Prehistory
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50 free Prehistory trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Prehistory is the longest chapter of the human story, and nobody alive at the time left a single word about it. Everything we know has been pieced together from bones, tools, paintings and buildings left in the ground, which is why each fresh find can still overturn what the textbooks say. This quiz walks through that deep past in order: the earliest toolmakers and the fossils that revealed them, the hunters and artists of the Ice Age, the first villages, crops and herds, and the people who raised giant stones across Europe. It also covers the famous discoveries and the methods archaeologists use to work out how old they are. The questions run from easy to hard, so the set works for a social studies or world history class, for students who need a gentler start, and for anyone who wants a tougher test. Every answer comes with a short explanation, which makes the quiz easy to read aloud.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animals, shown living beside cave people in The Flintstones, died out long before the first humans?
Dinosaurs
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.
Q 02Which famous Australopithecus skeleton, found in Ethiopia in 1974, was named after a Beatles song played in camp?
Lucy
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.
Q 03What nickname was given to the 5,300-year-old mummy that two tourists found in glacier ice in the Alps in 1991?
Ötzi
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.
Q 04Which stone circle on Salisbury Plain includes bluestones hauled about 150 miles from the Preseli Hills of Wales?
Stonehenge
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.
Q 05Which animal was the first to be domesticated, living alongside hunter-gatherers long before farming began?
Dog
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.
Q 06Which French cave, found by four teenagers in 1940, holds more than 600 wall paintings from the last Ice Age?
Lascaux
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.
Q 07Which staple food, usually linked with farming, were hunter-gatherers in Jordan making some 14,000 years ago?
Bread
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.
Q 08Which Ice Age animal's bones did hunters at Mezhyrich in Ukraine use to build huts some 15,000 years ago?
Mammoth
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.
Q 09Which extinct human relatives are named after a valley near Düsseldorf where their bones came to light in 1856?
Neanderthals
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.
Q 10Which Stone Age period, covering almost the whole span of human toolmaking, lends its name to a modern fad diet?
Paleolithic
Paleolithic people actually ate grains and other starchy plants, the evidence shows, yet the diet named after their era bans both grains and dairy.
Q 11Which invention, first seen about 5,200 years ago, marks the point where prehistory ends and history begins?
Writing
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.
Q 12On which continent did our own species emerge at least 300,000 years ago, before spreading around the world?
Africa
Africa was our species' only home at first. Groups later migrated out and gradually replaced the older human populations living elsewhere.
Q 13Which wooden hunting weapons, among the oldest ever found, came out of a coal mine at Schöningen in Germany?
Spears
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.
Q 21Which continent did people reach at least 50,000 years ago by land bridges and short sea hops from Southeast Asia?
Australia
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.
Q 22Which country's islands were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans, only about 700 years ago?
New Zealand
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.
Q 23Which animal did the Botai people of Central Asia herd some 5,500 years ago, the earliest evidence of its husbandry?
Horse
Q 14Which alloy names the middle period of the three-age system, falling between the Stone Age and the Iron Age?
Bronze
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.
Q 15In which region of the Middle East, a term popularised by James Breasted in 1914, did settled farming first emerge?
Fertile Crescent
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.
Q 16Which Ice Age land bridge between Siberia and Alaska was home to the people who went on to settle the Americas?
Beringia
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.
Q 17Which body part did cave artists stencil by pressing it to the rock and covering the surrounding area in pigment?
Hand
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.
Q 18Which desert, home to the prehistoric rock art of Tassili n'Ajjer, was habitable savanna when it was painted?
Sahara
The Sahara turned green when shifts in the Earth's tilt helped strengthen the monsoon, covering much of it in grasses, trees and lakes.
Q 19Einkorn and emmer, two of the first crops domesticated in the Near East, are early forms of which cereal?
Wheat
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.
Q 20Which crop did farmers in southern Mexico breed about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte?
Maize
Maize, the crop North Americans call corn, descends from a plant whose every seed is locked inside a very hard case.
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.
Q 24Which dark volcanic glass was once used for cutting and piercing tools because it fractures with very sharp edges?
Obsidian
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.
Q 25Which musical instrument, about 35,000 years old and among the oldest ever found, came out of Germany's Hohle Fels cave?
Flute
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.
Q 26Which city in the Jordan Valley holds a stone tower built around 8000 BC, one of the world's oldest stone buildings?
Jericho
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.
Q 27Which metal, first hammered cold and later smelted, gives the Chalcolithic age after the Stone Age its other name?
Copper
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.
Q 28Which geological epoch, known colloquially as the Ice Age, ended about 11,700 years ago after some 2.5 million years?
Pleistocene
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.
Q 29Which technique, which won Willard Libby a Nobel Prize, can date remains up to about 50,000 years old?
Radiocarbon dating
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.
Q 30Which site in Turkey, raised by hunter-gatherers, holds stone pillars that rank among the world's oldest megaliths?
Göbekli Tepe
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.