Prehistory: an age before written record; before history as we know it

• What we know about this period has been deduced primarily from scientific evidence: radiocarbon dating, stratigraphic dating, contextual evidence, etc.

• A well-rounded understanding of prehistory requires multidisciplinary applications: anthropology, archaeology, biology, chemistry, etc.

• The lack of writing and written records does not mean that the artists had a lack of sentience or intelligence. Most prehistoric artwork seems to serve many purposes and the fact that prehistoric people were making art at all shows that they were doing more than survival and reproduction and that not was important enough to devote resources to.

Art vs. Tools

• Humans and human ancestors (primarily genus Homo) were making purely functional tools as early as 2.5 million years ago.

• We know that these tools were made by humans and ancestors because they show evidence of deliberate shaping and have been found in large quantities near archaeological sites where human remains have always been found, so there is a direct correlation between these things.

• Art historians typically do not regard these objects as art, usually they are considered tools because their purpose is to aid in survival solely.

Methods to date Prehistoric Art and to determine their purpose

• Stratigraphy is an archaeological technique of deducing information about an object or site by mapping its relative position in a stratigraphic profile.

  • The oldest artifacts are at the bottom layers while the newest artifacts lay at the top layers

• Radiocarbon dating: As radioactive carbon (carbon-14) is present in all organisms and decays at a known rate, the amount of non-decayed carbon-14 left in a sample determines how long it has been since an organism died.

  • This method is really only useful for objects once considered alive; bone, antler, shell, and other biological materials

• Contextual evidence: an object’s function, purpose, age, etc. is determined from the evidence found in close proximity of the object (it’s site)

The Importance of Climate Change in Early Migrations

• There are typically three species we discuss when we discuss early humans and human ancestors:

  • Homo sapiens

  • Homo neanderthalensis

  • Homo erectus

• Humanity as we know it started in the Rift Valley region of Southeastern Africa

  • Homo erectus began to migrate c. 2,000,000 years ago a long time before Homo neanderthalensis and sapiens

  • The only species that was able to migrate across the whole world was Homo sapiens, after the extinction of the other two groups.

• There is genetic and temporal evidence that suggests that there were a significant amount of waves of migration from Africa

• Migrations of humans of the genus Homo (the three previously mentioned) were primarily facilitated by climate change

  • c. 125,000 - 100,000 years ago, the hottest area was shifting around, and eventually, areas in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula (now desert areas), making the area passable into Eurasia.

  • During the ice ages, lower global temperatures meant that the glaciers in the poles had more ice and sea levels dropped drastically. Therefore, islands and land masses merged and human migration to islands and other continents was facilitated by these glacial periods.

Three Periods (17:23)