Fossil gaps reveal how colonial science erased ancient life’s deep Indigenous and microbial roots
Original framing: “Animal life may be far older than its most ancient fossils – here’s how we uncovered its hidden history” — The Conversation - Global
Indigenous knowledge systems globally—from Aboriginal Australian *Songlines* to Māori *whakapapa* (genealogies)—document life forms and ecological cycles predating fossil records by hundreds of millions of years. For example, the Arrernte people of Central Australia describe 'tjukurpa' (Dreamtime laws) governing microbial symbioses in desert crusts, practices validated by modern microbiology only in the past decade. The erasure of these traditions from paleontological discourse reflects a colonial pattern of replacing oral histories with extractive science, where Indigenous custodians are excluded from defining 'deep time.'
The fossil record’s dominance as the 'official' narrative of deep time is not a neutral scientific achievement but a colonial artifact—one that erases Indigenous knowledge, microbial life, and historical patterns of extraction.
This framing serves power structures by legitimizing geological disruption (e.g., deep-sea mining) while obscuring the continuous ecological stewardship encoded in oral traditions and microbial networks. The trickster figure here is the fossil itself: a glamorous relic that distracts from the 'invisible threads' (microbial life) and the voices (Indigenous scholars) that have long predicted its limitations. To restore balance, solutions must integrate Indigenous-led archives, microbial-centric curricula, reparative funding, and speculative methodologies that expose these erasures. The synthesis is clear: deep time is not a fossil to be found but a living system to be co-stewarded—one that demands we unlearn colonial science’s most stubborn blind spots.