Memes

(exactly the problem you're having)

[Deleted]

Thanks! Nothing else worked at all, but that solution worked perfectly!

"Read the wiki" but the part of the relevant wiki page for the subject was removed years ago and the edit history was purged after the server ran out of disk space.

Ugh, yes. I try to always remember to update with what I did to fix it. Although if I'm honest, what probably happens 95% of the time is I just forget about the post entirely.

Wisdom of the Ancients

If we actually had lots of surviving material like that it would be amazing.

Before the early modern period it was rare for people to write down boring or mundane shit because writing was hard and expensive.

Wait, is this someone's actual ancient journal??? How incredibly exciting? And what was that slightly different recipe?

The Spectrum Through The Ages.

This mofo sold me shitty copper. Ea-Nasir, you're on my shitlist for eternity, you hear me!

Highly suggest Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror for all of you who like this stuff. All her work is great.

I hate every day that discord destroyed forums

100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost

Not entirely true. Some aboriginal oral traditions have accurately described the Budj Bim and Tower Hill Eruptions that happened 37k years ago, and the dramatic rise in sea levels 7-10k years ago.

The oral traditions of aboriginal tribes is kinda crazy. During the European colonization of australia there are times where you get to see encounters from written documents by Europeans and the history recalled by oral and dance traditions recorded by aboriginals. They tend to match in everything but perspective and often the aboriginal depictions are often more detailed.

Same for fossils. Heavily forested areas often had soil too acidic to create fossils at all. Fossils take some real luck and the right conditions to make. Otherwise, bones just slowly disintegrated. I've seen estimates that 90%+ of species that ever existed left no fossil evidence.

It's also why there's large gaps in the Human and Great Ape fossil records. Australopithecus fossils appear in Chad, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa... And no where in between. But is not like none of them existed in the lush jungles of central Africa. The soil dissolved the bones. Same with gorillas. There are no gorilla fossils.

And that’s by far the largest part of human history.

Eh... Depends how you measure the amount of 'history'.

If just going by length of time, yes. But if you also take into account how many people exist at that time (how much history is happening per unit of time), then there's an argument to be made that modern history is a much more significant portion, since our population sizes are so much larger than the relatively tiny populations in prehistory. The vast majority of people who have ever existed lived during the period of modern recorded history.

Monks were the og RAID array

Someone's probably out there right now transferring PragerU videos to glass plates along with instructions for decoding them. We'll all be remembered as far-right nutjobs.

Good thing we sold all our media outlets to billionaires who either use them explicitly to promote fascism or just use the modern first to eyes slop written for profit fear porn and trash entertainment “reporting” you used to find exclusively in tabloids. Defunding public service journalistic outlets sure did fix things, huh?