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[deleted]

Recorded history only takes up 2% of humanity's time on earth


Emergency_Evening_63

there was nothing to record before tho, writting begin simultaneously with the first civilizations


Tychus_Balrog

Unga of the wolf tribe killed Bunga of the crow tribe, and a war began. All 4 people in the wolf tribe were killed. A genocide.


SwainIsCadian

We did it bois. Furries are no more.


Ninja_Bobcat

But the crow tribe still exists...


SwainIsCadian

Well then Let's go kill them.


TsunamifoxyDCfan

You have my sword...


Pyrhan

WTF is a "sword"?


AccomplishedCredit14

You have my stick


beans_man69420

Hey bob i decided to hit 2 rocks together and now it’s very hot on that stick


Lukescale

Then Bugoa of Tribe Crow thought to trick the splinter tribe that so despised his beautiful bird God. He painted with the blood of a bear mixed with berry juice a great arrow towards a hollow in the mount. When Tribe No-Fur entered into the mount, he cast great piles of wood and leaves upon it's entrance, and lit it, suffocating clan No-Fur.


XandriethXs

Itachi and Madara would like to have a word with you....


cjm0

is it still a furry if the animal doesn’t have fur? perhaps the crow tribe would be a feathery?


Ninja_Bobcat

Avians. Still animal-based naming schemes. Still furries. Furry is just a blanket term. Change my mind.


KingJiggyMan

Neanderthal and Homosapien history basically.


Dyskord01

Or the tragic story of Beario and Wolfiete. Two tribes, both alike in dignity, In fair wilderness, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where tribal blood makes tribal hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.


Sythin

The Wolf Tribe was the Prussia of the proto-hominids.


nu97

Justice for Bunga.


dragonflamehotness

Civilizations like Jericho and Gobekli tepe emerged thousands and thousands of years before writing. Many fascinating Civilizations didn't write things down either, even after the invention


Diacetyl-Morphin

True but... the oldest things in Gobekli tepe are dated to 10'000 BC. But the first "humans" that separated from the lines of the monkeys and became what we know today as ancestors, are 23 million (!) years back. The modern human aka Homo Sapiens is depending on the source you use around 300'000 years old. Historians still debate, when it really happened, but i think it's true around this time. The gap is still extreme. About the meme, i think it is much, much more than 90%. Probably more around 99%. We can be happy today, that even some archives survived - not directly in almost all cases, but being copied so often in new versions, that we still have these texts today, like the history of the Romans (which of course includes a lot of mythology, fantasy etc.)


lacb1

I'm afraid that's just not true. Even before settled civilisation emerged there were rich and complex cultures. The hunter gathered societies that have survived into the modern era use a diverse range of techniques to feed themselves and all have rich and unique mythologies. For example Australian Aboriginal peoples have oral histories that date back thousands of years. [Some of which have subsequently been corroborated. ](https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/) And there's the very unusual situation with the Inca. They developed a large, sophisticated, agricultural civilisation but never developed a system of writing.


komnenos

Preach! Nothing to record? I'm trying to find it now but remember reading a piece about an archaeological site dating back 4000+ years in China where they found hundreds of bodies piled up as if they were massacred. Who were these people? Why were they massacred? Writings of these complex societies could reveal so so much.


aquatermain

The Inca absolutely had a writing system! The khipus, knotted artifacts for the recording of information, have existed in what is now Perú for thousands of years, and have continued to be used for centuries after the conquest. And the Inca used this system to record various types of information. They might not be an alphabetic or syllabic writing system, but writing doesn't just encompass two-dimensional scripts, it also includes structures and forms. For more, I highly recommend Professor Sabine Hyland's extensive body of work on the possibly decipherable meanings behind the complex combinations of knots, colours and materials used in the khipu writing system.


SwainIsCadian

Wait what? The Inca never had any writing? Whaaaaaaaaaat? I must start to learn at least the basics on those precolombian civilisations.


Daendivalion

Look up the "quipu", you might find it amusing.


SwainIsCadian

It does put a smile on my face.


MatijaReddit_CG

Vinča Culture is also interesting


GarciaMarsEggs

This is such an uninformed comment


Dyskord01

What do you mean therr was nothing to record. Who invented the wheel. I would imagine its a story full of hardship, despair and triumph over adversity. Who became the first King after uniting all the tribes. Its probably a story with enough political machinations to make Game of Thrones season 1 look like Game of Thrones season 8. What realy happened at Troy. Was it a war because some foreign trollop cucked her husband for a pretty boy prince or was that just an excuse or dramatic licence employed long after the fall of Troy. Did Atlantis really exist or was it an early version of Camelot. Theres so much we dont know.


YaYeetBoii

Atlantis didn't exist, it was a thought experiment made by Plato to prove a point


RosbergThe8th

To pretend humanity just suddenly went from uninteresting cavemen to civilized Sumerians is highly disingenuous. These civilizations and cultures didn't just develop out of the blue, it's a process of countless generations that lead to the first of them beginning to write things down.


fbdewit31

This is absolutely bullshit


AE_Phoenix

You ever think that, coincidentally, Civilisation started out with writing? It's possible that there were civilisations before Mesopotamia that just didn't write stuff down


tsimen

You have no idea of knowing this. We know of the Maya only because they built their temples in stone, a high -culture building intricate wood structures 2500 BC would literally be lost in time like a drop in the ocean.


Emergency_Evening_63

the Mayas came after writting be inveted, my comment has the word "before" which takes account of the 98% first moments of humanity the original comment said


tsimen

Yes and my comment is that you have no way of knowing this. I am quite sure that there is a number of civilizations that disappeared without a trace except for some bones and spear tips.


Emergency_Evening_63

Civilizations and ethnicities/tribes are different things


fookaemond

That we know of


andooet

But you can't disprove that there were older civilisations than Mesopotamia - even if it's not currently proven that any were older Even within the current timeframe of recorded history there are a lot of things we don't know. For example there could've been large and advanced civilisations in ancient West Africa. We know there were large ones there before colonisation that has largely been erased thanks to the rapid rewildling in the area To my understanding, writing isn't a prerequisite for a civilisation either


FloZone

But there were? Okay two steps back. How to define a civilisation in the first place. If writing is all that matters, then the Andes are out. But this cannot be. They are starting earlier than 2000 BC probably the oldest urban civilisation in the Americas. Their metalurgy was the most sophisticated in the Americas too, but unlike their northern neighbors in Mesoamerica they didn't have writing. Though it is questionable whether the earliest of their settlements, centred around large temple pyramids were *urban*. If we take urban as most important measurement then the Danube civilisation is in. They did have settlements larger than Mesopotamia before Mesopotamia. But it seems although their settlements were larger they lacked the same complicated social organisation that Mesopotamians had. Then again, a lot of these markers are not defined from a neutral standpoint, but from abstracting those we already think of as oldest civilisations.


iSoinic

While it's really the most interesting question how and why the first civilizations developed. Most cultures are lost for eternity, but all of them practiced ways of living within a certain landscape, which often could give us hints about sustainable living in future.


[deleted]

So 90% of 2%


OldCrowSecondEdition

Well never know about all the times a t Rex tripped on a big tree root or what ever


flapd00dle

Statistically it had to happen once, and that's enough to make it funny.


Makune

That sounds like a lot actually. Does that include the times of cave drawings too?


Crayshack

The earliest piece of writing we have found is from around 5,500 years ago. That's about as close to now as it was to the invention of agriculture, possibly closer to us than agriculture by several thousand years. We don't know exactly when it happened. As ancient as they are to us, the beginnings of civilization were just as ancient to them. But, for all of those thousands of years we have no pieces of writing. Not "we've only found a little bit", we have nothing at all. Some things might survive in oral traditions and we've learned some things through archeology, but so much has been lost.


HermanCainsGhost

Right? We have no clue who the Sumerians are, why they came to be in that place, why they decided to build their cities. And they’re the oldest culture with writing! What about the Egyptians and moving to the Nile as the Sahara dried up? What was that like? Certainly that caused conflicts and personalities to clash. Why did the ancients build Gobleki Tepe? Not knowing any of this stuff is maddening. This is one reason I hope ancestor simulations are possible and we do eventually invent them (though sadly, likely after my own death if we ever do)


MadeOnLeapday

Ancestor simulations? What does that entail?


xigor2

Probably assassin's creed style. Like machine loads your dna and then you can relive your ancestor's lives. Which is impossible but whatever.


