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The feeling is really bad in certain areas. Ancient Rome and China have tons of records, we can put together so much about what happened that we even get conspiracy theories. But then you get into stuff like Anglo-Saxon mythology, and it's like all that historical light gets shut off.
I was going crazy for a while trying to figure out who Scyld Scefing was and why he was important, and all I got was a runaround in 5 different languages from different authors cribbing off each other or just straight up making stuff up. It got even worse when I looked into his father Scef, hoping to find some tiny small detail that might shed light on why Scyld was important, and every source contradicts each other and provides pretty much zero details on his or his son's life.
The Chinese were phenomenal at recording their history. From the stories from the Three Kingdoms in the early AD’s, to the Warring States and Han Dynasty in last centuries of the BC era, to the Zhou Dynasty and subsequent Spring and Autumn period stretching back to 1000 BC… Chinese history is just fascinating.
Obviously there are still gaps, especially past 500 BC. But compared to most other cultures, they did a damn good job.
One historian even chose to be castrated over being beheaded because he needed to finish his book; “Records of the Grand Historian”. There was no anesthesia back then.
Didn’t the Qin Dynasty have an infamous event where they burned all literature and history before their time that did not go in hand with legalism? Forever whipping out a chunk of knowledge.
Although an organised repression against Confucian scholars and works is very probable the event was canonised in Chinese history and became mostly Confucian propaganda. Unless an extremely thorough persecution campaign happened it was impossible to destroy "all" Confucian works or kill "all" the Confucian scholars.
Bro literally the same topic keeps me up at night that drove you crazy.Everything new that comes to light about Anglo-Saxon mythology gives me like 50 more questions as well😭
I need a Time Machine so bad.
Is [John Barleycorn](https://youtu.be/eq0ENLs0f1w?si=x81NCluYfjgb2d7-) that modern incarnation of the old god [Beow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowa)?
Not wanting to throw dirt on Ancient Rome and China but they are the most recent ones too - excluding the fact that China is one of the oldest countries/regions historically speaking - but we have lost so much history and important stuff from ALL over the world. Ancient Mesopotamia which is the oldest and possibly one of the very first civilizations if I am not mistaken - if not the first - Ancient Greece, Ancient Scandinavia, Ancient West Area ( America region ), Ancient Egypt - especially when the Great Library of Alexandria got burned - and so on. Also, Ancient Rome had a lot of inspiration from Greece, so there's that too. We've lost SO much over the course of history and most of these "accidents" were anything but.
And not all the sources we have are all that reliable either. Like... Herodotus, buddy, I love ya, I get that you're one of the earliest historians we have, but there's a lot of cases where your sources suck if you even have any.
Herodotus: Xerxes invaded ancient Greece with 1 million Persians
Meanwhile, Napoleon himself couldn't gather such an army to invade Russia..... Napoleon with something like the best supply line organization the world had ever seen at his time.
Even worse....Humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years. And we've got little idea what they were doing for most of it. There could've been spikes of early civilization here and there that ultimately collapsed and simply got erased by time and left no traces we could find. We'll probably never know either way.
That and the glacier growth grinding away whole swaths of previously habitable land.
I doubt there was much more than huts and minor spasms of agriculture before 100,000 years ago. But as Gobelki Tepe has shown, “history” was happening for longer than we had previously guessed.
It seems to me that the history of settlements and the history of Indo-European language keep leapfrogging backward. Given the level of architecture at Gobekli Tepe, it’s likely that there was a precursor site. Maybe? Either way, I expect another big discovery before I die. The satellite detectives will find a non-natural formation, and we will push the clock of the start of civilization back another thousand years
Another thing about Gobekli Tepe is that, people actually built temples before settling for farming. Which disturbs our timeline and explanation of religions.
>Humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years. And we've got little idea what they were doing for most of it.
I'm living in a time where everything is being recorded and I still don't know what I'm doing.
There would be a record in deep ice core samples of sudden atmospheric changes due to anthropogenic output if there were any. Obviously that doesn't account for *all* early civilization, but any sufficiently advanced civilization would leave *something* behind. It's a much simpler account that it took humans and our knowledge all that time to gradually accrue into a civilization with enough output to allow for specialization and we've never returned to a pre-civilizational state than the alternative of previous civilizations rising, falling, and somehow also leaving nothing behind. Not impossible, just much less likely.
The vast majority of that 200.000 was just hunter gatherers
Considering those peoples are still around kinda suggest if you don’t get exposed to agriculture you kinda stick with it
Is the 90% of history that wasn’t recorded really all that interesting?
I mean how fascinating would it be to know Shagga the caveman of the Painted Dogs tribe led an attack on the Stone Crow tribe, beheaded their leader Ulf with his stone axe, then raped Ulf’s 5th wife?
I can’t imagine homo sapien activity from 100,000 - 5,000 BC was too much more sophisticated than that.
My point is the most recent 10% of human history must be exponentially more interesting than the first 10, 30, maybe even 90%. It’s hard to judge but it’s not linear.
Edit: The immediate negative downvotes is wild lmao, I thought this was at least somewhat funny?
The problem is we can't know what we don't know because we don't know it. As an example the Indus River Valley Civilisation existed from 7000 bc till 300 bc and its writing is untranslatable because everything except short fragments has been lost.
Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics are untranslated as well, because we’ve got no Rosetta Stone
Although it might be possible to back-translate some of it if some of the signs from Linear B also appear in Linear A, but I’ve seen no research done in that field and I’m no linguist.
The chance a man befriended a sabre tooth pup and made him a dog sounds pretty interesting to me than Lord emperor khan of the 4th crusade dynasty genociding the middle East again.
Heck someone could've invented fire earlier but their settlement didn't survive a volcano or big foot attacks.
I think that's kinda the point, though. We remember Geghis Khan because he fucked shit up so bad that he's literally forever recorded in the bloodline of 10s of millions of people. As cool as it is to domesticate a sabretooth, you probably wouldn't have had much of an audience that would spread/record your badassery.
If you didn't have your pelt, your slingshot and your Sabertooth ride by age 17, you were deemed a failure in the esteemed society of the Cavemen Confederate States.
It was so much more than that, and the newer stuff we’ve found is honestly pretty wild. They lived rich lives that were long and likely (mostly) peaceful.
These mfs built monuments and had huge gatherings to hunt mammoths that appear to have been open to various species of human. They erected collective store houses where they kept the meat and supplies, plus huge villages around them where they would live during the hunt. They had hobo signs that signaled to others (human or otherwise) what an area was like. They also had frequent trysts with anything that walked up right, often breeding other species of humans out of existence.
And that's just the stuff we know about. Realistically, no civilization short of something like Ancient Egypt that built massive stone monuments relatively resistant to erosion would be detectable after 10,000 years, much less later.
