Geologically speaking, 3 million years is only a wink, one minute of earth's day. But in human terms, the Old Stone Age is a deep abyss of time - more than 99.5 per cent of our existence - from which we crawled into the soft beds of civilization only yesterday.
Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, is between ten and twenty times older than the oldest civilization. But measured as subjective human experience - as a sum of individual lives - more people have lived a civilized life than any other.' Civilization does not run deep in time, but it runs wide, for it is both the cause and
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