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We adults could scarcely find our way in the world, either literally or metaphorically, if no one told us anything. Imagine planning a journey to a distant city you’ve never visited before. Even to conceive of that plan—to know of the city’s existence and to want to see it—calls for a wealth of geographic information that only other people can supply. Deprived of the testimony of others about the land in which we live, our spatial horizon shrinks to the places we have already seen and those we can see just ahead of us. Much the same can be said of our temporal horizon. If no one ever told us about the past, it seems unlikely that we would ever think about the Great War, the Roman Empire, or the Stone Age, let alone the eons that preceded life on earth. Our intuitions about the span of his tory would be cramped by our own short biography. In spite of this manifest de pen dence on information supplied by other people, pro …