Word of the day: pre-history
A friend recently told me that she was really interested in pre-history. I wondered how this term is defined and, of course, I found the explanation on Wikipedia:
“Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,000 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing spreading to almost all cultures by the 19th century.
The end of prehistory therefore came at very different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.”