# La Brea Tar Pits and Deep Time **Domain:** Deep Time / Personal Provenance / Paleontology **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Entry **Maturity:** Developed **Evidence / Concept Status:** Corpus provenance grounded in article + museum evidence ## Definition **La Brea Tar Pits and Deep Time** is the autobiographical and conceptual origin node for Bryant McGill's later use of deep time in continuity thinking. ## Why It Matters for Deep Time Continuity The encounter supplies the intuition that a modern city can sit directly over a preserved archive of radically older lives, environments, and ecological relationships—and that fragments can remain reconstructively meaningful across enormous temporal distance. ## Existing Architecture / Evidence In *The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley*, McGill writes that he first met deep time as a boy at La Brea. Official La Brea research states that its fossil record spans approximately 50,000 years to the present. ## Deep-Time Continuity Analysis The later continuity interpretation is autobiographical/corpus synthesis, not a claim that the Tar Pits themselves imply digital continuity. ## Evidentiary Boundary The key conceptual bridge is preservation → fragments → reconstruction → pattern → computational continuity. ## Related Ontology [[wiki/Deep Time|Deep Time]] · [[wiki/Deep Time Continuity|Deep Time Continuity]] · [[wiki/Fossil Record|Fossil Record]] · [[wiki/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley as Continuity Provenance|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley as Continuity Provenance]] ## Sources / Primary Anchors - https://tarpits.org/research-collections/tar-pits-our-research - https://tarpits.org/experience-tar-pits/la-brea-tar-pits-and-hancock-park