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.
Seeds of a water plant dated human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, to 23,000 to 21,000 years; pollen, quartz and lake mud were tested against them.
· 21,000 BCXianrendong's sherds lie in layers dated 20,000 to 19,000 cal BP; Yuchanyan's cauldron dates 18,300 to 15,430 cal BP. Foragers in southern China made both.
· 18,000 BCA 2019 Science paper put people at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, from 16,560 to 15,280 years ago. A 2020 comment, a 2022 reanalysis and two replies followed.
· 14,000 BCForagers at Odai Yamamoto in northern Japan fired plain pots about 13,000 BC and cooked fish in them; by 3900 BC Sannai-Maruyama ate chestnuts and fish.
· 13,000 BCA camp under a Chilean bog, dated to about 14,500 years ago, put people in South America before the Clovis hunters. Later claims reach 23,000 years.
· 12,500 BCDried feces from an Oregon cave carried DNA a 2008 study dated to 12,300 radiocarbon years. Rebuttals, a 2012 recheck and a 2020 lipid study followed.
· 12,300 BCA 13,000-year-old mammoth kill, bison kill and camp in southeastern Arizona, sealed under black clay, and the fluted points that define Clovis.
· 11,000 BCA Natufian woman of about 45 was buried at Hilazon Tachtit, Galilee, 12,400–12,000 cal BP, with over 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot.
· 10,000 BCRadiocarbon dates on 24 mud-wasp nests over and under 21 Gwion figures gave 11,500 to 12,700 years in 2020. A kangaroo painting dated in 2021 is older.
· 10,000 BCHunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's T-pillar rings about 9500 BC, before farming reached the region. Excavators now call it a settlement with rituals.
· 9500 BCGrahame Clark dug Star Carr three weeks a summer, 1949 to 1951. Excavations of 2004 to 2015 recounted the finds and dated a posthole hollow to 9300 BC.
· 9300 BCKathleen Kenyon found an 8.2-meter stone tower at Jericho in the 1950s. Four named scholars still give four different reasons for why it was built.
· 8000 BCSandstone shelters near Bhopal hold paintings from the Mesolithic to historic times, ordered by overlap, style and weathering; the paint itself is undated.
· 8000 BCÇatalhöyük's East Mound, 13 hectares on Turkey's Konya plain, held roof-entered mudbrick houses with the dead under the floors, about 7100 to 5950 BC.
· 7100 BCMehrgarh, Pakistan: the oldest known lost-wax casting, molars drilled 7,500 to 9,000 years ago and cotton thread in a copper bead, before the Indus cities.
· 7000 BCSix crane-bone flutes from Jiahu, China, date to 7000-5700 BC. Nature called them the earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated multinote instruments.
· 7000 BCLime-plaster statues on reed frames, buried in two pits at 'Ain Ghazal near Amman and lifted in 1983 and 1985, then conserved in London and Washington.
· 6750 BCA skull found in the Columbia River in 1996 led to a lawsuit, a 2015 genome study and a 2016 law that sent Kennewick Man to five tribes in 2017.
· 6500 BCDCCEEW dates Gunditjmara stone eel-channel construction at Budj Bim to at least 6,600 years old; UNESCO inscribed the site in 2019.
· 4600 BCAn excavator operator found gold near Varna in October 1972. The cemetery has been counted at 270, 294, 312 and 315 graves and dated two ways.
· 4600 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 BCTwo hikers found a body at 3,210 meters on the Tisenjoch on September 19, 1991. A survey put it 92.56 meters inside Italy; an X-ray found an arrow.
· 3300 BCA storm around 1850 stripped a dune at the Bay of Skaill, Orkney, and bared a kitchen midden 15 or 16 feet high. Petrie, Childe and Bayliss followed.
· 2900 BC
