An actual 6 year-old asked me the question today. I was at a loss.
**Edit**: a lot of interesting answers, food for thought, and ideas on how to explain it to a child. Many thanks to the community!
If I summarize:
* Dinosaurs lived for a very (very) long time, all over the earth, and there were countless different species of them.
* There were few of our ancestors, from just a few species, and most of their existence was confined to limited geographical areas.
* The conditions for a fossil to form are extremely rare, and they may have been even rarer for our ancestors than they were for dinosaurs.
In: 819
The prevailing theory of asteroid cataclysm would explain the piles of bodies as tsunamis sweetheart earth and left then in berms of debris. They were covered with the settling dust which helped preserve them.
Hominid were mostly cave dwelling. It is quite likely that succeeding bands would have cleaned house when moving in. A good cave is a good cave even if it needs fixing up.
Dinosaurs were around a lot longer than we have been, and so it was more likely for them to be represented in the fossil record. Also it’s too soon for humans to be fossilized and it requires very specific environmental conditions that aren’t as common anymore. But for a single species we DO find a ton of human remains. Keep in mind that only about 1% of all species that ever lived are even found as fossils. So the amount of ancient human remains we have found is pretty awesome. Probably because they’re still relatively young and there were a lot of them.
Same reason we find a bunch of dinosaur fossils, but only a few T-Rex fossils in comparison.
Dinosaurs were millions of species over millions of years vs T-Rex which was a specific species during a shorter period of time.
Kinda the difference between finding just Waldo vs all the people in the book.
Could it be previous humans were eaten by creatures pre and post mortem? Through the digestive process there weren’t many bones left intact or in the same area to be discovered.
There is a fun XKCD-comic about dinosaurs and the water we currently drink. Spoiler, it has been drunk before 🙂
[https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/)
People are providing a lot of answers to your question, but I question the basis of your question. What are you even talking about? On what basis are you suggesting that there are more dinosaur fossils than there are fossils of primates or direct human ancestors from the last 5 million or so years?
Fosils and bones don’t last much in warmer areas… They get degraded.
So most of the things we find has to be in areas that are cold or went through a process of either drying or frozen.
Interstingly, most of the bio diversity develops around the ecuator, meaning that we will never known most of the organisms that has existed.
Not only is fossilisation extremely rare, I think primate fossils (including humans) are notoriously difficult to fossilise. I forget why exactly but I think in part is due to the types of environments they lived in. The first chimpanzee fossil was only found in 2005 and it was just a couple of teeth.
1. A Fossil only form under very special circumstances
2. Dinosaurs were around for about 200 million years and they lived all over the Earth, thus giving relatively many opportunities for fossils to form.
3. Lucys species were around for a very limited period of time and geographically located to a small area, thus making far it far less likely for the special circumstances to happen for fossils to form.
Eli5 to a kid for difficulty – It’s like doing a where’s Waldo, but instead of him being on each page, he’s only on one.
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