It's mainly a problem for industrialized westerners. Go ask a herdsmen that spends all year outside and they'll have a fairly good memory for extreme weather events in the same way that you and I remember what the social climate of 2008 was like.
Anthropologists and biologists commonly track changes in floral/faunal ranges and ecosystems by asking the people who observe them daily.
They aren't worthless though. The current over-reliance on super-human storage systems coupled with a nasty dopamine loop that doesn't reward good memories really distorted our perceptions of what people can and should remember. Entire oral histories have been passed down centuries because brains are pretty big.
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It's mainly a problem for industrialized westerners. Go ask a herdsmen that spends all year outside and they'll have a fairly good memory for extreme weather events in the same way that you and I remember what the social climate of 2008 was like.
Anthropologists and biologists commonly track changes in floral/faunal ranges and ecosystems by asking the people who observe them daily.
No, human memories are just generally pretty crappy and selective, at least compared to hard data.
They aren't worthless though. The current over-reliance on super-human storage systems coupled with a nasty dopamine loop that doesn't reward good memories really distorted our perceptions of what people can and should remember. Entire oral histories have been passed down centuries because brains are pretty big.