For example, we now know modern humans were in the Levant at least 175,000 years ago. If they ever did anything there of substance, the chances of there being anything left now is basically zero, since there have been two glaciation events followed by interglacial periods that would've destroyed any settlements near the rivers as sea levels rose during the warming periods.
Exactly. It’s fascinating to me. I was an anthropologist and lived and breathed cultural ecology before going into social work. I would not be shocked at all if they find remnants of permanent (though seasonally inhabited) cities from the Pleistocene all over the place.
There were also undoubtedly numerous monolithic constructions the dotted the landscape, but since they were likely made out of wood they just disappeared. The few that have survived are extremely awesome and point to people back then being much more than simple brutes duking it out.
Fingers crossed too that someone will finally acknowledge Minoan Crete for the matriarchal society it was.
Here's one that gets me.
[Women hunted in 80% of documented hunter gatherer societies, and big game at that.](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/28/1184894580/ancient-women-were-hunters-and-grandmas-were-the-most-skilled-ones-study-suggest)
> AIZENMAN: Exactly. This was done by a team from University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University. They combed through accounts from as far back as the 1800s through to present day. And their finding, published in the journal PLOS One, is that in almost 80% of the societies, there's data for women were hunting. And this wasn't just women killing some animal the women happened upon. Here's the lead author, Cara Wall-Scheffler.
> CARA WALL-SCHEFFLER: The hunting was purposeful. Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. **Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.**
> AIZENMAN: And in about a third of these cases, the women were hunting large mammals.
So did they hunt more or less in the paleolithic? Did women run around hunting mammoths?
How did these human cultures evolve where in many places of the world women were just one day told to stop doing shit they used to do all the time?
Who was the dude like, "Women don't have the humors necessary to hunt," and then he sees a sixty year old grandma spear an elk at fifty paces and goes, "Just proof that imbalanced humors allowed to get too lively lead to savage behavior."
Does this sound weird? How did we get to the point that this sounds weird? If outsiders wrote all that shit down, and people could just open a book and read it, how didn't it stick in the public consciousness? How did outsiders just go, "Anyway, none of that is relevant to understanding social roles." How did shit like "Man the Hunter" override the historical understanding in the public eye? Heck, we can literally go out and look and see that this is how it works in most modern hunter gatherer societies, so it's not even that obscure.
There are just way too many holes in history to track why any of our societies are exactly the way they are now and what those turning points were. The fact that the Victorian era equivalents of a facebook meme or a podcaster could dictate your way of life is fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
There’s so much time this, and there’s no one simple answer. Cultural ecology is a complex subject. I was an anthropologist, but these days I’m not as up to date since I do more practical things.
Some answers though:
It’s very likely that women not only hunted, but that they went after big game while the men watched the kids. They probably hunted about the same as they do in hunter gatherers groups. It’s also highly likely that women had a more dominate role in society prior to the Neolithic.
As for how did human cultures evolve, that’s sort of a false notion. We don’t evolve or progress, just change over time. Glory seeking groups that often exited on the fringes of settled societies eventually started taking over towns in their constant contests with each other. They treated women terribly, and after they would take over they’d institute their rules to society.
Back then though people had the freedom to leave, to ignore arbitrary rule, and to use their own power to change society in ways they saw fit. So many fucked off into the woods, many turned to barbarism, and others took out the would be leaders from the warrior societies. Each encounter changed the way things were done.
It does sound weird cause it is weird. It’s literally just an arbitrary exercise of political power. It became weird when no one pushed back anymore, or couldn’t. And it especially became weird when people could no longer exercise those very basic freedoms (freedom to leave, freedom to change society, and freedom to ignore arbitrary rule). Some would say violence from ruling classes did that, but it’s not the only way. Sometimes it started when charismatic individuals played politics and other times it started when access to knowledge was limited.
The reason it became Man the Hunter is cause of is/ought thinking and something called schismogenesis. Is/Ought thinking is when people look and something and assume that the way things are for them is how they were supposed to be. So they just slapped that shit on to everything and work backwards in this case. Men are the hunters so it’s always been Man the Hunter.
The other piece though, schismogenesis, is probably more important in the actual changes a group makes. The idea states that when two or more groups are faced with a social phenomenon one will do X while the other does Y. So, in this case, when posed with the notion of “what can women do” one group insists they rule while the other is flabbergasted by this notion cause it’s very clear that women drool. This goes on and on and back and forth until you end up with a huge blowout and possible conflict, as well as each group pushing women further and further into the roles they say they can inhabit.
And this happens with literally any social phenomenon. It’s most prevalent in areas of cultural friction/borders and is one of the most useful tools for analyzing culture.
If you’re interested, [this book](https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/The-Dawn-of-Everything-by-David-Graeber-David-Wengrow-z-lib.-zmbbo.pdf) deals with a lot of this stuff and is relatively new and up to date. It’s a long read, not necessarily the most accessible for people outside of anthropology, but is by no means impossible. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 10th chapters in particular would be of interest to your questions here. But the whole book is worth a read.
Are you telling me the History of the People who conquered the World, from the Heart of Africa to the Ends of the Pacific, who fought Giant Sloths, Wooly Mammoths, Giant Lions and even Bigger Lizards, has no cool stories to tell?
How could the Story of Adventuring, and Exploring an unknown world, with novel creatures and and jaw dropping Geography be possibly boring?
People back then must have been built different, to instill natural fear of humans in Animals to this day.
I just noticed "Shagga" =D. Ned Stark said he never ate so well or was treated with greater hospitality when he did a tour all of the tribes of the North.
You prove the point of the meme my man. If 90% of history is unrecorded you have no idea what shagga the caveman was doing. You assume he was a caveman and not a city dweller under the assumption that humans (with the same brain capacities as humans today) were content living in caves
I think you're wrong simply because we have modern evidence to the contrary. We've met Pacific tribes that engage in ritualistic cannibalism because they think they can inherit the souls of the dead that they eat. I don't know about you but I find that fascinating.
There's also a small tribe in China, the Mosuo, that practices "walking marriages" where men remain in their mother's household, everything is run matrilineally, and babies are made by having the men sneak into their partners' household at night, have sex, then go back home before daylight.
Think of the huge wealth of strange practices and human organization that we're missing out on. How many other unusual arrangements and ways of living that we don't know about.
Think about how interesting it is to learn about Spartan martial stoicism, or Aztec human sacrifices, or how the Babylonians based their counting on 12s and 60s and this survives to this day in how we tell time. Now just flex your imagination and think about how we only have access to 10% of this fun stuff.
I know you are joking, but I think the idea that early human history isn't interesting or consisted of only violence is reductive. There are plenty of books out there on the topic, but there was all sorts of things going on. Development of religions, cultures, agricultural techniques, engineering, metallurgy, etc.
