All of this scientific backtracking has me seriously doubting stuff I welded to my brain back in elementary school.  First, Pluto is taken away from me (I’m sorry, but “My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas” sounds infinitely  cooler than “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos”.  Lame), and now, the pyramids and the dinosaurs.  What’s next, scientific community?  Will I wake up tomorrow to hear that King Tut was actually Napoleon?

So, the little fourth-grader/Egyptophile in me is flipping out a little.  Apparently, not only are my precious pyramids no longer one of the oldest stone structures around—Turkey’s Gobekli Temple, first excavated back in 1994, takes that crown—their relative meaning (as the result of religion, which, as I was taught, was the result of civilization) is also now up in the air.  Instead of this:

Civilization —-> Religion —-> Building Giant Stone Thingies

Newsweek says that archaeologists say that it’s now this:

Religion —-> Building Giant Stone Thingies —-> Civilization

Call me an utter ignoramus, but that makes zero sense to me.  I know, carbon dating, blah blah blah, and no evidence of civilization predates Gobekli Temple, blah blah blah…but it seems against logic, common sense, and the very principles of survival for humans—ones with the most primitive tools, at that—to spend their time building large stone structures in lieu of, say, a roof over their heads.  Or a fire pit to cook in.  Or a pot to…cook…in.

After that head-spinning revelation, I stumbled upon Wired.com’s article saying that dinosaurs have actually been in existence for much longer than generally accepted, hence shifting the entire geological timeline.  It’s almost like the ghosts of humans and reptiles past indignantly rose from their un-carbon dated graves in dual protest:

Scientists have discovered 243-million-year-old fossils of dinosaurs’ closest relatives, pushing back the origin of dinosaurs by at least 10 million years.

The dinosaur-like creature, Asilisaurus kongwe, was about the size of a Labrador retriever and had teeth and jawbones ideally shaped for eating plants, indicating it ate a mostly vegetarian diet.

“This shows that the lineage leading to dinosaurs goes a lot further back in time than we thought. The second thing is that it shows that there’s this real ecological diversity,” said paleontologist Randy Irmis, co-author of the study appearing Mar. 3 in Nature. “No one thought that the closest relatives to dinosaurs were these four-legged, herbivorous animals. We thought they were small carnivores.”

The earliest known dinosaur fossils are around 230 million years old. The new findings indicate that the dinosaurs and the silesaurs, the group that encompasses genus Asilisaurus, diverged more than 243 million years ago. That means dinosaurs must have originated sometime before then.