Here is another analogy, one that has
been used before.
Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its
origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip.
All the way
across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing
but bacteria.
Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around
your right elbow.
The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right
palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint.
The whole story of
Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the
thickness of one nail-clipping.
As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians,
the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the
legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and
Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and
Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles
and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in
the dust from one light stroke of a nail-file.
