Talk:Human history

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 talk 23:53, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that the agricultural and industrial revolutions are key turning points in human history?

• Source:

• • ALT1: ... that in early human history, humans migrated out of Africa and populated most of the Earth during the Last Ice Age? Source:
  • ALT2: ... that for most of human history, children did not have access to public education? Source:
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Betty Hanley
  • Comment:

References

Sources

• Cajani, Luigi (2013). "Periodization". In Bentley, Jerry H. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-968606-3.
• Christian, David (2008). This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Berkshire Publishing. ISBN 978-1-933782-04-1.
• Christian, David, ed. (2015). Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE. The Cambridge World History. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139194662. ISBN 978-0-521-76333-2. Archived from the original on 26 January 2023. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
• Pollack, Henry (2010). A World Without Ice. Penguin. ISBN 978-1-101-52485-5.
• Scott, William; Vare, Paul (2020). Learning, Environment and Sustainable Development: A History of Ideas. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-20802-3. Archived from the original on 10 December 2023. Retrieved 3 May 2023.

Improved to Good Article status by Phlsph7 (talk) and Cerebellum (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 22 past nominations.

Phlsph7 (talk) 11:52, 11 August 2024 (UTC).

• Not a review, but two friendly comments. First, Agricultural revolution in ALT0 is a disambiguation page (I'm guessing it refers to the First agricultural revolution, which redirects to Neolithic Revolution). Second, if it's possible to make a hook about life expectancy and/or child mortality, that could be a very interesting hook indeed—I know I found John Green's video "Most People Have Never Been 20" interesting. TompaDompa (talk) 12:26, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for pointing this out, I fixed the link. A hook on changes to life expectancy could be interesting. I think the article only covers this in the sentence Advances in medical science led to a sharp increase in global life expectancy from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000.[552], which does not give us much to work with. Maybe:

  ALT3: ... that in modern human history, advances in medical science helped raise global life expectancy from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000.

  Phlsph7 (talk) 12:53, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

• I'm not a big fan of ALT2, which is rather anachronistic: for most of human history, children did not live in societies in which "public education" was a meaningful concept. Given the wide scope of this article, I think a hook that encompasses a broad timescale would make the most sense. – Joe (talk) 11:24, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

  Many societies didn't really have public education so children didn't have access to it. Maybe you are concerned about something like the following: some readers may misconstrue the statement as implying that these societies did have public education but just not for most children. This is not what the hook says but it could happen. This problem could be solved by talking about formal education instead of public education but the claim in our article is about public education so this may not be acceptable according to the DYK rules. Phlsph7 (talk) 12:09, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

  What I mean is that 'public education' to be a meaningful concept there first needs to exist the idea of a formal education and a state that provides public services, neither of which existed for "most of human history". In other words I think the hook anachronistically implies that children were missing out on something that was not even conceptualisable until recently. Kind of like saying "for most of human history, satellites did not use reusable launch vehicles". Technically true, but not very meaningful. – Joe (talk) 09:36, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

  Can people miss out on something for which they lack the relevant concepts? For example, the ancient Egyptians didn't have the concept of antibiotics. Can we say that "the ancient Egyptians didn't have access to antibiotics"? To my ears, this sounds acceptable. But I'm also open to different ways of expressing the idea. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:56, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

• ALT3 is not very well sourced. It cites page 1 of The Twentieth Century: A World History, which doesn't cite any sources for these figures, and a textbook on marketing for the "due to advances in medical science" part, which also doesn't cite a source for this claim. Neither source make it clear what specific measure of life expectancy they're using, but it's probably life expectancy at birth, which was largely a function of infant mortality in premodern societies and therefore the change involved more factors than just medical science (also improvements in public health, contraception, reduction of child poverty and malnourishment, etc). – Joe (talk) 11:24, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

  ALT3 is not my favorite either but I think the sources fulfill our requirements even though they themselves do not cite other sources for these claims. The hook says "helped raise" to not imply that there were no other factors. Phlsph7 (talk) 12:09, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

  I wouldn't say they fulfil the basic requirement of being reliable sources, in this context, per WP:EXCEPTIONAL. But this is probably best continued on the article talk page. – Joe (talk) 09:36, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

  adjusted hook per talk page discussion at Talk:Human_history#Increase_in_life_expectancy:

  • ALT3a: ... that in modern human history, public health measures and advances in medical science helped raise global life expectancy from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000?

  Phlsph7 (talk) 07:44, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

• Full review needed. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:01, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Holy daunting, Batman! The article is a new enough GA, with 60k bytes of prose. Earwig's wasn't working for me, so I've spotchecked a few references, and not seen any issues. Random selection of images revealed no copyright issues. Only thing I see are a few nitpicks (non-standard punctuation in refs, for example), which are not DYK problems. Preference is for ALT3a, though all of them seem acceptable.  — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:29, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Hello Chris Woodrich and thanks for your review of this big nomination! Phlsph7 (talk) 08:12, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Repeating section titles violates MOS

Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Wikimarkup says:

For technical reasons, section headings should be unique within a page (so that section links work)

In this article, the "Post-classical" and "Early modern" sections have all of the same subsection headings. While the current divisions are reasonable, the headings should be changed to follow this MOS guideline. Instead of writing "Europe" twice, it could be changed to "Medieval Europe" and "Early Modern Europe". In some cases, parentheses or colons could be used to maintain the names of regions. I would also propose combining multiple regions in a few cases—for example, "Gunpowder empires (West and South Asia)".

