the.com/prehistory
the silent 99 percent of the human story, written before anyone could write it.
means The vast stretch of human existence before the invention of writing, known to us only through bones, tools, art, and the silent evidence of the ground.
from A 19th-century compound built from Latin 'prae-' (before) bolted onto 'history,' which traces back through Latin 'historia' to Greek 'historia' — meaning 'inquiry, knowledge gained by investigation.' So the word literally means 'before-inquiry,' a fitting name for the eras that left no records to inquire into. It came into use as archaeology matured and scholars needed a label for the time their shovels, rather than their libraries, illuminated.
- time share
- Spans roughly 99.9 percent of human existence
- oldest art
- Indonesian cave pig painted 45,500 years ago
- naming irony
- Term means before writing, yet recorded everywhere in stone
- fire mastery
- Humans controlled fire a million years ago
- agriculture flip
- Farming ended it independently on multiple continents