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Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but what if they couldn't take off in time? Those pilots/crew would suddenly be stuck on an island weathering one of the most powerful hurricanes in history.

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Recorded history.

This raises an interesting point. Do you know how long we've been accurately recording cyclones?

Depends on what you're trying to measure! Arguably we still can't measure many things accurately.

The National Hurricane Center has some records [1] going back to 1851 [2]. I'm sure those are based more off eye witness accounts.

[1] http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/#tracks_all

[2] http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks/tracks-at-1851.png

History already means recorded. Anything before records exist is called prehistoric.

The problem with that definition is that "prehistoric" is a lot more recent than people realize in the Americas.

Interestingly the Klamath people have an oral history of the eruption of Mount Mazama and formation of Crater Lake over 7000 years ago.

That's incredibly interesting. Does it line up with the geographical record?

Just a few days ago there was a village in Canada discovered thanks to oral tradition. It has been dated thousands of years older than the pyramids

I wouldn't trust that one bit. Have you ever played telephone? 7000 years is a lot of generations, it's likely completely inaccurate.

No, "prehistoric" is the time period before written records. If we only started paying attention to hurricanes in the gulf 200 years ago, that doesn't mean 1805 was prehistoric.

S/he didn't make this up. History is the study of the past trough written records.

The word has been since overloaded to be the study of the past. Which is fine, except that leaves no reason for the word pre-history

You're partly right. However, it's very common, even when people want to draw exactly the distinction you're talking about, that they'll just use "history" to refer to a period for which there are any records. That's a pretty different concept from the period for which there are records of the strength of hurricanes.

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