"living fossil"....My 92 YO mother-in-law wears "that" RIBBON, a gift from my daughter.....LOL....
We might be more like libraries than dinosaur museums. They might have burnt the Alexandria library in stages and destroyed the source data for Ptolemy's Almagest in the process, but so long as there is a living human the entire story of that which is closest to us, the tattered tent, or most of it, is right there if we learn how to read it.