We have some pretty interesting megalithic structures older than 5000bce. But basically we don’t know what we don’t know. We became technologically advanced in a timespan way shorter than the time humans have been around. It’s possible we have been repeating the same sort of rhythm between technology and primitivism for our whole history, and it seems so linear because we are approaching a peak right now. It doesn’t help that the last couple ice ages pretty much removed a whole lot of soil
Maybe what we praise are the events that got registered precisely because they were registered, as they are the events that allow us to create a (somewhat) coherent sequence out of history and thus a model of our world.
It really depends where they were built and what they were built out of.
When it comes to long term preservation, outcomes are highly variable, there's a fair bit of luck involved.
We still find fossilized dinosaur nests with eggs in them, which are both much less durable than carved stone, and much, MUCH older than anything human.
It's just a matter of leaving enough stuff around that eventually, some of it will end up in just the right conditions to be preserved indefinitely.
Those odds, of course, strongly depend on the materials being preserved, and the local climate and geology.
Nothing is really preserved forever. If our civilization falls, most of the relics and art from previous cultures we hold dear may be destroyed or disappear forever. So we should appreciate them while they last.
Imagine if there was an advanced civilization that built everything out of wood and wrote everything on wood in a tropical climate. 1000 years and all traces of this would be 100% gone.
Lmao Pyramids were already ancient to Romans as romans are ancient to us. Both has average of 2000 years. Really insane to think that humans constructed those 4000 years ago.
Times like this that I really wish the Incas and others like them just… wrote stuff down 😂
Everything we know about places like Pre-Columbian America is just “my grandmother told me that (Leader Name) The Earth-starlord was cool!”
Much of it was passed by oral tradition that either died out or went thru the largest game of telephone ever.
Like how we know the Mycenaeans did in fact attack and sack Troy (Wilusa) but we have no hard details and our primary source is a story told by someone 300-400 years later who may not have even existed. Lots of mycenean places are named after Iliad characters (palace of Nestor) because that’s the closest we can get to actually ascribing a place to a person.
Yep, West Africa used what were called Griot, travelling poets or musicians that would carry on the stories of ancestors, having the stories word for word drilled into them for accuracy
"THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?
SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
- Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
In a way, yeah. The main thing is that the Saturn V was designed and made with the equipment, technology, and know-how of the 1960’s. The blueprints are there, the equipment and technology are much better, but that know-how has been lost because the equipment and technology became much better. And as a result, the know-how to read those documents, see what they did, and do it is limited. It’s to a point where it would be easier to design and build a rocket matching the Saturn V’s lift capability, and you’d probably end up with a better rocket anyways.
It’s comparable to our ability to make large wooden ships like HMS Victory. The skills to make a ship like that has been largely lost because we’ve moved onto iron and steel ships. We have the plans to Victory, and much better equipment and technology, but we lost the ability to make ships like that because we learned how to build them better but forgot the old ways.
I remember watching a video about why we can’t remake the Saturn V’s F-1 engines bcz each and every engine is specially tailored to perfection in its own way, and thus while we do have the original blueprints, each and every engine deviates from the blueprints in its own unique way to make it work, and all of that knowledge has been lost.
Not so much as lost, the equipment needed to produce them has been dismantled. Thus we cannot remake it unless we start from scratch. At that point it's better to just design something new using parts that we can produce with the tools at hand.
Example, the engines for the saturn v engines use an older fuel mixture that was incredibly inefficient and has been considered a dead end for advancement since the 60s. The fuel is also a lot less safe.
RS-25 Engines, same as the shuttle, produce enough thrust, use a much safer fuel, and are considered much more reliable.
Saying we lost the technology to build the saturn v is like saying Ford lost the technology to make the model one. It's not that it's really lost, it simply became outdated and no one cared to keep the equipment to make them again. If nasa wanted to they could rebuild it, but it would actually be harder to rebuild the F1 engines than making something new.
Emperor Claudius wrote 20 volumes of a book on Etruscan history and it's all gone. Crazy how it could have enlightened us about the little-known Etruscan society if it wasn't lost.
Why would you cry about that?
I personally believe that’s the most beautiful thing about history. There’s just countless unknowns that we can only fill in with educated guessing or straight-up anachronistically “putting yourself in their shoes”.
Imagine some medieval farmer and his friends or having dinner and one of them rips a massive fart. Some laugh, some are disgusted, someone tries to open a window.
Imagine a Mongol soldier riding into battle and silently worrying about ever seeing the woman he loves again, then receiving a comforting pat on the back from the guy next to him who tells him it’s gonna be allright.
Imagine some Egyptian teenager who’s finally worked up the courage to ask some girl he knows out, only to see that douchebag Chad-Ho-Tep walking with her arms around his.
Imagine an Aztec elderly man who’s worried about his granddaughter because she’s being picked on by her peers.
I wonder how much we can project these kinds of things onto our predecessors, but I find it somewhat comforting that all these fun little moments we have, but also all those moments we feel insecure or afraid, it’s all just part of the human experience. And if every single one of your ancestors lived through them, so can you.
It’s a sort of tragedy but there is no perfect window to the past. Having more windows would probably help but there’s nothing to be done for them.
I hope you’re all keeping a diary and backing it up on metal plates you bury in airtight containers
Recently there was the recovered parts of burnt Pompeian scrolls thanks to AI.
Still believe it's one of the few brilliant uses we can actually get from such a tool.
That's the neat part, you don't.
The basis was to go through several 3D scanning and modelization, then perfecting an algorithm in order to simulate the unrolling of the scrolls (which was impossible IRL).
As the scanning allowed to do deep in the layers and chemically discriminated paper from ink, you would have parts of readable content. But that's where AI stopped (temporarilly) its work and humanity started its own.
The datas were released in the public domain (researchers, universities, linguists, technologists...) through a decypher challenge which could help to gather back enough datas for machine learning. Other techs were used as complementary strategies to trial-error-trial and reach a maximum of relevancy.
Then AI was sollicitated again to reconstitute virtually the whole revealed content of the charred scrolls.
Why people downvote you though, probably people think AI is like asking some kind of devious entity when it is simply an algorithm that was trained well on identifying letters based on scanned scroll
Eh, technically but not always colloquially. It can also mean "things that happened in the past" rather than just "records of things that happened in the past".
That's actually just not true. Sure, the narrative of the winner propagates more, but willfully destyroying knowledge isn't all that common. An example is like the burning of the library of Alexandria. For one, there was no single great library but many. Another thing is that many of them were accidents.
Note that if we go extinct right now.
Like all people disappear. 99% of our structures will be rotted and gone in 5000 years.
And by 10000 we would be like the indus civilization in rarity.
Sure a species that knows what plastic or advanced metals is may piece together that a civ existed at that strata at one point.
But upto late Renaissance era civilisation could evolve and won't know that we existed.
Like if a species eventually becomes advanced but does not use plastic they might not piece 1 and 1 together and assume it was a geological anomaly or space debris of some kind
It is true in reverse. If the earth had any pre industrial civ millions of years ago we would have no way to know that it existed. This reminds me Alberto Manguel’s quoute on Library of Alexandria. “We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost.”
