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
Trying to keep it simple
1) humans and our ancestor species (eg homo erectus, homo habilis, etc) have not been round for that long. Only about 2 million years for the various homo species. You could maybe expand it to 20 million to include other great ape ancestors. So thinking about similar skeletons from a 6 year olds point of view
Dinosaurs wee around for about 175 million years so you can imagine there were lots more of them overall
2) “dinosaurs” will cover sooooo many species. Could show the kid pictures of different birds to explain they are all birds but all different to help explain that they are thinking about more animals than just one type.
3) dinosaurs covered a lot of the earth so you can find potentially find their skeletons all around the world. But early on humans only lived in a relatively small area in east Africa. So we will only find early human bodies in that area
4) im not so sure about this but, but it’s a slightly education speculation. It is really unusual to find a whole dinosaur skeleton. But if you consider the size of the large dinosaurs, there is literally a lot of bone. So if only a small part of it gets preserved, e.g 10%, it’s potentially a relatively large piece on bone.
But a human skeleton is obviously much smaller to start with. So if only 10% of a human skeleton survives, that is really small and easily over looked.
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