What We Have In Common With Humans Of 23,000 Years Ago

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition from Susanna every Saturday. Recently, researchers reported that they’d found the oldest human footprints in North America. These fossilized tracks were made more than 21,000 years ago in what is now the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. It’s hard to comprehend that span of years and how many generations of humanity have come and gone since then. These were the slighted impressions on the earth—trace markings made by bare human feet pressing into the pliant mud of ancient lake. Yet they survived the Ice Age and everything since to represent people who left hardly any indications that they existed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I think about the mountain of documentation we each have of our lives in comparison to those ancient footprints. We’re sure we’ll leave acres of personal history when we go—thousands of photos on dozens of platforms capturing our lives minute to minute. Plus millions of words in emails and texts spooling out every minor thought. Subscribe to get “It’s Not Just You” every weekend. Yet, our modern platforms will become extinct faster than a Pleistocene-era giant sloth. Digital media ages badly—technology leaping ahead so quickly that our pixelated past will be rendered unreadable before we get a chance to transfer it to a new system. Our memories and playlists are ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized It's Not Just You Source Type: news