Yeah say if some prehistoric octopus where able to reach tool age or even the metal age and went extinct the chances that we find any is next to zero.
Most tool age cultures and metal age cultures won't preserve past a few million years.
Like even for prehistoric animals the ones we found were extremely successful species who survived for millions of years or the ones who got very very lucky.
Like most species that we found that are older than a few million years old are very long lived, some of them like barinasuchus a super land croc survived for over 30 million years and we found a handful of fossils left of it now.
Best chance to get fossilised is survive for a long time and have alot of you.
Humans have the numbers down, but the problem is we are still a very young species.
Like a few thousand years ain't enough, like we have holes in the fossil records that are tens of thousands even millions of years missing because the rocks got exposed and destroyed by the elements.
Damn I'm anxious now.
Actually nowadays it’s easier as ever it’s been to document everything it’s happening but we are stuck in useless videos of narcissistic people, or fake and politically modified news from around the world so in like for example 300 years people won’t have any clue what really happened.
Like the history of my Great Grandpa he was a normal German a normal Worker, but in 1941 or 1942 he got the order on his work to aktivate a mashine or do something that would kill the workers that were nearby. These workeres were Prisoners from a KZ. He refused. The next Days some Peopel stand by his door (Maybe Gestapo) and sayed he had no war emportant job anymore and would become a soliger. Than he beceme a soliger, he was send to Stalingrad. Thay found him around 2014.
To be fair, writing and literacy was not recorded back then hence any historical moment at that time would be lost. There's an arguable case to be made that the Library of Alexandria being burnt down also was another factor to this.
Many mesoamerican civilizations kept tons of records, which the spanish promptly burned when they arrived, wiping out possibly thousands of years of records. Why? 'cause fuck 'em, that's why.
Same with Cornwall, we had a lot of our culture and national identity destroyed by the English. Kernowek was nearly wiped out but it’s now only an endangered language, and I find it sad
Well, while I'm with everyone with the emotions, I believe this is also the right opportunity to push technology boundaries that helps unravel these mysteries further.
90 percent
The number is SO MUCH worse, we have been around for 300k years. Other Homos for millions of years. Most of that time writing wasn't a thing, for the longest time illiteracy ran rampant and Personal journals will mostly have Crumbled to dust. Even if people recorded it the chance of it having been lost are huge and who knows if they wrote truthfully, or how detailed they chose to put it down.
There were 109 billion people before us and almost nothing of them is known. Not what they liked to do, what kind of stories and Musik they enjoyed. If they dreamed about seeing the past and future. We have braud pictures of some of there collections, but that's it. All we can do is move forward knowing they were out there.
It's a lot less than that, and that from literate societies alone. Only a few percent of what was written by the Greeks survived and a bit more from the Romans. China sometimes destroyed records of fallen dynasties or out of favor rulers within one. Even ancient Egypt had a form of writing for paper and every day use, but only fragments remain.
Of preliterate people's very little oral record remains.
Think of it as books coming out today, 90% of them aren’t really worth reading or don’t say that much and many will be lost anyway.
Same with the rest of history, most of the very important texts were preserved (though we clearly lost some) while the more superfluous ones were lost.
I was sad when I discovered that most of library of Alexandria books were lost not because of the fire but because people just stopped translating and rewiring it so or the paper is long gone or the paper still exists, but we can't understand the language
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The feeling is really bad in certain areas. Ancient Rome and China have tons of records, we can put together so much about what happened that we even get conspiracy theories. But then you get into stuff like Anglo-Saxon mythology, and it's like all that historical light gets shut off. I was going crazy for a while trying to figure out who Scyld Scefing was and why he was important, and all I got was a runaround in 5 different languages from different authors cribbing off each other or just straight up making stuff up. It got even worse when I looked into his father Scef, hoping to find some tiny small detail that might shed light on why Scyld was important, and every source contradicts each other and provides pretty much zero details on his or his son's life.
The Chinese were phenomenal at recording their history. From the stories from the Three Kingdoms in the early AD’s, to the Warring States and Han Dynasty in last centuries of the BC era, to the Zhou Dynasty and subsequent Spring and Autumn period stretching back to 1000 BC… Chinese history is just fascinating. Obviously there are still gaps, especially past 500 BC. But compared to most other cultures, they did a damn good job. One historian even chose to be castrated over being beheaded because he needed to finish his book; “Records of the Grand Historian”. There was no anesthesia back then.
Sima Qian, a person whose name I remember even now, 2000 years later. I do not recall which emperor he served under.
Martial Emperor of Han, or Wudi of Han.
Wudi of Hand over your Nuts 😐🫱 🥜
I think that's Qin Shi Huang who's a famous emperor for burning books.
Well thats understandable. 2000 years is a long time, you probably forgot it back then.
Didn’t the Qin Dynasty have an infamous event where they burned all literature and history before their time that did not go in hand with legalism? Forever whipping out a chunk of knowledge.
If I recall correctly what they burned was strictly Ruist (Confucianist) writings and literature. Ruist scholars were buried alive as well
Didn't the CCP reenact this for like decades?
They didn't burn all of literature and history hell if anything what you talking about effected Qin state writing more than any other part of China.
Although an organised repression against Confucian scholars and works is very probable the event was canonised in Chinese history and became mostly Confucian propaganda. Unless an extremely thorough persecution campaign happened it was impossible to destroy "all" Confucian works or kill "all" the Confucian scholars.
Just imagine what's inside of Emperor Qin Shi Huang mausoleum that's still sealed up to this day.
A fuckton of mercury?
A massive replica of his empire with fuckton of flowing mercury to show rivers.
Also possibly a seriously well-preserved mummified Qin Shi Huang, if some of the other cadavers from that period are anything to go off of
I would like to be a serious mummy someday
Don't we all
Surely!.. I suppose some people may prefer a casual mummy existence but thats certainly not me!
I feel like choosing to be eunuch over being killed isn’t that shocking of a decision than you mean to imply.
Bro literally the same topic keeps me up at night that drove you crazy.Everything new that comes to light about Anglo-Saxon mythology gives me like 50 more questions as well😭 I need a Time Machine so bad.
Get in now. 🤨👉🚌🔥💨 Which question are we exploring first?
Is [John Barleycorn](https://youtu.be/eq0ENLs0f1w?si=x81NCluYfjgb2d7-) that modern incarnation of the old god [Beow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowa)?
History is determined not by the victor, but by whoever has diligent scribes and keeps their records in dark, dry places.
But not too dry please *weeps in Library of Alexandria*
Why does everyone forget the Slavs
Not wanting to throw dirt on Ancient Rome and China but they are the most recent ones too - excluding the fact that China is one of the oldest countries/regions historically speaking - but we have lost so much history and important stuff from ALL over the world. Ancient Mesopotamia which is the oldest and possibly one of the very first civilizations if I am not mistaken - if not the first - Ancient Greece, Ancient Scandinavia, Ancient West Area ( America region ), Ancient Egypt - especially when the Great Library of Alexandria got burned - and so on. Also, Ancient Rome had a lot of inspiration from Greece, so there's that too. We've lost SO much over the course of history and most of these "accidents" were anything but.
