History and Prehistory Humankind

History and Prehistory Humankind
Scholars customarily draw a a sharp distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory is taken to be the long era from biological beginnings of humankind over 2 million years ago to the origins of civilization about 5,000 years ago in the first urban centers of the Near East.

The transition to civilization and the advent of written records traditionally mark the commencement of history proper.

Prehistory, because of the exclusively material nature of its artifacts, mainly in the from of stone, bone or certain products has inescapably become the province of the archeologist, while the historical era, with its documentary records, is the domain of the history.

However the single label “prehistory” obscures two distinctly different substages: the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which held sway for around 2 million years, is marked by rudimentary stone tools, designed for collecting and processing wild food sources, while the succeeding Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which first took hold in the Near East around 12,000 years ago, entailed substantially more complex stone implements adapted to the requirements of an economy of low intensity food production in the form of gardening or herding.

The technologies of both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have left a rich legacy of material artifacts. In constant, only a feeble record exists of any scientific interest in these preliterate societies, mainly in the form of astronomically oriented structures. Thus, at the very outset, the evidence indicates that science and technology followed separate trajectories during 2,000 millennia of prehistory.

Technology of the crafts – formed an essential element of both the nomadic food-collecting economy of Paleolithic societies and the food–producing activities in Neolithic villages, while science , as an abstract and systematic interest in nature was essentially nonexistent, or at any rate, has left little trace.
History and Prehistory Humankind

Prehistory Idea

Prehistory Idea The concept of a span of human existence before recorded history may seem intuitively obvious to the readers, but such was not always the case.

What the eminent British historian of archeology Glyn Daniel (1914-86) called “the idea of prehistory” crystallized only in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Between 1820 and 1860, the study of the past moved from an antiquarian interest in old curiosities to a scholarly discipline which recognized that there was a considerable amount of human experience before historical records and which attempted to understand and explain this period in precise and rational terms.

In its European roots the study of human prehistory evolved along two major line.

The first generally be called “antiquarian,” and it involved the exploration of sites and the connoisseurship of artifacts, usually those of later prehistory.

Beginning in the late Renaissance, antiquarianism developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until came of age on the nineteenth century Romantic era.

The Past lent itself readily to the statement of this period and the collection and curation of artifacts came to be systematic. Museum and eventually university departments were organized and archeology took its place alongside other “human sciences” as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.
Prehistory Idea