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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   512 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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There are some parts of history, especially ancient history, where we have very little documentation. The third century crisis in Rome, the Mayans, the Carthaginians, are all examples. Which “black hole” in history most interests you?

If I had to pick, I would love more info on the Parthians/Arsacids. They ruled Iran for 500 years and were the Romans most perennial rivals. We don’t have any native narrative history from there, and really have to piece things together from minimal evidence.

Pre-history in general.

I'd like to know the extent of advanced cognition, planning and civilization building without written language, perhaps even without spoken language. Was Chomsky right? Did the capacities for language come into place long before the actual externalization of it?

I wonder if the modern emphasis on regurgitating linear sequences of words has actually weakened some of our mental complexity.

Indus Valley Civilization. I don't think there's much we'll get out of their symbols even if we do ever decipher them, because a text corpus where the longest work is seventeen characters long probably won't yield that much information. Even so, something so big and so old doth bring out wonder.

Number one for me is probably the early (think Cahokia) Native Americans, who didn’t leave almost any records and built mostly in wood. The large majority of our knowledge of North American native tribes starts with the tribes which existed at the time of European contact, and often only in the state they were in at that time. It would be fascinating to know their earlier histories, who came before the tribes we know, how did they form, how they got to be in their political positions and relative powers as we know them.

Also, the proto-Slavic cultures in places like Poland that also built primarily with wood (and so left essentially no ruins) and either barely had writing or wrote on wood which did not survive. We do have some general knowledge about these cultures but as far as I know there’s not much granularity.

I’m curious about the Minoan civilization and the Bronze Age collapse. I don’t really know how much documentation we have on either of those.

It's not exactly the same as what you're asking, but I'm very sad knowing we'll (likely) never know anything about the vast, vast majority of human languages that have ever been spoken. It'd be incredible to know exactly how Proto-Indo-European sounded, what other language families it was related to (did it share a common ancestor with Proto-Finno-Urgic?), whether the Altaic hypothesis in any of its forms really is correct, and so on.

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