Central Asia in the prehistory (before 3500 BC). Before writing, the record is stone, bone and DNA. These articles cover human origins, the ice ages and the first farmers, up to the moment cities and script appear.
In 1938 Okladnikov found a child's skeleton ringed by ibex horns in an Uzbek cave. DNA in 2007 and a 2012 study call it Neanderthal; a 2009 study did not.
· 70,000 BCIn 2003 a child's teeth and 121 skull fragments came out of layer 16 at Obi-Rakhmat, Uzbekistan. The teeth read as Neanderthal; the skull did not settle it.
· 70,000 BCA fingertip bone dug up in 2008 at Denisova Cave in the Altai held DNA unlike any Neanderthal or modern human. Its kin live on in Tibetan and Papuan DNA.
· 50,000 BCA Mal'ta humerus sampled at the Hermitage in 2009 dated to 24,000 years; the Siberian boy's genome sat between western Eurasians and Native Americans.
· 22,000 BCRaphael Pumpelly dug the two mounds at Anau in 1904 in two-foot levels, found wheat and barley chaff, and argued that drying oases sent people outward.
· 4500 BCNamed in 2009 as the earliest horse-domestication site, Botai in Kazakhstan lost that claim in 2018 when DNA made its horses the ancestors of Przewalski's.
· 3500 BC
