Telling time is a skill we share with all animals, but what makes Homo sapiens unique is the ability to transcend nature’s capricious ways by peering into the future and shaping it to meet our needs. But mental time travel is a gift and a curse. In peering into the future our ancestors must have foreseen more than they were prepared to cope with: their own inevitable death. This disturbing vision perhaps led them even farther into the future, and to the invention of extreme mental time travel: they envisioned an afterlife.
