There have always been ideas and stories about what went on in prehistory, but in recent years they’ve, sometimes dramatically. More information comes to light. Information we thought we had is challenged. New ideas put what we do know into new contexts.
The story I was taught in school decades ago, with brutal Neanderthals wiped out by advanced Cro-Magnons, has long been discarded. Now there’s a story about co-existence and interbreeding, but that story’s still being put together. It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of prehistory happen, but a little difficult to follow.
New tools and artwork and weapons have been found from times before writing. DNA testing has complicated ideas of migrations and gender roles, as new kinds of human beings are discovered and skeletons once assumed male are shown to be female.
We can now see traces in living human DNA of a human species or subspecies we call Denisovans. No complete Denisovan skeleton has been found but bits and pieces have come to light; a skull here, some teeth there, bone fragments and a jawbone from a teenager tens of thousands of years old. Denisovans have been rediscovered to be part of the jigsaw that make up modern humans.
It’s difficult to keep track of how these and other rediscoveries are leading to a new and better understanding of the long-ago past. So much is changing so quickly that old stories have been unwritten without a detailed new story ready to replace them.
Even some pop nonfiction books looking at new research, like David Reich’s Who We Are And How We Got Here, emphasize that there’s more to come as studies go on. It’s not just that we don’t know what we don’t know; we don’t know what we have the power to find out, and what we’re going to find out in the near future.
We can assume, maybe, that the past will be understood to be more complicated than we’d thought. Stories of prehistory used to talk about a single human migration out of Africa. Now it’s multiple migrations, and some peoples turning back and then going again, all over the course of many hundreds of thousands of years as modern humans were still evolving.
Was there a point several tens of thousands of years ago when humans developed a set of arts and customs and technologies that together we can call behavioral modernity? That used to be how the data was interpreted. But is that only an artifact of limited archaeological data? There are many critiques of the concept; I’ve no idea what the conclusion will be.
Beyond the big-picture questions of prehistory come questions of what life was like. Some artifacts have survived. Others haven’t. There’s a selection bias in what we know and can know; stone tools last, fiber tools don’t. Even there, new scientific examination can show evidence of fiber tools through the microscopic marks they leave on stone tools. We now know humans were using fibers, possibly to make ropes and baskets, in the Philippines 39,000 years ago. That was worked out in 2023.
Prehistory’s in a state of constant revision. We can’t help but project onto the unknown; we fill in blanks with assumptions. We extend what we know without always realizing it.
Academics who study prehistory are presumably more critical of that habit than most, but the reality is that reconstructing life tens of thousands of years ago is a different kind of creative act than reconstructing life 200 years ago, or even 500. There were hundreds of thousands of people in prehistory, not billions; fewer humans in the whole of the world than now exist in a good-sized city, and that few scattered over a much wider area. How did they trade information and ideas?
And how did their societies develop? Things change in history, even during so-called dark ages. In any given recorded 1000-year period we can see new technologies, sometimes the obvious like new weapons or transportation technologies, sometimes subtler, like a new configuration of a plow.
Above all, what sort of stories were told in those millennia that’re now forgotten? And how many of those stories haven’t been entirely forgotten, but remain as unheard influences in the stories told ever since? We can’t know. We don’t know what myths or religions people had then, and how their beliefs influence our own. We can only guess from examples like cave paintings and grave goods.
That’s what’s most frustrating and fascinating. The silence. So many long years of human societies with no surviving human words. Only glimpses, here and there, of arts and ritual lives. Records left in bone of diets and physical trauma. Genetic riddles and, sometimes, new finds.
Enough new finds the story of the past is changing fast. And what the future story of the past will look like is as unknowable as the past itself. The future of prehistory isn’t yet written.
