Talk:Prehistory

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The apge that will help you later

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[edit] Jade age

i read somewhere some people talking about a 'jade age'. is that stone age?

I don't belive so. i could see humans of the past using jade as a form of primative currency.

See http://english.people.com.cn/200402/25/eng20040225_135852.shtml for details. -Josiah Henderson

[edit] Prehistory?

This seems like a very strange definition to me -- is the statement "the dinosaurs were prehistoric animals" false?


No, it's valid, makes sense, and is an accepted term. Although it's strictly limited to the period before we have written sources, not before we learned to write (we could have written in sand for millions of years - but it's in our prehistory...). The period after is called "recorded history".


definition modified to try to explain the usage.

Can anybody improve the "surviving records" bit, i.e., explain why a cave painting is not a surviving record?

IMHO it pretty much boils down to "pre-writing" = "prehistoric", "post-writing" = "posthistoric"

A cave painting is a human record, but it's not human language. It's possible that for its makers, it symbolized something beyond simple visual depiction, the way a crucifixion or a patriotic emblem does for us; but it isn't a symbolically encoded communication. It's an artifact, not a written record.

We can incorporate a cave painting into histories we make. We cannot know whether the painting's makers intended its meanings to be read historically; and even if we were to posit such a reading of it, we could not know the histories they constructed around it. Those hypothetical meanings (if they existed) are lost to us in the depths of time. All that comes down to us is the object itself. It is pre-historic.

[edit] Removed

The sheer scale of prehistory is surprising. From three to 150 human civilizations equal in duration to our own could have been lost in this period.

since surprising is just a POV, while 3-150 human civilizations is meaningless speculation 195.149.37.57 16:05 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

I removed the external link to an obscure Delphi forum that has 10 visitors in 3 days. The posts there are mostly URL links to pseudoanthropological theories. --Menchi 08:12 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Sentence

The following sentence is too long and doesn't make much sense to me. This could be divided into two or more sentences.


"If however, human prehistory is defined, as presumably it should be, as the pre-literate history of Homo sapiens sapiens then at least the matter can be resolved in principle, and the recent pace of progress in understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens suggests the answer will not be long in coming."

[edit] Homo erectus?

why homo erectus as beginning of prehistory??

--Yak 20:38, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Recorded history might have began in 1900 A.D.? I don't think so...

I edited the part of the article which deals with the question of when recorded history began, which originally read as follows:

"The date marking the end of prehistory is also disputed. In Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3500 BC whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, 1900 AD."

This is misleading and frankly, absurd, not to mention just plain WRONG. What is a reasonable person to make of such a statement - that all of the recorded history from the time of the pharaohs through the Spanish-American War is in dispute? C'est absurd. I can only presume that this was intended as a politically correct nod to the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and their myths at the expense of the truth.

It now reads:

"While the date marking the end of prehistory is disputed, it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3500 BC in Egypt."


WikipediaEditor 21:07, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Read it again. It means that prehistory ended and history began at different times in different places. Reverting adamsan 21:50, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Re-removed. Pre-history refers to the time before historical records were kept. It ended when human beings started to keep records of events. The end of prehistory is thus dated to the oldest known credible records. This does not change from region to region, though perhaps knowledge of the oldest known records might. In any event, if the people of New Guinea think recorded history began in 1900 A.D., they are simply WRONG. If a previously unknown tribe were to emerge tomorrow with credible records from 25,000 years ago, the 'non-New Guinean' world would similarly have been proven wrong and be obliged to revise their date of the end of pre-history. The end of prehistory - the beginning of the documentation of historical events - was a real event in real time and a major milestone in the development of our species, not some culturally determined 'belief' that varies from region to region. WikipediaEditor 04:51, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

