Prehistory

• 1. Introduction

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  Prehistory covers the span of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins, roughly 3.3 million years ago, and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing. The earliest known writing systems appeared only about 5,200 years ago. Everything before that vast threshold belongs to a story with no authors and no narrators. By definition, there are no written records from human prehistory. It can be known only from material archaeological and anthropological evidence: prehistoric materials and human remains. So how do you tell the story of people who left no words behind? How do you name peoples who never named themselves, and how do you date a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of years ago? And why does the moment prehistory ends differ so wildly from one corner of the world to another? Those are the questions that follow.

• 2. The Anonymous Past

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  Restricted to material processes, remains, and artefacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. It does not deal with named nations or named individuals. Instead it deals with the activities of archaeological cultures, which is the deepest way it differs from history. Because the people are silent, the labels are modern inventions. Terms that prehistorians use, such as Neanderthal or Iron Age, are modern labels whose definitions are sometimes subject to debate. As one goes back further in time, these assigned labels often become the only way of distinguishing groups of prehistoric peoples and conveying information about them in the present. The culture that is written about by others but has not developed its own writing system occupies a strange middle ground, often known as the protohistory of that culture. In Europe, the well-documented classical worlds of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbours like the Celts and the Etruscans who left little writing of their own. Historians still debate how much weight to give the sometimes biased accounts of these protohistoric cultures found in Greek and Roman literature.

• 3. Naming The Silence

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  The notion of prehistory emerged during the Enlightenment, in the work of antiquarians who used the word primitive to describe societies that existed before written records. The word prehistory first appeared in English in 1836, in the Foreign Quarterly Review. During the nineteenth century, British, French, German, and Scandinavian anthropologists, archaeologists, and antiquarians systematised two great frameworks: the geologic time scale for pre-human time periods, and the three-age system for human prehistory. An early conception held that without written records there could be no history at all, and no meaningful way to speak about people who left no writing. The more common conception today is that history rests on a wide range of evidence. Some historians have been uncomfortable with the term, and the concept of prehistory has been questioned, but not discarded. Archaeologists in particular view the term as a meaningful and necessary distinction of the type of work they do and the stories they can convey about the past.

• 4. Reading The Evidence

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  The archaeological record is the main source of information for prehistory, frequently studied in context with research from the natural sciences. The primary researchers are anthropologists, both archaeologists and physical anthropologists, who use excavation, geologic and geographic surveys, and other scientific analysis to interpret the behaviour of pre-literate and non-literate peoples. Human population geneticists and historical linguists provide further insight, while cultural anthropologists supply context for how objects passed among people. Data therefore arrives from a wide array of fields, including archaeoastronomy, comparative linguistics, biology, geology, molecular genetics, paleontology, palynology, and physical anthropology. The key step to understanding prehistoric evidence is dating, and reliable techniques have developed steadily since the nineteenth century. The most common of these is radiocarbon dating. Newer methods include forensic chemical analysis, which reveals the use and provenance of materials, and genetic analysis of bones, which can determine kinship and physical characteristics. Reconstructing ancient spoken languages has added yet another line of evidence to a past that wrote nothing down.

• 5. A Frontier That Moves

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  African prehistory begins about 2.5 million years ago, while prehistoric Asia dates back to 1.8 million years ago, and European prehistory begins around 1.3 million years ago, upon the first arrival of humans to the region. The ending is just as uneven, because the adoption of writing across the globe has been a slow process. In Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3100 BCE. In New Guinea the end is set far more recently, in the 1870s, when the Russian anthropologist Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai spent several years living among native peoples and described their way of life in a comprehensive treatise. The three-age division is not used everywhere. In places where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly through contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas, the framework does not fit. With some exceptions among pre-Columbian civilizations, those areas did not develop writing before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into recent times. For Australia, the year 1788 is usually taken as the end of prehistory.

• 6. Ninety Nine Percent

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  The Stone Age lasted for roughly 3.4 million years and encompasses 99 percent of human history. It ended between 4000 BC and 2000 BC with the advent of metalworking. Its earliest stretch, the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, begins with the first use of stone tools by hominins around 3.3 million years ago. The oldest of those tools, dated to roughly 3.3 million years ago at the Lomekwi site in Kenya, predate the genus Homo and were probably used by Kenyanthropus. Fire enters the story slowly and with dispute. Evidence of its control during the Lower Palaeolithic is uncertain, with at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim is that H. erectus or H. ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP at a site at Bnot Ya'akov Bridge in Israel. Early Homo sapiens originated some 300,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Palaeolithic, when anatomic changes indicating modern language capacity also arise. Sites in Zambia hold charred logs, charcoal, and carbonized plants dated to 180,000 BP, the first definitive evidence of human use of fire. The Upper Palaeolithic, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, brought the first organized settlements and a blossoming of artistic work.

• 7. From Foraging To Farming

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  Throughout the Palaeolithic, humans generally lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, in societies that tended to be very small and egalitarian. Where resources were abundant or food-storage techniques advanced, some groups developed sedentary lifestyles with complex social structures such as chiefdoms and social stratification. Long-distance contacts may have existed, as in the case of the Indigenous Australian highways known as songlines. The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, began with the retreat of glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene, some 10,000 BP. In Northern Europe, warmer climate fed rich marshlands, and societies that lived well there left distinctive traces in cultures such as the Maglemosian and Azilian. Such conditions delayed the Neolithic in northern Europe until as late as 4000 BCE. The Neolithic period began around 10,200 BCE in some regions of the Middle East, when farming produced the Neolithic Revolution. Early farming centred on a narrow range of plants, including einkorn wheat, millet, and spelt, alongside dogs, sheep, and goats. By about 6,900 to 6,400 BCE it took in domesticated cattle and pigs, permanent settlements, and the use of pottery. The Vinča culture may have created the earliest system of writing, and the megalithic temple complexes of Ġgantija are notable for their gigantic structures.

• 8. The Coming Of Metal

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  An archaeological site in Serbia holds the oldest securely dated evidence of copper making at high temperature, from 7,500 years ago. The find, made in 2010, extended the known record of copper smelting by about 800 years. It suggested that copper smelting may have been invented independently in separate parts of Asia and Europe, rather than spreading from a single source. This transitional Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, remained largely Neolithic in character, sitting between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. Timna Valley contains evidence of copper mining 7,000 years ago. The Bronze Age arrived when smelting copper and tin and combining them to cast bronze became widespread. Tin ores are rare, so much so that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before 3000 BCE, and the scarcity stimulated extensive trading routes. From Chinese ritual bronzes to Indian copper hoards to European hoards of unused axe-heads, much of the valuable new material was hoarded by social elites. By the end of the Bronze Age, large literate states had arisen in Egypt, China, Anatolia among the Hittites, and Mesopotamia. The Iron Age followed with the advent of ferrous metallurgy, which required more heat than earlier metals. Its changes ran so deep that the archaeological Iron Age coincides with the Axial Age in the history of philosophy. One marker from this long span stands out: Ötzi the Iceman, who died around 3,300 BCE, was found preserved in the Ötztal Alps in 1991 with a copper-bladed axe at his side.