PS: incredible work on this article! I love rereading it. — Vigilant Cosmic Penguin 🐧 (talk | contribs) 01:40, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Hello Vigilantcosmicpenguin and thanks for raising this issue. I'm not sure that this is technically speaking a problem. The guideline says that the section links should work and they still do. For example Human_history#Europe directs to the postclassical Europe section while Human_history#Europe_2 directs to the early modern Europe section. One difficulty for using local period names for each region is that their dates may not exactly match the dates of the corresponding world-historic period, which creates inconsistencies. This could be avoided by using a reference to the world historic period, such as adding "... in the post-classical period" and "... in the early modern period" to each subsection title. However, this would be highly redundant. I think the better solution is to keep things as they are and to deal with link problems as they arise, for example, by adding invisible anchors. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:07, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

By my reading of the MOS, I think it should be changed; however, your interpretation also makes sense. I agree that invisible anchors would be a reasonable solution. — Vigilant Cosmic Penguin 🐧 (talk | contribs) 19:59, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

why is America colored in the image Empires of 1898

pretty sure the US wasn't an empire in 1898 ~2025-43634-34 (talk) 04:26, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

I removed the image. From what I can tell, it's not based on a reliable source. It may be controversial whether the term "empire" applies to all of the depicted political entities. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:20, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Hey Phlsph7, I hope you are doing well :) I'm not sure I agree with removing the image, see Cambridge World History vol 7.1, pg. 602: A key contributor to the growth of the American state was the acquisition of a formal empire. In 1898, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam were gained as a result of the Spanish–American War over Cuban independence. --Cerebellum (talk) 10:36, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi Cerebellum, it's been a while. My main concern with the image is not the US in particular. The image presents a lot of information, including what the main empires in 1898 were and where the boundaries between them lay. This information needs to be sourced and we currently have no source. Additionally, it may be controversial whether the term "empire" is appropriate for all the depicted entities. If we had a source, maybe it would shed some light on this concern. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:51, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough, that map shows Denmark and Sweden-Norway as empires which seems questionable. I've looked around on Commons and can't find an alternative with sources. File:Colonisation 1914.png is pretty good but has some issues. Maybe someday, if some of your work ethic rubs off on me, I will make a corrected version with sources :) I do think it's helpful to have a map to show the extent of imperialism. --Cerebellum (talk) 13:19, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

An image on the topic would be nice. To address the sourcing issue, the easiest approach would be to find a map of this type in a high-quality source and reproduce it with enough changes (e.g. colors, legend, layout) to avoid a copyvio. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:43, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Recentism - Recent history given undue weight

This article describes 300 000 years of human history. Despite this, almost all focus is on the most recent 10 000 years, which represent only about 3% of human history.

As it is, the article does not help the reader get a good understanding of the entirety of human history, as it skims over the first 97%. Shouldn't the article try to give a balanced description the main events during the history of the human species?

This article should be tagged with the Recentism tag {{Recentism}}. ~2026-16787-9 (talk) 20:49, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

Hello and thanks for your suggestion. History is about presenting important developments, not about allocating space in proportion to the amount of time that has passed. Scholars identify more important developments in the period from 8,000 BCE to 2,000 CE than in the period from 110,000 BCE to 100,000 BCE, which is why there is no direct match in the allocated space for these periods. Evidence density from those periods is also a point to consider. If we were to follow your line of thought, our article would be almost exclusively on deep history. According to WP:PROPORTION, articles should treat "each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject." I think that's what our article is doing since high-quality sources on human history or world history follow a similar pattern. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:37, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

Lead sentence

@Phlsph7: I respectfully disagree. That sentence essentially reads to me as "human history is the history of humans". Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 14:34, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Hello Snowmanonahoe and thanks for your input. You are right that the sentence includes a definition. However, it's not a purely circular definition, as you are suggesting. The sentence serves a clear and standard function: to define the scope of the article in plain terms. According to MOS:LEADSENTENCE: "If its subject is definable, then the first sentence should give a concise definition". Phlsph7 (talk) 16:25, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

@Phlsph7: Human history as a concept should be defined, but the current sentence also contains a definition of the word history by itself, which is why it reads awkwardly. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 21:07, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not 100% sure what you mean. You seem to imply that the lead sentence contains two definitions: the first one of "human history" and the second one of "history". A definition usually has the form "X is Y". The sentence only has one "is", so it's not clear where you see the second definition. Or are you saying that the current sentence only defines "history" but that it should define "human history" instead? Phlsph7 (talk) 08:03, 21 April 2026 (UTC)