Probably more like 99,999…%
Well how far back are we talking? 200,000 years or just since writing was invented. Technically those cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago could be telling historic events of some kind but if we even just say “only since 5000BCE” and only consider events of significant historic consequence shaping any given region (as opposed to neighbors starting a blood fued by shitting in each others yurts), then it’s STILL probably like 90% lost which is just wild.
Is it history and not ancient times if it is not recorded?
I would like to add:
Imagine all of the recorded history that was destroyed.
I had a thought about this on a toke and walk. Imagine all the artisans over the course of human existence. All the skills and tricks they learned to just exist and live. Like a hunter tieing the ends of their bow in a slightly different way so it would work better with what they had, or a cook who figured out a more interesting way to make pasta or something. All that is just lost to the sands of time. That’s okay, humanity is struggling along just fine. Still left me wondering, what do we not know?
Want to feel sadder? Humanity has existed on Earth in its current form for about 200,000 years.
We’ve only had civilization for about 10,000.
That means humans spent about 180,000 years throwing rocks, sticks, and presumably feces at each other in the dirt before we entertained the idea of working together for mutual benefit. With all of our present senses and capacities at our disposal.
Just incase anyone ever wonders why it’s so difficult for humanity to do what’s best for itself. We only do what’s in our best interests after we’ve fully exhausted all the bad options several times over.
that’s not really true. 10,000 years ago is about when we developed agriculture, stopped roaming as much, and started writing in some form that could survive the millennia, but we’ve been living and working together since long before we were ever recognizably human.
In addition, we keep pushing key invention dates back further and further as we discover more archaeological evidence. It’s quite possible we were doing human things long before we think we did.
This is another thing that seems really weird to me. The explosion of technological development in the last 300 years or so compared to the preceding several thousand is pretty wild.
What boiling water with coal does to a motherfucker.
One of my favorite memes in general, used to great effect here.
What ______________ does to a mf
But I mean… really tho!!
. 10,000 years ago is about when we developed agriculture, stopped roaming as much, and started writing in some form that could survive the millennia
This is bias towards a specific type of societal structure.
Lots of peoples with rich, complex and fascinating cultures continued to live successful nomadic lives for centuries past the introduction of agriculture.
Pre-agrarian humans had more in common with beasts than with us. We were basically just another migratory animal subject to the migration patterns of our prey and seasonal growth. We have had the misfortune to see what feral humans who survived in isolation behave like.
The larger scale cooperation required for agriculture is when we began to diminish behaving as such.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Sanichar
We are products of our environments.
This is the dumbest “im so smart and edgy” comment I’ve ever seen. what we call a feral human today haa zero relation to life in pre-agrarian societies, also the idea that people …going to places were food will be makes them mindless zombies is so ridiculous thatI don’t even know where to start
20 minutes of looking into archeological sites will show you how complex and cooperative non-agrarian society’s were (I’m saying non here instead of pre because there are many instances of societies developing agriculture and then moving away from it due to various social/environmental factors)
Yeah. People seem to forget that the people in our past are exactly the same as us. They had fun, loved each other, got upset, got happy, worked together. They just didn’t have the advancements we have. Just because they went where food was doesn’t make them any less human. What else were they gonna do? Starve? They needed to eat, and they didn’t know of any alternative reliable way of getting food besides hunting since they didn’t figure out farming yet.
We never stopped throwing feces and I guarantee we were more close to each other in prehistory than we are now. We’ve been waging war for as long as we could record it.
That’s what the authorities want you to think. They don’t consider anything civilized unless it’s suffering under their rule.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilis#Latin
It literally just means “living in a city”
The first and longest lasting of all prisons.
Go live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, then. Stop wasting society’s resources.
I give more to society than you or the parasites you worship.
Feels like we’re doing our best to make up for that now with pics and video from almost everyone on the planet hitting the interwebs.
I pity the historian that has to try to dig through all of it.
That’s if it survives. Entropy has a go at everything.
Funny how some older media are so much better for longevity, like CDs.
And the expected lifespan is still only 50-100 years.
That’s a speck of sand it the human history.Tape disk drives and tapes are actually some of the longest lasting, when stored properly. Tape isn’t great for active data needs, where you need to read/write the data regularly. Super slow for that. But it’s killer for writing once and then dropping it in storage.
Anyway, same thing with tapes, the length of time they last is a fraction of history, on top of needing proprietary hardware to play them.
For example, there was that recently unearthed pilot of a sketch comedy show from Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’s Douglas Adams. It’s not particularly great, but it was lost to time except for a copy that Chapman had recorded to tape when the show first aired.
Problem was, that tape was so old when it was discovered, it pre-dated VHS and Betamax and was in a format that literally no players existed for anymore. This lead to a long effort to rebuild a player from scratch, which they eventually succeeded, and now it lives on YouTube for weird comedy nerd historians.
