"One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago."
I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation. In the rest of the world (especially China, Europe, India and the Middle East) we know about as much as we do about the history of people currently alive. We can read their diaries, what happened in their governments, poetry, stories etc (at least for the literate classes, but this is again true in the modern world).
"Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at."
We would be able to detect really quite a bit, though less than we would like. Anything electronic would be gone, but the fact that we had electronics would be obvious. As would the vast majority of print. Some writing (especially carving) would remain, as would some pictures in lucky circumstances. Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around, and you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they order their buildings, and by what stuff they had. This is all assuming we some how up and leave for 10,000 years like in Göbekli Tepe[0]
"I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation."
Yes, and specifically the area where I am living. That "400 years" has more to do with the specific people I live around and their view that basically anyone before them lacked What-a-Burger restaurants and Shiner beer and are have more in common with deer and possums than humans.
Thanks for the thoughts and the links.
"Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around"
I'm sure that my fantasies about how little we actually leave behind and the reality of how obvious it would be are probably different.
Like, I feel like humans have been around for quite a while longer than we have any sort of history about, but I am probably just motivated by fantasies that there were large-scale civilizations on earth that predate our own by millennia but which are wholly lost because we don't have the material archeological record or the linguistic tools to trace the existence of specific cultures (or whatever kinds of tooling that would be necessary to demonstrate such a history).
While I don't think there is evidence for that fantasy, I also think humans are creative, interesting folks and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that folks have been just chilling with oral histories for 20K+ years until they suddenly got motivated 600 years ago or so (or 2000 or wherever we might place those histories).
So thanks for tempering that fantasy with a specific counter factual example.
I’m sure there are many lost human historical cities, outposts, et al. But based on all the excavation and discovery, it doesn’t seem likely that we are missing out on some huge timeline gap of advanced human societies.
We still aren’t even sure if some written language of some of the first civilizations like the Indus Valley were languages or not since we haven’t been able to decipher them. We also have a few areas around the world where we can look for things like evidence of stable civilization and writing that were probably isolated from the rest of the world - America’s, China, and Europe, as examples. Yet all three locations so far only show writing as recent discoveries 2-4K years ago.
To me, humans not having advanced quicker doesn’t seem so far fetched. Humanoids were on two feet and making basic tools over a million years ago. Fire was controlled hundreds of thousands of years ago at the latest. Yet even with all that, we don’t have any evidence of humanoids being advanced like setting up in one location or writing text (not just drawings) down more than a couple thousand years. The modern human species I think is only a few hundred thousand years too.
Of course we could just somehow be missing tons of data. But that also wouldn’t line up with how we do see a progression of advancement from the earliest civilizations and then empires.
I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation. In the rest of the world (especially China, Europe, India and the Middle East) we know about as much as we do about the history of people currently alive. We can read their diaries, what happened in their governments, poetry, stories etc (at least for the literate classes, but this is again true in the modern world).
"Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at."
We would be able to detect really quite a bit, though less than we would like. Anything electronic would be gone, but the fact that we had electronics would be obvious. As would the vast majority of print. Some writing (especially carving) would remain, as would some pictures in lucky circumstances. Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around, and you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they order their buildings, and by what stuff they had. This is all assuming we some how up and leave for 10,000 years like in Göbekli Tepe[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe