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 Bantu-speaking peoples derive largely from such linguistic analysis. Archeologists have contributed much to our grasp of the unwritten past through their study of human fossil remains, tools, pottery, buildings, art, and more.

Yet another, and somewhat controversial, technique for doing history before writing lies in analogies with more recent nonliterate peoples. In the twentieth century, anthropologists and other scholars descended on the few remaining gathering and hunting peoples, studying their cultures and collecting their stories, myths, and oral traditions. For good reasons historians are often skeptical about the usefulness of such material for understanding the distant past of Paleolithic societies. Since all societies change over time, is it reasonable to think that contemporary gathering and hunting societies would resemble in any way their ancestors thousands of years ago? Furthermore, there is the problem of contamination. After all, gatherers and hunters in recent times have often mixed and mingled with agricultural societies, come under European colonial rule, or made contact with elements of modern civilization. Other scholars, and particularly teachers, have embraced these materials, even while recognizing their limitations, for they provide at least a glimpse into ways of living and thinking that have almost completely vanished from the earth. Document 1.1 allows you to make a judgment about the usefulness of this approach to history before writing.