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Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers . They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
Lascaux cave paintings from France. Prehistory covers human intellectual history before the invention of writing. The first identified cultures are from the Upper Paleolithic era, evidenced by regional patterns in artefacts such as cave art, Venus figurines, and stone tools. [4]
It took over two million years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 207 years more to grow to 7 billion. [154] The combined biomass of the carbon of all the humans on Earth in 2018 was estimated at 60 million tons, about 10 times larger than that of all non-domesticated mammals. [146]
The main find was a skeleton believed to be a woman of about 30 years of age. Found in 2003, it has been dated to approximately 18,000 years old. The living woman was estimated to be one meter in height, with a brain volume of just 380 cm 3 (considered small for a chimpanzee and less than a third of the H. sapiens average of 1400 cm 3). [105]
The migrating modern human populations are known to have interbred with earlier local populations, so that contemporary human populations are descended in small part (below 10% contribution) from regional varieties of archaic humans. [note 2] After the Last Glacial Maximum, North Eurasian populations migrated to the Americas about 20,000 years ago.
Harari's work places human history within a framework, with the natural sciences setting limits for human activity and social sciences shaping what happens within those bounds. The academic discipline of history is the account of cultural change. Harari surveys the history of humankind from the Stone Age up to the 21st century, focusing on Homo ...
Traditionally, history was primarily concerned with written documents. It focused on recorded history since the invention of writing, leaving prehistory [b] to other fields, such as archaeology. [7] Today, history has a broader scope as one of the disciplines interested in human history before the invention of writing. [8] [c]