Prehistoric Age: Life of Human in Prehistory Period

Prehistory describes the life of people, who led their life before the invention of the writing system. The prehistory shows the life and habitat of people who lived 3.3 million years ago. During this period, people mainly used symbols, marks, and images for expressing their ideas. People started writing systems and human culture only after the nineteenth century. The prehistory came to end on different dates in different places. The written records of history gave complete information about the ancient people. The written records belong to 3200 BCE discovered by Archaeologists in Egypt. So, they kept ancient history as the beginning of history, as they could find the written records of history.  The written records of history will give more information about their life and how the ecosystem was.  The main source of information for prehistory is given in detail in this article. Here, students can learn what is prehistory and  how is it different from history. 

Information from Prehistory

Many historians guessed that modern human beings should enter into the world- before 200,000 to 30000 years ago. And the age of the planet must be around 4.5 billion years. So, they believed that the human being arrived late to the planet because the planet remains stable from long back. As humans came to the world - before 200,000 years ago, now every human being on earth must be born after an average of 6000 generations. While thinking about the scope, our earth should come under various adventures, sorrows, environmental changes, and the rise and fall of various civilizations during this vast period. 

Written Records

Human beings started using tools in their life to protect themselves from animals and to search for their food. Many historians who came after having the knowledge to maintain records took many sources of prehistory and maintained records. Even today, archaeology and anthropology departments were doing research on these records to analyze the life of ancient people. The oldest records discovered by archaeologists were 5000 years old and they belonged to Egypt. So, historians started to believe that, that is the time when prehistory came to end and the world entered into history. But on the other hand, there is no exact evidence for it. 

There is no surety that all the written records were correct and accurate. As it may be derived from the dead language. So, archaeology and anthropology departments will handle written records of history carefully and thoughtfully. If we got the written records of one side, it is difficult to make biased decisions, without considering another side. Most of the time, the basic instructions to be followed by generation were written only once. Then they are just transmitted orally through speech and it will change consciously or unconsciously according to that situation. The incident which happened yesterday may have two directions for observers. So, knowing the information that has happened in prehistory was tougher even without any written records. 

But many archaeologists have identified many tools and structures of ancient people from their burial sites and also researched remaining fossils and artifacts. Through the artifacts and several other techniques, archaeologists can easily calculate the approximate age of fossils. They can use carbon dating measurement for finding the number of radioactive carbons deposited on fossils to calculate the age. For finding the age of artifacts, they used the age of the layer of rocks to identify its exact buried year. This method is known as stratigraphic dating. The linguists and geneticists can research and find how the human migrated from one place to another and how they spread and intermingled in various locations in a different atmosphere. 

Uncertainty Behind Prehistory

After analyzing all the details as given above, present historians can construct and narrate the complete information about the past. Even though historians can predict some information from existing tools, many other data remain undiscovered with the available sources. Even today archaeological departments were researching and finding small pieces, but those are not sufficient to find complete history. 

What is the Difference Between History and Prehistory? 

The below table shows the major differences between prehistory and history in detail. 

Conclusion

This article explained what is prehistory and history,  how historians classified history and prehistory, and the uncertainty behind prehistory in detail.  In simple words we can say that the prehistory was a period before the invention and recording of writing systems.