Historians Are Why We Rule the Planet

(Other Species Should Probably Be Concerned)

Here's a weird fact: there are currently millions of people on Earth whose full-time job is to remember things that already happened.

Think about that for a second. Millions of humans get up every morning, drink coffee, and go teach teenagers about the Peloponnesian War. Or excavate 3,000-year-old pottery shards. Or carefully preserve documents about trade disputes from 1847. We pay them to do this. With actual money.

The Wolf Problem

A wolf pack in 2026 is roughly as capable as a wolf pack from 10,000 years ago. They hunt. They have a social hierarchy. They're excellent at being wolves. But they don't build on innovations from packs centuries ago.

Wolves don't employ historians. Each pack basically starts from scratch.

Humans? We're absurdly, terrifyingly different.

The Unbroken Chain

Somewhere around 200 years ago, there were almost no people with "historian" as a formal job title by modern standards. Before the early 1800s, you had a handful of gentlemen scholars, some monks, maybe a court chronicler or two. History wasn't yet a mass profession.

But go back further - before universities, before professions, before writing - and you still find them. The druids memorizing genealogies for decades. The griots preserving West African histories through oral tradition. Aboriginal elders maintaining songlines stretching back 50,000 years. Norse skalds. Chinese court historians. Mesopotamian scribes.

There has probably never been a moment in human history, since we became recognizably us, when some people weren't specifically tasked with remembering and transmitting what came before.

We've always employed historians. We just didn't always call them that.

Why This Makes Us the Dominant Species

Here's the thing: cumulative cultural transmission is our species' superpower.

You don't need to rediscover fire. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You don't need to figure out agriculture from first principles or rediscover that mercury is poisonous. Someone already did that. Someone remembered it. Someone taught it to someone else. The chain continues.

This is what makes humans weird. A physicist in 2026 can build on Newton, who built on Galileo, who built on Archimedes, who built on Babylonian mathematics from 4,000 years ago. We stack knowledge like cathedral stones, higher and higher, generation after generation.

And the people making sure those blocks don't fall? Historians, teachers, archivists, tradition-keepers - the professional rememberers.

Without them, we're just unusually chatty chimpanzees.

The Miracle Is That It Works At All

Here's the uncomfortable part: we're actually quite bad at this.

Libraries burn. Languages die. Entire civilizations vanish with barely a trace. We forgot how to make Roman concrete for over a millennium. We lost the recipe for Greek fire. Countless oral traditions disappeared when the last speaker died. The Library of Alexandria. The burning of the Maya codices. The lost plays of Sophocles.

And even when we don't lose knowledge, we ignore it spectacularly. We keep rediscovering that lead is poisonous. We keep forgetting that pandemics require preparation. Politicians keep learning (or not learning) the same lessons about inflation, war, and hubris that previous generations learned the hard way.

History teachers are overworked and underpaid. University history departments get their budgets slashed. We cut funding for remembering the past because it doesn't show immediate returns.

The miracle isn't that we have institutional memory. The miracle is that it works at all given how little we invest in it and how fragile the whole system is.

It's like we discovered we had a superpower and then decided to see how much neglect it could survive.

But here's the thing: even our terrible implementation of cumulative cultural transmission is so vastly superior to not having it that we still dominate the planet. The advantage is immense. Even half-remembered, poorly-funded, frequently-ignored institutional memory is enough to build civilization.

The Exponential Weirdness

From almost none by modern standards in 1825 to millions employed in the field today. In just 200 years, we went from a handful of eccentric scholars to a global infrastructure of institutional memory employing more people than the entire population of Denmark.

We built an industry around not forgetting.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a wolf pack is hunting elk using the exact same strategies their ancestors used 10,000 years ago. They're very good at it. They haven't improved. They don't need to improve. They don't have historians telling them about that time in 8,000 BCE when wolf pack #4,829 tried a new flanking maneuver.

We do. We have millions of people doing this. And that's why we have cities and spacecraft and nuclear weapons and TikTok.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

So yes, in a very real sense, historians are why humans rule the planet.

Not just historians - obviously we need the scientists and engineers and farmers and everyone else. But the whole stack only works because we have people whose job is to make sure we don't forget what we've learned.

We're the only species that deliberately allocates massive resources to maintaining institutional memory. We're the only pack with a memory longer than a single generation. We're the only animal that gets better at being ourselves over time.

We're also the only animal that might destroy itself despite - or perhaps because of - knowing exactly how we're doing it.

Which makes the question rather urgent: Will we be the species that finally learned from history? Or just the one with the best records of our own extinction?

The wolves should be worried. But they won't be, because they don't have historians to warn them.

We do. Whether we listen is another question entirely.

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Rough estimates suggest millions of people are currently employed worldwide to teach or research the past. Yes, that includes your high school history teacher who mostly showed movies on Fridays.