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
I know that the conditions of topography and geology that allowed fossils to be preserved were/are rare. So paleontology only gets a small glimpse of prehistoric animal kingdoms through fossils. Most animals lived and died without any record of their existence. Extending this line of reasoning, maybe early humans were better at avoiding the “fossil maker” conditions than their animal counterparts.
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