Diff — Prehistory

{{infobox

| title = Prehistory

| subject = Everything before writing — the 99.7% of the human story with no words on paper

| span = c. 3.3 million BCE first stone tools → c. 3,200 BCE, writing begins

| first tools = Lomekwi, Kenya — c. 3.3 Mya

| first art = Sulawesi ochre — c. 43,900+ BCE

| last act = The Neolithic — see [[Neolithic Period]]

| end = c. 3,200 BCE — proto-cuneiform tablets, Uruk

| related = [[Neolithic Period]] · [[History of Education]] · [[History of Learning]]

| image = pre-lucy.jpg

| caption = Australopithecus afarensis — the species of "Lucy," cast in the Vienna Naturhistorisches Museum. Our ancestors walked upright three and a half million years ago (Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0).

}}

**Prehistory** is the name we give to everything that happened before anyone thought to write it down — and that turns out to be almost everything. From the first stone tool struck in Kenya to the first wedge pressed into Mesopotamian clay, the span covered here is **three and a third million years**. Written history, the whole of it, occupies the last **five and a half thousand**. If the human story were a book of a thousand pages, the first nine hundred and ninety-seven would have no letters at all — only pictures we must read from stone, bone, and ash.

That reading is harder, and more honest, than the written kind. Nobody in prehistory tells you their side of the story. You have to infer it: a butchered bone, a footprint in volcanic ash, a bead worn around a child's neck fifty thousand years after the child wore it. This article is the full arc — the parent story that our [[Neolithic Period]] article ends inside.

## How to read a million years

Dates this deep resist ordinary intuition, so a device helps: imagine the entire age of stone tools compressed into **a single day**. The first tool is struck at **one second past midnight**. Lucy walks at about **00:01**. Homo erectus arrives near dawn; fire is tamed around mid-morning; our own species, *Homo sapiens*, appears at roughly **9 p.m.** The first cave painting happens around **11:45 p.m.**, agriculture at **11:56**, and the first written word at **11:59:52** — eight seconds before midnight. Your whole life, so far, is the last few *hundredths* of a second.

Two rules for the numbers that follow. First, they are ranges, not facts — radiometric dates carry error margins, and "about a million years ago" is honest where a false precision wouldn't be. Second, **newer is not always better**: the deepest tools were made by brains nothing like ours, on a planet we would not recognize. The timeline above keeps both ideas honest.

## The first technology

Somewhere on the shore of Lake Turkana, Kenya, **3.3 million years ago**, someone picked up a rock and hit another rock with it — deliberately, with intent to sharpen. The **Lomekwi 3** site, reported in 2015, pushed back the oldest known stone tools by seven hundred thousand years and predates our own genus, *Homo*.[[cite: Harmand, S. et al., "3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya," *Nature* 521 (2015)]] The tools were made by a smaller-brained ancestor, probably an australopithecine — which means *technology is older than us*.

The **Oldowan** tradition followed (~2.6 Mya) — sharp flakes struck from cores, crude but effective. Then came the greatest tool of the entire Stone Age: the **Acheulean handaxe**, a teardrop-shaped biface appearing about **1.7 million years ago** and made, essentially unchanged, for nearly **1.5 million years**.[[cite: Gowlett, J., "The longest transition — the Acheulean and the human career," *Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute* (2016)]] No other technology in human history has lasted so long. Smartphones will have to survive until roughly the year 1.5 million CE to match it.

[[File:pre-handaxe.jpg|right|340px|Nine Acheulean bifaces, 700,000–200,000 BCE — the longest-lived technology in human history, made for one and a half million years (Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0).]]

## The family album

For most of prehistory, **we were not alone** — several human species walked the Earth at once, sharing the genus *Homo* and often the landscape. The family album is a crowded one.

The earliest candidate hominin yet found is **Sahelanthropus tchadensis**, a skull from Chad dated to roughly **7 million years ago** — near the split between our line and the chimpanzee line. Whether it stood upright is still argued.[[cite: Brunet, M. et al., "A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa," *Nature* 418 (2002)]] Far less controversial is **Australopithecus afarensis**: in 1974, Donald Johanson's team found a partial skeleton at Hadar, Ethiopia — about forty percent complete — nicknamed **Lucy** after the Beatles song playing at the celebration that night.[[cite: Johanson, D. C. et al., "A new species of the genus Australopithecus…," *Kirtlandia* 28 (1978)]] She was 3.2 million years old, stood about a meter tall, and proved our ancestors walked upright long before they were clever.