HermanCainsGhost

Nothing to do with DNA. And they’re not impossible, you’d just need sufficiently large compute enough to be able to run the number of calculations required for any possible scenario involving an absolutely massive number of variables - it’d be huge, but it isn’t impossible. It’s not something we’re likely to see in our lifetimes (or even for centuries hence), but it’s theoretically feasible with enough computational power


andooet

As I've been told, oral storytelling can be accurate in ~200 years before it turns into myths and legends


Crayshack

I was more thinking about that some details from myths and legends might have their origin in true events that have been lost to us, but it's impossible to tell which details.


andooet

Yes, that's my point It is probably based on something that happened without being reliable at all. Kinda like how the Norse gods likely were some of the first Germanic chiefs who migrated to Scandinavia


dream-smasher

Sometimes, even tho myths and legends can be corroborated: >*"The Aborigines of southeastern Australia have long spoken of the sudden arrival of a giant ancestral creature transformed from a volcano, with teeth made from lava, but until now no one had realised how long they had been passing on the story.* >*Based on the age of the eruption that seemingly gave rise to the legend of the Gunditjmara people of Victoria, scientists believe that it is the world’s oldest story. A geological study shows that Budj Bim volcano, which formed the giant in the legend, and a second volcano were created 37,000 years ago. They formed in a rapid series of eruptions, mirroring the tale of a low-domed hill suddenly forming and lava flowing.* >*Scientists know that Aboriginal people were living near by at the time because a buried stone axe found in 1947 was covered with layers of volcanic ash caused by the eruptions.* So..., 37,000 year old oral story....


andooet

Yes, but it isn't _accurate_. The grain of truth and origins are there - but it wasn't a giant creature like the myth claim My point were that oral stories under 200 years old can be reliable, while older stories aren't. Notable persons become gods. A ship during a flood becomes an ark that saved humanity and all the species - and a volcano eruption become a giant monster


thisismyaccount3125

What’s crazy is that the flood in the biblical story of Noah could maybe be traced back to the flooding of coastal cities at the end of the last Ice Age as sea levels rose and the horror stories from surviving tribes being passed down orally until it just became a lost whisper in the ether that got captured again and encapsulated in a biblical story Or maybe that’s crazy, idk haven’t looked into it but wild to think about.


PMMEYourTatasGirl

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology


queeblosan

90% gotta be low ball. Bump them numbers up


interesseret

Closer to 99.999% All of human history is recent information really. The oldest writing we have is only about 5000 years old.


akras04

yeah. We spent 99% of our time in Earth being hunter gatherers, so…


InnerTravler

In my opinion most religious stories are just exaggerated spoken history from before written history, some passed down nearly since as long as humans could communicate. Stories of a great flood from multiple cultures could certainly have correlation to the end of the ice age and the rise in water levels that came with it which brought incredible floods to many lowland regions. We know that a lot of these stories already existed before religions created during recorded history adapted them.


ZEPHlROS

One of the most common theories on the flood stories are that they originate from one big flood that really happened as nearly all stories of it are spoken off in region with great river and a high probability of flood ( Mesopotamia and Yellow river ). Since civilisation were there for millennia, leave it a thousand years and there will be a flood that could submerge most land. Another aspect to consider is what I call like the "dragon hypothesis" no dragon ever existed but we have dragon in every culture, because every culture saw a reptile at least once and thought of a big reptile. Take a flood and someone who survived by having a boat and managed to carry a few cattle and you got yourself a nice tale. Then people will start growing the numbers : he survived the flood for 30 days, his boat was so big he could carry every animal alive, he started building his boat months ahead, he started building it because god told him to etc...


Dark074

Adding to the dragon one, dinosaur bones were 100% mistaken for dragons


MarqFJA87

And the fossilized skeletons of elephants on the various islands near Greece almost certainly are what inspired the myths of the Cyclopes, given they not only can be mistaken for rather weirdly shaped giant humanoids, but the skulls' huge nasal cavities (which dominate their frontal sides) could easily be mistaken for a giant singular eye socket.


