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One of the earlier definitions of "humanity" is "a creature that uses tools." This is outdated, but it's still the one I first learned, and there's still something precise enough about it that we kind of recognize what it means. It implies more than just tools. A parent leans down and teaches their offspring the …

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For a long time, the earliest tool culture was assumed to be the Oldowan, dating to about 2.6 million years ago. History is always changing, we know very little of it, and what we do know will change, but we must try anyway. One must imagine Sisyphus happy as he asserts that some particular rock …

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Historical evidence is discovered constantly, old evidence is reinterpreted, etc. This makes writing anything definitively - especially as an outsider without access to the cutting edge - difficult. Still, many of these are small changes. That's not the same as minor change - they often led to large changes in our view of history, even if they …

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Traditionally, "history" refers to the era after writing (at least writing we can read). Thus, history begins in ~3300 BC. The periods before that - anatomically modern humans or not - are pre-history. I could start with writing, but it would be almost aggressively unsatisfactory. Too many interesting events - scraps, hints, relics of a …

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The blog you are reading is about history. I'm not a historian, and the majority of content here will be taken directly from people who actually know what they're talking about. Here is what happened: I realized that I knew almost nothing about the past. Some basics, of course, courtesy of a good American education …

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How to use this: Below are three options for navigating the content of this site. The full archive will be a list of every article by chronological order of events. The second links to subarchives by era, each of which lists articles roughly chronologically with occasional jumps to maintain cultural continuity. The third is a …