50 Fun Facts About Prehistory

Which animals, shown living beside cave people in The Flintstones, died out long before the first humans?

Dinosaurs, apart from the line that became birds, were wiped out about 66 million years ago. The oldest known stone tools were made more than 60 million years later.

Which famous Australopithecus skeleton, found in Ethiopia in 1974, was named after a Beatles song played in camp?

Lucy got her name from the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, played over and over in camp that night. About 40% of her skeleton survived, from a female who lived 3.2 million years ago.

What nickname was given to the 5,300-year-old mummy that two tourists found in glacier ice in the Alps in 1991?

Ötzi is named after the Ötztal Alps on the Austria–Italy border, where he lay frozen. An arrowhead buried in his left shoulder suggests that he was killed by another person.

Which stone circle on Salisbury Plain includes bluestones hauled about 150 miles from the Preseli Hills of Wales?

Stonehenge also holds a stone from even farther away: a 2024 study traced its Altar Stone to north-east Scotland, some 700 km from Salisbury Plain.

Which animal was the first to be domesticated, living alongside hunter-gatherers long before farming began?

The dog is also the only large carnivore people have ever domesticated. Ancient DNA suggests the bond began near the peak of the last Ice Age, among hunters of giant game.

Which French cave, found by four teenagers in 1940, holds more than 600 wall paintings from the last Ice Age?

Lascaux has been closed to the public since 1963, after the heat, humidity and carbon dioxide from 1,200 visitors a day visibly damaged the paintings. Tourists now see replicas instead.

Which staple food, usually linked with farming, were hunter-gatherers in Jordan making some 14,000 years ago?

Bread-like crumbs from a 14,400-year-old fireplace at Shubayqa 1 were made of wild cereals and tubers ground into flour. That is about 4,000 years before farming emerged in Southwest Asia.

Which Ice Age animal's bones did hunters at Mezhyrich in Ukraine use to build huts some 15,000 years ago?

Mammoth bones built the four huts found at the site, and one hut alone used 385 of them. They came to light in 1965, when a farmer enlarging his cellar dug up a jawbone.

Which extinct human relatives are named after a valley near Düsseldorf where their bones came to light in 1856?

Neanderthals take their name from the Neander Valley, itself named after the 17th-century hymnwriter Joachim Neander. A local schoolteacher first recognised that the bones were not a modern human's.

Which Stone Age period, covering almost the whole span of human toolmaking, lends its name to a modern fad diet?

Paleolithic people actually ate grains and other starchy plants, the evidence shows, yet the diet named after their era bans both grains and dairy.

Which invention, first seen about 5,200 years ago, marks the point where prehistory ends and history begins?

Writing is so recent that prehistory, which opens with the first stone tools about 3.3 million years ago, makes up more than 99% of the human story.

On which continent did our own species emerge at least 300,000 years ago, before spreading around the world?

Africa was our species' only home at first. Groups later migrated out and gradually replaced the older human populations living elsewhere.

Which wooden hunting weapons, among the oldest ever found, came out of a coal mine at Schöningen in Germany?

The spears, part of a set of ten wooden weapons found with animal bones, showed that early human ancestors were far closer to modern people in skill and teamwork than had been thought.

Which alloy names the middle period of the three-age system, falling between the Stone Age and the Iron Age?

Bronze was harder and more durable than the other metals of its day, which gave the peoples who could make or trade for it a technological edge.

In which region of the Middle East, a term popularised by James Breasted in 1914, did settled farming first emerge?

The Fertile Crescent curves through modern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. People there began clearing natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated plants as crops.

Which Ice Age land bridge between Siberia and Alaska was home to the people who went on to settle the Americas?

Beringia got its name in 1937 from Vitus Bering, who sailed into the strait in 1728. At its greatest extent the land bridge was up to 1,000 km wide.

Which body part did cave artists stencil by pressing it to the rock and covering the surrounding area in pigment?