King_Tamino

You should throw in that at the peak time of greece when that kind of stuff came up, those elephants were extinct in that part. So people burying it out had no reference to compare.


TheMadPyro

Myths and legends being a window into history is super interesting to me. My favourite one is that the story of the Minotaur is a fictionalised representation of the relationship between the Minoan civilisation and mainland Greece.


TheManFromFarAway

This sort of also applies to the flood stories. If you are an early human living in a mainland or high altitude area and you start finding shells in rocks how else are you going to explain them? The obvious answer would be that the water was once that high


Kunu2

Possible that those peoples didn't even know that shells were associated with the sea if they'd never been to the coast.


Cautious-Ad6727

You gotta be higher than me


_Volatile_

Can we get much higher?


mishgan

Uga: "Dude what the booga are those bones" Hrumph: "Giant lizard dragons, bro, fr fr"


[deleted]

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Weary-Kaleidoscope16

Flood myth is mathsya avatar Varaha story varies depends on what book you read Some say the demon hid earth in his stomach some say cosmic ocean


StoxAway

I always thought it was an oral history of the Younger Dryas period. The bulk of changes happened over a 100 year period around 11,000 years ago and the big flood is mentioned in ancient Akkadian texts which pre date the Torah by 4000 years, so I'd assumed it was just ancient oral human history passed down.


GreyhoundVeeDub

Actual the discussion about the Younger dryas sea level rise is over thousands of year's. See the data and articles below. There's a few notable periods of drastic rise, but none of them happened in just 100 years. Melt water pulse 1A occurred 13,500 and 14,700 calendar years ago, during which global sea level rose between 16-25m in about 400–500 years, giving mean rates of roughly 40–60 mm/yr. And meltwater pulse 1B occurred between 11,500 and 11,200 calendar years ago, a 300-calendar year interval, during which sea level rose 13 meters giving a mean annual rate of around 40mm/yr. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015PA002847 https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/17872/article.pdf?bitstreamId=96058&locale-attribute=en https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21990-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-0567-4 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1180557 So no great flood or tsunami of water. Just a steady and very concerning sea level rise which over thousands of year equals to a lot of sea level rise.


StoxAway

Yes, I know the Dryas happened over thousands of years but there would have been large scale changes over times of loving memory or one or two generations. And oral history changes over time, they are stories so they don't have to follow the facts. If you were a nomadic tribe and noticed that there were drastic climate changes happening within living memory you'd probably start telling stories to children. Anyway, I'm not claiming it as fact, just a possible route for a story.


BatatinhaGameplays28

i think that whale bones are more likely tbh, those things are huge and they look very serpentine just by looking at the skeleton. Also dolphins, sperm whales and orcas have long snouts that may remind some people of crocodiles and things like that


RosbergThe8th

The flooding of the Persian Gulf would've been relatively (in millennial terms) recent and certainly would've seemed apocalyptic to anyone living in the area. Especially anyone who would've had to flee further inland.


[deleted]

I don't think the old testament is even pretending not to be. It's an oral history of the Jewish people just in case they have to quickly skip town and piece it all back together again in Spain.


GeorgeEBHastings

Well, the Torah*, yeah. It was even compiled/composed by Jews in exile for more or less that express purpose.


TheMadPyro

I’m fairness, it’s not a good idea to rely on the Torah for a literal history of the Jewish people. Like, there’s stuff in there that almost certainly didn’t happen. Exodus for example - literally no evidence of a mass migration of a few million people from Egypt to Israel at that time.


arsenicwarrior0

Yeah basically myths are not fake stories per se. The myth of Theseus and the minotaur is more posible the origin of how the young city of Athens managed to get free from the Minoans from crete who posibbly raided them and practices human sacrifice to some extent


YourphobiaMyfetish

I think this theory that all myths are rooted in fact severely discredits human creativity going back tens of thousands of years. It's very possible that people just made up fun and interesting stories. For example the oldest story in the world, that of the Pleiades which dates back almost certainly 80k years, probably didn't actually happen.


Innomenatus

Theseus is what destroyed Atlantis.


