The History that Time Forgot
Written by America Arellano
When it comes to what we know about human history, it seems like we have a lot of information on everything important that has taken place, but do we really? Of course not!
In fact, historians estimate that 97% of history's entire timeline has been completely lost. Even if we consider the roughly 3% of recorded history that we know about, not all of those sources are still in existence today. When you sit down and think about it, not every piece of information that we encounter needs to be recorded. So it stands to reason that much has been overlooked or even destroyed throughout the mere thousand years of human history. Book burnings and tossed letters are nothing new to us.
Have we ever considered that the leading cause of the loss of human history is not its destruction or neglect, but our inability to record it?
We have records of human history because of the early innovations in language, most notably Sumerian, which was around 3500 B.C. This is after hundreds of thousands of years of Homo sapiens roaming the world and leaving behind evidence of their lives in the form of tools and bones. Prehistory is the time before writing and written language were invented. History begins with the first written records. Before that, it was harder for historians to piece together what took place. Archeologists can learn a lot from early tools, skeletons, and other things that reveal presence, but these don't always convey the same story as written records.
Modern humans have been around for a very long time from an evolutionary viewpoint. Although mankind as a whole has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the earliest recordings date back only a few thousand years. We can only speculate about the number of small civilizations that sprang up over that time period, the types of social environments they created, and the events that vanished because there was no way to record them or any notion that they were necessary. One instance that comes to mind is Gobekli Tepe, an archaeological site in Turkey that rose to prominence as potential evidence that social phenomena like religious rituals took root before agriculture. Another example would be the early cave paintings and tools that have been found, but we will never decipher the full meaning of these drawings since we lack personal context of the situation. This is where historians can see the benefit of documented history over oral tradition. As memories die with people, written records can live on for a very long time after the carrier has died.
If anything, it serves as a good lesson in why language is likely the most critical tool for history. No information would ever last without communication, especially the spoken and written kinds. It’s only thanks to these underappreciated tools that we’re able to record as much as we can. So the next time you get frustrated at needing to write something, try and be thankful for what you have instead; you may be leaving behind a valuable historical record without even knowing it.
In fact, historians estimate that 97% of history's entire timeline has been completely lost. Even if we consider the roughly 3% of recorded history that we know about, not all of those sources are still in existence today. When you sit down and think about it, not every piece of information that we encounter needs to be recorded. So it stands to reason that much has been overlooked or even destroyed throughout the mere thousand years of human history. Book burnings and tossed letters are nothing new to us.
Have we ever considered that the leading cause of the loss of human history is not its destruction or neglect, but our inability to record it?
We have records of human history because of the early innovations in language, most notably Sumerian, which was around 3500 B.C. This is after hundreds of thousands of years of Homo sapiens roaming the world and leaving behind evidence of their lives in the form of tools and bones. Prehistory is the time before writing and written language were invented. History begins with the first written records. Before that, it was harder for historians to piece together what took place. Archeologists can learn a lot from early tools, skeletons, and other things that reveal presence, but these don't always convey the same story as written records.
Modern humans have been around for a very long time from an evolutionary viewpoint. Although mankind as a whole has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the earliest recordings date back only a few thousand years. We can only speculate about the number of small civilizations that sprang up over that time period, the types of social environments they created, and the events that vanished because there was no way to record them or any notion that they were necessary. One instance that comes to mind is Gobekli Tepe, an archaeological site in Turkey that rose to prominence as potential evidence that social phenomena like religious rituals took root before agriculture. Another example would be the early cave paintings and tools that have been found, but we will never decipher the full meaning of these drawings since we lack personal context of the situation. This is where historians can see the benefit of documented history over oral tradition. As memories die with people, written records can live on for a very long time after the carrier has died.
If anything, it serves as a good lesson in why language is likely the most critical tool for history. No information would ever last without communication, especially the spoken and written kinds. It’s only thanks to these underappreciated tools that we’re able to record as much as we can. So the next time you get frustrated at needing to write something, try and be thankful for what you have instead; you may be leaving behind a valuable historical record without even knowing it.