History doesn’t supersede evolution, it merely complicates it. - David Rains Wallace

My ignorant journey had started a change in my thinking. I’d come south unconsciously regarding life as something to be adapted to desire. I disliked the usual way civilization reshapes nature by turning landscapes into suburbs or theme parks, yet my tropical daydream was also an attempt, psychological rather than technological, to make the landscape a desirable artifice. Central America’s roller coaster of diversity had showed me how unimaginative that attempt was.

Central America aroused my curiosity after twenty years of an education that had seemed largely to dull it. I had been a mediocre student, partly because I was lazy, but also because my enthusiasms seldom followed the curriculum. Curiosity was encouraged in theory, but students were supposed to be curious about what the authorities wanted to teach. In Central America, there were no authorities, or none that I was supposed to consult. Trees had no labels or park rangers to identify them, and I suddenly wanted to know what they were.

Like all evolutionary stories, it is really two—of how the land bridge evolved, and of how people discovered it. Evolution occurs in geological time but is perceived in historical time.