Beneath the ocean floor, time itself becomes tangled — burrowing creatures churn sediment for millennia, blending the remains of organisms centuries apart into single layers that paleontologists must then interpret as coherent history. A twenty-year international study, drawing on more than 7,500 radiocarbon-dated fossils from environments spanning six continents, has now identified the primary force governing this temporal blurring: the rate at which sediment accumulates. Where burial is swift, the past is preserved in sharper focus; where it is slow, generations collapse into one another. Th