Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _Microft 1293 days ago
> About 30 million years ago, a virus infected our primate ancestors and one of its genes got trapped in their genomes.
1 comments

So at +/- 1 million, that's a range of 29-31 million, or three million years. That still seems imprecise, to be fair.

For any virologists out there, is this question similar to estimating the date of a Git commit? Or maybe it's similar to finding the nearest tag to a given commit, where a "tag" is some external reference point with a known date (like a fossil or ice core)?