This is deeply wrong, but it’s an interesting kind of wrong.
Our perception of the past telescopes: there’s the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I’ve said before, a lot of Americans’ idea of human #history seems to go roughly as follows:
- #Cavemen.
- #Pyramids.
- #Jesus.
- Robin Hood and King Arthur.
- #Columbus and #pirates.
- #Pilgrims and George Washington.
- #Cowboys.
- World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
- #Hippies and #Vietnam.
- The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.
Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.
So here’s an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that … I dunno … jellyfish or something.
#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.
@medigoth
This sounds approximately logarithmic: the last ten years occupies the same mental and conceptual space as the previous hundred, which is about the same as the previous thousand, the previous ten thousand, and so on into the millions and hundred millions.
I wonder if there’s a way to chart this mathematically vs. psychologically.
The same has been found with kids’ hand-drawn maps of the world: their homes take up most of the map, and the farther things are from their direct experience, the smaller they’re drawn.
