There’s a Giant Hole in Human History

If human history were a big book, we, today, can only read the very last page.
Modern humans have been around for at least 315,000 years, but probably longer. This means that our entire recorded history, only covers about 1% of the time we’ve been on the planet. 99% of our story is gone. Missing. Forgotten. There isn’t just a gap in human history… There’s a gigantic black hole.

We like to think of history as one linear journey, from nomadic people in the stone age, to the invention of farming, the early civilizations, and so on. we look for clear progress at each stage, all of it building up to eventually reach us, in our advanced affluent modern society. But why is the first chapter of this story so huge? Why did we live as nomadic hunter gatherers for over 300,000 years and then only at the very end, settle down and form civilizations? What happened during this earlier time, that makes up the vast majority - 99% - of our history?

We view the past through the prism of our own civilization. We think we know it all but in reality, the last 5000 years are just a blip in the human story. We think in our age of science and reason we have figured everything out, and that we can answer all the questions. But we can’t.

In reality, there are possibly a whole range of breakthroughs and wisdom that ancient humans achieved but we have subsequently lost and forgotten.

mirrored Michael Button / Rumble