Hand stencils in French and Spanish caves may not all be the work of men: after analysing them, researcher Dean Snow proposed that a share were made by women.

Which desert, home to the prehistoric rock art of Tassili n'Ajjer, was habitable savanna when it was painted?

The Sahara turned green when shifts in the Earth's tilt helped strengthen the monsoon, covering much of it in grasses, trees and lakes.

Einkorn and emmer, two of the first crops domesticated in the Near East, are early forms of which cereal?

Wheat changed in one key way under farming: wild emmer's ripe seed head shatters and scatters its grain, while the domesticated kind stays intact, making it easier to harvest.

Which crop did farmers in southern Mexico breed about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte?

Maize, the crop North Americans call corn, descends from a plant whose every seed is locked inside a very hard case.

Which continent did people reach at least 50,000 years ago by land bridges and short sea hops from Southeast Asia?

Australia's first people were the ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians, and most evidence puts their arrival between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago.

Which country's islands were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans, only about 700 years ago?

New Zealand was first reached by Polynesians in oceangoing canoes between about 1280 and 1350. Around half of its forest cover was then lost to fire.

Which animal did the Botai people of Central Asia herd some 5,500 years ago, the earliest evidence of its husbandry?

Horse meat was the mainstay of the Botai diet, and their pottery held traces of mare's milk. Heaps of bones and dung beside corral-like enclosures point to kept herds.

Which dark volcanic glass was once used for cutting and piercing tools because it fractures with very sharp edges?

Obsidian forms when lava cools too quickly for crystals to grow, and traces of iron tint it dark brown to black. It has even been tested as a blade for surgical scalpels.

Which musical instrument, about 35,000 years old and among the oldest ever found, came out of Germany's Hohle Fels cave?

The flute has five finger holes and lay in a cave that also held some of the oldest known figurative art. Its finders called it the earliest evidence of humans making music.

Which city in the Jordan Valley holds a stone tower built around 8000 BC, one of the world's oldest stone buildings?

Jericho's tower stands 8.5 metres tall and was built of undressed stones around an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. Kathleen Kenyon discovered it in the 1950s.

Which metal, first hammered cold and later smelted, gives the Chalcolithic age after the Stone Age its other name?

Copper was being hammered into shape around North America's Great Lakes from about 6,500 BC. The oldest securely dated evidence of smelting it comes from Belovode in Serbia, from around 5000 BC.

Which geological epoch, known colloquially as the Ice Age, ended about 11,700 years ago after some 2.5 million years?

The Pleistocene saw sea levels fall by as much as 120 metres at the peak of its glaciations, exposing land that joined Asia to North America.

Which technique, which won Willard Libby a Nobel Prize, can date remains up to about 50,000 years old?

Radiocarbon dating works because carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, so after roughly 50,000 years too little is left to measure reliably.

Which site in Turkey, raised by hunter-gatherers, holds stone pillars that rank among the world's oldest megaliths?

Göbekli Tepe has been popularly described as the world's first temple, though no definite purpose for its great pillared circles has ever been established.

Which 9,000-year-old town in Turkey had no streets, so that most homes were entered through holes in the ceiling?

Çatalhöyük's houses were packed together like a honeycomb, so the rooftops were effectively its streets. People climbed down into their homes by timber ladders or steep stairs.

Which Stone Age village in Orkney, exposed by a severe storm in 1850, still contains its stone furniture?

Skara Brae was lived in from roughly 3180 BC to 2500 BC and is Europe's most complete village of its age. The storm that uncovered it caused over 200 deaths across Scotland.

Which Irish passage tomb, older than Egypt's pyramids, fills with light from the rising sun on the winter solstice?

Newgrange lets the dawn in through a 'roofbox' above its entrance, sending a beam along the passage to light the inner chamber and its carved triple spiral.

Which Breton town gives its name to more than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones, the world's largest such collection?