[[File:pre-laetoli.jpg|right|360px|The Laetoli footprints, Tanzania — trails pressed into volcanic ash 3.66 million years ago. Two hominins walked here, together, in the rain (E. J. McNutt et al., CC BY 4.0).]]

Four years later, in 1978, Mary Leakey's team found proof that needed no interpretation: the **Laetoli footprints** in Tanzania — a 27-meter trail of hominin footprints pressed into fresh volcanic ash **3.66 million years ago**, then sealed by more ash. Two individuals, walking upright, side by side, on a rainy day in the Pliocene.[[cite: Leakey, M. D. & Hay, R. L., "Pliocene footprints in the Laetolil Beds at Laetoli, northern Tanzania," *Nature* 278 (1979)]] No fossil could say it plainer: **they walked like us before they thought like us.**

From there the line thickens: **Homo habilis** ("handy man," ~2.4 Mya) with slightly bigger brains and the first recognized tools; **Homo erectus** (~1.9 Mya), tall, efficient, the first to leave Africa — surviving for nearly two million years across Africa and Asia, the most successful hominin ever. The best-known fossil is the **Turkana Boy** (or Nariokotome Boy), an ~8-year-old erectus found in Kenya in 1984, almost complete — our best single look at an ancestor's body.[[cite: Walker, A. & Leakey, R., *The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton* (1993)]]

[[File:pre-turkana.jpg|right|330px|Turkana Boy — Homo erectus, ~1.6 million years old. Reconstruction by Mauricio Antón (CC BY 4.0, published with Alan Turner).]]

## Fire

Nobody can date the moment fire was tamed — flames leave no fossils. But at **Wonderwerk Cave** in South Africa, ash and burnt bone fragments found deep inside the cave show hominins were using fire about **one million years ago** — the earliest secure evidence yet.[[cite: Berna, F. et al., "Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave," *PNAS* 109:20 (2012)]]

Fire changed everything that mattered. It cooked food — and cooked food is pre-digested food, unlocking more calories for less work, which primatologist **Richard Wrangham** argues is what made our big, expensive brains affordable in the first place.[[cite: Wrangham, R., *Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human* (2009)]] It warmed camps, scared predators, and — maybe most importantly — it gathered people. The campfire is the original hearth, the first television, the first social network: a fixed point of light around which the whole group circled, every night, for a million years. Every story humans tell started being told there.

## Out of Africa — twice

The map of prehistory is a story of *leaving*. Homo erectus left Africa perhaps **1.8 million years ago** (Dmanisi, Georgia). But *Homo sapiens* — us — is younger: the oldest securely dated sapiens fossils are ~**300,000 years** old, from **Jebel Irhoud, Morocco** — discovered not in East Africa's rift, as the textbook story went, but on the far side of the continent.[[cite: Hublin, J.-J. et al., "New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens," *Nature* 546 (2017)]]

The great dispersal came far later. One lineage, possibly more, left Africa around **60,000–70,000 years ago** and became everyone outside Africa. They reached **Australia by ~65,000 years ago** — an open-sea crossing that implies boats and planning;[[cite: Clarkson, C. et al., "Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago," *Nature* 547 (2017)]] **Europe by ~45,000**; the Americas by **~15,000–20,000** (or earlier — the evidence keeps pushing back). By the time farming arrived, humans had settled essentially every habitable land on Earth — on foot.

## The other humans

We tend to imagine *Homo sapiens* stepping onto an empty stage. In fact, when our ancestors left Africa, the world already had people in it — other humans, older than us in their home ranges, whom we met, outlasted, and occasionally loved.

**The Neanderthals** held Europe and western Asia for ~400,000 years. Stockier than us, with brains *at least* our size, they made tools, controlled fire, buried their dead — see [[Neolithic Period]] for the Shanidar story — and may have painted before we arrived: a hand-stencil in Spain has been dated to ~64,000 years ago, before sapiens reached Iberia.[[cite: Hoffmann, D. L. et al., "U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art," *Science* 359 (2018)]] The proof that we knew them intimately is in your own cells: most non-African humans carry **1–4% Neanderthal DNA** — we didn't just meet them. We met them.[[cite: Green, R. E. et al., "A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome," *Science* 328 (2010)]]

[[File:pre-neanderthal.jpg|right|340px|A Neanderthal skeleton on display at the Smithsonian — a second human species, gone ~40,000 years, still inside most of us (Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 2.0).]]

