That 100,000 years before recorded history

For most of that 100K years human history was pretty much just the happenings of very small bands of people just doing hunter gatherer things. What seem like momentous occurrences to us—the peopling of the Western Hemisphere, for instance—happened over thousands of years and hundreds of generations. About twenty thousand years ago settlements got a little larger in places, architecture began, and trade networks appeared. But even then it was all small and incremental. Happening large enough to rate as history didn’t begin until ten thousand years ago or so, and even then it took awhile before cities, government, law, large scale economics and the technologies that enabled them, exponentially growing populations, epidemic disease, war, organized religion and writing, all new things, began to develop to the point that enabled things to happen on such a scale that they can be considered historical and not just the goings on a few dozen or few hundred people in family groups. History, that is involving actual events and actual people does not extend much past the 5000 years of recorded history, as you need writing to record history. What happened before then is a sort of human deep time, that is the the first two to three hundred thousand years the Homo sapiens were on the planet, and the two million years of archaic humans immediately prior to us. This Deep Time isn’t likely to go on much further, though, certainly not millions of years, as Homo sapiens appear to be the evolutionary dead end of eight or so million years of bipedal ape evolution. We’re all that’s left of all those other species, and all species eventually go extinct, mammals a little faster, primates maybe faster still. Species of bipedal apes seem to have a fairly brief shelf life (Neanderthals, for instance, probably lasted four hundred thousand years.) It’s weird to think of humans being with pronghorns, horseshoe crabs and tuataras, but each of us critters is the very last in our lines of evolution, and when the last pronghorn, horseshoe crab, tuatara or human dies, an entire long line of evolution dies with it. What an epic work of human history that will make. Too bad there’ll be no one around to read it.

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