Now we know.

One Final Thought About Time

Thirty-one thousand years is the kind of number that resists comprehension.

The human mind is well-suited to grasping spans of years up to a lifetime, a few generations, perhaps a century or two of historical narrative.

Beyond that, scale collapses into abstraction.

Here is one way to make it real.

If you count backward from today by generations — assuming a new generation roughly every twenty-five years — thirty-one thousand years represents approximately 1,240 generations.

Twelve hundred and forty ancestors in a direct line, each one the parent of the next, each one living and dying and transmitting life forward.