page_title: Prehistory
section_title: Definition
hierarchical_section_title: Prehistory / Definition
caption_attribution_description: English: The world: historical and actual. What has been and what is. Our globe in its relations to other worlds, and before man. Ancient nations in the order of their antiquity. The middle ages and their darkness. The present peoples of the earth in their gradual emergence from barbarism into the sunlight of to-day, and as they now stand upon the plane of civilization .. by Gilbert, Frank Published 1882 Topics History (General) SHOW MORE Publisher St. Louis&#160;: R.S. Peale &amp; Co. Pages 732 Language English Call number 909 G37W1882A Digitizing sponsor University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates Book contributor University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Collection university_of_illinois_urbana-champaign; americana
context_page_description: Human prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the period between the use of the first stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and 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. 5,300 years ago and it took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted. In some human cultures, writing systems were not used until the nineteenth century and, in a few, not even until the present. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
  Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilization, and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and to keep historical records; this took place already during the early Bronze Age. Neighboring civilizations were the first to follow. Most other civilizations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age.
context_section_description: Beginning
  The term "prehistory" can refer to the vast span of time since the beginning of the Universe or the Earth, but more often it refers to the period since life appeared on Earth, or even more specifically to the time since human-like beings appeared.
  End
  The date marking the end of prehistory is typically defined as the advent of the contemporary written historical record. The date consequently varies widely from region to region depending on the date when relevant records become a useful academic resource. For example, in Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BCE, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, at around 1900 common era. In Europe the relatively well-documented classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbouring cultures, including the Celts and to a lesser extent the Etruscans, with little or no writing, and historians must decide how much weight to give to the often highly prejudiced accounts of these "prehistoric" cultures in Greek and Roman literature.
  Time periods
  In dividing up human prehistory in Eurasia, historians typically use the three-age system, whereas scholars of pre-human time periods typically use the well-defined geologic record and its internationally defined stratum base within the geologic time scale. The three-age system is the periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies:
  Stone Age
  Bronze Age
  Iron Age
caption: A nineteenth century concept of early humans in a wilderness
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