[prmph]

Then don’t present it as an Atlas of world history. It should be called an Atlas of Eurocentric history.

Furthermore, we would have had much more records from non-european sources if many European explorers and colonialists had not gone on a rampage destroying whatever indigenous documents and history they could lay their hands on.

As a Latin American I’m sure you know about how the conquistadors destroyed written records.

[santiagobasulto]

It's true, they did destroy written records (especially the Khipu I mentioned before).

But what can the creator of this tool do? Call it "partial atlas of history based on what we have left after 5000 years of wars"?

It is what it is, whoever built this atlas included EVERYTHING[0] known or possibly known. The result might be Eurocentric based on all the reasons stated above, but I don't attribute it to malice from the creator of the tool

[0] It's clearly not everything. There's knowledge of the Tehuelche people in my region (Patagonia, Argentina) for example that doesn't show up here.

[JKCalhoun]

I assume people will already understand that any purported compendium of history is necessarily incomplete.

[psychoslave]

Always assume that information is unevenly distributed, this statement included.

[zarzavat]

The meaning of the word "history" is the study of historical records. The events that happened in times before writing are called "pre-history", and similarly the events that happened in places that didn't write things down are out of scope.

[AlotOfReading]

History has never been purely about studying literary records. Thucydides' History includes gratuitous use of oral speeches and discussion of events that predate writing. I can't think of a single modern historian who doesn't make use of archaeological data either.

Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic definition that was popular among Renaissance and early modern historians as a way of legitimizing their preference for classical scholarship over the "dark" middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or isn't historical.

[prmph]

This is kind of missing the point.

What I'm saying is there are records that have either been ignored, neglected, or destroyed.

In Mali alone there are millions of historical documents [1] that have not been suitable explored. The Meroitic [2] script that contains historical records is still poorly understood

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroitic_script