**The Denisovans** we know almost entirely from a cave in the Altai Mountains — a finger bone, a few teeth, a jawbone from Tibet — and the beads and pendants they left behind. Found in 2008 and sequenced in 2010, they were a *third* distinct human lineage nobody knew existed until DNA said so — and their genes survive today, especially in Melanesians, Tibetans, and indigenous Australians (the Tibetan high-altitude adaptation is a Denisovan gift).[[cite: Reich, D. et al., "Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia," *Nature* 468 (2010); Meyer, M. et al., *Science* 338 (2012)]]

[[File:pre-denisova.jpg|right|330px|Beads and notched bones from Denisova Cave — jewelry from a human species we know mostly through its DNA (Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0).]]

And there were more: the **Hobbit** of Flores (*Homo floresiensis*, a meter-tall island hominin surviving to ~50,000 BCE), the tiny-brained **Homo naledi** of Rising Star — and others still being named. Why we're alone now is the open question. The honest answer is probably *all* of them — climate, competition, absorption by interbreeding — and the last one means they never entirely left.

## The bottleneck

Around **74,000 years ago**, the **Toba supervolcano** in Sumatra exploded in the largest eruption of the last two million years — a VEI-8 event that threw thousands of cubic kilometers of ash into the sky and dimmed the sun for years.[[cite: Rampino, M. R. & Self, S., "Volcanic winter and accelerated glaciation following the Toba super-eruption," *Nature* 359 (1992)]]

[[File:pre-toba.jpg|right|360px|Lake Toba, Sumatra — the 100-kilometre caldera left by the largest eruption of the last two million years, ~74,000 years ago (Wagino 20100516, CC BY-SA 3.0).]]

The genetic evidence suggests humanity was nearly wiped out: all living humans descend from a population that may have shrunk to a few **thousand** breeding individuals.[[cite: Ambrose, S. H., "Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans," *Journal of Human Evolution* 34 (1998)]] Whether Toba caused the bottleneck or merely coincided with it is debated — but the bottleneck itself is real, written into our unusually thin genetic diversity. Every person alive is a descendant of the survivors of something catastrophic.

## Becoming symbolic

Somewhere between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, humans started making things that *meant* things. At **Blombos Cave** on South Africa's southern coast, ochre blocks were engraved with deliberate cross-hatch patterns ~75,000 years ago — the earliest known abstract marks; shell beads were strung ~75–100,000 years ago — the earliest known jewelry.[[cite: Henshilwood, C. et al., "Emergence of modern human behaviour: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa," *Science* 295 (2002); d'Errico, F. et al., *Journal of Human Evolution* (2005)]]

[[File:pre-blombos.jpg|right|330px|A Blombos stone point — the refined toolkit of people who also engraved ochre and strung shell beads ~75,000 years ago (Vincent Mourre / Inrap, CC BY-SA 3.0).]]

**Music** may be older than painting: a bone flute found at **Jiahu**, China, playable and tuned to a scale, is ~9,000 years old — and flutes from Germany's Hohle Fels, made of vulture wing-bone, reach back ~40,000 years.[[cite: Zhang, J. et al., "Oldest playable musical instruments found at Jiahu early Neolithic site, China," *Nature* 401 (1999); Conard, N. J. et al., *Nature* 460 (2009)]]

[[File:pre-flute.jpg|right|330px|A bone flute from Jiahu, China (~7,000 BCE) — one of the oldest playable instruments known, drilled to a working scale (Furius, CC0).]]

Cave art, Venus figurines, and the painted dark belong to the [[Neolithic Period]] article — which treats them at length. Here the point is simpler: before the New Stone Age, the *symbolic* human — the one who paints, buries, sings, and adorns — was already fully formed.

## The impossible question: language

The single most consequential invention of prehistory left **no fossil at all**. When did we start talking?

Anatomy offers clues: a low larynx for vowels, a modern **hyoid bone** (Neanderthals had one — they could probably speak), and the **FOXP2** gene, whose two human-specific mutations are shared with Neanderthals — suggesting the capacity for complex language predates our split.[[cite: Enard, W. et al., "Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language," *Nature* 418 (2002); Krause, J. et al., *Current Biology* (2007)]] Estimates for full language range from **50,000 to 2,000,000 years** — a forty-fold spread that tells you how honestly nobody knows.

What we can say: it existed before the great dispersal (all living languages share a deep structure), and once it existed, it changed the unit of evolution — a human could now *inherit* knowledge without experiencing it. Every word you've ever read, including this one, descends from something nobody wrote down.

## The last chapter

By 10,000 BCE the stage was set: modern humans on every continent, dogs at the fire, art on the walls, memory in the soil. What happened next — the temple before the farm, the first towns, the mammoths' last stand, the invention of agriculture eleven separate times — is its own story, and it's a good one.

