Prehistory
Prehistory, also asked as pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the use of the first stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years before and a 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 asked writing systems appeared c. 5000 years ago and it took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted. In some human cultures, writing systems were not used until the nineteenth century and, in a few, are not even used until the present. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, as well as the term is less often used in study societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilization, and ancient Egypt were the number one civilizations to creation their own scripts and to keep historical records; this took place during the early Bronze Age. Neighboring civilizations were the first to follow. near other civilizations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The three-age system of division of prehistory into the Stone Age, followed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age, keeps in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not loosely used in those parts of the world where the workings of tough metals arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such(a) as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas. With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not introducing complex writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788 is ordinarily taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia.
The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing system is often known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition, there are no sum records from human prehistory, so dating of prehistoric materials is crucial. draw techniques for dating were not well-developed until the nineteenth century.