Page 8 - SYTYGIB Prehistoric Times

What is prehistory and the deep past?
Imagine last week didn’t happen. Or rather, it did but no one can remember it and there aren’t any photos, videos or pieces of writing about it.
Ooh, I got a lovely postcard from Aunt Jean!
That would mean the really amazingly funny thing you said to your pals that made Erin Smith laugh so hard she did a WeE in class would be cOmPlEtElY FoRgOtTeN and nobody would ever know about it!
It would also mean that the lovely artwork you made of a plastic spoon stuck to a lollipop stick and painted green would be lOsT FoReVeR! Unless, that is, it fell into a hole and was buried, and somebody dug it up and made an amazing discovery of a weird spoon-lollipop thing and it ended up in a museum.
Well, that’s often all we have left from thousands of years ago.
Because there was no writing back then (only pictures), and it was a vErY long time ago – even older than your head teacher – not much is known about the details of these ancient people’s lives.
What does it say?
Errrr . . . mammoth.
Almost everything we know comes from objects, skeletons and the remains of buildings that have been dug up by archaeologists.
The prehistoric period lasted for hundreds of thousands of years and is usually divided into: Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic eras (which together are known as the Stone Age), the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The thing is, it’s not like one age stopped on a Tuesday and the next age started on a Wednesday. No, just to really confuse everyone, they all overlapped and didn’t really ‘begin’ or ‘end’ – instead, they merged into one another over a very long time.
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