Same for fossils. Heavily forested areas often had soil too acidic to create fossils at all. Fossils take some real luck and the right conditions to make. Otherwise, bones just slowly disintegrated. I've seen estimates that 90%+ of species that ever existed left no fossil evidence.

It's also why there's large gaps in the Human and Great Ape fossil records. Australopithecus fossils appear in Chad, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa... And no where in between. But is not like none of them existed in the lush jungles of central Africa. The soil dissolved the bones. Same with gorillas. There are no gorilla fossils.

You never know. It might well be there are some ancient alien Bracewell probes out there that have been recording Earth's Funniest Caveman videos for millions of years.

100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost

Not entirely true. Some aboriginal oral traditions have accurately described the Budj Bim and Tower Hill Eruptions that happened 37k years ago, and the dramatic rise in sea levels 7-10k years ago.

The oral traditions of aboriginal tribes is kinda crazy. During the European colonization of australia there are times where you get to see encounters from written documents by Europeans and the history recalled by oral and dance traditions recorded by aboriginals. They tend to match in everything but perspective and often the aboriginal depictions are often more detailed.

Australia: 😂

Explanation: Australian oral histories have survived for tens of thousands of years, far longer than any European written histories. Australia has had the best historians in the world for longer than European civilisation has existed.

What if some of the surviving neolithic monuments were shitposts?

And that’s by far the largest part of human history.

Eh... Depends how you measure the amount of 'history'.

If just going by length of time, yes. But if you also take into account how many people exist at that time (how much history is happening per unit of time), then there's an argument to be made that modern history is a much more significant portion, since our population sizes are so much larger than the relatively tiny populations in prehistory. The vast majority of people who have ever existed lived during the period of modern recorded history.

I recall a story where a historian visited ireland and heard a song with what the people singing called gibberish, but the historian recognized as an ancient language.

Im unfortunately too lazy to look it up and link it

There is a native american (i forget the exact group but located in near colorado) who's oral tradition accurately recounts glacial floods from many thousands of years ago. I wish I remembered how many but I read this in a textbook last year and only half recall it. Either way it isn't all lost, just 99.999% lost

Lost and waiting to be found. Instead we spend money on wars 🤷

I often wonder how much was lost just in the Library of Alexandria. Start combining that one place, with countless wars, fires and natural disasters throughout time and it boggles my mind thinking about it.