Talk:Prehistory

Richard, this article was written by a history Editor, so in theory for a mere Author to remove stuff is rather dubious. In fact the stuff you removed looks pretty weird to me. For that matter so does the rest of it. Why should the prehistory of "Western civilization" be regarded as ending with the invention of writing in the Middle East? Why are the Americas not part of Western civilization? For that matter, can a "civilization" have a prehistory? In what sense? Anything might have a prehistory in the sense of what happened before it started. That might be before, after, or simultaneous with, the invention of writing. Peter Jackson (talk) 09:47, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

I removed a couple of sentences because it went off into meta-commentary on the semantics of the term. Worth noting that I did the same for the same text in the history article. Considering the length of the article, it threw off the balance; there may be a place for it in a fully fledged page but at this stage I think it complicates the subject when the page should be trying to create an easy to read overview.

As you say, there are some issues in the article as it currently stands. I would try to avoid using the term 'Western civilisation' because it invites a lot of assumptions and would need defining. Ideally when introducing a new topic you want to keep other terms that need defining for the reader to understand to a minimum.

I'm wondering if it is worth starting anew. Richard Nevell (talk) 20:44, 3 September 2019 (UTC)