Practice question · Multiple choice
Prehistory covers 99.9% of the human past and is studied almost entirely without texts. What does that proportion argue?
Hints
- Ask what fraction of six million years has writing in it.
- The division is about evidence, not about people. What follows?
Show the answer
C. That documentary history is the exception rather than the norm
Why
The line marks a change in what survives rather than in the people, so treating documents as the normal case inverts the actual distribution. Options 2 and 3 overreach: the argument is that a text-only method would miss almost everything, not that texts are dispensable where they exist.
Practise Synthesis: The Human Journey
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Synthesis: The Human Journey
- Prehistory accounts for roughly 95% of the human story.
- Order the whole human journey, oldest first.
- Farming spread despite making individual lives measurably worse, shorter, sicker, harder. Why does that…
- Sort each claim: a habit of thought the course teaches, or a trap it warns against?
- Why does the long view make the present look contingent?
- Complete the course’s closing argument.
- Which habits of thought has this course been building?
- In what sense is the prehistory/history line "drawn behind" people rather than crossed by them?