Definition
Prehistory is the period of the human past that came before the invention of writing. Because no written documents survive from this era, everything historians know about it comes from physical evidence: bones, stone tools, cave paintings, hearths, burials, and the remains of settlements.
Prehistory is not a short prelude to history — it is by far the longest part of the human story. Humans and their ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years before the first scripts appeared, around 3300 BCE in Mesopotamia. Everything earlier than that local moment of writing falls under prehistory.
Why it matters
How it works
Prehistory is usually divided into ages named for the dominant tool material — the Stone Age, then the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age. The Stone Age itself splits into the Paleolithic, when humans foraged with chipped stone tools, and the Neolithic, when they began to farm.
The era ends, region by region, whenever a society begins keeping written records. A people enters recorded history at the moment its script can be read; until then, its story is told entirely through the objects it left in the ground.