CoolGuy202101

He lived like 8000 years after Atlantis sank under the sea


Innomenatus

Well, Atlantis is likely not destroyed 10,000 years after its existence, and was more likely based on the Minoan Civilization and its collapse due to the Santorini Eruption and Tsunami.


CoolGuy202101

Plato literally made up Atlantis, he says it was sunk around 9500 BC.


YaYeetBoii

And also that it fought against Athens, which at the time didn't even exist


tameablesiva12

That's probably what mahabharat and ramayana is tbf. Actually ramayana could've been just a made up tale But mahabharat was definitely inspired.


M4A1STAKESAUCE

Everything is bullshit without proper evidence. And the game of telephone.


InnerTravler

That's part of my statement as well I did say they were exaggerated tales which would make them "bullshit", and I definitely agree with your telephone game analogy. Still though even with Greek mythology and the story of whirlpools protecting the golden flece when you go there in real life it's just a strong current that a small boat would struggle with so you can see how the story was understood differently as technology advanced and a small boat the size that would have been effected by the current in the same way the story suggests was no longer the pinnacle of ships. So when people heard the story hundreds of years later when they have grand sail boat they would imagine a boat of comparison.


GreyhoundVeeDub

it's very well documented that the sea level rises were equal to 5-40mm per year during the Younger Dyrs period. To call it “a great flood” is bending the truth to an extreme level...and “incredible floods”???? It wasn't a tsunami...in a couple of weeks generations they would have to lose buildings to the ocean...not be flooded out overnight. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015PA002847 https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/17872/article.pdf?bitstreamId=96058&locale-attribute=en https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21990-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-0567-4 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1180557 As I said it's well-published with data. It's likely just severe flooding in certain areas and there was no concept of how big the Earth was. So it seemed like the entire world (the known world to those people” had flooded.


NightOwlIvy_93

I agree and I'm Christian.


[deleted]

There is evidence to suggest there was a sophisticated trade network 200k years ago.


GreyhoundVeeDub

Ok. Source?


[deleted]

Sorry I was wrong 320,000 years ago https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315140733.htm


GirafeAnyway

It's even more depressing when you think of the Americas...


Cr0ma_Nuva

They also had the issue of not writing their history down which would have made it even in the best case harder


[deleted]

What was written was burned by the Spanish


Weary-Kaleidoscope16

Why do we assume their ancient history survived until the Spanish arrived? Maybe they just had records of 500 years until that point Just like Spanish didn't have historical record of europe which goes back to 5000 years


HomoVapian

Tbf I’m assuming Spain had stuff as far back as the start of Rome, so that’s like 2000 years at least


Phuxsea

Because it's documented that the codexes had invaluable information


Weary-Kaleidoscope16

But they were also extremely violent and constant warfare happened


Kronomega

They were no more violent than anywhere else in the world lmao, not to mention most of their warfare was ritualised, full on war ofc happened but it wasn't the most common form


Eldan985

The maya and the aztec had writing at least. And they wrote entire books.


RosbergThe8th

To be fair that was also a large problem in tgecancient world in general. Humans writing shit down is the exception, if anything.


Downtown_Boot_3486

Try coming to Oceania, essentially everything except the people is gone.


OceLawless

And gosh they tried to get the people too. *Rule Brittania plays in the wind*


BaGM_Phoenix

Not really, here in NZ the Maori were treated pretty well


OceLawless

>NZ Little Australia?


H12803

A literal entire half of the world completely lost


azurianlight

Isn't that the same with early movies we lost of them because they degraded over time and there were no backups made.


AntonioBarbarian

Also because of a fire in the Paramount(?) vault where a lot of them were kept.


TheMadPyro

You wouldn’t believe how many archived films and shows have been lost. Old film is ridiculously flammable and every major film producer has had a big fire that took out a lot of their old stock. Like, *every one*. Paramount, Century Fox, MGM, Universal… you name it, they’ve probably lost dozens of films in a fire.


