Draft:Outline of prehistory

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to prehistory:

Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.

In the early Bronze Age, Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and keep historical records, with their neighbours following. Most other civilizations reached their end of prehistory during the following Iron Age. The three-age division of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas. With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not develop complex writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia.

What type of thing is prehistory?

Prehistory can be described as all of the following:

Time period – a discrete, quantified named block of time, created in order to facilitate the study and analysis of the past. The time period known as prehistory precedes history (time period with recorded events), that is, it is the time period for which there is no written record.

Fields that study prehistory

Cosmology –
- Cosmogony –
Evolutionary history of life –
- Paleontology – scientific study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments (their paleoecology).
  - Human evolution –
Human prehistory –
- Archaeology –

Prehistory by period

Prehistory by region

Prehistoric Cyprus

Prehistoric Africa

Prehistoric North Africa
- Prehistoric Egypt

Prehistoric Americas

Prehistoric Asia

Prehistoric Caucasus

Prehistoric Europe

Prehistory by subject

Prehistoric people

Prehistoric technology

Historiography of prehistory

Main articles: Historiography and Historiography of prehistory

Prehistory organizations

Persons influential in the field of prehistory

(Place these in the outline above)

References

External links

Submerged Landscapes Archaeological Network
The Neanderthal site at Veldwezelt-Hezerwater, Belgium.
North Pacific Prehistory is an academic journal specialising in Northeast Asian and North American archaeology.
Prehistory in Algeria and in Morocco [1]
Early Humans a collection of resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library.