Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Prehistorical. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Prehistorical Quotes And Sayings by 91 Authors including Ernst Haeckel,Jane Goodall,Julia Ward Howe,Jack Horner,Dag Hammarskjold for you to enjoy and share.
An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.
However much you know giraffes, to see one in the wild for the first time feels prehistoric.
The broken eggshell of a civilization which time has hatched and devoured.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
Apes. The moon woke them
round the world's navel revolved
prayer wheels of steps.
Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.
Children, behold the Chimpanzee:
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.
Two million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus.
We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times.
[Lat., Vetera extollimus recentium incuriosi.]
During cycles long anterior to the creation of the human race, and while the surface of the globe was passing from one condition to another, whole races of animals-each group adapted to the physical conditions in which they lived-were successively created and exterminated.
This cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this decent into the deepest dark of fuck.
Welcome...to Jurassic Park!
They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. Everything
Maybe I'm a prehistoric monster by being an individual. It's highly likely. All I offer to others is their own individuality. Grab it!
As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.
We are fossils in the making.
Horizontal and vertical sprawl ... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.
somethingological
Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.
Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.
Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The
Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.
These slender little people (Homo Habilis), the size of modern 12 year olds, were devoid of fangs and claws and almost certainly slower on foot than the four legged animals around them. They could have succeeded in their new way of life only by relying on tools and sophisticated cooperative behavior
Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.
Millar Burrows of Yale observes: 'Archeology has in many cases refuted the views of modern critics. It has shown in a number of instances that these views rest on false assumptions and unreal, artificial schemes of historical development. This is a real contribution and not to be minimized.'
The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.
We have fossils ... We win!
Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 160 million years.
EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?
I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
If our prehistoric ancestors visited us today they would find that while we now dwell in different huts, the hearts that dwell in us are still the same; and while we now drive different things, the things that drive us have also never changed.
The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos ... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man ...
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.
Dinosaur fossils were placed in rocks by prankster God just to make human beings think the world is older than it is.
Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.
Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.
Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record.
You just took on five million years of evolution again
The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.
When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.
Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass.
Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.
You could call a people primitive, if you chose to judge them by how big their homes were, or how the managed to defend themselves, without studying their knowledge, or asking how they viewed the world; but what would that say about you?
It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.
Assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I
The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.
Maybe my caveman ancestors invented the wheel or something. I'm not sure.
CHAPTER 8 The Remains of the Day: Dinosaur Vomit, Stomach Contents, Feces, and Other Gut Feelings
Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.
Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.
Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the mysteries of prehistoric creations.
If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.
In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.
Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.
The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.
God created dinosaurs. God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man. Man destroyed God. Man created dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man ... Woman inherits the earth.
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.
If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.
If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring.
That Mesozoic mama's boy wouldn't have lasted five seconds in the Cretaceous period.
Compared to prehistoric times, ninety is the new forty.
Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast.
History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies.
Palaeontological research exhibits, beyond question, the phenomenon of provinces in time, as well as provinces in space.
All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.
Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.
"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
P 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.
Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.
Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn't.
The individual is at the apex of his species' past, at the entrance to its future.
Time is aboriginal eternal
There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.
Anyone who has examined into the history of the theories of earth evolution must have been astounded to observe the manner in which the unique and the difficultly explainable has been made to take the place of the common and the natural in deriving the framework of these theories.
Now, half an hour later, adrenaline thrust him into overdrive. Storms of shale and spall burst from the ground. Ropes of sweat braided his skin. He swung again and again. The heavy pick shattered earth. Digby was in a rhythm, a digging trance, that rare state of archaeological
The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.
It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.
among them Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent") and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene ("but a little recent").
The story of our human lineage is continually enlarged, almost daily, by discoveries from physical anthropology, archeology, and genetics.
It is demonstrable from Geology that there was a period when no organic beings had existence: these organic beings must therefore have had a beginning subsequently to this period; and where is that beginning to be found, but in the will and fiat of an intelligent and all-wise Creator?
Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We
In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
The last time I dated, dinosaurs roamed the earth. We didn't even have electricity.
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
You're barely one step up from the Australopithecines, aren't you? (Acheron) Hey, be respectful when you say that, snot nose. Haven't you seen the commercials? Us cavemen are very sensitive people. (Savitar)
The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.