Prehistory

Fossils discovered in Chad represent one of the oldest known species on the human lineage after the split from chimpanzees. Features small brain but forward-positioned foramen magnum suggesting possible early bipedalism.

In 2000, Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford announced Orrorin tugenensis, a hominin from the Tugen Hills of Kenya dated by radiometric, paleomagnetic and biochronological methods to roughly 6 million years ago.

First recovered by Yohannes Haile-Selassie in Ethiopia's Middle Awash region from 1997 and elevated to a distinct species in 2004, Ardipithecus kadabba is known from a jaw fragment, isolated teeth and postcranial elements including a toe…

Fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus were excavated near Aramis in Ethiopia's Middle Awash by a team led by Tim White between 1992 and 1994, but the analysis of the partial skeleton nicknamed 'Ardi' was not published until 2009.

One of the earliest members of the genus Australopithecus. Shows clear adaptations for bipedal walking while retaining some tree-climbing ability.

Best known early hominin species. Famous specimen 'Lucy' (AL 288-1). Clear evidence of habitual bipedalism combined with arboreal capabilities. Brain size approximately 400-500 cc.

Beginning in 1994 with four foot bones and continuing through a painstaking excavation led by Ronald Clarke from 1997, the Sterkfontein Caves of South Africa yielded StW 573 — nicknamed 'Little Foot' — one of the most complete…

In 1978 a team associated with Mary Leakey uncovered, at Laetoli in northern Tanzania, trails of fossil footprints preserved in a layer of volcanic ash that had hardened after a rain shower roughly 3.66 million years ago.

In 2011 researchers working at Lomekwi 3, on the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, recovered deliberately struck stone artefacts that excavation and dating placed at about 3.3 million years old.

The genus Homo appears. LD 350-1 specimen (~2.75 mya) represents one of the earliest members. Oldowan stone tool industry begins – simple choppers and flakes.

From roughly 2.7 to 1.2 million years ago, a distinctive branch of hominins — the 'robust' australopithecines, often placed in the genus Paranthropus — flourished across eastern and southern Africa.

Announced in 1999, Australopithecus garhi was described from a partial skull and other remains recovered at Bouri in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia and dated to about 2.5 million years ago.

At Shangchen on the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi Province in northern China, archaeologists led by Zhaoyu Zhu recovered 96 simple stone artefacts — notches, scrapers, cores and hammerstones — from seventeen sediment layers, the oldest dated by…

In August 2008 nine-year-old Matthew Berger, son of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, spotted the first bones of a new hominin at the Malapa cave site in South Africa.

Around 1.76 million years ago, toolmakers at Kokiselei 4 west of Lake Turkana in Kenya were shaping large, bifacially flaked teardrop handaxes and cleavers — the hallmark of the Acheulean industry, named after Saint-Acheul in France.

Homo erectus (and African form Homo ergaster) appears. Larger brain (850–1100 cc), more advanced Acheulean handaxes, and first hominin to migrate out of Africa into Eurasia on a large scale.

At Dmanisi in southern Georgia, excavations led by David Lordkipanidze uncovered a remarkable assemblage of early human fossils — including five well-preserved skulls — alongside simple Oldowan-style stone tools and animal bones, securely…

In 1984, a team led by Richard Leakey and Kamoya Kimeu recovered a near-complete juvenile skeleton, KNM-WT 15000, at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana, Kenya, dated to roughly 1.5–1.6 million years ago.

Homo erectus colonised eastern and southeastern Asia and persisted there for well over a million years.

Around one million years ago, Homo erectus became the first hominin species for which there is widely accepted archaeological evidence of the deliberate use and maintenance of fire.

At the Gran Dolina cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca near Burgos, Spain, level TD6 yielded fossils of a previously unknown human species named Homo antecessor in 1997, dated to roughly 850,000–800,000 years ago.

In 1907 a quarry worker near Mauer, southwest of Heidelberg in Germany, unearthed a robust, chinless human lower jaw that became the type specimen of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, described by Otto Schoetensack in 1908.

In a 13-metre vertical shaft called the Sima de los Huesos ('Pit of Bones') in the Atapuerca mountains of northern Spain, excavators have recovered nearly 7,000 fossils representing at least 28 individuals, dated to around 430,000 years…

Excavations at an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany, recovered a set of carefully crafted wooden throwing spears, along with throwing sticks and the butchered remains of dozens of horses, in waterlogged…

In 2013 cavers exploring the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa, squeezed through a narrow chimney into the Dinaledi Chamber and found it littered with hominin bones.

Oldest widely accepted fossils of Homo sapiens found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco (~315,000 ya). Shows modern facial features but somewhat more archaic braincase.

Across the later Middle Palaeolithic, Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia (and early Homo sapiens in North Africa and the Levant) produced a sophisticated stone-tool tradition known as the Mousterian, or Mode III.

Discovered in 1932 at the Florisbad thermal spring in South Africa's Free State, the Florisbad cranium has been directly dated by electron spin resonance on an associated molar to about 259,000 years ago.

The Omo I and Omo II remains, recovered in 1967 from the Kibish Formation along Ethiopia's Omo River, were long regarded as among the earliest fossils of our species.

An upper jawbone with most of its teeth, recovered from Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel and analysed in detail in 2018, dates to roughly 177,000–194,000 years ago.

About 336 metres inside Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France, far beyond the reach of natural daylight, lies an extraordinary set of constructions: roughly 400 broken stalagmite segments deliberately arranged into two large rings and…

Excavations led by Curtis Marean at the Pinnacle Point caves near Mossel Bay on South Africa's southern coast document some of the earliest systematic human use of marine resources.

In 1997 a team working in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia's Afar depression recovered the fossilised crania of two adults and a child, with fragments from several more individuals, near the village of Herto.

In 2019 researchers announced a new human species, Homo luzonensis, based on teeth and hand, foot and limb bones recovered from Callao Cave on Luzon in the northern Philippines.

Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast of South Africa has yielded some of the most influential evidence for the deep antiquity of symbolic behaviour.

In 2003 a joint Indonesian-Australian team excavating Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia uncovered a partial skeleton, announced in 2004, of a tiny adult hominin standing about 1.06 metres tall with a brain of only around…

In 2010 a team led by Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute sequenced DNA from a juvenile finger bone excavated in Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia and found it belonged to a previously unknown group of archaic humans…

During the later Middle Stone Age, southern African populations developed two distinctive and short-lived stone-tool industries that mark bursts of technological and symbolic innovation. The Still Bay (broadly c.

At Shanidar Cave in the Zagros mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, excavations led by Ralph Solecki between 1951 and 1960 uncovered the remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children.

Around 74,000 years ago the Toba volcano in Sumatra produced one of the largest eruptions of the Quaternary, ejecting roughly 2,800 cubic kilometres of material and blanketing South Asia in a layer of ash still traceable today.

The Indian subcontinent lay on the principal corridor for modern humans expanding eastward from Africa and Southwest Asia toward Sahul and East Asia.

In 2018 researchers reported a small silcrete flake from the roughly 73,000-year-old levels of Blombos Cave bearing a deliberate pattern of six straight sub-parallel lines crossed obliquely by three slightly curved lines — informally…

Complex symbolic behaviour, advanced tools, long-distance trade, and ritual practices become widespread. Major wave of Homo sapiens leaves Africa, eventually reaching Australia (~65–50 kya) and Europe (~45 kya).

Excavations at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter on the lands of the Mirarr people in northern Australia, place human occupation at around 65,000 years ago on the basis of optically stimulated luminescence dating of the artefact-bearing sands.

At Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape of South Africa, excavators recovered a large collection of more than 270 fragments of ostrich eggshell deliberately incised with geometric designs, dated to the Howiesons Poort phase around…

Microscopic and residue analysis of small stone points from Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, has provided the earliest widely cited evidence for bow-and-arrow hunting, dated to about 64,000 years ago.

The limestone caves of the Maros-Pangkep karst on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi preserve what are currently the oldest known figurative paintings and narrative scenes in the world.

Having occupied Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, the Neanderthals vanished from the fossil and archaeological record around 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens expanded across Eurasia.

Between Sunda (the Ice Age landmass of mainland Southeast Asia) and Sahul lies Wallacea, a chain of islands — including Sulawesi, Flores and Timor — separated from both continental shelves by deep-water straits that were never bridged even…

By around 45,000 years ago, populations of Homo sapiens had spread from Southwest Asia into Europe, encountering Neanderthal populations that had occupied the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.

A single fossilised femur eroding from a bank of the Irtysh River in western Siberia, discovered in 2008, belonged to a man who lived around 45,000 years ago.

Two notched animal bones from Africa are among the oldest candidates for deliberate numerical notation.

From the caves of the Swabian Jura in southwestern Germany came the oldest securely dated musical instruments yet found: flutes made from bird bone and mammoth ivory.

In 1968 the geologist Jim Bowler found burnt and crushed human bones eroding from the lunette dunes of dry Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes region of southeastern Australia.

Excavated in 2008 from the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southwestern Germany, this 6-cm female figurine carved from mammoth ivory is the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being and one of the oldest figurative artworks in the…

Carved from a single mammoth tusk and recovered in fragments from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, the Löwenmensch ('Lion-Man') depicts a standing human body with the head of a cave lion.

In the limestone caves of the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat karst of East Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, depictions of large wild cattle (likely banteng) were dated by uranium-series methods to at least about 40,000 years ago…

The open-air site of Nwya Devu, located about 4,600 metres above sea level on the central Tibetan Plateau, documents the earliest secure human presence in such an extreme high-altitude environment.

Spectacular cave art (Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira), Venus figurines, musical instruments, and complex burial practices appear across Europe and other regions. Clear evidence of abstract thinking and possibly spiritual beliefs.

Modern humans reached the Japanese archipelago by around 38,000 years ago, most likely entering Kyushu via the Korean Peninsula and the Tsushima Strait, with further routes into the Ryukyu Islands and across to Honshu.

In the Ardèche valley of southern France, artists of the Aurignacian produced one of the earliest and most sophisticated bodies of figurative art known.

At Sungir, near Vladimir about 200 km east of Moscow, excavators uncovered some of the most lavish burials of the Upper Palaeolithic, calibrated to roughly 34,000–30,000 years ago.

The Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (Yana RHS), at 71° north on the Yana River in far northeastern Siberia, pushed back the date of human settlement above the Arctic Circle to around 32,000 years ago — roughly twice as old as any previously…

Across Ice Age Europe, from France to Siberia, hunter-gatherers of the Gravettian period carved small female figurines now collectively known as 'Venus' figurines.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the most recent interval of maximum global ice cover, when continental ice sheets over North America (Laurentide), northern Europe and Scandinavia reached their greatest extent, roughly between 26,500 and…

During the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels stood roughly 120 metres below present, exposing the floor of what is now the southern North Sea as a vast lowland known to archaeologists as Doggerland.

Genetic evidence indicates that the ancestors of Native Americans diverged from their Siberian and East Asian relatives around 25,000 years ago and then spent thousands of years as a relatively isolated population before entering the…

Fossilised human footprints exposed in the dry bed of an ancient lake at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, provide some of the strongest evidence that people were living in the interior of North America far earlier than the…

During the Magdalenian and late Solutrean periods, cave painting in western Europe reached an extraordinary peak.

While the larger Wallacean islands were settled around 45,000 years ago, the smaller and more isolated islands of eastern Indonesia — places such as Obi and Kisar that were never connected to any larger landmass — were colonised much…

A two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo on the ceiling of a rock shelter in the northeast Kimberley region of Western Australia has been dated to between about 17,500 and 17,100 years ago, making it the oldest known intact figurative rock…

A cluster of well-documented sites overturned the long-dominant 'Clovis-first' theory and showed that people had spread across the Americas before the Clovis culture.

While Levantine foragers were settling down, hunter-gatherers in the Japanese archipelago independently developed one of the world's earliest pottery traditions.

The dog (Canis lupus familiaris) was the first species humans domesticated, well before any plant or livestock and while people were still mobile hunter-gatherers.

In the Levant — modern Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — the Natufian culture of the Late Epipaleolithic marked a decisive break from the mobile foraging that had defined humanity for hundreds of millennia.

Toward the end of the Pleistocene, a wave of extinctions eliminated much of the world's megafauna — animals over about 44 kg — with especially severe losses in the Americas and Australia.

Charred crumbs recovered from two hearths at Shubayqa 1, a Natufian site in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan, provide the earliest direct evidence for breadmaking, dated to around 14,400 years ago.

At Eynan (Ain Mallaha) in the Upper Jordan Valley, Natufian foragers built one of the earliest known permanent settlements, occupied across several phases over roughly two millennia.

Between roughly 13,500 and 12,700 years ago, a distinctive tool tradition spread rapidly across much of North America: the Clovis culture, named for finds near Clovis, New Mexico.