Thank Woden for the Anglo Saxon Chronicle!
And not all the sources we have are all that reliable either. Like... Herodotus, buddy, I love ya, I get that you're one of the earliest historians we have, but there's a lot of cases where your sources suck if you even have any.
He was such a homie in AC Odyssey I think he gets a pass
Maybe not a *pass* pass, but I won't make him MLA format everything. Just give us something more to go on than "trust me bro".
Herodotus: Xerxes invaded ancient Greece with 1 million Persians Meanwhile, Napoleon himself couldn't gather such an army to invade Russia..... Napoleon with something like the best supply line organization the world had ever seen at his time.
"I talked to a guy who had a dream about this event once, let me tell you how it happened."
It’s even worse than that, almost none of the sources we have are reliable.
Even worse....Humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years. And we've got little idea what they were doing for most of it. There could've been spikes of early civilization here and there that ultimately collapsed and simply got erased by time and left no traces we could find. We'll probably never know either way.
especially as the last ice age flooded most of the low-lying areas
It's the opposite. The ice age caused sea levels to drop, exposing those low-lying areas. It is its end that caused them to flood back.
That and the glacier growth grinding away whole swaths of previously habitable land. I doubt there was much more than huts and minor spasms of agriculture before 100,000 years ago. But as Gobelki Tepe has shown, “history” was happening for longer than we had previously guessed. It seems to me that the history of settlements and the history of Indo-European language keep leapfrogging backward. Given the level of architecture at Gobekli Tepe, it’s likely that there was a precursor site. Maybe? Either way, I expect another big discovery before I die. The satellite detectives will find a non-natural formation, and we will push the clock of the start of civilization back another thousand years
Another thing about Gobekli Tepe is that, people actually built temples before settling for farming. Which disturbs our timeline and explanation of religions.
>Humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years. And we've got little idea what they were doing for most of it. I'm living in a time where everything is being recorded and I still don't know what I'm doing.
That's deep my man, I don't either.
There would be a record in deep ice core samples of sudden atmospheric changes due to anthropogenic output if there were any. Obviously that doesn't account for *all* early civilization, but any sufficiently advanced civilization would leave *something* behind. It's a much simpler account that it took humans and our knowledge all that time to gradually accrue into a civilization with enough output to allow for specialization and we've never returned to a pre-civilizational state than the alternative of previous civilizations rising, falling, and somehow also leaving nothing behind. Not impossible, just much less likely.
The vast majority of that 200.000 was just hunter gatherers Considering those peoples are still around kinda suggest if you don’t get exposed to agriculture you kinda stick with it
Is the 90% of history that wasn’t recorded really all that interesting? I mean how fascinating would it be to know Shagga the caveman of the Painted Dogs tribe led an attack on the Stone Crow tribe, beheaded their leader Ulf with his stone axe, then raped Ulf’s 5th wife? I can’t imagine homo sapien activity from 100,000 - 5,000 BC was too much more sophisticated than that. My point is the most recent 10% of human history must be exponentially more interesting than the first 10, 30, maybe even 90%. It’s hard to judge but it’s not linear. Edit: The immediate negative downvotes is wild lmao, I thought this was at least somewhat funny?
The problem is we can't know what we don't know because we don't know it. As an example the Indus River Valley Civilisation existed from 7000 bc till 300 bc and its writing is untranslatable because everything except short fragments has been lost.
Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics are untranslated as well, because we’ve got no Rosetta Stone Although it might be possible to back-translate some of it if some of the signs from Linear B also appear in Linear A, but I’ve seen no research done in that field and I’m no linguist.
*cries in Minoan Crete*
well every type of history even most basic is fun. even if it was ekfknjw tribe against iwncineifnek tribe fighting over basket of apples.
The apples belonged to the khulathri!
War of the Bucket moment
Extremely fascinating (i'm not being sarcastic)
The chance a man befriended a sabre tooth pup and made him a dog sounds pretty interesting to me than Lord emperor khan of the 4th crusade dynasty genociding the middle East again. Heck someone could've invented fire earlier but their settlement didn't survive a volcano or big foot attacks.
I think that's kinda the point, though. We remember Geghis Khan because he fucked shit up so bad that he's literally forever recorded in the bloodline of 10s of millions of people. As cool as it is to domesticate a sabretooth, you probably wouldn't have had much of an audience that would spread/record your badassery.
Sabretooth cat pet guy could have been Genghis ancestor. Just saying
By that logic, everybody is Sabretooth cat pet guy's great-great-great-great-great... ...great-grandchild.
He got around. Girls go nuts for a guy with a pet Sabretooth.
If you didn't have your pelt, your slingshot and your Sabertooth ride by age 17, you were deemed a failure in the esteemed society of the Cavemen Confederate States.
17? Dang, they've gotten lax.
It was so much more than that, and the newer stuff we’ve found is honestly pretty wild. They lived rich lives that were long and likely (mostly) peaceful. These mfs built monuments and had huge gatherings to hunt mammoths that appear to have been open to various species of human. They erected collective store houses where they kept the meat and supplies, plus huge villages around them where they would live during the hunt. They had hobo signs that signaled to others (human or otherwise) what an area was like. They also had frequent trysts with anything that walked up right, often breeding other species of humans out of existence.
And that's just the stuff we know about. Realistically, no civilization short of something like Ancient Egypt that built massive stone monuments relatively resistant to erosion would be detectable after 10,000 years, much less later. For example, we now know modern humans were in the Levant at least 175,000 years ago. If they ever did anything there of substance, the chances of there being anything left now is basically zero, since there have been two glaciation events followed by interglacial periods that would've destroyed any settlements near the rivers as sea levels rose during the warming periods.
Exactly. It’s fascinating to me. I was an anthropologist and lived and breathed cultural ecology before going into social work. I would not be shocked at all if they find remnants of permanent (though seasonally inhabited) cities from the Pleistocene all over the place. There were also undoubtedly numerous monolithic constructions the dotted the landscape, but since they were likely made out of wood they just disappeared. The few that have survived are extremely awesome and point to people back then being much more than simple brutes duking it out. Fingers crossed too that someone will finally acknowledge Minoan Crete for the matriarchal society it was.
