Prehistory, also called pre-literary history,
In the early Bronze Age, Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and keep historical records, with their neighbours following. Most other civilizations reached their end of prehistory during the following Iron Age. The three-age system of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where metalworking arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas. With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not develop writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia.
The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing system, is often known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition,[Graslund, Bo. 1987. The birth of prehistoric chronology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.] The most common of these dating techniques is radiocarbon dating.
Definition
Beginning and end
The beginning of prehistory is normally taken to be marked by human-like beings appearing on Earth.
[Renfrew, Colin. 2008. Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind. New York: Modern Library][Fagan, Brian. (2007). World Prehistory: A brief introduction New York: Prentice-Hall, (Seventh ed.), Chapter One] The date marking its end is typically defined as the advent of the contemporary written historical record.
Both dates consequently vary widely from region to region. For example, in regions, prehistory cannot begin before million years ago, which is when the first signs of human presence have been found; however, Africa and Asia contain sites dated as early as and 1.8 million years ago, respectively.
Time periods
In dividing up human prehistory in Eurasia, historians typically use the three-age system, whereas scholars of pre-human time periods typically use the well-defined
geologic record and its internationally defined
stratum base within the geologic time scale. The three-age system is the
periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive
, named for their predominant tool-making technologies:
Stone Age,
Bronze Age and
Iron Age.
In some areas, there is also a transition period between Stone Age and Bronze Age, the
Chalcolithic or Copper Age.
For the prehistory of the Americas see Pre-Columbian era.
History of the term
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.
The geologic time scale for pre-human time periods, and the three-age system for human prehistory, were systematised during the nineteenth century in the work of British, French, German, and Scandinavian Anthropology, Archaeology, and .[
OCLC 1379265149.]
Means of research
The main source of information for prehistory is archaeology (a branch of anthropology), but some scholars are beginning to make more use of evidence from the natural and social sciences.
[The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratification and the State edited by María Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo García Sanjuán, Antonio Gilman. Pg 36.][ Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. Edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall, Sian Jones. p. 8.ISBN 9780415518888][ Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology: An Introductory Handbook. By Walter E. Ras. p. 49.ISBN 9781563380556]
The primary researchers into human prehistory are archaeologists and physical anthropologists who use excavation, geologic and geographic surveys, and other scientific analysis to reveal and interpret the nature and behavior of pre-literate and non-literate peoples.
Human prehistory differs from history not only in terms of its chronology, but in the way it deals with the activities of archaeological cultures rather than named or . Restricted to material processes, remains, and artefacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that prehistorians use, such as "Neanderthal" or "Iron Age", are modern labels with definitions sometimes subject to debate.
Stone Age
The concept of a "Stone Age" is found useful in the archaeology of most of the world, although in the archaeology of the Americas it is called by different names and begins with a
Lithic stage, or sometimes
Paleo-Indians. The sub-divisions described below are used for Eurasia, and not consistently across the whole area.
Palaeolithic
"Palaeolithic" means "Old Stone Age", and begins with the first use of
. The Paleolithic is the earliest period of the
Stone Age. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by
Hominini million years ago, to the end of the
Pleistocene Before Present (before the present period).
The early part of the Palaeolithic is called the Lower Paleolithic (as in excavations it appears underneath the Upper Paleolithic), beginning with the earliest stone tools dated to around 3.3 million years ago at the Lomekwi site in Kenya.[Harmand et al., 2015, p. 315.] Evidence of control of fire by early hominins during the Lower Palaeolithic Era is uncertain and has at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim is that H. erectus or Homo ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP in a site at Bnot Ya'akov Bridge, Israel. The use of fire enabled early humans to cook food, provide warmth, have a light source, deter animals at night and meditate.
Early Homo sapiens originated some 300,000 years ago,[Race and Human Evolution. By Milford H. Wolpoff. p. 348.] During the Middle Palaeolithic Era, there is the first definitive evidence of human use of fire. Sites in Zambia have charred logs, charcoal and carbonized plants, that have been dated to 180,000 BP.
The Upper Paleolithic extends from 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the first organized settlements and blossoming of artistic work.
Throughout the Palaeolithic, humans generally lived as . Hunter-gatherer societies tended to be very small and egalitarian,[Vanishing Voices : The Extinction of the World's Languages. By Daniel Nettle, Suzanne Romaine Merton Professor of English Language University of Oxford. pp. 102–103.] although hunter-gatherer societies with abundant resources or advanced food-storage techniques sometimes developed sedentary lifestyles with complex social structures such as chiefdoms,
Mesolithic
The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age (from the
Greek language mesos, 'middle', and
lithos, 'stone'), was a period in the development of human
technology between the Palaeolithic and
Neolithic.
The Mesolithic period began with the retreat of glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, some 10,000 BP, and ended with the introduction of agriculture, the date of which varied by geographic region. In some areas, such as the Near East, agriculture was already underway by the end of the Pleistocene, and there the Mesolithic is short and poorly defined. In areas with limited glacial impact, the term "Epipalaeolithic" is preferred.
Regions that experienced greater environmental effects as the last ice age ended have a much more evident Mesolithic era, lasting millennia. In Northern Europe, societies were able to live well on rich food supplies from the fostered by the warmer climate. Such conditions produced distinctive human behaviours that are preserved in the material record, such as the Maglemosian and Azilian cultures. These conditions also delayed the coming of the Neolithic until as late as 4000 BCE (6,000 Before Present) in northern Europe.
Remains from this period are few and far between, often limited to . In forested areas, the first signs of deforestation have been found, although this would only begin in earnest during the Neolithic, when more space was needed for agriculture.
The Mesolithic is characterized in most areas by small composite flint tools: and . Fishing tackle, stone , and wooden objects such as and bows have been found at some sites. These technologies first occur in Africa, associated with the Azilian cultures, before spreading to Europe through the Iberomaurusian culture of Northern Africa and the Kebaran culture of the Levant. However, independent discovery is not ruled out.
Neolithic
"Neolithic" means "New Stone Age", from about 10,200 BCE in some parts of the Middle East, but later in other parts of the world,
[ First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies by Peter Bellwood, 2004] and ended between 4,500 and 2,000 BCE. Although there were several species of humans during the
Paleolithic, by the
Neolithic only
Homo sapiens sapiens remained.
This was a period of
technological and
social developments which established most of the basic elements of historical cultures, such as the domestication of crops and
domestication, and the establishment of permanent settlements and early chiefdoms. The era commenced with the beginning of farming, which produced the "Neolithic Revolution". It ended when metal tools became widespread (in the
chalcolithic or
Bronze Age; or, in some geographical regions, in the
Iron Age). The term
Neolithic is commonly used in the
Old World; its application to cultures in the
Americas and
Oceania is complicated by the fact standard progression from stone to metal tools, as seen in the Old World, does not neatly apply.
Early Neolithic farming was limited to a narrow range of plants, both wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat, millet and spelt, and the keeping of dogs, sheep, and goats. By about 6,900–6,400 BCE, it included domesticated cattle and pigs, the establishment of permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements, and the use of pottery. The Neolithic period saw the development of early , agriculture, animal domestication, , and the onset of the earliest recorded incidents of warfare.
Settlements became more permanent, some with circular houses made of mudbrick with a single room. Settlements might have a surrounding stone wall to keep domesticated animals in and hostile tribes out. Later settlements have rectangular mud-brick houses where the family lived in single or multiple rooms. Burial findings suggest an ancestor cult with preserved skulls of the dead. The Vinča culture may have created the earliest system of writing.
Chalcolithic
In Old World archaeology, the "Chalcolithic", "Eneolithic", or "Copper Age" refers to a transitional period where early
copper metallurgy appeared alongside the widespread use of stone tools. During this period, some weapons and tools were made of copper. This period was still largely Neolithic in character. It is a phase of the
Bronze Age before it was discovered that adding
tin to
copper formed the harder
bronze. The Copper Age is seen as a transition period between the Stone Age and Bronze Age.
An archaeological site in
Serbia contains the oldest securely dated evidence of copper making at high temperature, from 7,500 years ago. The find in 2010 extends the known record of copper
smelting by about 800 years, and suggests that copper smelting may have been invented independently in separate parts of Asia and Europe at that time, rather than spreading from a single source.
The emergence of
metallurgy may have occurred first in the
Fertile Crescent, where it gave rise to the Bronze Age in the 4th millennium BCE (the traditional view), although finds from the Vinča culture in Europe have now been securely dated to slightly earlier than those of the Fertile Crescent.
Timna Valley contains evidence of copper mining 7,000 years ago.
The process of transition from
Neolithic to Chalcolithic in the Middle East is characterized in archaeological stone tool assemblages by a decline in high quality raw material procurement and use. North Africa and the Nile Valley imported its iron technology from the
Near East and followed the Near Eastern course of Bronze Age and
Iron Age development.
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is the earliest period in which some civilizations reached the end of prehistory, by introducing written records. The Bronze Age, or parts thereof, are thus considered to be part of prehistory only for the regions and civilizations who developed a system of keeping written records during later periods. The invention of writing coincides in some areas with the beginnings of the Bronze Age. After the appearance of writing, people started creating texts including written records of administrative matters.
The Bronze Age refers to a period in human cultural development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) included techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of ores, and then combining them to cast bronze. These naturally occurring ores typically included arsenic as a common impurity. Tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before 3000 BCE. The Bronze Age forms part of the three-age system for prehistoric societies.
While copper is a common ore, deposits of tin are rare in the Old World, and often had to be traded or carried considerable distances from the few mines, stimulating the creation of extensive trading routes. In many areas as far apart as China and England, the valuable new material was used for weapons, but for a long time apparently not available for agricultural tools. Much of it seems to have been hoarded by social elites, and sometimes deposited in extravagant quantities, from Chinese ritual bronzes and Indian copper hoards, to European of unused axe-heads.
By the end of the Bronze Age large states, whose armies imposed themselves on people with a different culture, and are often called empires, had arisen in Egypt, China, Anatolia (the Hittites), and Mesopotamia, all of them literate.
Iron Age
The Iron Age is not part of prehistory for all civilizations who had introduced written records during the Bronze Age. Most remaining civilizations did so during the Iron Age, often through conquest by empires, which continued to expand during this period. For example, in most of Europe conquest by the
Roman Empire means the term Iron Age is replaced by "Roman", "
Gallo-Roman", and similar terms after the conquest. Even before conquest, many areas began to have a protohistory, as they were written about by literate cultures; the protohistory of Ireland is an example.
In archaeology, the Iron Age refers to the advent of ferrous metallurgy. The adoption of iron coincided with other changes, often including more sophisticated agricultural practices, religious beliefs and artistic styles, which makes the archaeological Iron Age coincide with the "Axial Age" in the history of philosophy. Although iron ore is common, the metalworking techniques necessary to use iron are different from those needed for the metal used earlier, more heat is required.
Timeline
All dates are approximate and conjectural, obtained through research in the fields of
anthropology, archaeology,
genetics,
geology, or
linguistics. They are all subject to revision due to new discoveries or improved calculations. BP stands for "
Before Present (1950)." BCE stands for "Before Common Era".
Paleolithic
- Lower Paleolithic
-
c. 3.3 million BP – Earliest stone tools
-
c. 2.8 million BP – Genus Homo appears
-
c. 600,000 BP – Hunting-gathering
-
c. 400,000 BP – Control of fire by early humans
- Middle Paleolithic
-
c. 300,000 BP – Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appear in Africa,
-
c. 300,000–30,000 BP – Mousterian (Neanderthal) culture in Europe.
-
c. 170,000–83,000 BP – Invention of clothing
-
c. 75,000 BP – Toba Volcano supereruption.
-
c. 80,000–50,000 BP – Homo sapiens exit Africa as a single population.
[This is indicated by the M130 marker in the Y chromosome. "Traces of a Distant Past", by Gary Stix, Scientific American, July 2008, pp. 56–63.] In the next millennia, descendants from this population migrate to southern India, the Malay islands, Australia, Japan, China, Siberia, Alaska, and the northwestern coast of North America.
-
c. 80,000–50,000? BP – Behavioral modernity, by this point including language and sophisticated cognition
- Upper Paleolithic
-
c. 45,000 BP / 43,000 BCE – Beginnings of Châtelperronian culture in France.
-
c. 43,000 BP - 37,000 BP The Aurignacian culture began, for example in the German Swabian Jura
-
c. 40,000 BP / 38,000 BCE – First human settlement in the southern half of the Australian mainland, by indigenous Australians (including the future sites of Sydney,
[Gary Presland, The First Residents of Melbourne's Western Region, (revised edition), Harriland Press, 1997. . Presland says on p. 1: "There is some evidence to show that people were living in the Maribyrnong River valley, near present day Keilor, about 40,000 years ago."])
-
c. 32,000 BP / 30,000 BCE – Beginnings of Aurignacian culture, exemplified by the cave paintings ("parietal art") of Chauvet Cave in France.
-
c. 30,500 BP / 28,500 BCE – New Guinea is populated by colonists from Asia or Australia.
[James Trager, The People's Chronology, 1994, ]
-
c. 30,000 BP / 28,000 BCE – A herd of reindeer is slaughtered and butchered by humans in the Vezere Valley in what is today France.
[Gene S. Stuart, "Ice Age Hunters: Artists in Hidden Cages." In Mysteries of the Ancient World, a publication of the National Geographic Society, 1979. pp. 11–18.]
-
c. 28,000–20,000 BP – Gravettian period in Europe. Harpoons, needles, and saws invented.
-
c. 26,500 BP – Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Subsequently, the ice melts and the glaciers retreat again (Late Glacial Maximum). During this latter period human beings return to Western Europe (see Magdalenian culture) and enter North America from Eastern Siberia for the first time (see Paleo-Indians, pre-Clovis culture and Settlement of the Americas).
-
c. 26,000 BP / 24,000 BCE – People around the world use fibres to make baby-carriers, clothes, bags, baskets, and nets.
-
c. 25,000 BP / 23,000 BCE – A settlement consisting of huts built of rocks and mammoth bones is founded near what is now Dolní Věstonice in Moravia in the Czech Republic. This is the oldest human permanent settlement that has been found by archaeologists.
-
c. 23,000 BP / 21,000 BCE – Small-scale trial cultivation of plants in Ohalo II, a hunter-gatherers' sedentary camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel.
-
c. 16,000 BP / 14,000 BCE – Wisent (bison) sculpted in clay deep inside the cave now known as Le Tuc d'Audoubert in the French Pyrenees near what is now the border of Spain.
-
c. 14,800 BP / 12,800 BCE – The Humid Period begins in North Africa. The region that would later become the Sahara is wet and fertile, and the are full.
["Shift from Savannah to Sahara was Gradual", by Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 9 May 2008.]
Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic
-
to 9,500 BCE – Natufian culture: a culture of sedentary hunter-gatherers who may have cultivated rye in the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean)
Neolithic
-
–9,200 BCE – Figs of a parthenocarpic (and therefore sterile) type are cultivated in the early Neolithic village Gilgal I (in the Jordan Valley, 13 km north of Jericho). The find predates the domestication of wheat, barley, and , and may thus be the first known instance of agriculture.
-
– Circles of T-shaped stone pillars erected at Göbekli Tepe in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey during pre-pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period. As yet unexcavated structures at the site are thought to date back to the epipaleolithic.
-
–7,000 BCE – In northern Mesopotamia, now northern Iraq, cultivation of barley and wheat begins. At first they are used for beer, gruel, and soup, eventually for bread.
[Kiple, Kenneth F. and Ornelas, Kriemhild Coneè, eds., The Cambridge World History of Food, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 83] In early agriculture at this time the planting stick is used, but it is replaced by a primitive plough in subsequent centuries.["No-Till: The Quiet Revolution", by David Huggins and John Reganold, Scientific American, July 2008, pp. 70–77.] Around this time, a round stone tower, now preserved at about 8.5 meters high and 8.5 meters in diameter is built in Jericho.[Fagan, Brian M, ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996 , p. 363.]
-
–4,500 BCE In Central Europe Neolithic circulars emerge.
[map in Daim and Neubauer 2005, p. 14; reprinted in Plath 2011, p. 24. Main distribution is between the Danube Bend and the middle Elbe, say between Budapest and Brunswick (800 km). Including outliers, the area is somewhat larger, encompassing most of Central Europe, stretching over some 1100 km from the Danube-Drava confluence to the lower Rhine (Ruhr area).]
Chalcolithic
-
– Pictogram proto-writing, known as proto-cuneiform, appears in Sumer, and records begin to be kept. According to the majority of specialists, the first Mesopotamian writing (actually still pictographic proto-writing at this stage) was a tool for record-keeping that had little connection to the spoken language.
[Glassner, Jean-Jacques. The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing In Sumer. Trans. Zainab Bahrani. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Ebook.]
-
– Approximate date of death of "Ötzi the Iceman", found preserved in ice in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. A copper-bladed axe, which is a characteristic technology of this era, was found with the corpse.
-
– Skara Brae is constructed. This stone-built village consisted of ten clustered houses with stone hearths, beds, cupboards, and an ancient sewer system. This village was occupied for 600 years before being abandoned in .
-
– Stonehenge construction begins. In its first version, it consisted of a circular ditch and bank, with 56 wooden posts.
[Caroline Alexander, "Stonehenge", National Geographic, June 2008.]
-
– The Yamnaya culture expansions from the Pontic–Caspian steppe into Europe and Asia. These migrations are thought to have spread Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry and Indo-European languages across large parts of Eurasia.
By region
- Old World
-
Prehistoric Africa
-
Predynastic Egypt
-
Prehistoric Central North Africa
-
Prehistoric Asia
-
East Asia:
-
Prehistoric China
-
Prehistoric Korea
-
Japanese Paleolithic
-
East Asian Bronze Age
-
Chinese Bronze Age
-
South Asia
-
Indus valley civilization
-
South Asian Stone Age
-
Prehistory of Sri Lanka
-
Prehistory of Central Asia
-
Prehistoric Siberia
-
Southeast Asia:
-
Prehistoric Indonesia
-
Prehistoric Thailand
-
Southwest Asia (Near East)
-
Prehistoric Europe
-
Prehistoric Caucasus
-
Prehistoric Georgia
-
Prehistoric Armenia
-
Paleolithic Europe
-
Neolithic Europe
-
Bronze Age Europe
-
Iron Age Europe
-
Atlantic fringe
-
Prehistoric Britain
-
Prehistoric Ireland
-
Prehistoric Iberia
-
Prehistoric Balkans
- New World
-
Pre-Columbian Americas
-
Prehistoric Southwestern cultural divisions
-
2nd millennium BCE in North American prehistory
-
1st millennium BCE in North American prehistory
-
1st millennium in North American prehistory
-
Prehistory of Newfoundland and Labrador
-
Prehistory of the Canadian Maritimes
-
Prehistory of Quebec
-
Oceania
See also
External links
