.... because people have remnants from the age before and bits and pieces of information and artefacts from the age before that or maybe older but the washing out of memories have passed the point where they can tell for sure. Beyond the Age of Legends, everything is more or less perceived as being from a mythic "first age", especially that no character could be certain when the Portal Stones (the few who know of them and the fewer still who know they're not from the AOL), the Horn or Valere and company are from. There remains only scraps from earlier ages - that in one humanity ran with animals (that'd be like prehistory), that in one the world was covered with ice, that there was an age with huge wars (this might well be our own - it seems RJ meant our age to end in a nuclear war between the two giants Merk and Mosk, ie: the USA and the USSR) and an age of peace (the AOL) and so on. Most common folk would overlook the scraps of ealier ages and commonly think of the present Age as the third. The fact we know humans will decide that the "fourth age" has started with victory at TG by the end of the series indicates there won't be big enough a cataclysm this time around to make knowledge of the three earlier ages disappear. Not only that, but the cosmology apparently survives intact for at least one more Age. The cataclysm that will empty the earth of man and change the continents massively must happen much later in the "timeline" - 2-3 ages from the end of the series. We'll never know anything about this, and part of the reason for it is that it doesn't fit with scientific knowledge and (to some people) with their religious beliefs on man's origins and therefore it works much better to leave the reader make up his or her own story.

We don't know what the people of the AOL perceived their own Age to be either. It's the Age in which the Wheel cosmology was developped, so maybe they had stuff to theorize or establish six Ages before their own. Typically, they probably perceived themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization, the last Age.



He was and didn't hide that. He said once he didn't try to make this scientifically accurate. In his creation, there's no big bang and the sun is eternal. The Ages described in the series are some time beyond Prehistory and the Ice Age. We have to go with that as "the truth" the same way christian fanatics are taken the creation myth of Genesis as real.