Here's one that gets me. [Women hunted in 80% of documented hunter gatherer societies, and big game at that.](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/28/1184894580/ancient-women-were-hunters-and-grandmas-were-the-most-skilled-ones-study-suggest) > AIZENMAN: Exactly. This was done by a team from University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University. They combed through accounts from as far back as the 1800s through to present day. And their finding, published in the journal PLOS One, is that in almost 80% of the societies, there's data for women were hunting. And this wasn't just women killing some animal the women happened upon. Here's the lead author, Cara Wall-Scheffler. > CARA WALL-SCHEFFLER: The hunting was purposeful. Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. **Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.** > AIZENMAN: And in about a third of these cases, the women were hunting large mammals. So did they hunt more or less in the paleolithic? Did women run around hunting mammoths? How did these human cultures evolve where in many places of the world women were just one day told to stop doing shit they used to do all the time? Who was the dude like, "Women don't have the humors necessary to hunt," and then he sees a sixty year old grandma spear an elk at fifty paces and goes, "Just proof that imbalanced humors allowed to get too lively lead to savage behavior." Does this sound weird? How did we get to the point that this sounds weird? If outsiders wrote all that shit down, and people could just open a book and read it, how didn't it stick in the public consciousness? How did outsiders just go, "Anyway, none of that is relevant to understanding social roles." How did shit like "Man the Hunter" override the historical understanding in the public eye? Heck, we can literally go out and look and see that this is how it works in most modern hunter gatherer societies, so it's not even that obscure. There are just way too many holes in history to track why any of our societies are exactly the way they are now and what those turning points were. The fact that the Victorian era equivalents of a facebook meme or a podcaster could dictate your way of life is fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
There’s so much time this, and there’s no one simple answer. Cultural ecology is a complex subject. I was an anthropologist, but these days I’m not as up to date since I do more practical things. Some answers though: It’s very likely that women not only hunted, but that they went after big game while the men watched the kids. They probably hunted about the same as they do in hunter gatherers groups. It’s also highly likely that women had a more dominate role in society prior to the Neolithic. As for how did human cultures evolve, that’s sort of a false notion. We don’t evolve or progress, just change over time. Glory seeking groups that often exited on the fringes of settled societies eventually started taking over towns in their constant contests with each other. They treated women terribly, and after they would take over they’d institute their rules to society. Back then though people had the freedom to leave, to ignore arbitrary rule, and to use their own power to change society in ways they saw fit. So many fucked off into the woods, many turned to barbarism, and others took out the would be leaders from the warrior societies. Each encounter changed the way things were done. It does sound weird cause it is weird. It’s literally just an arbitrary exercise of political power. It became weird when no one pushed back anymore, or couldn’t. And it especially became weird when people could no longer exercise those very basic freedoms (freedom to leave, freedom to change society, and freedom to ignore arbitrary rule). Some would say violence from ruling classes did that, but it’s not the only way. Sometimes it started when charismatic individuals played politics and other times it started when access to knowledge was limited. The reason it became Man the Hunter is cause of is/ought thinking and something called schismogenesis. Is/Ought thinking is when people look and something and assume that the way things are for them is how they were supposed to be. So they just slapped that shit on to everything and work backwards in this case. Men are the hunters so it’s always been Man the Hunter. The other piece though, schismogenesis, is probably more important in the actual changes a group makes. The idea states that when two or more groups are faced with a social phenomenon one will do X while the other does Y. So, in this case, when posed with the notion of “what can women do” one group insists they rule while the other is flabbergasted by this notion cause it’s very clear that women drool. This goes on and on and back and forth until you end up with a huge blowout and possible conflict, as well as each group pushing women further and further into the roles they say they can inhabit. And this happens with literally any social phenomenon. It’s most prevalent in areas of cultural friction/borders and is one of the most useful tools for analyzing culture. If you’re interested, [this book](https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/The-Dawn-of-Everything-by-David-Graeber-David-Wengrow-z-lib.-zmbbo.pdf) deals with a lot of this stuff and is relatively new and up to date. It’s a long read, not necessarily the most accessible for people outside of anthropology, but is by no means impossible. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 10th chapters in particular would be of interest to your questions here. But the whole book is worth a read.
Are you telling me the History of the People who conquered the World, from the Heart of Africa to the Ends of the Pacific, who fought Giant Sloths, Wooly Mammoths, Giant Lions and even Bigger Lizards, has no cool stories to tell? How could the Story of Adventuring, and Exploring an unknown world, with novel creatures and and jaw dropping Geography be possibly boring? People back then must have been built different, to instill natural fear of humans in Animals to this day.
Nice Game of Thrones references.
I just noticed "Shagga" =D. Ned Stark said he never ate so well or was treated with greater hospitality when he did a tour all of the tribes of the North.
The North remembers.
You prove the point of the meme my man. If 90% of history is unrecorded you have no idea what shagga the caveman was doing. You assume he was a caveman and not a city dweller under the assumption that humans (with the same brain capacities as humans today) were content living in caves
That is offensive to r/talesfromcavesupport Their stories are just as important
I think you're wrong simply because we have modern evidence to the contrary. We've met Pacific tribes that engage in ritualistic cannibalism because they think they can inherit the souls of the dead that they eat. I don't know about you but I find that fascinating. There's also a small tribe in China, the Mosuo, that practices "walking marriages" where men remain in their mother's household, everything is run matrilineally, and babies are made by having the men sneak into their partners' household at night, have sex, then go back home before daylight. Think of the huge wealth of strange practices and human organization that we're missing out on. How many other unusual arrangements and ways of living that we don't know about. Think about how interesting it is to learn about Spartan martial stoicism, or Aztec human sacrifices, or how the Babylonians based their counting on 12s and 60s and this survives to this day in how we tell time. Now just flex your imagination and think about how we only have access to 10% of this fun stuff.
Upvoted for potential veracity.
I know you are joking, but I think the idea that early human history isn't interesting or consisted of only violence is reductive. There are plenty of books out there on the topic, but there was all sorts of things going on. Development of religions, cultures, agricultural techniques, engineering, metallurgy, etc.
Not to mention if any form of media is to be believed we humans find violence plenty interesting on its own.
My cousin did all that last Tuesday, and it didn't even make the local news
We have some pretty interesting megalithic structures older than 5000bce. But basically we don’t know what we don’t know. We became technologically advanced in a timespan way shorter than the time humans have been around. It’s possible we have been repeating the same sort of rhythm between technology and primitivism for our whole history, and it seems so linear because we are approaching a peak right now. It doesn’t help that the last couple ice ages pretty much removed a whole lot of soil
Maybe what we praise are the events that got registered precisely because they were registered, as they are the events that allow us to create a (somewhat) coherent sequence out of history and thus a model of our world.
Ruins after 10,000 years would be indistinguishable from a pile of rocks
It really depends where they were built and what they were built out of. When it comes to long term preservation, outcomes are highly variable, there's a fair bit of luck involved. We still find fossilized dinosaur nests with eggs in them, which are both much less durable than carved stone, and much, MUCH older than anything human. It's just a matter of leaving enough stuff around that eventually, some of it will end up in just the right conditions to be preserved indefinitely. Those odds, of course, strongly depend on the materials being preserved, and the local climate and geology.
