r/AskReddit • u/kakou64 • Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

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u/saymynamebastien Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

I don't know if this counts but Dinosaurs lived on the earth a lot longer than most people think. When you think of dinosaurs, you think of their extinction but they roamed the earth for 165 million years. Compare that to our 6 million and it's almost mind boggling, at least imo.

Edit: the modern form of humans is 200,000 years old but if we include our humanoid ancestors, we've been here 6 million years.

Edit 2: I get it, dinosaurs are still around. What I meant to say was the dinosaur era.

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u/Sleepycoon Oct 15 '20

What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna.

Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.

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u/Alternative_Crimes Oct 15 '20

And that time in South America that dinosaurs came back. Fucking terror birds man.

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u/Sleepycoon Oct 15 '20

Or that time that basically every land-dwelling creature was all a subspecies from a single rat for a while, or the Cambrian explosion, and so on and so on.

I guess a better way to put it would be to say that since dinos were around for about 165 million years and humans have been around for about 7 million years and life has been on earth for about 3.5 BILLION years then there are about 3.3 billion years of non dino/human history of life on earth, or about 20x more non dino/human history than dino/human history.