Prehistory is an exciting field, fueled by advancements in genetic research and new archeological field activities and investigation techniques. We are beginning to get hints of the history of human development before the first "historic" civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The time range goes back from before the emergence of homo sapiens to about 3000 BC. In the early part of the period, 21st century work indicates a much more complex story about human evolution than the one-time "Out of Africa" scenario posited only thirty years ago, with multiple pulses of emigration out of Africa and the emergence of other of earlier human species in Asia, including species that existed at the same time as sapiens.
Within the past 15,000 years there is new information available about sites like Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (modern Turkey) that seemed to have existed prior to the development of agriculture, confounding theories about the start of civilization. The history of the settlement of Europe may also be in the course of being rewritten. Decades ago I learned that it was thought the agriculture began in Europe with the migration of farmers from the Anatolian Plateau into the Balkans, from their spreading to the Atlantic and Baltic, beginning around 9,000 years ago. It still appears that migration occurred but about 5,000 years ago, peoples from the Eurasian steppes, known as the Yamnaya, entered Europe, and may have killed most of the male Anatolian migrants they found in the new lands, establishing a new culture in Europe. One good source for finding a lot of this research is via Razib Khan's substack and twitter feed.
Another example comes from Jacob Shell, the geography professor about whom I wrote just a couple of days ago. Take a look at this map:
Map of North African during its late "humid" period, i.e. roughly 8000-4000 BC. I'd put chances that a big archaeological discovery remains to be found under the sands of the Sahara at better than 50%. pic.twitter.com/JmcOw9MhZG
— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) October 14, 2022
It portrays the era of the green Sahara, pastoral, full of lakes, and fertile. As the local climate dried and warmed, the desert began to encroach, and the population of the interior migrated in different directions - to coastal North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Nile Valley from which emerged the civilization of the pharaohs around 3000 BC.
This green period also explains why elephants, rhinoceros, and lions were found in North Africa during the Classical period. It was only because the Sahara was once verdant that these animals were able to migrate from south of the Sahara to the shores of the Mediterranean.
As Shell notes, there's a substantial likelihood of fascinating evidence of those times lies beneath the desert, an even more intriguing possibility given that the origins of permanent human settlement appears to go back much further than thought a couple of decades ago.
