Chapter 5 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 4. Prehistory
The longest and the least dated period: what the word designates, its two great phases, its landmarks, and why its dates are wide.
A word that speaks of the sources, not of the people
Prehistory does not mean "before humans". The word designates the period for which no text is available: everything known comes from objects, bones, traces and layers of earth. The people of Prehistory had a history, stories, names and dead whom they buried. What is missing is not their history, it is their writing.
This definition has a consequence that is often forgotten. Prehistory does not end at the same moment everywhere: it ends, for each region, when texts appear there. In Mesopotamia that is in the fourth millennium BCE. Elsewhere it is far later, sometimes several thousand years later. One and the same century can therefore be ancient in one region and prehistoric in another.
It is also the longest period of all, and by a very long way. It covers several hundred thousand years, against about five thousand five hundred for the four other periods put together. Any timeline that puts them on the same line, at the same scale, makes the last four invisible. That is why the tables in this chapter give the durations in plain figures.
The words archaeology uses here
These eight words are exactly the ones the French official syllabus keeps as key words for this period. They come back throughout the documentation.
- The Palaeolithic
- The age of chipped stone. Tools are obtained by striking a block to detach cutting flakes from it. Groups move about, hunt and gather.
- The Neolithic
- The age of polished stone. Tools are worn down and smoothed by rubbing. It is also the period when agriculture and stock-raising appear, and when groups settle.
- Domestication
- The passage from a wild species to a species raised or cultivated by humans, who choose how it reproduces. It concerns plants and animals first, and it transforms both lastingly.
- Archaeology
- The study of the past through the material traces it has left: objects, buildings, bones, seeds, layers of earth. It is the only source available for the whole of Prehistory.
- Migration
- The lasting movement of a human group from one region to another. Prehistoric migrations are read in the distribution of tools and bones and, more recently, in genetic analyses.
- The necropolis
- A place set aside for the dead, used repeatedly. The appearance of necropolises is one of the clearest signs of a population settled in the same place over several generations.
- Population growth
- The increase in the number of inhabitants of a territory. In the Neolithic it goes with agriculture: the same surface feeds more people than hunting and gathering do.
- The farmer
- Someone who cultivates plants they have sown, on land they work and come back to. The word implies settlement, and therefore a complete change in the relation to space.
| Date | The fact | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Around 400,000 BCE | The domestication of fire | The cooking of food, light at night, warmth, protection against animals, and a place around which the group gathers |
| Around 300,000 BCE | The oldest traces of Homo sapiens, in present-day Morocco | Our own species is attested in Africa well before it appears elsewhere: the whole history of the peopling of the world starts from there |
| Around 10,000 to 9,000 BCE | The beginning of the Neolithic in the Near East | Agriculture and stock-raising appear, groups stop moving about, the first villages form |
| Around 4,000 BCE | The invention of the wheel | Carrying heavy loads becomes possible, which changes trade, building and war |
The word "around" appears before each of these four dates, and it is not a stylistic precaution. It means that the date is an interval and not a point: the oldest traces known to date fall around this value, and a discovery can move it. A prehistoric date without the word "around" or without a margin of uncertainty is almost always a date copied without its source.
The Neolithic change, in two columns
Before: hunting and gathering
- The group moves about to follow the game and the seasons.
- It carries little, because everything has to be carried.
- It takes what the environment gives, without changing it lastingly.
- Numbers stay limited by what a territory supplies of its own accord.
- The dead are left where the group happens to be, rarely in the same place.
After: cultivating and raising
- The group stays in the same place, because a harvest is sown and then waited for.
- It accumulates: granaries, heavy pottery, bulky tools, houses.
- It transforms the environment: clearings, fields, enclosures, channels.
- Numbers rise, because the same surface feeds more people.
- The dead are given a place of their own, used over several generations.
What the Neolithic costs, and it has to be said
The move to agriculture is almost always told as progress. It is progress from the point of view of numbers: a population that cultivates grows. It is not necessarily progress from the point of view of those who live through it, and it is enough to follow what the change implies to see this.
A diet resting on a few cultivated plants is less varied than that of a group hunting and gathering dozens of species. Farm work is longer and more repetitive. People living packed together, with animals, in villages where waste piles up, catch diseases that mobile groups did not catch. A lost harvest, finally, starves a whole village at one stroke, which does not happen to those who draw on a varied environment.
