Life on Earth
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Order by how long ago it happened, most recent first. Drag or tap it onto the line
Milestone
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Milestone
Life on Earth
Order by how long ago it happened, most recent first. You place all 39 cards on one timeline, one at a time. You start with three lives, and ten right in a row wins a lost one back.
39
Cards
3
Lives per run
millions of years ago
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How to play the life on Earth ranking game
Milestones in the history of life and the planet make up this deck, each with a place or short note printed underneath. You're ordering them by how many millions of years ago each happened, most recent first. One milestone is placed with its age showing. Put each new card above or below the ones already down. A right placement reveals how many millions of years ago it was; a wrong one still sets it in its true place and takes one of three lives.
The scale is the whole puzzle. Human milestones are squeezed into a sliver at the recent end, while the earliest chapters are spread across almost unimaginable stretches of time. Some notes name a geological period, so knowing their order helps. Thinking about what had to come first, like plants on land before the animals that lived among them, will save you lives.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in millions of years ago, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
How players are doing
This deck has been played 41 times. An average run places 6.7 cards, and 69% of all placements land in the right spot. Only 2 runs have ever placed every card.
The cards players get wrong most often:
- Grasslands spread worldwide missed 54% of the time, usually by about 2 places
- Pangaea breaks apart missed 50% of the time, usually by a single place
- First birds missed 50% of the time, usually by a single place
What's in the deck
Here are 28 of the 39 cards you might be dealt, with 11 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- Farming begins Fertile Crescent
- Woolly mammoths die out Wrangel Island
- Cave paintings at Chauvet France
- Homo sapiens appears East Africa
- Neanderthals appear Europe and western Asia
- Controlled use of fire Homo erectus
- Homo habilis appears East Africa
- Australopithecus walks upright Afar region
- Grasslands spread worldwide Global cooling
- First whales Ancestral cetaceans
- First primates After the dinosaurs
- Tyrannosaurus rex hunts Western North America
- Flowering plants spread Cretaceous
- Pangaea breaks apart Supercontinent splits
- First mammals Tiny shrew-like ancestors
- First dinosaurs Triassic
- Coal swamps cover the tropics Carboniferous
- First reptiles Carboniferous
- Devonian mass extinction Late Devonian
- First forests Devonian
- First insects Devonian
- Plants colonise land Ordovician
- First fish Cambrian seas
- Ediacaran biota First large organisms
- Multicellular life Complex organisms
- First eukaryotic cells Cells with a nucleus
- Cyanobacteria photosynthesise Stromatolites
- First life Earliest microbial fossils
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