age of the dinosaurs begins at
sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many
forms and great diversity are
around for 14 and a half sheets.
Dinosaurs are extinct by the end
of the Cretaceous, five squares
from the end, making way for the
mammals. Our story and place on
the timeline as upright walking
apes begins only in the last half
of the very last sheet. The human
story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than two millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.
Our own individual lifetimes
cannot be depicted on this final
sheet of the toilet roll as it would
be too thin a line, yet we have
been witness to more change to
the planet, to the diversity of life,
global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We
are undoubtedly the cause of the
sixth mass extinction event that
the planet has seen in its history.
The last 50 years has shown
an enormous increase in human
MORE ON
TED WEEKENDS
WHY WE DENY
THE REALITIES
OF POPULATION
GROWTH
HUFFINGTON
07.14.13
LOUISE
LEAKEY
Voices
HUMANS,
STARS AND
THE BIG BANG
population, but also extraordinary
leaps in technological innovation. The question that needs to
be asked is if we can rise to the
opportunity, to use our technology to better understand our impact, to stem the tide of extinction on land and in the oceans, to
preserve what we have left, and
to discover and understand more
about our past. What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet.
We are but one species of several
hominids that inhabited planet
earth, and like our distant cousins
who went extinct fairly recently,
our time on planet earth is also finite. It won’t take