The Brief History of Earth and Humans

Your life is literally a microscopic glitch in the history of the Earth. The Geologic Time

Scale tracks over four billion years of history, but get this—for ninety percent of

that time, the planet was just a wet rock with bacteria. That’s the Precambrian

eon. The actual fun stuff, like dinosaurs and massive forests, only showed up in

the last ten percent. We know this because scientists read rock layers like pages in a book

using radioactive dating and fossils. Now we’ve entered the Anthropocene, meaning humans are

officially messy enough to have our own geological layer.