Random Observation about Human History
247 words.
I often read the “on this day” section of Wikipedia just out curiosity. It occurred to me one day that, according to the “on this day” records, not much happened before around 1500 A.D.
We’re told that recorded human history began “in the 4th millennium B.C.”, suggesting some 6,000 years of written records. But if you look at the list of events on Wikipedia for any given day, there are rarely many entries prior to around 1500 A.D.
So I think it’s more accurate to say that records of day-to-day human history only began around 1500 A.D., and really only picked up steam (no pun intended) after 1800 A.D., when the barrier for entry into published writing significantly lowered. Prior to that, we only have tiny fragments of history, most likely commissioned by the most wealthy and powerful in society, who would probably only write down the things that made them look good.
So we really only know what we’ve been up to for the past 500 years.
But even those 500 years of events will probably be lost. I heard someone (don’t remember who or where I heard it) speculate that far in the future, human history will be seen to begin around the year 2000, because that is when all of our records began to exist on the Internet in digital format. Future historians will probably only be interested in the things they can find in a Google search.
This has been a random observation.
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