Before writing, which is most of the story — migration out of Africa, the other hominins, and the turn to farming.
11 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries
James Fergusson · 1872
Argues Europe's megaliths — Stonehenge among them — are not prehistoric at all but medieval or later monuments, a thesis excavation has since firmly…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Man Makes Himself
V. Gordon Childe · 1936
Coins the term 'Neolithic Revolution' to argue that the shift to farming, not any political event, was humanity's first great transformation of its…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
Charles Darwin · 1868
Marshals evidence from selective breeding of pigeons, dogs and crops to argue that variation-and-selection also explains domestication, and proposes…
+4 more at this level
10 works
James Fergusson
Argues Europe's megaliths — Stonehenge among them — are not prehistoric at all but medieval or later monuments, a thesis excavation has since firmly disproved, though the comparative survey of sites remains useful.
link checked 17 Sept 2026V. Gordon Childe
Coins the term 'Neolithic Revolution' to argue that the shift to farming, not any political event, was humanity's first great transformation of its relationship to nature and the true beginning of civilisation.
Marshall Sahlins
Argues Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours than agricultural or industrial people and were not living at subsistence's edge, overturning the assumption that foraging life was a harsh struggle for survival.
Ian Hodder
Argues the material record at Çatalhöyük shows no clear gendered division of labour or status, challenging the assumption that early farming settlements were already organised around male dominance.
Chris Stringer
Reviews the fossil and genetic evidence to argue modern humans evolved through population structure across Africa rather than in one place, and that dispersals out of Africa were repeated attempts rather than a single successful exodus.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Darwin
Marshals evidence from selective breeding of pigeons, dogs and crops to argue that variation-and-selection also explains domestication, and proposes the theory of pangenesis — since discredited — to explain how variation is inherited.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Henry Breasted
Breasted's translation of Ramesses III's own Medinet Habu inscriptions, claiming Egypt alone withstood a coordinated invasion of 'Sea Peoples' that had already destroyed the Hittite and Levantine kingdoms around 1177 BC.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Colin Renfrew
Argues that calibrated radiocarbon dates overturn the old diffusionist picture of European prehistory, showing that megalithic Europe and Bronze Age societies developed independently rather than by borrowing from the Near East.
Kay Prufer et al.
Sequences a high-coverage Neanderthal genome and shows both long-standing inbreeding in the population and gene flow into modern humans, so the lineages met and interbred rather than simply replacing one another.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Maxime Aubert et al.
Uses uranium-series dating to show figurative cave art in Indonesia is as old as the earliest European cave art, arguing image-making symbolism was not a uniquely European invention.