You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
Interpretation
Evolutionary remnants may not always be discovered, as many are lost to time.
This quote by Steven Pinker emphasizes the idea that the evidence of evolution is often incomplete. Many species and their tools may have left no trace, leading to gaps in our understanding of evolutionary history. The fossil record is limited, and what we find is only a fraction of what once existed, highlighting the fragility of our knowledge about the past.
In practice
In a classroom setting, when discussing the significance of the fossil record, I would quote Pinker to illustrate the challenges in studying evolution.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
If spiritual science is to do the same for spirit that natural science has done for nature, it must investigate quite differently from the latter. It must find ways and means of penetrating into the sphere of the spiritual, a domain which cannot be perceived with outer physical senses nor apprehended with the intellect which is bound to the brain.
Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast of the universe; which means endless.
Just as Mars - a desert planet - gives us insights into global climate change on Earth, the promise awaits for bringing back to life portions of the Red Planet through the application of Earth Science to its similar chemistry, possibly reawakening its life-bearing potential.
There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.
Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.
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