PREHISTORY: A QUICK GUIDE
The origins of humanity lie in the depths of the Palaeolithic. Our earliest immediate and direct ancestors, that is, those comparable to ourselves in brain size and erect posture, emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago.
Yet the earliest regular use of tools by hominids - creatures with a slightly erect posture who had developed brains about a third or so the size of our own and those of our immediate ancestors (i.e., less than ca. 500 cubic cm [cc] against 1500-1600 cc) - dates to sometime during the four million or so years before our appearance. At this time, there was little to distinguish our ancestors from chimpanzees, who also use tools. Although the oldest traces of sophisticated tool manufacture and the creation of figurines date to less than half a million years ago this was still a period when the ancestors of our ancestors had developed brains with a cranial capacity only about half the size of our own (ca. 800 cc). This was still hundreds of thousands of years before the appearance of our direct ancestors.Significantly, our oldest real, immediate and direct ancestors, the Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH, i.e. like ourselves) who appeared sometime around 200,000 years ago in Africa, used the same tools as their slightly older contemporaries, the Neanderthals (who had a larger brain than ours and that of our ancestors, but belonged to a parallel line which broke off from our own around a half million or more years ago). But, in contrast to the Neanderthals, our ancestors had already began to use colour systematically to decorate objects and to bury their dead in clearly defined non-domestic areas around 100,000 years ago. Yet the Neanderthals and our direct ancestors shared the same habitats, and used the same types of tools; and in some cases, both lines continued to use the same tools that they had inherited from ancestors living before either line appeared. The Neanderthals and the AMH met when our ancestors came out of Africa and crossed into Palestine.
It was only much later that the AMH arrived in Europe, at a time when the Upper Palaeolithic had begun in Europe. By 30,000 years ago, our ancestors had begun to decorate the walls of caves, and began to produce figurines in relative abundance. The Neanderthals also had burial customs, but failed to distinguish “cemeteries” from “domestic spaces”. They eventually died off, leaving further developments to our own line. Obviously, “we” differed significantly from the other hominids; this was not just a question of brain size or geography, for Neanderthals and our ancestors lived in the same regions and used the same types of tools. “We” seem to have seen no necessity to invent any new kinds of tools or to distinguish ourselves from the others until our ancestors were the only hominids left. Even at this point, there was no uniform development associated with our species.There was a gap of about 20,000 years between the end of the Neanderthals (ca. 30,000 BCE) and the beginning of farming in the Near East (ca. 10,000 BCE, following thousands of years later in Europe). Monumental architecture is likewise unknown before the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic, around 12,000 years ago. It appears in Anatolia and Palestine with the Neolithic Revolution - and thousands of years before the megaliths of Malta and monumental tomb architecture arise in Neolithic Europe.