ABSTRACT
Nearly all of human existence passed before writing was invented. That means that nearly all we know of humans over two million years comes from information obtained from the kind of evidence a detective uses: objects and the circumstances in which they are found. The very long period before the relatively recent creation of written documents of history is termed “prehistory.” Archaeologists discover and identify evidence of human lives in the past, prehistoric and also historic, and interpret the evidence through cross-cultural comparisons with other sites from the past and with historic and contemporary societies.