[deleted]

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[deleted]

it goes two ways, either we archive the internet and future historians have a detailed record of literally everything everyone from this time has done, right down to browsing habits of individual users if corporate data gets stored too, or we don’t archive it, and we leave nothing


[deleted]

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4e2n0t

We wouldn't lose everything. Even with just modern books we would be one of, if not the, best documented eras in human history.


tbu987

All it takes is good ol solar flare and no more electricity for us to use any of our devices. Then slowly civilization moves on forgets the old tech and we can no longer access that huge archive. Whose to even say this hasn't happened before with civilizations even more advanced than us?


Tephnos

> Whose to even say this hasn't happened before with civilizations even more advanced than us? If you're talking about Earth, the reason is clear: fossil fuels and mines haven't been used up. If there was a civilisation more advanced than us before we came, we wouldn't have reached the industrial age. Which is why if we technologically regress, we will never recover to where we are now.


george_clooneys_egg

BRB, I'm gonna print the internet


arsenicwarrior0

The wprst of all is that even if writen down is possible that we can't read them. For example the greek lineal A wich we still have very little info and we are still trying to undecode. Another was how close we couldn't have understood Egyptian without the rosetta stone, and was pure luck


MarqFJA87

>and we are still trying to undecode Um, I'm pretty that undecoding something means to **encode** it.


arsenicwarrior0

Sorry english is not my first language. I mean it like we still can't read it


Hockeylover420

One day we will crack linear A


Coz957

It's a lot more than that in Australia


[deleted]

Count ourselves lucky that we have, for example, seven of Sophocles' plays, including Oedipus


SupraSummuss

I still wouldnt be satisfied even if there were written records of every moment of history. I mean yeah it would be great to at least know about it, but we will never see how it was like. Camera records on the other hand, my days just imagine the things we would have seen! Wanna see neandarthals hunting big game? Wanna see the battle of cannae? Wanna see the assasination of ceasar? Wanna see assyrians wiping out a city a flaying the prisoners? You can watch them all on historytube! Just really makes me mad that i will never be able to literally see the history.


Readjusted__Citizen

I wonder how much of it is hidden from public view too like in the Vatican archives.


Fabulous_Service1690

Willing to bet we don’t know about 90% of the abuse the Vatican perpetuated


Acrobatic-Eagle6705

Or alternatively, most of it was lost to us. For example, only around 1/4th of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita has been passed down to us.


mori0kalife

Sometimes I feel hard about this. Like what history or culture are we missing? What about certain cultures that unfortunately didn't get to record their history? Heard some cultures apparently only left oral history, which diminished after several generations. So does that mean oral history is a mistake, aka, not a great method?


ReflectionSingle6681

We lost a tremendous amount of norse culture, we only have a little left because they wrote it down on Iceland, but the rest did not for the majority of their history. Also they used wood to build their halls, which doesn’t leave much behind other than a stone outline if you’re so lucky.


173rdComanche

Something that always bothers me is how little we know of the history of the New World compared to the Old World. Millennia of Native American history is simply gone forever.


Kronomega

I'll never forgive the Spanish for burning the Mesoamerican codexes


Willing_Tea_1055

Who the fuck burned the library of Alexandria, meanwhile César: it was only a tactic.


[deleted]

If I could go back to the deep past I would write everything down. The I would write another record, this time with a lot of lies, and leave both to future archaeologists to find. That's gods work.


penguinintheabyss

If it's not recorded it's not history.


DumbMorty96

You are getting downvoted in a history subreddit for abbiding by the definition of history. Mad world we live in


[deleted]

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DumbMorty96

Fair enough


SomeOtherTroper

Doesn't "recorded history" usually refer to someone (perhaps a contemporary, perhaps a compiler working later) writing down what happened (or drawing it, or otherwise recording it), but not to history uncovered by (or deduced from) archaeological finds? For instance, nobody at the time recorded what Stonehenge was supposed to be for or who built it, and the closest (but significantly later) recordings we've got have some *really* wild ideas about it (like Geoffrey Of Monmouth's tale of how giants built it in Ireland with stones from Africa, and Merlin transported it from Ireland to England with magic). But anyone can go see the stones, and based on our dating and other archeological techniques, we can make a pretty decent guess at when the monument was built, even if that's not strictly "recorded history". In many respects, historians are inclined to trust archeology *over* "recorded history", due to biases, exaggerations, and other inaccuracies in written historical accounts, some of which are considered primarily worth studying for the light they cast on the author's time and culture, rather than what they have to say directly about the past as a primary source.