At Tell Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates in Syria, archaeobotanical evidence indicates that Epipaleolithic foragers began deliberately cultivating wild cereals — including rye and other large-seeded grasses — around the onset of the Younger…

Just as the planet was warming out of the last ice age, the Younger Dryas was an abrupt return to near-glacial conditions across the Northern Hemisphere, lasting from roughly 12,900 to 11,700 years ago.

In a cave at Hilazon Tachtit in the Galilee, a Late Natufian community some 12,000 years ago staged an elaborate funeral for a small, elderly, physically disabled woman, interpreted by excavators as one of the earliest shamans known from…

The end of the Younger Dryas marks one of the most consequential thresholds in human history: the close of the Pleistocene 'Ice Age' epoch and the beginning of the Holocene, the warm, comparatively stable interglacial in which all later…

With the warming Holocene, communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) in the Levant established the first true farming villages, growing cultivated cereals and pulses while still keeping wild-type or barely domesticated crops and…

During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) in the Levant, villagers developed a striking mortuary practice: removing the skulls of selected dead, modelling lifelike faces over the bone with lime plaster, inlaying the eye sockets with shell…

Independent domestication of wheat, barley, sheep, and goats begins in the Levant and surrounding regions. Transition from mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to more sedentary farming and herding communities (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A).

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), an iconic emblem of Ice Age megafauna, vanished from most of its vast Eurasian and North American range as the Pleistocene ended.

Massive T-shaped limestone pillars arranged in circles, carved with animals and symbols, built in southeastern Turkey. Constructed by pre-agricultural or early transitional groups. No permanent village found at the site during main phases.

At the large Neolithic settlement of ʿAin Ghazal, on the outskirts of modern Amman in Jordan, inhabitants of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic produced some of the oldest large-scale representations of the human form.

In the centuries following the first cultivation of cereals and pulses, Neolithic communities of the Fertile Crescent transformed several wild ungulates into managed livestock, completing the founding 'package' of Old World farming.

In the semi-arid loess lands of northern China, Neolithic communities domesticated broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica), drought-tolerant cereals well suited to the Yellow River region.

Along the lower and middle Yangtze, foragers gradually transformed wild rice (Oryza rufipogon) into domesticated japonica rice (Oryza sativa), creating one of the world's most important staple crops.

The high Andes became an independent centre of domestication, producing crops and animals adapted to extreme altitude.

Around 7500 BCE, during the African Humid Period when monsoon rains transformed the eastern Sahara into seasonal savanna and lakes, Neolithic communities began settling the Nabta Playa basin in what is now southern Egypt's Nubian Desert.

On the Konya plain of central Anatolia, the East Mound of Çatalhöyük was occupied continuously for over a thousand years (c. 7100–5950 cal BCE), growing into one of the largest known Neolithic settlements, with thousands of inhabitants.

In the tropical lowlands of the Central Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico, early farmers began selecting the wild grass teosinte (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) for desirable traits, initiating the domestication of maize (corn).

Obsidian, the glassy volcanic stone prized for making razor-sharp blades and reflective mirrors, became one of the first commodities moved over very long distances in the ancient world.

Some of the oldest surviving woven cloth in the world comes from Neolithic sites in Anatolia and the Levant.

On the Kachi plain at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Baluchistan (modern Pakistan), the settlement of Mehrgarh became the earliest known farming community in the Indian subcontinent.

Alongside maize, Mesoamerican and broader American farmers domesticated squash and pumpkins (Cucurbita species) and the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), building the complementary crop trio later known as the 'Three Sisters.' Squash is…

The Neolithic transformation was not confined to the Old World. In Amazonia, ceramics from the Taperinha shell midden near Santarém in Brazil have been dated to roughly 8,000–7,000 years ago, among the oldest pottery yet identified…

In the Wahgi Valley of the New Guinea highlands, the wetland site of Kuk Swamp preserves some of the clearest evidence that agriculture arose independently in the tropics of Sahul.

Fired clay vessels were first made tens of thousands of years earlier by Ice Age foragers in East Asia, but during the Neolithic, pottery became a widespread, everyday technology bound up with settled farming life.

The exploitation of animals for renewable 'secondary products' rather than only meat began with milk.

The 8.2-kiloyear event was the most pronounced abrupt climate fluctuation of the early Holocene, a sudden cooling that began around 8,200 years before present (c. 6200 BCE) and lasted roughly 150 years.

In central Mesopotamia, on the margins of the rain-fed zone, Samarran communities such as Choga Mami in the Diyala region built some of the earliest known irrigation canals around 6000 BCE.

