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xg15today at 5:53 PM1 replyview on HN

> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers.

OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.

Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.

But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...


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sdenton4today at 6:04 PM

And the total human population in prehistory was tiny, likely under a million for much of that time, and possibly dropping to a few thousand at some point. The total human experience of those 250k years may not be much more than the last few thousand...

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