disaster, cuz you’re magnifying the odds of misremembering some settled detail. As an aside, I remember a kid in middle school reading a book where these very photogenic tough guys (at least, this is what was on the cover) take fully automatic weapons back to some historical war. I guaran-fuckin-tee they never have to reload yet always have bullets.🙄
Anyway, I simply want to mention that I plan to skip ahead a few billion years and change. But before I do, let’s review what we learned: first, we learned that the Earth is thought to be ~6.5 billion years old. However, a really important detail there is that a billionish years of that were years where the planet wasn’t even sphereishical. When someone says the Earth is 6.5 billion years old, that number means _total_. I guess that should be obvious, but I never really thought of it like that. Like, forget about Pangea, continental drift and plate tech tonics were not even possible ~6.5 billion years ago, because the planet didn’t even have air back then. You know the expression “old as dirt?” We’re talking waaayyy older than that.
This has been an enlightening jaunt, but there’s not much to say. We can call this pre-history or whatever, but the fact is that if things can only be determined by indirect means, such as exotic dating techniques and fossil records, most of the finer details are simply speculative. My goal here is to share what is known and how. Correspondingly, I do not want to simply restate things that have been restated already, like we’re in a generational game of “telephone.” Ergo, I would like to skip ahead billions of years.
I would say we’re jumping ahead to “the dawn of man,” but I believe our first stop predates that.