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.
Idk what your classifying as the period of modern recorded history though. Maybe you could say that period started in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC in the middle east, but that doesn’t mean it started everywhere. At that time there were tons of people who lived without writing, and that continues on until very recently. So even after history was “invented” only a fraction of people lived under societies that practiced it until ~200 years ago.
I’m not going to do all the math but it seems to me a majority of people who ever lived, were not a part of societies that recorded 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.
You sure about that, this says that 117 billion people of our species have ever lived. Writing is around 5,000 years old, and initially was used for accounting so history doesn’t come around until later, whereas the species is 200,000 years old.
Idk what your classifying as the period of modern recorded history though. Maybe you could say that period started in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC in the middle east, but that doesn’t mean it started everywhere. At that time there were tons of people who lived without writing, and that continues on until very recently. So even after history was “invented” only a fraction of people lived under societies that practiced it until ~200 years ago.
I’m not going to do all the math but it seems to me a majority of people who ever lived, were not a part of societies that recorded history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population?wprov=sfla1
According to the wiki about half of all humans have lived in the last 2000 years.