For example, the birth of the very first caveman would probably not be considered history, but rather a subject of human anthropology. So is there a point where human events happened so long ago that they are no longer grouped with history?
For example, the birth of the very first caveman would probably not be considered history, but rather a subject of human anthropology. So is there a point where human events happened so long ago that they are no longer grouped with history?
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History is the study of the recorded human past. More specifically it is the study of how past humans perceived their environment, including contemporary events or their own understandings of history
If there is information which a human has recorded in order to (or if it incidentally happens to) provide information about events or eras they witnessed or were preserving knowledge about, it falls under the historian’s purview.
Because in the past five thousand years or so, writing systems have allowed for information to be preserved in more or less close to their original state, written history is the primary focus of history as a discipline, but historians can and do research oral histories, archaeological findings, and preserved environmental data in things like ice cores to help explain the human past as well.
The 20 year rule exists in this sub not because things which were recorded in the last 20 years are considered “not history”. Rather that rule exists to avoid distractions, arguments, etc that often arise online discussing more recent events, and to allow the relatively slow academic process to absorb and make reliable statements about how events happened and were perceived.
So no, there is not a certain age at which recorded information is deemed “no longer history”. It is just that, prior to the advent of written language, there is relatively little direct evidence that is still visible to us thousands of years later about how people recorded the events of their own past and present. Therefore there is not as much which historians can say with certainty using historical methodology(ies).
That depends on your definition of “history”, of which we can find several. One such that you may find, which is rather narrow, would be used to differentiate “history” (as a scholary practice) from other scholarly activities that engage with the past, such as archeology. In such a framework, one might find the distinction of history and pre-history, which is separated by the invention of writing / the presence of written sources, with history dealing with this and archeology with the stuff before. (Including archeology in anthropology is a quite US-centric idea, btw.)
Another very classic distinction would be between what philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries called Naturgeschichte as opposed to Geschichte, which posits history (plain Geschichte) as everything human beings have ever done and will ever do. This is basically the big conceptual nature/culture split, where the domain of the natural sciences is separated from that of the human / social sciences (although it is older than things like “social sciences” existing). Classic theories of history such as Droysen’s operate under the presupposition of this split and philosophers like Hegel, Schelling etc. reflected on this kind of separation. Simply put, here, “not-history” would, temporally speaking, necessarily point towards all the stuff between the beginning of the universe and the emergence of mankind; likewise, philosophers like Windelband and Dilthey argued that history in this broad sense is inaccessible to the scientific method and requires one of its own.
This distinction was very much paradigm for most of the time history as an academic discipline existed; however, it has become increasingly problematic to use it as defining the subject matters and questions we would call being the domain of history in the face of contemporary concepts—often emerging in theoretical or philosophical anthropology such as Bruno Latour’s—that are often summarily linked to the concept of the “anthropocene“. Simply put, the final realization that a hard separation between nature and culture (here: the activities of human beings) is a highly problematic one, and most likely untenable, since we exist within the same reality as everything else. (A good example of this way of thinking being problematic is when writing a history of climate.)
That being said, if we use a narrow definition of “history” as being the object of the academic practice of historians, then any pre-existing, or at least pre-human history becomes methodologically problematic, falling outside of the scholarly practice of “history” because exploring such a time requires a different approach from the critique and interpretation of “historical” sources (which mostly are conceived to be texts in both their ideal and material form, although any man-made objects and alterations to “nature” have always also been included in the object of study).
Basically, you have asked the philosophical question of “What is History?”, but, as you see, this hinges a lot on whether we speak of history as an academic discipline, a scholarly practice, a form of knowledge, etc.
P.S.: The 20-year cutoff line is just arbitrarily decided by the sub to stop devolving it into politics or so, it is not reflective of conventional academic practice.