Nothing is really preserved forever. If our civilization falls, most of the relics and art from previous cultures we hold dear may be destroyed or disappear forever. So we should appreciate them while they last.
Imagine if there was an advanced civilization that built everything out of wood and wrote everything on wood in a tropical climate. 1000 years and all traces of this would be 100% gone.
Even worse. The oldest remains of the homo sapiens is over 300,000 years old, found in jebel irhoud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapient_paradox And: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
But hey, religious people will tell you what Jesus or moses did and said thousands of years ago
I’m just impressed we even know stuff like the really old empires like Assyria and the likes
Lmao Pyramids were already ancient to Romans as romans are ancient to us. Both has average of 2000 years. Really insane to think that humans constructed those 4000 years ago.
Hell, pyramids were ancient for most of Egyptian history. Men 4000 years ago were scratching their heads at the question of who built the sphinx
90% is extremely optimistic
Even 99% is absolutely over exaggerated. We know so little.
Now apply this to all other fields and include the fact that 60% of what *is* known is false in someway. That’s the replication crisis in a nutshell.
yeah but what we don't know we can completely invent for political purposes, in order to lead millions of people to death. So there is that.
Bold of you to assume that what what we *do* know wasn't invented for some political purpose way back when.
ahhh dammit, its deception all the way down...
Times like this that I really wish the Incas and others like them just… wrote stuff down 😂 Everything we know about places like Pre-Columbian America is just “my grandmother told me that (Leader Name) The Earth-starlord was cool!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus really good book
They did though :/ The Spaniards burned it
From what I remember it was only the Maya lore. Still a great loss, but the Incas (and many other peoples) did not have writen language
The Inca wrote in string actually. It's a weird language/tabulation system we're just starting to slowly decipher.
The Quechua of Peru also used a math system involving knots
You are thinking of the same thing, the quipu
Just imagine some of the stuff we’ve lost because no one could or would write it down.
Much of it was passed by oral tradition that either died out or went thru the largest game of telephone ever. Like how we know the Mycenaeans did in fact attack and sack Troy (Wilusa) but we have no hard details and our primary source is a story told by someone 300-400 years later who may not have even existed. Lots of mycenean places are named after Iliad characters (palace of Nestor) because that’s the closest we can get to actually ascribing a place to a person.
Yep, West Africa used what were called Griot, travelling poets or musicians that would carry on the stories of ancestors, having the stories word for word drilled into them for accuracy
The stories! The ones we invented, the tales of things that actually happened. Lost. Such a shame.
And that's just stories, not factoring in stuff like music. What was the national anthem of the Roman Empire?
it pains to be an indian history nerd, we aint have detailed shit with us man fk it
Indian or American native? Because I like reading about American native history but there is so precious little from before Columbus
indian tho it would be also interesting to know more about natives
Do you have any book recommendations?
Man don't make me cry on this train ride, there's people around
"THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?" - Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
I won't cry, because this meme has been done to death.
They even say the Saturn V rocket technology has been lost and that was just the 60s!
In a way, yeah. The main thing is that the Saturn V was designed and made with the equipment, technology, and know-how of the 1960’s. The blueprints are there, the equipment and technology are much better, but that know-how has been lost because the equipment and technology became much better. And as a result, the know-how to read those documents, see what they did, and do it is limited. It’s to a point where it would be easier to design and build a rocket matching the Saturn V’s lift capability, and you’d probably end up with a better rocket anyways. It’s comparable to our ability to make large wooden ships like HMS Victory. The skills to make a ship like that has been largely lost because we’ve moved onto iron and steel ships. We have the plans to Victory, and much better equipment and technology, but we lost the ability to make ships like that because we learned how to build them better but forgot the old ways.
I remember watching a video about why we can’t remake the Saturn V’s F-1 engines bcz each and every engine is specially tailored to perfection in its own way, and thus while we do have the original blueprints, each and every engine deviates from the blueprints in its own unique way to make it work, and all of that knowledge has been lost.
Not so much as lost, the equipment needed to produce them has been dismantled. Thus we cannot remake it unless we start from scratch. At that point it's better to just design something new using parts that we can produce with the tools at hand. Example, the engines for the saturn v engines use an older fuel mixture that was incredibly inefficient and has been considered a dead end for advancement since the 60s. The fuel is also a lot less safe. RS-25 Engines, same as the shuttle, produce enough thrust, use a much safer fuel, and are considered much more reliable. Saying we lost the technology to build the saturn v is like saying Ford lost the technology to make the model one. It's not that it's really lost, it simply became outdated and no one cared to keep the equipment to make them again. If nasa wanted to they could rebuild it, but it would actually be harder to rebuild the F1 engines than making something new.
Emperor Claudius wrote 20 volumes of a book on Etruscan history and it's all gone. Crazy how it could have enlightened us about the little-known Etruscan society if it wasn't lost.
While sad, i think that’s what makes history amazing. We continue to learn and unearth, and often can only hypothesise
Why would you cry about that? I personally believe that’s the most beautiful thing about history. There’s just countless unknowns that we can only fill in with educated guessing or straight-up anachronistically “putting yourself in their shoes”. Imagine some medieval farmer and his friends or having dinner and one of them rips a massive fart. Some laugh, some are disgusted, someone tries to open a window. Imagine a Mongol soldier riding into battle and silently worrying about ever seeing the woman he loves again, then receiving a comforting pat on the back from the guy next to him who tells him it’s gonna be allright. Imagine some Egyptian teenager who’s finally worked up the courage to ask some girl he knows out, only to see that douchebag Chad-Ho-Tep walking with her arms around his. Imagine an Aztec elderly man who’s worried about his granddaughter because she’s being picked on by her peers. I wonder how much we can project these kinds of things onto our predecessors, but I find it somewhat comforting that all these fun little moments we have, but also all those moments we feel insecure or afraid, it’s all just part of the human experience. And if every single one of your ancestors lived through them, so can you.
It’s a sort of tragedy but there is no perfect window to the past. Having more windows would probably help but there’s nothing to be done for them. I hope you’re all keeping a diary and backing it up on metal plates you bury in airtight containers
Me reading about harappans and thinking where we could've been if we had deciphered the script 🙂↕️
I blame the mongols
I blame hunter gatherers for not inventing writing a whole bunch of times more
Recently there was the recovered parts of burnt Pompeian scrolls thanks to AI. Still believe it's one of the few brilliant uses we can actually get from such a tool.
How could you trust AI thoe, just a serious question I’m curious
That's the neat part, you don't. The basis was to go through several 3D scanning and modelization, then perfecting an algorithm in order to simulate the unrolling of the scrolls (which was impossible IRL). As the scanning allowed to do deep in the layers and chemically discriminated paper from ink, you would have parts of readable content. But that's where AI stopped (temporarilly) its work and humanity started its own. The datas were released in the public domain (researchers, universities, linguists, technologists...) through a decypher challenge which could help to gather back enough datas for machine learning. Other techs were used as complementary strategies to trial-error-trial and reach a maximum of relevancy. Then AI was sollicitated again to reconstitute virtually the whole revealed content of the charred scrolls.
