> Crazy that humans have been around for at least 10x as long as the oldest written history. What were we up to during those times?

A thought experiment, maybe slightly lateral to your question, but it is valid IMO. I tried this once on a WhatsApp chat with minor response (small group), but maybe it is time to try it again.

Let us go back 10000 years. Let us imagine a generation is about 25 years. How many ancestors did you have? Even if I count just my "fathers", I am a male, I come up with 400 generations, that's how many direct male ancestors have I had. Now forget direct male descendants, consider every dimension. My mother, her mother, her father, my father's mother ... The numbers become astronomical.

1. Of course we did not have that many people exist in the world. Maybe we had, then instead of 10000 years, go back 100000 years, and at some point the number of people(humans) in the ancestry chain will exceed the number of people that lived (during that era). First inference is that there was a lot of cross-pollination in the ancestry chain. That is simple math.

So I probably had a million ancestors (2 to the power of 400 is a big number BTW) during these 10000 years. May be more for some. May be less for some, but what else? If you look at numbers that big, I contend they would form some kind of normal distribution, may not be perfectly normal, but should be close enough. If we look at this distribution and identify the 99 percentile (people on the edges on either side), then what would those ancestors have been ...

2. One of my ancestors had to have killed someone.

3. One of my ancestors had to have committed suicide.

4. One of my ancestors had to have been raped.

5. One of my ancestors had to had been a demagogue and get people to fight each other.

6. One of my ancestors had to have died without seeing his unborn child.

7. One of my ancestors had to have drowned.

8. One of my ancestors had to have committed incest (not 20 degrees of separation, but direct siblings)

9. One of my ancestors had to have died peacefully at home, but another one had to have died quite miserable, and another quite brutally.

10. One of my ancestors had to have changed religion by choice, and one of my ancestors had to have changed religion due to force or societal pressures.

11. One of my ancestors had to have ruled (a tribe, a small family group), and another of my ancestors had to have been a consiglieri to one such tribe.

12. One of my ancestors had to have left home (for work, whatever) and never come back, and one of my ancestors had to have lived all his/her life within miles of where they were born.

13. One of my ancestors had to have been a prostitute or been managed some.

14. One of my ancestors had to have killed their child; and one of my ancestors had to have been killed by their child.

15. One of my ancestors had to have kids outside of marriage; and one my ancestors would have never married ("marriage" as understood based on current practices of that era)

16. One of my ancestors had to have died a virgin ... oh wait !! Strike that.

But that is on the edges, and I do not have the time to talk about people who were right in the middle of this normal bell curve, but there were lots of them.

Now I do not talk about what cultures emerged, and all I am saying is that human traits are somewhat unchanging. Maybe some norms change but the core remains the same. And with the same core, and with a rather large group, same patterns of society emerge. Yes there may be only one Rasputin, but the stories of tribes could be quite similar between various societies that were not even connected because on one side there is archaeological history (buildings, tunnels, what not) and then there is people history - and people history likely has repeating patterns based on the mix of people that end up being born and in that region at that point of time.

// Now this does not mean points 1-15 had to have happen to every reader's ancestors. Some tribes just lived in same village for generations. However, 10000 years is a long time for lot of these patterns to play out, so maybe they missed 1-2 bullet points, but the other 13-14 would have played out.

// Wonder if there is a book dealing with such thinking