Written records have long been the chief source of data for historians seeking to reconstruct the past. But writing is a quite recent innovation in the long journey of humankind, emerging with the advent of the first civilizations only about 5,000 years ago. This absence of written records for earlier phases of human history is one of the reasons many world historians have neglected or avoided the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.

And yet, all manner of techniques for probing the more distant past have evolved over the last century or so. An emerging field known as genetic anthropology uses DNA analysis to trace the movement of people across the planet. Linking genetic evidence with fossil remains, scholars have reached a general consensus that sub-Saharan Africa was the original home of our species, Homo sapiens. Historical linguistics, rooted in the changes that languages undergo, has also aided in tracking human movement and defining the character of particular cultures by analyzing their vocabularies. Our understanding of the widespread cultures of Indo-European and African Bantu-speaking peoples derives largely from such linguistic analysis. Anthropologists studying modern gathering and hunting societies have also shed light on the lives of our distant ancestors, while archeologists have contributed much to our grasp of the unwritten past through their study of human fossil remains, tools, pottery, buildings, art, and more. This collection of sources explores work by specialists in these final two fields to explore how we know about early human societies.