A Long Now post pointed to a cool animation showing the migration of humans over the past 160,000 years, since modern humans arose in Africa. There’s a lot the gets me thinking when I read about ancient human history, such…

That volcano eruption has had me fascinated for a long time. These were folks like you and me living a long winter. What was it like? How might this have been recorded or engraved in our cultural or genetic memory?

And so so few individuals alive. This was an amazing bottleneck. We owe everything to the amazing survival skills of these people.

Thinking of the Long Zoom, we can see broad swaths of time and climate and geographical changes. But you sometimes need to get down on the human scale of things and be amazed as to the odds and survival through all these changes.