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 most popular place for a primitive settlement is on a fresh-water river, but near the ocean. This gives you fresh water, and fresh-water fish.
Being near the ocean gives you access to salt-water fish and also salt, which is not a trivial consideration. Salt is vital for life, and it can cure meats to store it for wintertime. Most people don’t know this because we now naturally get almost too much salt in our food without even trying.
12,000 years ago, north America was covered by a glacier. then, in the fairly rapid timeline of about 1,000 years, it all melted. We don’t know why, but we have some clues about asteroid strikes. Either way the glaciers melted and the ocean rose about 300 feet.
It can take many hundreds of miles of range to reach a change of 300 feet in altitude when you are near the ocean. Where the shallow part of the ocean floor drops off is called the “continental shelf”. If you look at the Hudson river (New York), as soon as the water flow hits the ocean its velocity dissipates and spreads out, which causes the river floor to stop eroding.
If you look at a map of the ocean floor by the outlet of the Hudson river, there is a river bed cut across the continental shelf along the axis of the Hudson. When the ocean was 300 feet shallower, the “beach” was about 200 miles farther along than it is now. The settlements for ancient societies were on the what is now the continental shelf.
There is another problem, though. If a skeleton is exposed to ocean creatures, even the bones will decay and be consumed.
Of course there were villages in just about every region, but…the large settlements that were frequently occupied by millions of descendants through the eons, will be found on the continental shelf, 300 feet down and a couple hundred miles off shore.
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