distant past

Until recently, details about this group's most distant past have been elusive.

A long-silent voice from a distant past — eerie and reverberating — awakens in the climate-controlled, antiseptic chambers of a Paris museum.

Over the last few years, popular culture has been offering sympathetic reappraisals of scandal-plagued women from the not too distant past like Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson.

But today, we can consider how a near-miss asteroid and a possible ring around Earth affected life in the distant past because we know that space debris had a deep impact on life at another time.

Layers of rock can be thought of as pages of a history book – with each layer containing details of the Earth’s condition in the distant past.