There are places on our planet that can be appreciated, revered, and fully protected only in the context of earth time. The Grand Canyon is an obvious example, because it displays time so explicitly and majestically. Vishnu Schist underlying the inner gorge is 2 billion years old, the Kaibab Limestone on the rim is “only” 230 million years old, and the Colorado River took a mere 2 to 3 million years to cut through this gigantic time column.

Alaska is a less obvious example. Reverence for Alaska requires not just an appreciation of the gargantuan forces of glaciation and mountain building, but also a willingness to understand and to accept humanity’s place in earth time.

We can all predict what would happen if a chicken attempted to fly across the Pacific Ocean: it would not get far before becoming shark bait. How, then, did domestic chickens, which are native to Southeast Asia, find their way to South America?

The remains of a 600-year-old chicken dinner excavated from an ancient rubbish dump have solved the mystery of whether chickens were originally transported to South America by the first Spanish explorers or by trans-Pacific human voyagers long before the arrival of the earliest Europeans in the New World.

The Spanish explorer hypothesis has long been popular, but historians have long known of a perplexing wrinkle to that idea: