Prehistory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prehistory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Prehistory (meaning "before history", or "before knowledge acquired by investigation", from the Latin word for "before," præ, and historia) is the span of time before recorded history or the invention of writing systems. Prehistory refers to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins.[1] More broadly, it can refer to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing.

The term "prehistory" can refer to the vast span of time since the beginning of the Universe, but more often it refers to the period since life appeared on Earth, or even more specifically to the time since human-like beings appeared.^[4][5] In dividing up human prehistory, prehistorians 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 time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

"Neolithic" means "New Stone Age." This was a period of primitive technological and social development, toward the end of the "Stone Age". The Neolithic period saw the development of early villages, agriculture, animal domestication, tools and the onset of the earliest recorded incidents of warfare.^[15] The Neolithic term is commonly used in the Old World, as its application to cultures in the Americas and Oceania that did not fully develop metal-working technology raises problems.

Forest gardening, originating in prehistory, is thought to be the world's oldest known form of agriculture (or agroecosystem).^[16] Vere Gordon Childe then describes an "Agricultural Revolution" occurring about the 10th millennium BCE with the adoption of agriculture and domestication of plants and animals. The Sumerians first began farming c. 9500 BCE. By 7000 BCE, agriculture had been developed in India and Peru separately; by 6000 BCE, in Egypt; by 5000 BCE, in China. About 2700 BCE, agriculture had come to Mesoamerica.

Although attention has tended to concentrate on the Middle East's Fertile Crescent, archaeology in the Americas, East Asia and Southeast Asia indicates that agricultural systems, using different crops and animals, may in some cases have developed there nearly as early.

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Mesoamerica is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.^[1][2] It is one of six areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently, and the second in the Americas after Norte Chico (Caral-Supe) in present-day northern coastal Peru. 

As a cultural area, Mesoamerica is defined by a mosaic of cultural traits developed and shared by its indigenous cultures. Beginning as early as 7000 BC, the domestication of maize, beans, squash and chili, as well as the turkey and dog, caused a transition from paleo-Indian hunter-gatherer tribal grouping to the organization of sedentary agricultural villages. In the subsequent formative period, agriculture and cultural traits such as a complex mythological and religious tradition, a vigesimal numeric system, and a complex calendric system, a tradition of ball playing, and a distinct architectural style, were diffused through the area. Also in this period, villages began to become socially stratified and develop into chiefdoms with the development of large ceremonial centers, interconnected by a network of trade routes for the exchange of luxury goods, such as obsidian, jade, cacao, cinnabar, Spondylus shells, hematite, and ceramics. While Mesoamerican civilization did know of the wheel and basic metallurgy, neither of these technologies became culturally important.

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The technological and social state of the world, circa 1000 BCE.

^{hunter-gatherers}

^{nomadic pastoralists}

^{simple farming societies}

^{complex farming societies/chiefdoms}

^{state societies}

^uninhabited

The cradles of early civilizations were river valleys, such as the Euphrates and Tigris valleys in Mesopotamia, the Nile valley in Egypt, the Indus valley in the Indian subcontinent, and the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys in China. Some nomadic peoples, such as the Indigenous Australians and the Bushmen of southern Africa, did not practice agriculture until relatively recent times.

Agriculture made possible complex societies — civilizations in many climates. States and markets emerged. Technologies enhanced people's ability to harness nature and to develop transport and communication."The city represented a new degree of human concentration, a new magnitude in settlement".^[17] Cities relied on agricultural surplus."since the inhabitants of a city do not produce their own food...cities cannot support themselves...thus exist only where agriculture is successful enough to produce agricultural surplus."

The term 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. Copper/tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before 3000 BCE. The Bronze Age forms part of the three-age system for prehistoric societies. In this system, it follows the Neolithic in some areas of the world.

The Bronze Age is the earliest period for which we have direct written accounts, since the invention of writing coincides with its early beginnings.

In archaeology, the Iron Age refers to the advent of ferrous metallurgy. The adoption of iron coincided with other changes in some past cultures, 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.

Middle Paleolithic

• c. 200,000 BP – Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appear in Africa, including by this point lack of significant hair compared to other primates
• c. 300,000–30,000 BP. Mousterian (Neanderthal) culture in Europe.^[19]
• c. 75,000 BP – Toba Volcano supereruption.^[20]
• c. 70,000–50,000 BP - Homo sapiens move from Africa to Asia.^[21] In the next millennia, these human groups' descendants move on to southern India, the Malay islands, Australia, Japan, China, Siberia, Alaska, and the northwestern coast of North America.^[21]
• c. 50,000? BP – Behavioral modernity, by this point including language and sophisticated cognition
• c. 42,000–650,000? BP – Invention of clothing

Upper Paleolithic

• c. 32,000 BP – Aurignacian culture begins in Europe.
• 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.^[22]
• c. 28,500 BCE – New Guinea is populated by colonists from Asia or Australia.^[23]
• c. 28,000–20,000 BP – Gravettian period in Europe. Harpoons, needles, and saws invented.
• c. 26,000 BP / c. 24,000 BCE – People around the world use fibers to make baby-carriers, clothes, bags, baskets, and nets.
• c. 25,000 BP / 23,000 BCE – A hamlet consisting of huts built of rocks and of mammoth bones is founded in what is now Dolni Vestonice in Moravia in the Czech Republic. This is the oldest human permanent settlement that has yet been found by archaeologists.^[24]
• c. 20,000 BP or 18,000 BCE – Chatelperronian culture in France.^[25]
• c. 16,000 BP / 14,000 BCE – Wisent 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.^[26]
• 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 Aquifers are full.^[27]

Mesolithic

Neolithic

• c. 8000 BCE / 7000 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.^[28] In early agriculture at this time, the Planting stick is used, but it is replaced by a primitive Plow in subsequent centuries.^[29] Around this time, a round stone tower, now preserved to about 8.5 meters high and 8.5 meters in diameter is built in Jericho

Chalcolithic

• c. 3700 BCE – Cuneiform writing appears in Sumer, and records begin to be kept. According to the majority of specialists, the first Mesopotamian writing was a tool that had little connection to the spoken language.^[31]
• c. 3000 BCE – Stonehenge construction begins. In its first version, it consisted of a circular ditch and bank, with 56 wooden posts.^[32]