Some students enter high school believing—as movies have shown them—that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the distant past. How distant, they cannot say, because to know the dates for the evolution of humanity—perhaps 4 million years ago—and the last mass extinction of dinosaurs—about 65 million years ago—leads to the simple realization that there’s no overlap here. Further, some students picture this overlap in historical time, Stone Age human beings fending off dinosaur attacks.
If we picture all of human history—about 10,000 years—on my blackboard, which is 5 feet wide, then where did the dinosaurs live? My blackboard is oriented north-south, parallel to Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Putting today, 2011, on the far right and the Neolithic revolution, around 8000 BCE, on the far left, we can then extend the timeline back, north along Main Street, and ask, where did the dinosaurs last live? And the answer is, roughly, a bit more than 6 miles north, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of Norman Rockwell and the Red Lion Inn. It’s amusing to picture the dinosaurs in rocking chairs on the Red Lion’s porch, perhaps smoking the cigarettes that, according to Gary Larson, may have done them in. (As one of the largest remaining wood-structure hotels, I’m sure there’s no smoking allowed on the front porch of the Red Lion.)
Comparing the distance between the end of the age of dinosaurs and the beginning of history gives a valuable and needed corrective perspective for students who suffer from too many movie images of the world.
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