Some periods in Earth history are so different from our own that they may as well belong to another planet. Many people are interested in the age of dinosaurs, or the Ice Ages, but it is an intermediate world, the Miocene Epoch – a sort of “in-between” world, geologically speaking: less recent than mammoths and stone tools, but not the deep past of dinosaurs – that many scientists find interesting.
By the start of the Miocene, the dinosaurs had been dead for 40 million years. The continents were more or less in their current positions, yet our hominin ancestors had not ventured down from the trees.
It was our planet, immediately before humans – instantly recognisable, but only just.
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