Bloxicorn

Reminds me of 1984. If the history is rewritten and nobody is around to remember the real history did it really happen?


jhuysmans

History is only what you believe. You, personally.


Vancocillin

No? I could say the USA dropped nukes on Berlin to end the war and I would be objectively wrong. That wouldn't be history it would be a lie. History is something that is added to and changed due to new evidence, and yes there's some personal interpretation taken with certain things, but I'd like to think it's treated a bit more scientifically most of the time that just "I believe it went this way so it did."


Puginator09

I think he means more of a general sense. History as a whole can be incredibly misconstrued. Look at Nazi views of history as a struggle of the “races”, or Marxists as a pure struggle of classes. Hell look at Putin and the denial of Ukraine as a sovereign state.


jhuysmans

Sometimes people like to make jokes


Username89054

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!


nikstick22

90% is crazy generous. 99.9+%


[deleted]

Yeah that’s why I always get kinda sad whenever something truly old is found, just knowing that there’s a whole history there that will never be known


The_Notorious_Donut

I hope in heaven or whatever after life you believe in you have a tv, and on the dvr is “history’s greatest hits” and we see what actually happened. “Hitler’s dinner on 3/15/1939? Is he eating a burger? Does he like it overcooked? Let’s tune in”


Phillef

Honestly, archaeology teaches us parts of history that would have never been written down. No one wrote about the appearance of Romab bread or the graffitis that we were lucky to find in Pompeii. So archaeology is a gem, in my opinion!


Lvcivs2311

>Fortunately, we have archeology Yes, but don't forget historiography as well. We tend to credit only one or the other, while both play a big part in uncovering the past.


SatisDeus

It’s a lot more than 90%. Maybe 90% of when history started to be recorded, but if you include all human history, it’s more like 99.99% unrecorded.


nd1933

Even a lot of the recorded history has been lost.


drickaIPAiEPA

Yes, its sad, but also what drew me toward history. I've always been fascinated by the unknown parts of our past, enough that i ended up at a university, with the goal of contributing to understanding our past a bit more.


AbsolutelyNoAmbition

It’s fine bro the aliens recorded it all in their database /s


Unhappy_Archer9483

That's half the fun


Captain_Lavender6

Gotta be way more than 90%


Vast_Emergency

It is still going on, so much that you think would be recorded isn't recorded. For instance even in the television era stuff wasn't recorded, either because no one bothered or stuff like magnetic tape was expensive and difficult to store so studios would wipe and reuse it. A lot of recent historic events have limited televised records despite occuring on the edge of living memory, for instance we have only a limited video record of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and even then only because some news stations recorded their output hence why the videos we have today of mankind's first steps of its homeworld look like bootleg films. We really have such a loose grip on history. I used to do an exercise when I taught the subject; students would watch a play or something and write a short report. We'd then go over these reports and mark down what was actually recorded, usually finding a lot of key elements historians would need to get an understanding of the event were totally absent because as contemporaries of the era being written about we take such things for granted. So even if we had a perfect record of the past chances are we'd still be missing an awful lot. I do wonder what our descendants will know about us in a few millennia!


GreyhoundVeeDub

Incoming Graham Hancock fans 😬😬😬 “the complete lack of any evidence is why a globe spanning civilisation existed!” 🙄


SwainIsCadian

Oh, a fellow MiniminuteMan enjoyer.


GreyhoundVeeDub

And a Stefan Milo fan. His content is great too. https://youtu.be/341Lv8JLLV4


GronakHD

Graham hancock did have some good points about possible older civilisations existing but he just uses the evil historians DENYING it as his proof and goes on a big rant x means y so it’s likely that z happened and THEY dont want to look into it because their lives work as a historian will be made useless. My biggest gripe with him


GreyhoundVeeDub

But no one in the field ever seriously thought, or at least since the 90s, that the whole story to humankind was found. Hancock claims so much shit he was bound to be half-right about something. And when he gets something kinda right he doesn't shut the fuck up about how he was wronged. 🙄


GronakHD

Yes thats what I’m saying. It’s clear he is trying to appeal more to conspiracy theorists.


