What Can we Learn From Lost History and Ancient Widsom?

Humanity has been through a lot. While we count our history from about 2000 years ago, the oldest known settlements by actual humans – that is the species homo sapiens – date from over 300,000 years ago. That’s an amazing number! 300,000 years is so long, that there may have been 12,000 generations of humans since then. That’s 12,000 iterations of “great” before your great grandma. The Romans, with their aqueducts and concrete, were at the height of their influence about 2000 years ago, or just 80 generations. The Greeks began their civilization about 800 years before that, and the Egyptians even earlier. 

The first Egyptian pyramid was build around 2780 BCE. They’ve inspired mathematicians, architects, engineers, archaeologists, artists, and alien hunters ever since. What does this tell us? That even though we have incredible scientific and engineering knowledge today, the Ancient Egyptians too had their versions of mathematics and engineering, not to mention writing, history, religion, and art. Yet we barely know the names of any of these ancient people, barely know their stories.