#geologic time

Geologic Time Chart. Guide for beginning fossil hunters. 1959.

1-10 years - recent

10-50 years - a while ago, vintage, still within a human's living memory

50-100 years - starting to get old, getting into the territory of not within living history but probably still within a generation of the present.

100-300 years - definitely old

300-500 years - quite old. We're talking Renaissance-ish timeline here.

500-1000 years - solidly medieval, I'm willing to start calling things ancient here.

1000-1500 years - early medieval, quite ancient. We're talking Catholic Church levels of tradition/history

1500-2000 years - this is the Roman Empire era. Solidly ancient.

2000-3000 years - Ancient Greece ancient.

3000-6000 years - mind bogglingly old. We're looking at the edge of recorded history here.

6000-10,000 years - end of the Stone Age old

10,000-20,000 years - invention-of-agriculture ancient.

20k-30k years - literally the Ice Age.

30k-50k years - Upper Paleolithic i.e. the very earliest evidence of permanent settlements. Neanderthals go extinct about now.

50k-100k years - anatomically modern humans leave Africa basically for the first time (or at least the first time it stuck)

100k-300k years - There are lots of other human species around the world, like neanderthals and denisovans, who are doing way better off than we are.

300k+ years - literally this is when anatomically modern humans started. Before this, whatever the thing is, it's not our species doing it.

300k-1 million years - we mentioned it's not homo sapiens yeah? It's barely even Homo. We're talking like homo erectus and homo habilis here.

1-3 million years - our earliest known stone tools are from this time and like. You only know they're tools and not just literally rocks picked up off the ground if you're a trained archaeologist.

Get a glimpse of history at our local museum. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is home to Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, a 17th-century Dutch painter known for his lively depictions of frozen scenes. At first glance, this painting might seem like a simple winter pastime, but it actually captures a moment in history shaped by the Little Ice Age—a centuries-long period of colder-than-average temperatures that transformed daily life in Northern Europe.

During the Little Ice Age, canals and rivers that rarely froze became icy highways, and winter recreation became a central part of life. Avercamp’s work reflects this reality, showing townspeople skating, socializing, and going about their routines in a world adapted to extreme cold. Without knowing the history, a viewer might see only a charming winter scene, missing the deeper story of climate and resilience hidden within the brushstrokes.

Seeing this painting in Boston makes the history even more accessible. While the Dutch of Avercamp’s time embraced the cold as a way of life, New Englanders know the challenge of harsh winters all too well. Standing before this masterpiece at the MFA, you can appreciate not only its artistry but also the way weather shapes culture—both then and now.

Chart with PhyloPic silhouettes from an essay in the upcoming comic book, Paleocene #4. These are lineages that survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event but died out before the Holocene Epoch (which is almost too brief to be visible here—it is a thin sliver atop the Pleistocene). Figures are not to scale, and do not line up perfectly to lineage extinction dates, just to epochs. This chart is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

For more information about the silhouettes in the chart, see: https://www.phylopic.org/.../7dc1ae186d11d8c2ad9f502fc47d...

Obviously this is not to say we don't have an idea about what earth was probably like, or that it isn't probably pretty accurate. However, we weren't there, and our perception of the past is ALWAYS colored by our experience of the present. There is not a truly neutral way to look back at the past.

Geologic time noun. The time covering the physical formation and development of the earth, esp. Prior to human history.

Big History time spiral

(to zoom in on image, click here)