The Neolithic is therefore not first of all an improvement in life, it is a change of system: it allows far more people to exist, and it changes what each of them eats, does with their days and risks. The four points above follow from what the change implies; this book puts no figures on them, for want of a document it could put into its reader's hands. It is a good exercise in method: a period is not judged, it is described, and what cannot be measured is said without being counted.
An example of dating, and of its revisions
The cave of Lascaux, discovered in 1940, offers a textbook case. The ministère de la Culture publishes the scientific dossier of its dating, and that dossier does not give a figure: it gives a history of figures, revised over more than eighty years.
In the years after the discovery, two prehistorians attach the paintings to one culture; a third points out that this imagery carries as many features of one as of the other of the two great traditions; a fourth leans towards the second. In 1951 fragments of charcoal are analysed in Chicago, in the laboratory of the man who has just invented carbon 14 dating, and give an age of around nineteen thousand years before present. The dossier states the meaning of this unit: the present is, by convention, fixed at the year 1950, the date the method was invented, and every date said to be "before present" in this book is read in that way. Other samples, dated afterwards, give ages between twenty-one and eighteen thousand years.
At this point the dossier pauses on the series of attributions and comments on it itself: these successive adjustments show the difficulties met in establishing a precise, sufficiently argued diagnosis. Then it starts again. In 1998 and then in 2002, two new measurements made by a more recent method make the whole thing older and place it between twenty-three thousand five hundred and twenty-two thousand years before present.
The dossier does not stop there. Between 2018 and 2021 a reassessment project had several fragments of reindeer bone from the main sectors of the cave dated, and the dossier writes that the remains would therefore result from one (or several) occupation(s) situated somewhere between 21.5 and 21 thousand years before present. It adds that the use of the cave is thus made younger by 1000 to 1500 years compared with the ages obtained at the end of the 1990s. That is the most recent state this dossier publishes.
A public institution that writes these sentences about its most famous site teaches more than an exact date. It shows that a date is the result of a measurement, that the result of a measurement has a margin, and that a margin tightens or moves when the method changes. The chapter on dating takes this point up in detail.
| When | By what means | Age proposed for Lascaux |
|---|---|---|
| In the years after 1940 | Comparison of styles with painted blocks found in dated layers | Attachment to a culture, with no figure |
| 1951 | Carbon 14 on charcoal, in the laboratory of the inventor of the method | About 19,000 years before present |
| After 1951 | Carbon 14 on new charcoal, taken during excavation | Between 21,000 and 18,000 years before present |
| 1998 and 2002 | Carbon 14 by accelerator mass spectrometry, on reindeer antler | Between 23,500 and 22,000 years before present |
| 2018 to 2021 | New carbon 14 dating programme, on reindeer bones from the main sectors of the cave | Between 21,500 and 21,000 years before present |
Four received ideas about Prehistory
"Prehistoric people lived in caves"
Caves preserve traces, that is all. They are dry, sheltered from frost and rain, so what is left in them survives. What was left in the open air has almost always disappeared. We find things in caves because that is where finding is possible, not because more people lived there.
"Prehistory is before history"
It is before WRITING, which is not the same thing. The word describes the state of the sources available to us today, not the state of the societies of the time. A society without writing is not a society without memory, without law and without transmission.
"The Neolithic began on a date"
It begins in the Near East around ten thousand years BCE, and far later elsewhere, each region at its own pace. The official syllabus in fact asks that several centres of origin and the currents of diffusion be located, which assumes exactly this offset.
"We know almost nothing about this period"
We know a great deal, but differently. Bones tell of age, illness and diet; teeth tell of weaning; seeds tell of cultivated plants; layers of earth tell the order of occupations. What is missing is the names, the words and the intentions.
What Prehistory teaches about the rest of the book
Three lessons of method come from this period, and they serve for all the others. The first is that the state of the sources determines what can be said. Where there is no text, gestures and objects are described, never words or plans. A book that lends thoughts to a Palaeolithic hunter is inventing.
The second is that the precision of a date depends on the method that produced it, and that this method has to be named. "Around four hundred thousand years BCE" and "26 August 1789" are two legitimate dates, obtained by unrelated means, and it would be absurd to reproach the first with its imprecision.
The third is that discoveries move the landmarks. The oldest traces of Homo sapiens have been pushed back as sites were excavated, and nothing rules out their being pushed back again. A prehistoric landmark is a state of knowledge at a date, not a fixed truth. That is why the sources chapter of this book gives, for each document, the date on which it was consulted.