Records

Humans don't have a primacy in record making, and record keeping. All forms of life imprint, and get imprinted by the immediate environment. The environment itself is a set of records.

Marks, records, imprints, and others. These are changes in one object due to the actions of nearby objects. A meteorite hiting a planet and leaving a crater is a record making event. We know that sixty five million years ago a meteorite hit the place now called Chicxulub and the catastrophic consequences are evident all over the Earth. That is how we know about this incident.

History depends crucially on these records. No records, no History.

Oral traditions are not enough, words exist in air for a short time, then they produce marks in the listeners brains, but those records are transitory. Externally written records are better, they last more. History depends on both records, but the artefacts are better. A set of marks on a bone, a fossilized stick, a pyramid, a stele, and so on and so forth.

It is hard to disentangle the meaning in those marks, but it is possible.

We know what happened in the past because of the human discipline of History. This is a scientific enterprise.

Information is the set of records.