Geologic Time

When thinking about time, most of us think in terms of hours, days, and years. This concept of time is often regarded as individual or personal time. When talking about human evolution (or evolution in general), it is necessary to switch gears and think about time in spans of many hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years. This can be difficult at first to many students new to thinking of time on this large scale.

In scientific fields a different concept of time, known as geologic time, is necessary to put Earth history into context. Geologic time is absolutely essential to the field of paleoanthropology. Geologic time covers the history of Earth from its initial formation to the present. It puts the different periods, eras, and eons in a sequence according to chronology and duration. Geologic time places human evolution in a context in which it can be correlated with other happenings, such as environmental changes or mass extinction events. Most importantly, it allows us to grasp that modern humans and our ancestors have been around for only a very short period of time compared to the vast history of life on our planet.