Eras
Prehistory
Also Known As Prehistoric Era
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Prehistory is the vast span of the human past that precedes written records, running from the first stone tools made by early hominins through the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the eventual invention of agriculture and settled life. Because there are no documents from most of this era, everything historians know about it comes from archaeology, palaeoanthropology and comparative studies of surviving oral cultures, rather than from the words of people who lived through it. Prehistory is not a single uniform stretch of time. It covers hunting and gathering societies that endured for hundreds of thousands of years relatively unchanged alongside the Neolithic Revolution, when farming, permanent settlement and the domestication of animals transformed human life in a comparatively short span. The era ends, by convention, wherever a society first produces texts that survive, which is why prehistory closes at very different calendar dates in different parts of the world.
Facts
Disputed
Start YearConventionally dated to the earliest known stone tools, the Lomekwian industry at Lomekwi, Kenya. Some historians instead begin prehistory with the appearance of the genus Homo around 2.5 million years ago, or with anatomically modern humans around 300,000 years ago. There is no single agreed starting point, only a shared sense that prehistory has no fixed beginning. End YearConventionally marked by the earliest Sumerian cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, around 3200 BCE. Because writing was invented independently at different times in different regions, in Egypt around 3100 BCE, in China around 1200 BCE, and in Mesoamerica later still, prehistory does not end everywhere at once. The boundary is regional, not global. Geographic ScopeGlobal in principle, since every human society has a prehistoric phase, but the specific boundary dates conventionally cited, and the archaeological record used to study them, are heaviest for East Africa, where the earliest stone tools and hominin fossils are concentrated, and for the Near East and Europe, where excavation has been most extensive. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Prehistory entry
The Cambridge Ancient History
Cambridge University PressVol. I, Part 1, prehistoric background chapters
Wikipedia
WikipediaIncludes: The Paleolithic Period, Paleolithic, in relation to PrehistoryQuote, Includes: The Paleolithic Period, Paleolithic, in relation to Prehistory
a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools.
Wikipedia
WikipediaIncludes: The Neolithic Period, Neolithic, in relation to PrehistoryQuote, Includes: The Neolithic Period, Neolithic, in relation to Prehistory
the final division of the Stone Age in Asia, Europe and Africa.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
End Year
A significant strand of historiography, particularly work engaging with Indigenous and oral-tradition societies, has challenged the writing-based prehistory and history boundary itself, arguing it implicitly frames societies that preserved their past through oral tradition rather than writing as existing outside history proper. On this view, the convention that prehistory ends where writing begins encodes a bias toward literate, state-organized societies rather than describing a genuine universal transition, and the boundary recorded here should be read as a convenience of the documentary record available to historians, not a claim about which societies possessed history.
A dissenting reading, from Historiographical critique of the prehistory/history divideEncyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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