If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and d

If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD. Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.