Before anyone wrote anything down
The human past before writing, from a time when there were several kinds of human to the first farmers and the monuments built by people who did not yet farm.
7 stopsShallows to deep
The order, and why it is this one
Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.
- Who were we before anyone wrote it down?Ancient DNA has rewritten human prehistory twice in twenty years. The current picture is a braided, interbreeding set of populations rather than a line, and large parts of it are still blank.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- How long have we been talking?Estimates for the origin of language run from a sudden appearance fifty to a hundred thousand years ago to a capacity already in place half a million years ago. A 2013 review argues from Neanderthal anatomy, genetics and behaviour that the capacity is much older than the recent estimates allow. A 2019 review of primate vocal anatomy goes further, putting what it calls the dawn of speech more than twenty million years back.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- When did we start wearing clothes?Human head lice and clothing lice are two forms of one species, and clothing lice live only in clothing. Dating their divergence gives a date by which the habit existed, and the 2010 estimate is of the order of a hundred thousand years, before the migration out of Africa.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- When did people reach the Americas?The consensus that people arrived about 13,500 years ago began to collapse in the late 1980s and 1990s and has not been replaced by a firm number. Footprints dated to the height of the last glaciation would put people in North America thousands of years before the route they were supposed to have used was open.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- What killed the large animals?About two thirds of the genera of large land animals disappeared during the late Quaternary, continent by continent, at different times. A global analysis finds the pattern matches how long people had been present far better than it matches climate change, and the argument is not over, because the two are correlated in places.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- Why did farming start?Agriculture began separately in several parts of the world within about six thousand years of each other, after hundreds of thousands of years in which it did not. The skeletal evidence suggests it made individual lives harder. What made it happen, repeatedly, at that moment, is unresolved.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
- What did we build before we had cities?A site in south-eastern Anatolia forced a rewrite of the standard sequence: large-scale construction came before farming, not after it. By the excavators’ count in 2012, most of its enclosures were still buried.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read