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bluesam3 t1_jeabd9a wrote

Reply to comment by oicura_geologist in The brightest gamma-ray in human history hit our planet this past Fall by PuzzleheadedOne1428

"Human history" generally means "the time in which humans have been recording history" (often implicitly "in a way that has survived to the modern day"), not "the time in which humans have existed".

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oicura_geologist t1_jef1r1o wrote

Not being an anthropologist myself, I can't say what the field considers. I am a geologist and note that history is not just that which is recorded in anthropomorphic records. Otherwise, history is only the last 5k years, and everything else was just mystical fun to note.

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bluesam3 t1_jef763l wrote

Yes, "history" only generally refers to that period. I don't know where you got the idea that knowledge of the past is divided into "history" and "mystical fun to note" - that's just outright nonsense. Indeed, everything prior to written records is generally called "pre-history".

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oicura_geologist t1_jefqqm4 wrote

Geology is a historic science. Perspective, to a geologist; pre-history is anything that happens prior to creation of the planet 4500 Ma. To a Cosmologist, pre-history is prior to the inflationary period 1x10^-32 sec post big bang. The article itself quotes "Scientists say the gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful type of explosion in the universe, was 70 times brighter than any previously recorded event. So the title of THIS reddit forum claims "The brightest gamma-ray in human history hit our planet this past Fall" is not precise enough. Especially if one considers that Gamma radiation was not detected until 1903 by humans, and thus, the title is patently wrong considering the perspective of the historical argument.

Your opinion that "History" is only what is written, is a fallacy as many sciences see "history" in very different ways.

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bluesam3 t1_jefsff4 wrote

That is just not how the word "history" is used by literally anybody else I can find. In particular, it's not how it's used by historians, who I rather think get to decide what they study.

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