Talk:Prehistoric man
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[edit] Merge with prehistory
It looks like this was started in much the same way as that article and they underwent some divergent evolution.Trilobitealive 05:43, 7 January 2007 (UTC) I can't understand why this is displaying so oddly.Trilobitealive 23:19, 7 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 23:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
A merger is probably a good idea. First, the prehistoric man article is terrible. In fact it shouldn't exist as anything other than a stub. The term "Prehistoric man" is no longer used by scholars and hasn't been since the 1970's becuase it is androcentric and because there really is no such thing as a group or type of people who are characteristically "prehistoric". In other words, people in prehistoric societies have no particualar commonalities except a lack of writing. Prehistory is a rubric used by scholars to differentiate the methods used to study the past, not a type of people. There is no such thing as a stage of personhood or social development in which a person is a prehistoric man or woman. For example, the Inca remained a prehistoric people until the Spanish conquest and yet they ruled one of the most impressive empires on earth and still had no writen records (quipa were memory aids, not writing). In Central America, the prehistoric period starts more than a thousand years earlier. Further, the term is Eurocentric and based on the notion of progressive stages of "mankind" like the "stone age". There are people who still use stone tools. The "ages as stages" concepts have long since been abandoned in the social sciences since they do not apply universally and can not be tied directly to other political and social developments around the world. So I say Merge the two articles and cut the outdated garbage. Actually, what I suggest is that the discussion of the "ages", three age system, stone age, copper age etc, be made either a seperate article - Ages of Human Prehistory or something like this - or a series of seperate articles since each "age" is really complicated and specific enough to deserve seperate attention. Also, if one were to start listing all the prehistoric typologies (geological, biological, astronomological) in one article it would be far to cumbersome. DHBoggs 16:24, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
- Other problems. (1) There is no mention of hunter-gatherers anywhere in the stone age section, which is strange. (2) To have a one-paragraph "Prehistoric culture" section to cover all of the "Ages" seems inexplicable. I agree that there is very little of value in this entry at all.LC | Talk 02:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Title
I agree that even if this article isn't merged or something, the title should at least be changed to something more unoffensive like "prehistoric people" or "prehistoric humanity". Also, there is a link on the "-ology" page under palentology that should link here but doesn't. --Teebone51 15:55, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
I've decided to Be Bold and turn this into a redirect until someone is willing to rewrite the article so that it covers something OTHER than the Three Age System, which we have an article for already, or Prehistory generally, which we also have an article for. I don't have any suggestions for what should go here instead, and until someone does, I think the redirect is better. I encourage further discussion, but something like this has been under consideration since January, so I feel its the right step. TriNotch 18:52, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
