
Why is history always about humans? - Petiver
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/07/13/why-history-always-about-humans/kXSi8rJLcfQKYR1P3EDUIM/story.html
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lainga
Because elephants are notoriously shoddy about leaving primary sources for us
to use?

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1996
They have great memory, they are just not good at writing.

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rectangletangle
They prefer to paint instead.

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rqs
Well, if you put it this way, we humans was[0] also good at it.

This got me thinking, maybe about 64000 years later we will see the first
group of elephant programmers :D

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting)

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extralego
Could be a lot sooner with a stronger movement for inclusive keyboard design.
QWERTY is forever holding things back.

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ohiovr
What will make the writer really mad is that the world began with humans, and
nothing else, for a basic reason. Before us, there was no one to give the
world, or anything else, a name. Some say the beginning of wisdom is
understanding the meaning of words. I believe the most essential difference
human beings have over all other creatures is the development of stories. And
those stories can last for thousands of years.

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fcbrooklyn
If you haven't read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, you'd probably dig it. He
makes a very good case that storytelling is a cornerstone of the evolution of
society as we know it.

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zwkrt
Douglas Hofstadter has made a career out of arguing that human consciousness
is founded on the ability to interpret analogies. "This is like that
except..." Kind of like a generalization of the story theory.

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perl4ever
It seems to me excruciatingly obvious that either human consciousness _does
not_ involve the ability to interpret analogies or else humans are not
generally conscious.

This is based on observing innumerable vehement and apparently unresolvable
disagreements on the internet over whether a given analogy is valid,
particularly in the realm of politics.

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ianai
...don’t use internet discussion to draw conclusions about consciousness. It’s
just not credible.

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perl4ever
As this is an internet discussion, accepting your opinion leads to a paradox
as I would be doing what you say not to.

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ianai
When someone tells you to not trust them, take them at their word - Maya
Angelou (paraphrase)

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ravitation
I find this article pretty amusing, because, despite its title, it focuses on
anthrozoology (the intersection of humans and animals), which is still
fundamentally about humans. It doesn't actually focus on things that are
fundamentally about animals, like zoology or paleontology.

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simondedalus
always unfortunate when not only 1) is the article title a clickbait
"provocative question," but 2) the question has an obvious answer.

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Koshkin
Easy: animals _do not have_ a history - just like humans did not, say, 50,000
years ago. In the sense that not much changes or happens in the course of
millennia that would be worth having a record of.

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watwut
The article contains a lot of animal history through. And how that history
affects humans and vice versa.

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mirimir
Maybe "history" is mainly about humans, but there's also "natural history",
which is about animals and plants.

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emodendroket
I mean, you can cast this as a recent trend if you want, but what are fields
like paleontology if not a kind of "history" of animals other than humans?

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jlehman
I find that history is best viewed as a phenomenon of consciousness—the mind's
awareness of itself. With awareness of oneself comes awareness of the
eventuality of death, the discovery of the "future" and its opposite, the
past. In this sense history is a discovery of conscious beings of which humans
are the most advanced by probably orders of magnitude (which is a difficult
thing to quantify to say the least).

It's not so much that history is "about" humans; it only really applies to
humans in the first place. To have a history of "elephants" is just to have a
history of elephants as understood by humans—unless it's elephants that are
communicating it.

The best explanations I've heard of this concept are in Jordan Peterson's
Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series, available
on Youtube here:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat).

His book Maps of Meaning is also fantastic: [https://www.amazon.com/Maps-
Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Pete...](https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-
Architecture-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0415922224)

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luke0016
Are paleontologists and paleobotanists different from "animal historians?"

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dabbledash
It’s the thumbs.

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Pica_soO
Why is recently everything about animals?

Is it just another cowardly attempt to withdraw a way from the uncomfortable
huge problems and their solutions ("You probably should be out there in the
street, protesting the government not doing something against your lifestyle
and demanding the destruction of your job, your car and your luxerys") into a
controllable little niche - which gives everybody the feeling of doing good,
while accomplishing ultimately nothing on the grand scale?

If you save a dog now, the world goes to hell, its grand-grand-descendants
will still have to suffer and if it has history books - its archeologists will
Marvell at this strange "elder species" who was nice to individuals but nasty
to the whole ecological system.

Emotionalize that away, you socially isolated, anthropomorphic romantics.

@Regarding elephant Programmers: Imagine a Keyboard for a trunk.. it would
look like a bowl with keys..

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andrewstuart
The word "history" is literally "his story" \- stories about people by people.

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drb91
This is an illusion; “his” is a Germanic word but “history” is derived from
the Greek word “historia”.

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andrewstuart
That's a pity. Seems to make so much sense.

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mixmastamyk
Visit your local "Natural History" museum.

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whorat
The title of this story indicates I would probably not enjoy reading it.
:yawn:

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pests
You were welcome to continue scrolling and not leave a comment.

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cyberpunk0
Why is history always about wealthy humans?*

Because history is written by the victor and most of those with wealth and
power have historically exploited and destroyed everyone around them to obtain
their position.

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ellius
Counterpoint: Karl Marx and Howard Zinn both wrote history.

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afarrell
As did the survivors of the Mongol destruction of Baghdad and the Viking
destruction of Lindisfarne.

History is written by those with the time and skill to write things others
will read, often moderately wealthy elites but thats less true now.

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azernik
More concisely put: history is written by the historians.

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perl4ever
I think even that is misleading/questionable. History is written by the people
who are literate and write stuff that is both appealing to reproduce and does
get reproduced. Just because a historian writes something doesn't mean it
doesn't get lost or ignored, at least for a while.

