[underlipton]

People seem to think that South-of-Sahara Africa is "history-less" because of a lack of written history (there were griots, whose oral history might have provided a base for archaeological inquiry in the same way ancient writings with unreliable narrators, if not for the social disruptions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries); South America was treated similarly until archaeological rediscoveries helped to expand our understanding or pre-Colombian life and broaden imaginations.

Anyway, none of the civilizations in these regions had built nuclear technology, or influenced the emergence of treatment-resistant diseases, or generally altered the landscape to such an extent as we have (dams, holes in the ground, big tall chunks of metal and concrete). It is probably in the best interests of anyone living on this planet in the next few thousand years that they have some knowledge of how we've lived and why. "We built weapons that can each destroy land a day's walk wide because there was a war where the stakes were genocide" is maybe something that shouldn't be forgotten. Any number of other developments are also important. It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.

[Bluestein]

> It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.

Another good reason for widespread archival.-