The Linear Pottery culture (Linearbandkeramik, or LBK) carried the Neolithic farming economy rapidly across temperate central Europe.

The harnessing of wind to drive boats was one of prehistory's quieter revolutions, freeing watercraft from the limits of paddling and rowing.

Long before script, the farming and trading communities of the Near East kept accounts with small modelled clay tokens — cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and other shapes — each standing for a quantity of a commodity such as grain, oil or…

During the Ubaid period, communities in the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia developed networks of canals and ditches to draw water from the Euphrates and Tigris onto fields of barley and emmer wheat.

The deliberate smelting of metal from ore, as opposed to merely hammering naturally occurring native copper, marks one of humanity's most consequential technological thresholds.

Along the middle Yellow River in China, the Yangshao culture flourished from about 5000 to 3000 BCE, representing one of the great independent centres of the Neolithic world.

At a cemetery on the Black Sea coast near Varna in Bulgaria, accidentally discovered in 1972, archaeologists uncovered the oldest large assemblage of worked gold known anywhere, dated to roughly 4600–4200 BCE.

Around 4600 BCE, the Gunditjmara people of south-western Victoria, Australia, engineered an extensive aquaculture system across the basalt lava flows of the Budj Bim volcano, today recognised as one of the oldest and most extensive such…

From the fifth millennium BCE, farming communities across the Near East and Europe began to exploit domestic animals not only for meat but for renewable 'secondary' products — milk, wool and muscle power.

Between roughly 4100 and 3600 BCE, communities of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture in present-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania built some of the largest settlements on Earth at the time.

Around 4000 BCE the Neolithic 'package' — domesticated cattle, sheep and goats, cultivated wheat and barley, pottery, polished stone axes and timber houses — reached the islands of Britain and Ireland, carried across the sea by farmers…

Sub-Saharan Africa became an independent centre of cereal domestication, with distinct crops adapted to the seasonal aridity of the Sahel and Sahara.

During the Uruk period, the settlement of Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka) in southern Mesopotamia grew into what is widely regarded as the world's first true city.

On the open grasslands of the central Eurasian steppe, the horse — long hunted for meat — began to be managed and kept by people.

In the fourth and early third millennia BCE, Neolithic communities along Europe's Atlantic and Mediterranean fringes raised enormous monuments of stone and earth, among the most ambitious constructions of the pre-literate world.

Around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE the wheel-and-axle was harnessed for transport, producing the first wheeled vehicles.

At Uruk the Sumerians raised a high mud-brick platform in the Anu district and crowned it with the whitewashed sanctuary known to archaeologists as the White Temple, an early example of the stepped temple-platform tradition that would…

Building on early milking, Old World farming communities increasingly exploited their herds for a wider range of renewable products from the fourth millennium BCE onward — a set of innovations the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt grouped as…

By around 3500 BCE potters in southern Mesopotamia were using a true, continuously rotating potter's wheel, an advance over the slow hand-turned turntables (tournettes) in use since the sixth millennium.

During the Late Uruk period administrators in southern Mesopotamia began using cylinder seals: small engraved stone cylinders that, when rolled across wet clay, left a continuous raised image.

Driven by gradual changes in Earth's orbital geometry that weakened the West African and North African monsoons, the 'Green Sahara' of the early-to-mid Holocene gave way to the modern desert.

In 1991, hikers in the Ötztal Alps on the Italian–Austrian border found a naturally mummified human body melting out of a glacier.

Bone and ivory tags, pottery, and clay seal impressions bearing proto-hieroglyphic signs were deposited in Tomb U-j in the Umm el-Qaab necropolis at Abydos, the burial ground of Predynastic and Early Dynastic rulers.

In the administrative archives of Uruk, scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks and pictographic signs into clay tablets to record quantities of grain, livestock, labour and goods, producing the earliest known writing system, proto-cuneiform.

Around the turn of the fourth to third millennium BCE the rotary technology developed for the potter's wheel was adapted to transport, producing the first wheeled vehicles.

During the Early Harappan (Ravi and Kot Diji) phases, the first known symbols of what would become the Indus script appear, incised on pottery at Harappa, with occupation levels dated to roughly 3500-3300 BCE.

Around 3300 BCE the Yamnaya (Pit Grave) culture coalesced across the Pontic-Caspian steppe, stretching from the eastern Carpathians and the lower Dnieper to the Ural River north of the Black and Caspian Seas.