**Continue reading: [[Neolithic Period]]** — the New Stone Age, where this story ends and the one we call civilization begins.

## Epilogue: history starts here

Prehistory ends not with a war or a flood but with a *document*. Around **3,200 BCE** in the Sumerian city of **Uruk**, temple accountants began pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay — inventory, rations, barley tallies. The marks became cuneiform, the tablets became archives, and for the first time, memory could outlive the person who held it.[[cite: Englund, R. K., *Archaic Administrative Texts from Uruk* (1994); Englund & Nissen, *Die lexikalischen Listen der archaischen Texte aus Uruk* (1993)]]

[[File:pre-tablet.jpg|right|360px|A proto-cuneiform tablet from Uruk, ~3,100–2,900 BCE — a barley-distribution account with seal impressions. One of the oldest documents on Earth, and the end of the era this article describes (Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0).]]

This tablet is a *barley receipt*. It says nothing profound — and that is precisely the point. History begins not with an epic but with paperwork. The three-million-year prologue was over; from now on, we'd write it all down.

## Quiz: were you paying attention?

- [ ] Which species predates our own genus *Homo* — and yet used the oldest stone tools known (~3.3 million years)?

- [ ] What did the Laetoli footprints prove before anyone found a skeleton to match them?

- [ ] Name two *other* human species that coexisted with early *Homo sapiens* — and what their DNA still does inside us.

- [ ] What supervolcano nearly ended humanity ~74,000 years ago — and where is its caldera today?

- [ ] What invention *ended* prehistory — and what was the oldest document actually about?

```hide Show answers

1 — probably an **australopithecine** (the Lomekwi 3 tools predate *Homo*) · 2 — that hominins walked **upright** 3.66 million years ago, side by side, long before big brains · 3 — **Neanderthals** and **Denisovans** (also naledi, floresiensis) — most non-African people carry 1–4% Neanderthal DNA · 4 — **Toba**, Sumatra — its caldera is now Lake Toba · 5 — **writing**, c. 3,200 BCE in Uruk — the oldest documents are *barley accounts*, not epics.

```

## Notes

- **On Lucy:** "Lucy" is the nickname of specimen AL 288-1; the Hadar team's celebration played "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Her species' upright gait is corroborated by the Laetoli tracks.

- **On fire:** a million-year date is the earliest *secure* claim (Wonderwerk). Claims of fire use at 1.5–1.7 Mya exist but remain disputed; the text uses the conservative figure.

- **On Toba:** the eruption's date (~74,000 ya) is solid; the *causal link* to the human population bottleneck is contested. The bottleneck itself — our thin genetic diversity — is not.

- **On naledi:** the deliberate-burial claim is still disputed; see the full story in [[Neolithic Period]].

- **On language:** no fossil evidence exists; dates cited are anatomical/genetic inference, which is why the range spans forty-fold.

- **On dates:** all deep-time figures are radiometric estimates with error margins; "Mya" = million years ago, "k ya" = thousand years ago.

## References

- Harmand, S. et al., *Nature* 521 (2015) — the Lomekwi tools, predating *Homo*

- Johanson, D. et al. (1978); Leakey & Hay, *Nature* 278 (1979) — Lucy and the Laetoli tracks

- Berna, F. et al., *PNAS* 109 (2012) — Wonderwerk fire

- Hublin, J.-J. et al., *Nature* 546 (2017) — Jebel Irhoud and the pan-African sapiens origin

- Green, R. E. et al., *Science* 328 (2010); Reich, D. et al., *Nature* 468 (2010) — Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes

- Rampino & Self, *Nature* 359 (1992); Ambrose, *J. Hum. Evol.* 34 (1998) — Toba and the bottleneck

- Henshilwood, C. et al., *Science* 295 (2002) — Blombos engraved ochre

- Zhang, J. et al., *Nature* 401 (1999) — the Jiahu bone flutes

- Englund, R. K. (1994) — the archaic Uruk tablets

- Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access (CC0); Smithsonian; eLife; *Nature*; *PNAS*; Wikimedia Commons contributors — images

## See also

- [[Neolithic Period]] — the final chapter this article hands off to

- [[History of Education]] · [[History of Learning]] · [[History of Science]] · [[History of Mathematics]]

- [The ALB handbook](/handbook) · [Examples](/examples) — the species that learned to write, now learning to program

[[Category:History]]

[[Category:Science]]

[[Category:The big histories]]