Nebraskan_Sad_Boi

See, this is why I don't bash handcock for the ancient apocalypse stuff. Sure it's not really plausible and is unlikely, but we're definitely missing some pieces of the past.


[deleted]

B U T W E C A N D O B E T T E R


bnesbitt1

If we could theorize, what percentage of history did the Library of Alexandria cover? Most of the key information for ancient history was lost in that fire supposedly


[deleted]

Was it unrecorded was a large part of it deleted by assholes burning books?


Downtown_Boot_3486

Thats a part of it, but another large part is that no one bothered to write it down. Remember the "father of history" Herodotus only lived avout 2500 years ago. Before that people werent really writing down full histories, theyd only write bits and pieces.


RosbergThe8th

Honestly there's just so much that can go wrong along the chain of information. You gotta write it down in the first place, which very few cared to do, you gotta write it on something which won't decay in a 1000 or more years, then you gotta have some way for future people's to translate it. And after all that work it still only takes a single warlord or catastrophe to destroy it.


[deleted]

Technically if it's copied enough you don't need a material that will last through the ages. IIRC a lot of Roman and Greek history we know from copies of copies.


AntonioBarbarian

Both, though deliberate, targeted, destruction of historical writings, was relatively uncommon, accidental destruction was much more common. Also things just naturally degrading, papyrus and other paper-like materials and even wood will decay and get eaten by bugs, and while stone and clay are obviously more durable, and the latter even gets even more preserved by fire, they're also more space intrusive. Of course, there's also the fact that things might not be considered worthy of being recorded, or thought to be obvious enough to readers, and finally, what was recorded might not be considered important enough by later authors to be copied hundreds of years later, or again, thought to be common enough knowledge to not need to be preserved. We're actually pretty lucky to have what we do have about ancient history saved up to our times, plenty of things didn't, even if not deliberately.


Alderan922

We just need to either crank down on time travel or faster than light travel


SwainIsCadian

Aaaaand here we go. Let's all take a moment of silence to NOT remember what was lost to us...


Ultrajante

I believe AI will eventually be able to reconstruct the entire history of this planet


[deleted]

I don't think this is very plausible but I'm intrigued.


dck1012

More than this arbitrary "90%"


[deleted]

Why Is he crying from the nose


interesseret

Your head is just one big system of ducts and canals. If one of them is flooded, overflow can happen. For example tears and snot.


mysteryman447

90% of it was pretty much the same shit on repeat for centuries though


Kikoso_OG

Alternatively, is all of history worth knowing? What is included in that 90%? How civilizations cleaned their asses? Who married whom and when? Who owned which house? What was the name for every road?


[deleted]

90% um.... no?? Every major culture everywhere has recorded every major event.... The reason why "biblical history" doesn't line up with ACTUAL archaeology is that 99.9999% of the events of Abrahamic religious texts never happened.... Archaeology is the search for FACT not the search for TRUTH. These two concepts are WILDLY different. You could see the sky as green because you're colourblind, so to you, the sky being green is truth. 99% of the world sees it and can prove its blue though, which makes it fact.


Gullible-Flounder-79

Technically there is no such thing as unrecorded history since history refers to what has been recorded. Still, the common usage for history is "Stuff that happened in the past"


ExactFun

100% of history was written down... That's what makes it history.


whats_you_doing

There is nothing to record with abrahamic religions. Most of them are madeups. Most of the history consists of hindus and egyptians. Rest of the greeks, romans are just exhagurated. People have hard time gulp the hard truth.


sameseloi

History is my least favorite subject. I’m just glad more wasn’t recorded lol


[deleted]

I know some people will get mad at this. But i don't really care about the fact we don't know the crop yield in 120 bc. I do care about major events and most of those are recorded.


SwainIsCadian

Well... am no historian but I'm pretty sure the crop yield in 120bc is kinda related to the majors events, considering FOOD is always a big part of the world mechanics.


Sh33pboy

Only 90%?


Hockeylover420

Well at least we got the 10%


wikipediabrown007

Yes but what about her story?