Comment by stunseed
8 hours ago
> But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.
Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?
But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.
History means the time of recorded events, the 10 kya to present day, they used the word correctly. Anatomically modern humans are prehistory.
History certainly does not predate sedentary farming. It seems reasonable to put at around ~8kya.
Certainly, some people still live as hunter gatherers. I presume people can deduce I do not refer to them.
I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.
History is recorded, that's the definition of the word. Prehistory is not recorded which is what the 500 kya to 10 kya refers to.
History is a bit of a confusing word that way; I suppose I can see it can be used in an informal sense to refer to any timeline outside of just historiography, which does tend to refer to a distinct study from archaeology and anthropology. Noted.
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