Anyway, the point being is that the mediums are short-term storage, for all intents and purposes, and that pretty much goes for all types of media humans uses, going as far back as stone tablets and books. The ones that survived were lucky and most are lost to time due to destruction or environmental degradation. At least with stone tablets and paper all you needed was to understand the language it was written in. Now we’re going to need electricity and knowledge of historical data storage practices and technologies.
So, we’re always losing history, and people who go out of their way to preserve history and put it in modern formats to attempt to keep the data from disappearing forever are doing a service to future human history. I would say, in this way, pirates who remove DRM from media are taking part in an act of historical preservation.
Yeah, I think as long as we can count on some level of society, we have a shot at longer term preservation. Like, computers will continue to get faster, and mediums will continue to get upgraded and transferred and so forth, and we’re kind of already at a point where nothing recorded today needs to be “lost” with some careful planning. There are obvious holes in this, but it’s increasingly less likely to be a problem that the storage medium is the issue (again, caveating that we’re not talking about rebuilding society after a catastrophe or something) and more a problem with what the dependency of reading the data to be saved is, whether it’s transferred on storage formats that maintain data integrity, etc.
Like, we can do redundant backups and so forth, but what if the things we’re backing up are server dependent? Or even simpler shit like Flash games. I really hope that more people writing software especially think about how to keep it usable for a long time.
Depends. In some ways you are correct but in other ways not so much. We like to think in the digital age once its up, its up forever. In theory yes but in some ways no since we have already seen in recent memory. Hell the popularity of lemmy and the fedeverse was kicked off because many of us left reddit, lead to many of us basically deleting/editing our prior comments. Someone can possibly have a snapshot of it but the chances of it are pretty small for some weird random obscure post on a forum. Our reliance on free services can easily lead to something disappearing as easily as it appeared. Hell we are seeing some youtube videos basically disappearing over fears of Ai scraping and it can happen abruptly.
Not only that; websites get deleted, servers can fail, data can be corrupted, business toss out memory storage when going out business, etc.
Nothing in the digital lasts.
That’s making some assumptions about what society looks like in the future. I’m guessing it’s more likely they’ll be looking over the device you used to type that message wondering what the hell it was used for.
They won’t dig through it manually. They’ll have better bulk data processing than even the NSA has today.
They’re crying because of the comma
I really want to know what that’s doing there. Like, what did they think that was supposed to do?
Dramatic pause maybe?
Commas don’t do that; that’s what em dash is for.
Here’s something even sadder. We only need history because human lives are so short.
I mean… Even if you lived forever one person can’t remember everything
I can’t even remember most of high school
I can’t remember what I ate last week
Then we just wouldn’t ask that one person about history.
Which, to bring some happiness into this, we are the only species that we know of that can record our history, no matter how short our lives are. So since most of our content produced now is tik tok, that will be our new history 😁😀😀😬😐😕😥😭
I don’t see that as sad. Also, even if we lived four hundred years we’d still need to write things down because we’d eventually die.
Unless we were immortal and capable of remembering everything, we’d need history.
And most of what was recorded is logistics and propaganda.
We got lucky there
We often only know the propaganda by the way it contradicts the logistics.
The real problem we have now is that there is so much information, we cannot store it all. You can’t just throw things out either because you truly have no idea what seemingly worthless things we produce are going to be deemed of significant value later on.
That old blurry photograph of your great aunt with a photo bomb of some random dude? It is the only photo of the zodiac killer. That random shitty video in portrait mode of you driving through your home town in Kansas is the only surviving footage of what used to exist there before the 2046 asteroid impact that wiped out the state.
You just never know what truly matters until its gone.
Just keep extending the horizon until it doesn’t matter again 😌
Data hoarder identified.
This thinking is why my mother’s house is full of useless crap that she thinks belongs in a museum.
What museum? The broken camera-chipped pottery-photographs of children museum?
Sorry that I ranted on you. I clearly have an issue with my mother’s hoarding.
Well I won’t argue that you were incorrect. I do have hoarder tendencies and I “manage” that by keeping it only digital. That being said, I think my point still stands because despite my more ridiculous examples this does still happen.
Lost classic TV show episodes that were thought lost to time are found again because of hoarders. Historical data on towns are kept by the person who has never thrown out a newspaper. Hoarding is bad, but it does prove to be useful on rare occasions. The fine line is saving potential chunks of history vs a stack of pizza boxes because they may have a use one day as storage.
You may take a hard no on the matter because of what you have dealt with what your mother is going through, but I argue there is some specific things worth saving.
Reminds me of the blurry video that may or may not be the only footage of Nick Drake.
It would be awesome to find that someone took a camera over to the studio and the reel has been laying in an attic for 50 years.
