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This timeline of prehistory covers the time from the appearance of Homo sapiens approximately 315,000 years ago in Africa to the invention of writing, over 5,000 years ago, with the earliest records going back to 3,200 BC. Prehistory covers the time from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) to the beginning of ancient history.
Prehistory – Period between the appearance of Homo ("humans"; first stone tools c. three million years ago) and the invention of writing systems (for the Ancient Near East: c. five thousand years ago). Paleolithic – the earliest period of the Stone Age Lower Paleolithic – time of archaic human species, predates Homo sapiens
The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (c. 3.3 million – c. 11,700 years ago) (/ ˌ p eɪ l i oʊ ˈ l ɪ θ ɪ k, ˌ p æ l i-/ PAY-lee-oh-LITH-ik, PAL-ee-), also called the Old Stone Age (from Ancient Greek παλαιός (palaiós) 'old' and λίθος (líthos) 'stone'), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost ...
The oldest human skeletal remains are the 40ky old Lake Mungo remains in New South Wales, but human ornaments discovered at Devil's Lair in Western Australia have been dated to 48 kya and artifacts at Madjedbebe in Northern Territory are dated to at least 50 kya, and to 62.1 ± 2.9 ka in one 2017 study. [26] [27] [28] [29]
Dates for the Paleolithic are given as Before Present (BP), which uses 1 January 1950 as the commencement date of the age scale. All later dates are given as Before Christ (BC), which uses the conventional Gregorian calendar with AD 1 as the commencement date of the age scale.
The Upper Paleolithic developed in Europe some time after the Levant, where the Emiran period and the Ahmarian period form the first periods of the Upper Paleolithic, corresponding to the first stages of the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa. [4] They then migrated to Europe and created the first European culture of modern humans, the ...
Beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. The first large settlement of Europe by modern humans, nomadic hunter-gatherers coming from the steppes of central Asia. When the Ice Age reached its maximum extent, these modern humans took refuge in southern Europe, namely in Iberia, and in the steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia.
This timeline of natural history summarizes significant geological and biological events from the formation of the Earth to the arrival of modern humans. Times are listed in millions of years, or megaanni ( Ma ).