“No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race…[]” Lyell 1863
The debate over the age of the earth generated an even more intriguing question: how old is humankind? Written records date back some thousands of years, but geological evidence and the fossil record show us that earth must be millions of years old. Some authors tried to reconcile this discrepancy by assuming a succession of worlds, each destroyed by a global catastrophe. Therefore the “age or reptiles” could be very ancient, the ice age mammals more recent and the final catastrophe, creating the human world, happened probably only some thousands of years ago. This succession of worlds seemed to be in accordance both with the geological record as with the biblical chronology.
The debate over the age of the earth generated an even more intriguing question: how old is humankind? Written records date back some thousands of years, but geological evidence and the fossil record show us that earth must be millions of years old. Some authors tried to reconcile this discrepancy by assuming a succession of worlds, each destroyed by a global catastrophe. Therefore the “age or reptiles” could be very ancient, the ice age mammals more recent and the final catastrophe, creating the human world, happened probably only some thousands of years ago. This succession of worlds seemed to be in accordance both with the geological record as with the biblical chronology.