[bnegreve]

> As humans, we have a tendency to be pessimistic

Maybe, but it is not because we tend to be overly pessimistic in general, that serious problems cannot happen to us. Entire civilizations have diapered in the past, so we should remain vigilant.

After all, another bias that humans have, is a strong tendency to believe that what is true now, will remain true forever.

[rendall]

Very, very, very true. The light of civilization is a flickering candle in the darkness

I often think about the city-states along the Silk Road: healthy, peaceful, cultured, unprecedented prosperity for their time. All defeated when the hordes of Genghis Kahn rode by, many utterly destroyed

The Empire of Mali. The Kingdom of Lithuania. Macedon. Tyre. Babylon. Carthage. Samarkand. Assyria. All once mighty, all gone, perhaps a place-name remains, if that

[rendall]

>> The Kingdom of Lithuania

For anyone still paying attention, I should have written "The Grand Duchy of Lithuania", which was a powerful state for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages

The Kingdom of Lithuania, while also powerful, lasted about 2 years

[InitialLastName]

> The Empire of Mali. The Kingdom of Lithuania. Macedon. Tyre. Babylon. Carthage. Samarkand. Assyria. All once mighty, all gone, perhaps a place-name remains, if that

Aside from perhaps Macedon and Carthage (indirectly via Rome) most of those don't even warrant a mention in the high school history curriculum (in the US, at least).

[rmah]

I've seen the high school world history books of my nieces and nephews and all of those (except maybe lithuania), were at least mentioned in US schools. Other civilizations ranging from the maya to the khmer were also included. By necessity, none of them are examined in depth but they all got at least a few pages.

The simple fact is that pre-industrial history has had literally thousands of different thriving civilizations around the world. It's simply not possible to even briefly cover anything but a fraction of the more "important" in a non-university setting.

[nytgop77]

history starts at 1700 when columbus discovered indians?

[InitialLastName]

Not far off. IIRC, my freshman year history course (at a high-achieving school, no less) covered world history from the agricultural revolution until 1500 CE. That's ~14000 years (call it 4000 of knowable history). There's not a lot of time for anything other than "Don't forget, there were lots of other extraordinarily successful civilizations we know about that were less influential on our intellectual forebears".