How Do Scientists Date Ancient Events?

Knowing the history of organisms is fundamental to build a scientific classification of living

entities. The most important sources we have to reconstruct the history of life are fossils.
They give us a lot of information about the organisms that lived in the past. Fossils are
scattered on the surface of Earth and they’re covered in layers of rocks, which are called
strata. The oldest layers are at the bottom, youngest at the top. Relative ages of rocks can be
determined by looking at strata of undisturbed sedimentary rocks, which are accumulations
of sediments like sand, mud and gravel. These sediments derive from the erosion of
superficial rocks, caused by atmospheric agents and water; every fossil is included in
sedimentary rocks. Besides, rocks help us understand the geographic environment and the
climatic conditions of the place where they formed, thanks to the sediments contained in
them, in fact, they present different compositions based on where they are located.
There are other types of rocks which rarely include fossils, such as volcanic rocks, but
they’re still useful to know the age of the layers at the top. However, even though fossils are
pretty useful to understand the creation of Earth, the first steps of the creation process are
hard to reconstruct, because, since we are talking about something that happened a long
time ago, material proofs don’t exist. Scientists think that the origin of life dates back to 4
billion years ago but it was 600 million years or more before life evolved. At that time, the
atmosphere was without oxygen and the oldest form of life were bacteria with an anaerobic
metabolism. The history of Earth can be pictured as a 30-day month and the fourteenth day
of the month (2,5 billion years ago) appeared the photosynthesis thanks to the presence of
many photosynthetic prokaryotes which filled the atmosphere with oxygen. The last week of
the calendar is filled with events that happen in a very quick way, in which appeared for the
first time, aquatic organisms, plants and animals. These events are documented by fossils
and can be reconstruct with a specific scheme. Thus, the history can be divided into four
eons:
-Hayden, Archean, Proterozoic, Precambrian
-Phanerozoic, which is divided in Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic
Eons are the biggest time units and they are divided in eras, which are divided in periods,
periods in epochs, epochs in ages; this is the geologic time scale.