He’s the only artist who I admire so deeply and I can’t connect with him at all outside of his art. With other artists that I admire, I can see their mannerisms and personality if I want to. His is lost to time except through his music and stories from family and friends.
Sometimes, when hiking, I’ll see something incredible, and when I go to capture it in a photo, it just doesn’t come out the same.
Those vistas are allllll for me
Glowworm Caves yesterday, many sunsets, the impact of the view of rolling hills on your eyes vs recorded etc.
The photo will never replicate the experience, but you can use it as a cue to go back to that place in your mind!
Agreed. Partially. I find myself looking back at pics and experiencing something much different.
Similarly, I can retrace a route again and see things I completely missed before. Memory is fun :)
And you are ultimately going to die as part of that 90% that won’t be remembered for anything at all no matter how big of a deal you view yourself in any form function or manner.
Me too. It won’t be so bad. Unless they check the hard drive. Oh buddy then we’re historically remembered. Like, that’s a lotta porn.
The thought of having your digital foot print live on forever was kind of neat, but most of it wasn’t worth remembering or will probably get deleted after a few decades anyways. Future generations will ever know about the witty banter on yahoo answers.
Oh buddy then we’re historically remembered. Like, that’s a lotta porn.
That ain’t special
Hey on the bright side, everybody in modern times has a pretty good chance to add a number to a statistic somewhere.
Anyone who has ever had to dig through an overly verbose log file is fine with this. 90% of what happens is tediously mundane.
Eh, I’m not sure as much is truly lost as one might currently think.
There’s a number of things that seem more like an issue of history as a field having challenges in undue influence of academic popularity contests and subspecialty isolation.
For example, the face of the historical basis for Helen of Troy has likely been on modern magazine covers, we just haven’t broadly realized it because most modern historians throw out Herodotus wholesale so they’ve ignored the details in his version of the Helen narrative, which happens to connect the events to part of Egypt’s history that’s been similarly poorly evaluated by scholarship to date.
Even the way Homer and the Trojan War narrative gets handled is pretty ass backwards, with scholars preferring to just hand wave it as mythological history rather than seeing it as having combined a history of the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia in the LBA with a later sea peoples capture of Wilusa back from the Hittites in the EIA (it has rather impressive levels of detail around events tied to both these things).
We see modern debates about whether the Exodus narrative occurred or not as described in the Bible but there’s very little investigation into the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the same which differ significantly from the Biblical version (notably about it being ethnocentric), even claiming the latter version was altered. Versions that might be quite relevant to recent archeological finds like the Aegean style pottery with local clay in Tel Dan or the imported bees from Anatolia in Tel Rehov.
Give it time. A lot of big topics that are generally dismissed or thought to be lost today might not still seem that way within a generation or two.
This comment warms my pre-modern-eastern-history-degree having heart
yes but how much of that history is important? no doubt its still the majority, but i suspect that some of that 90% you mention is just some random irrelevant persons life. i should also mention that i am not a historian nor a statistics person so take what i say with a grain of salt.
90% of the bullet points are unrecorded. If we’re counting every Joe Smoe, then 99.9999…% is unrecorded.
I would say considering homo sapiens have been around for ~250,000 years we need a lot of decimal places… if you want to consider prior homo species that’s 2.8 million years and honestly you might as well call it 100%.
What’s more awful? Most of the history we know is biased in favour of the winners.
There’s lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.
History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That’s where the historical blind spots are.
I take issue with describing Josephus as a part of the ‘losing’ side. Josephus had defected and was working as an interpretor for Titus while Titus was conducting the seige on Jerusalem in 70 AD. He took on the Roman emperor’s family name, Flavius. He firmly sits on the ‘winning’ side, with the Romans.
Plus later on Christian’s were the ones copying his books, not Jews, since he was viewed as a turncoat by his own people. So his books were preserved by the ‘winning’ side as well.
Not saying he should be completely disregarded or written off as a historian, just that he wasn’t part of any ‘losing’ side of history.
Yeah, it is current winners, no matter how losing they were.
I think not having it recorded in any way is worse. At least if something is recorded you can examine and study and compare the accounts to get an inkling of what may have actually happened or see where the truth has been stretched.
In 150 years historians will be lamenting that we recorded everything we did and now they have to sift through terrabytes of memes, pointless arguments, and outright misdirection to get at anything resembling truth.
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it…[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us… The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians…the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians…the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us…as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Ibn Khaldun, 1332-1406 (as translated by Rosenthal)
omg thank u comrade new book to search for: Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah
Isn’t ancient Persian science pretty significant?
To my knowledge, most of it from antiquity was lost. Whish is what Ibn Khaldun was speaking about, not the scholarship for the Islamic period.
To clarify, I did mean the pre-Islamic Persians, but it looks like you’re right. There is evidence of engineering achievements but a lot was lost.