Carnac's stones stand in such straight lines that local tradition calls them a Roman legion turned to stone by Merlin the Wizard.

Which prehistoric standing stone, the kind Obelix carries in the Asterix comics, takes its name from two Breton words?

Menhir combines the Breton words maen and hir; in modern Welsh the matching phrase, maen hir, means long stone. Bretons themselves now use a different word, peulvan.

Which Spanish cave's paintings were first pointed out in 1879 by an amateur archaeologist's eight-year-old daughter?

Altamira's art was at first rejected by some experts, who argued that prehistoric people lacked the capacity for abstract thought needed to make it.

Which Roman goddess lends her name to Ice Age statuettes of women, such as the one found at Willendorf in Austria?

The Venus of Willendorf was excavated in 1908 from the Danube valley. Guesses at what such figures meant range from fertility symbols to self-portraits by female artists.

Which earth pigment dyed the Ice Age skeleton found in a Welsh cave in 1823 and nicknamed the Red Lady of Paviland?

Ochre had stained the bones and the earth around them red. Their finder, William Buckland, took them for a Roman-era woman, but the 'lady' was a man buried about 34,000 years ago.

Which animal's head tops the human body of an Ice Age ivory statue from Germany's Hohlenstein-Stadel cave?

The Lion-man is the oldest confirmed statue ever discovered. It was found in 1939 and has been rebuilt several times as newly found fragments were added.

Which extinct wild ancestor of domestic cattle, painted in Ice Age caves, survived in a Polish forest until 1627?

The aurochs stood up to 1.8 metres at the shoulder, with horns that reached 80 cm in length. The last confirmed animal died in Jaktorów forest.

Which early human species, first known from the Java Man fossils found in 1891, was the first to wield fire?

Homo erectus was also the first human species to evolve a humanlike body plan and gait, and the first to colonise Asia and Europe.

What name did archaeologist V. Gordon Childe give in 1936 to the shift from hunting and gathering to settled farming?

Neolithic Revolution was Childe's label in his book Man Makes Himself. He chose the word revolution to stress how deeply farming changed the communities that took it up.

Which antiquarian, arranging a Copenhagen museum's collection, is credited with originating the three-age system?

Christian Thomsen refined the scheme by noting which artefacts occurred together in closed finds. He had been put in charge of the collection in 1816.

Which prehistoric Japanese culture is named for the cord patterns pressed into the wet clay of its pottery?

Jōmon pottery was made for so long that the gap between its earliest pots and its better-known middle period is about twice the time separating the Great Pyramid from the 21st century.

Which scientist's team discovered early hominin footprints preserved in volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1976?

Mary Leakey's find gave convincing evidence that hominins were already walking upright in the Pliocene. She had earlier discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge.

Which stone-tool industry, known for its oval and pear-shaped bifaces, is named after a suburb of Amiens in France?

The Acheulean takes its name from Saint-Acheul, where such hand axes were dug from gravel pits in the 19th century. Gabriel de Mortillet named the period after the site in 1872.

What is the craft of shaping flint into tools called, in which a hammerstone strikes flakes from a core?

Knapping outlived the Stone Age: the same skill later supplied the strikers for flintlock firearms and flat-faced stones for building and decorating walls.

Which New Mexico town gives its name to the stone-tool culture long believed to be the first people in the Americas?

Clovis no longer marks the beginning: several accepted sites, Monte Verde among them, are at least a thousand years older than the oldest Clovis camps.

Which bog body, found by Danish peat cutters in 1950, was so well preserved that the police were called in?

Tollund Man had in fact died between 405 and 384 BC, in Scandinavia's Pre-Roman Iron Age. The family who found him near Silkeborg believed they had come upon a recent victim.

Which land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, once stretched from eastern Britain to Germany and Jutland?

Doggerland is named after the Dogger Bank, itself named after 17th-century fishing boats called doggers. In 1931 a trawler dragged up a barbed antler point from the seabed.