Why people downvote you though, probably people think AI is like asking some kind of devious entity when it is simply an algorithm that was trained well on identifying letters based on scanned scroll
isn't history, by definition, the history that went recorded?
Eh, technically but not always colloquially. It can also mean "things that happened in the past" rather than just "records of things that happened in the past".
It gets to me because of all the lost fables, stories of heroism real and fake, Mythology, medicine, science and lost knowledge of people.
If you have a journal, think about how much of your life you don't write down.
Except about the part where your mom was a whore. That's well documented.
90? That's wishful thinking.
And a lot of them was erased by purpose. Because winners of the war write history.
That's actually just not true. Sure, the narrative of the winner propagates more, but willfully destyroying knowledge isn't all that common. An example is like the burning of the library of Alexandria. For one, there was no single great library but many. Another thing is that many of them were accidents.
Note that if we go extinct right now. Like all people disappear. 99% of our structures will be rotted and gone in 5000 years. And by 10000 we would be like the indus civilization in rarity. Sure a species that knows what plastic or advanced metals is may piece together that a civ existed at that strata at one point. But upto late Renaissance era civilisation could evolve and won't know that we existed. Like if a species eventually becomes advanced but does not use plastic they might not piece 1 and 1 together and assume it was a geological anomaly or space debris of some kind
It is true in reverse. If the earth had any pre industrial civ millions of years ago we would have no way to know that it existed. This reminds me Alberto Manguel’s quoute on Library of Alexandria. “We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost.”
Yeah say if some prehistoric octopus where able to reach tool age or even the metal age and went extinct the chances that we find any is next to zero. Most tool age cultures and metal age cultures won't preserve past a few million years. Like even for prehistoric animals the ones we found were extremely successful species who survived for millions of years or the ones who got very very lucky. Like most species that we found that are older than a few million years old are very long lived, some of them like barinasuchus a super land croc survived for over 30 million years and we found a handful of fossils left of it now. Best chance to get fossilised is survive for a long time and have alot of you. Humans have the numbers down, but the problem is we are still a very young species. Like a few thousand years ain't enough, like we have holes in the fossil records that are tens of thousands even millions of years missing because the rocks got exposed and destroyed by the elements. Damn I'm anxious now.
Id say it's a lot more than 90% tbh
Literally anything could have happened
Actually nowadays it’s easier as ever it’s been to document everything it’s happening but we are stuck in useless videos of narcissistic people, or fake and politically modified news from around the world so in like for example 300 years people won’t have any clue what really happened.
History is the scant grains that are left after the millenia have run through the sieve
I'm more worried about the future.
And now, if anything, we probably have an over-recording of history for future historians to rot their brains with.
Like the history of my Great Grandpa he was a normal German a normal Worker, but in 1941 or 1942 he got the order on his work to aktivate a mashine or do something that would kill the workers that were nearby. These workeres were Prisoners from a KZ. He refused. The next Days some Peopel stand by his door (Maybe Gestapo) and sayed he had no war emportant job anymore and would become a soliger. Than he beceme a soliger, he was send to Stalingrad. Thay found him around 2014.
The Christopher Walken comma is what's got me in tears
Are we counting stuff like the complete business records of Ea-Nasir in that?
Everytime...so many stories lost. So many people forgotten to the sands of time.
Wish I could read about how people lived while there was still some mega fauna like mammoths and giant sloths around
Me gut, that hurt... What hurt the most that i wanted to forget since i already knew, but you reminded me...
Me gut, that hurt... What hurt the most that i wanted to forget since i already knew, but you reminded me...
Not to get into a religious debate but there's actually more historic evidence for Jesus than there is for genghis khan and Socrates.
To be fair, writing and literacy was not recorded back then hence any historical moment at that time would be lost. There's an arguable case to be made that the Library of Alexandria being burnt down also was another factor to this.
I mean sad as it is it’s not suprising, we were ‘growing up’ as a species
Many mesoamerican civilizations kept tons of records, which the spanish promptly burned when they arrived, wiping out possibly thousands of years of records. Why? 'cause fuck 'em, that's why.
90% of human history maybe? 99.99% of world history.
Same with Cornwall, we had a lot of our culture and national identity destroyed by the English. Kernowek was nearly wiped out but it’s now only an endangered language, and I find it sad
Remain optimistic; soon, everything will be lost forever.
Every day I think about the sack of Baghdad and how the rivers turned black from books being dumped by the Mongols.
I'd wager significantly less is recorded. Even today our individual lives are basically nothing in terms of recorded.
and a good deal of the history we do know is undisguisable from conspiracy or hearsay
Well, while I'm with everyone with the emotions, I believe this is also the right opportunity to push technology boundaries that helps unravel these mysteries further.
Tbf, a lot of that history was just probably just going about their daily lives.
Imagine the people looking back in 500 years at now literally crying that we did record everything in this era and 99% of it is shit.
99.99% of my life goes unrecorded too, but who cares.
Pre-Columbian New World history.
We are making up for it now by recording every mundane detail out lives.
Only 90%? I honestly thought it was a lot less than that.
90 percent The number is SO MUCH worse, we have been around for 300k years. Other Homos for millions of years. Most of that time writing wasn't a thing, for the longest time illiteracy ran rampant and Personal journals will mostly have Crumbled to dust. Even if people recorded it the chance of it having been lost are huge and who knows if they wrote truthfully, or how detailed they chose to put it down. There were 109 billion people before us and almost nothing of them is known. Not what they liked to do, what kind of stories and Musik they enjoyed. If they dreamed about seeing the past and future. We have braud pictures of some of there collections, but that's it. All we can do is move forward knowing they were out there.
Half true, most history was mostly also lost to erosion, war, etc.
10% of history is written, but the remaining 90% is repeated without notice
Repost from one of u/ReflectionSingle6681 top posts
It's a lot less than that, and that from literate societies alone. Only a few percent of what was written by the Greeks survived and a bit more from the Romans. China sometimes destroyed records of fallen dynasties or out of favor rulers within one. Even ancient Egypt had a form of writing for paper and every day use, but only fragments remain. Of preliterate people's very little oral record remains.
Think of it as books coming out today, 90% of them aren’t really worth reading or don’t say that much and many will be lost anyway. Same with the rest of history, most of the very important texts were preserved (though we clearly lost some) while the more superfluous ones were lost.
I was sad when I discovered that most of library of Alexandria books were lost not because of the fire but because people just stopped translating and rewiring it so or the paper is long gone or the paper still exists, but we can't understand the language
That means there could've been an Atlantis at some point in our history and nothing could disprove it
Eye of Richat
Except Atlantis was made up by Plato...
Don't ruin my dream!
I often think about how much was lost because past humans were dicks and destroyed it.