Rocks gathered from the Moon's far side by China's Chang'e-6 mission have quietly overturned a long-held chapter in planetary science: the early Solar System's bombardment was not a single catastrophic episode but a slow, vast diminishment spanning more than three billion years. Because the Moon carries no weather, no tectonics, no erosion to rewrite its surface, it preserves what Earth cannot — a faithful record of the violence that preceded life. In reading these fragments, scientists are not merely revising a timeline; they are recovering the conditions from which our world, and eventually