Chronologies of World History Ignore the True Beginnings

I just spent some time looking through about a dozen chronologies of world history and all of them begin discussions of world history with the emergence of man. This does two disservices to the study of history that I see:

1. By focusing on human history, it ignores the big picture and makes it hard for a history scholar to step back and see the intracicies relationship with his world. There is a small but growing trend to study "Big History" which looks at history from an all inclusive perspective. A book I read recently Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land by Denis Wood, argued for just such a reorientation of the way we study history. Notice he started with 5 billion years ago, while the chronologies of world history in Davis only looked at 250,000 at the most.

2. By starting histories of the world by mentioning the earliest human fossils and artifacts that have been found, an even greater disservice is done in ignoring how these peoples and most of the world's current population view their histories. A recent survey pointed out that in American alone, over half of students entering college still believe that man was formed in more or less his present form about 9,000 years ago. Even if history were a science, which it is not, it chronologies such as these ignore a great deal of human history as it has been understood until the breakthroughs of Darwin and modern science. Wood's book mentions that as a history, he is telling a story and he starts his explicetly from the beggining with the Big Bang. He mentions that his is the account of the world from a scientific perspective and that there are of course alternates.

The chronologies in question are located between LC Call Numbers D9-D11