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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I always find it sad that our history knowledge is so incomplete.

I wish humans learned to write earlier and more globally. We know virtually nothing of so many civilizations.

Having enjoyed Durant & Durant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in short doses, I once tried to read through multiple volumes of them in a row; after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

(and that's less than 2% of human history)

Blame mainly awful people who liked to brag how awful they were and what awful things they did to other people. When writing down the history of stuff and people, it was too expensive for ordinary folks to engrave on stone how they optimized their crops or how they improved weaving.

While awful by today's standards, they recorded their feats because those awful actions allowed their civilization to thrive, even at the cost of others' perishing. Plus, by boasting of your awful deeds, you're more likely to dissuade would-be challengers.

It would be lovely if we had knowledge from the common man from throughtout history, but the common man wasn't typically the reason for domminance.

> after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

I suppose the internet is a fairly accurate reflection of human history. What a depressing thought.

Humans will weaponize anything. If AI is trained on human data, it will most certainly extinguish us. How can we use the behavior of all animals to train AI? I’d rather have a smart dog (retriever?) to talk to than a human. I could trust it

Be careful what you wish for. The (nonhuman) animal world is much more ruthless than the human one, despite all our own ruthlessness.

Prey animals in the wild often die more awful deaths than what even slaughterhouses see.

And even predators in the wild don’t die under professional care in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. It’s probably a violent death or starvation.

I did falconry once and found it impressive that the captive birds had a mean life expectancy of 22 years while the wild ones had just 9. The reason was starvation. You get injured and can't hunt? You starve. You age a bit and aren't quite fast enough to catch mice anymore? You starve.

Civilization's ability to let us specialize, combined with private property, really allows humans to achieve amazing lives compared to the often romanticized other options.

I did the other side - I’ve had pet house rabbits. A wild rabbit is apparently lucky to make it to 2 years. High probability it gets gruesomely torn apart and eaten alive by predators.

Meanwhile a house rabbit can live on average 8-10 years, even as long as 12-15.

It is important to remember that most writing from just two thousand years ago didn't survive to us today. Due to the collapse of civilizations over time, the number of people capable of writing and therefore copying decaying manuscripts fell periodically. Only what the folks doing the copying felt was most important therefore survived, and many of those writings could have been changed by the transcriber (Beowulf comes to mind). While we have no evidence to support the idea that the oldest civilizations known had any form of writing, it is certainly possible that they did. It is also well-known to modern historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists that writing was often purposefully destroyed. As a new Egyptian king replaced a former, it wasn't unheard of for all mention of the previous to be completely erased. The Spanish purposefully destroyed "heathen" writings of the Maya. It is unknown how common these practices may have been in antiquity, but we know that many civilizations were quite proud of themselves and disdainful of all others.

Why Writing? Ancient monuments and buildings tell us more than another creation myth.

writing can capture different information, and the fact that much of what we do have is religious is tied to the fact that writing was so rare!

If you personally dont find the history of human belief interesting, think of something you might. What if you could read journals from explorers settling the pacific islands. What would a daily journal from a 20k BC Mesoamerican include? What did people think about sabertooth tigers,

Without translations it's not useful either. I'm not against writings but we can glean way more info from DNA and archeology than glyphs. Pictographs are useful but long dead writing methods aren't interesting unless we can understand them.

Obviously that depends on what you want to learn. DNA is not going to tell you the hopes, dreams, or thoughts of early peoples. I have zero care for information as a general concept. I care about specific types of information.

The funny thing about translations are that if you have lots of texts, it makes them easier to translate

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