So a culture that had no links with Ancient Egypt and was tens of thousands of miles away magically entered the historical period when some scribe beside the Nile wrote something down? Neolithic Europe, Iron Age South Africa and Archaic North America and are all historical societies by your reasoning even though they had no written history. By all means we can name the first society to enter the historical era but the end of prehistory is not a single date across the globe- just a series of single transitions for each culture. It is a fact that the Highlands of PNG have no history before the nineteenth century. Try telling someone who studies the Bronze Age that he isn't a prehistorian. It is not a question recorded history being invented somewhere or other but when a people adopts it. No historical or archaeological terms are globally applicable; societies like Amazonian tribes are still in the Neolithic. adamsan 07:06, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
With all due respect, you seem to be confused about the generally accepted meaning of the term 'prehistory'. It simply refers to the time before any humans anywhere are known to have kept records of events.It doesn't change from region to region as people take to recording events. Note also that the term 'prehistory' has no necessary connection to technology. Suppose, for example, that evidence of a high tech society - with airplanes and Internet and predating Egypt - were found tomorrow. Despite their technological achievements, such a society would remain correctly described as prehistoric if they kept no historical records. The fact that in New Guinea, local history was not recorded until 1900 AD simply means that we have no written records of events in New Guinea prior to 1900 AD. Societies that did not keep records of events during and after the time of the Pharaohs (eg. North Amercian Indians of 2000 years ago) are nevertheless correctly described as living within the timeframe of recorded history, even though their history was not recorded. I hope this clarifies the concept of prehistory for you.WikipediaEditor 22:18, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
Hello Wikipedia Editor. I must first apologise for reverting your contributions yesterday without noticing your post above first and am sorry about that. However, I am unable to find any references to say, North American Indians from 2000 years ago living in the historical period. Here] for example is a course description from a US university defining US prehistory as ending at the time of European contact not 3500 BC. You will find that academics who study the period since then and the arrival of historical records in their own regions will describe themselves as prehistorians. Here we see the Prehistory Department of the University of Hawaii studying the builders of the stone heads at Easter Island which was a society that existed around the same time as the European Middle Ages. And here is an Australian university teaching a course in European prehistory that covers the millennia following the development of writing by our Egyptian friends.
You are quite right that any society, no matter how technologically advanced is prehistoric if it has no historical records, but this does not alter the point that prehistory does not have a single defined ending. If anything it supports this view as it would show that cultural development varied considerably around the world.
The précis of the three age system article has little place in this wider piece on prehistory as it really cannot be applied in most of the world and most of the time period covered. I do hope that you will not revert my other edits to the article in future even if we disagree on the definition of the term. I look forward to your response but in the meantime will be asking some of the other Archaeological Wikipedians to comment on this important article. adamsan 11:30, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
WikipediaEditor, adamsan is right. Prehistory varies between different parts of the world. As far as Scandinavia is concerned, the Historic era begins during the Viking Age. Everything prior to this is Prehistory in spite of the fact that there are some historic accounts of Scandinavia prior to the Viking Age.--Wiglaf 11:42, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Adamsan and Wiglaf here, athough I think Wikipedia Editor has misunderstood the point. According to the disputed version of the article, events in New Guinea before about 1900 AD went unrecorded in writing, meaning the recorded history of New Guinea starts about 1900, and any events in New Guinea before then are prehistoric. It doesn't mean that any events anywhere in the world before 1900 are prehistoric to a New Guinean. History and prehistory are defined by the existence of writing, and writing arrived in different parts of the world at different times. In the same way, the Irish Iron Age didn't happen at the same time as, say, the Mesopotamian Iron Age as iron arrived in different parts of the world at different times. --Nicknack009 16:37, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree with what you say, except for the writing part. Scandinavia was literate with the runic script for 600-800 years before it left prehistory. An area only enters history, when there is a consistent and conscious history writing in the area.--Wiglaf 16:53, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I understand the concept of prehistory argued originally by Adamsan and subsequently defended by Nicknack and Wiglaf, and agree that it's important to know when the practice of recording historical events began in particular regions of the world. Nevertheless, the article is flawed if it fails to acknowledge the sense of the term as the date of the oldest known historical records. I don't have a problem with the notion of regional prehistory so long as the important question of what the oldest known historical records are is also addressed. I suggest a re-edit that would include both the global and regional sense of the term (eg. 'World prehistory' as well as 'New Guinean prehistory' and 'Scandinavian prehistory' etc.).

WikipediaEditor 17:23, 11 September 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Bullets?

Why is this article a series of bullet points? This doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of Wikipedia. Threepounds 06:22, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Details of period

I reverted the additions "from other articles" -- its not clear if that is a fork of other articles or what or where it came from. There should be one place where this information is kept, linked to with "Main articles" - not replicated verbatum across multiple articles. Also it is not clear that this is the primary article for the history of the period - or is this a historiography article about the term. I'm leaning towards a historiography article as I think the term is somewhat deprecated in modern scholarly discourse. -- Stbalbach 14:20, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Prehistoric man

It looks like this was started in much the same way as that article and they underwent some divergent evolutionTrilobitealive 05:44, 7 January 2007 (UTC) This is displaying oddly as well. The other one normalized when I made a comment. What is happening?Trilobitealive 23:20, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Fixed it - that always happens when you start a line with a space. --Nicknack009 00:09, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
As to the proposed merge, on a cursory look at both articles you're probably right. --Nicknack009 00:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Unless somebody comes up with a compelling reason why not to do so I'm contemplating the merger in a week or so.Trilobitealive 23:36, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

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