Considering the 4.5 billion years of the planet compressed into one earth day:
- 4:00 am - life begins (single cell organisms)
- // nothing advances for the next 16 hours
- 8:30 pm - first sea plants emerge
- 8:50 pm - first jellyfish and Ediacaran fauna
- 9:04 pm - trilobites appear
- 10:00 pm - first land plants
- 10:05 pm - first land creatures
- 10:24 pm - carboniferous forests emerge and first winged insects
- 11:00 pm - dinosaurs
- 11:38 pm - age of mammals
- 11:58:47 - humans emerge
Relatively speaking, humans have been on the planet for about 77 seconds of a 24 hr day.
Another way of looking at it is to stretch ones arms to represent the entire history of the earth. The distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other represents the Precambrian (pre-fossil) era. All the complex life of the earth is represented by one hand, and the entire human history is represented by a single stroke of a medium-grained nail file.