With the term prehistory we mean a period of about two million years that goes from the appearance of the human species on Earth until the moment when man invents writing and begins to leave written records, this happens about five thousand five hundred years ago, in Mesopotamia . Among the first to use writing as a tool to collect data were the Sumerians, but we will talk about them in another post and in a dedicated video.
When man appeared on earth his appearance was anything but " human "It was a very primitive version of the human species, more like monkeys ( like Adriano Celentano ) and subsequently, due to multiple crossings and a long and slow evolution, its appearance would have become more similar to that of today, but, if well they had animal-like physical traits, the first hominids were able to stand only on the lower limbs thus leaving the upper limbs ( the arms ) free to grasp and hold tools in wood and stone, according to some anthropologists of the last century, this ability would be at the origins of the cognitive development of the human species, more simply said, man, learning to walk on two legs, began to develop more intelligence to find new uses for the now useless upper limbs.
In the two millennia preceding the invention of writing man progressively changes his appearance and develops his technical skills more and more learning to control and modify more and more the environment in which he lived, he thus passes from adapting to the place where he lived, collecting meats, berries, fruits, etc. to feed himself to hunt and cultivate, he also goes from living in caves to building increasingly sophisticated homes, initially using what nature provided, then branches, trunks and animal skins, and then moving on to " building materials" increasingly sophisticated, such as stone and mud used as glue or sun-dried or baked clay bricks, which would be followed by fences and walls to protect homes and villages.
The progressive improvement of the lifestyle , and the reduction in mortality caused by wild beasts produces a first significant increase in the human population on earth which then begins to build ever larger villages and cities in which hundreds of families resided and consequently, with the increase of the population, the the organizational structure of the cities begins to change and the need for an "t estual / visual" communication tool is beginning to be felt more complex than the simple graffiti that their ancestors left in caves to testify to the proximity of herds of animals or streams. This practical need to organize and administer life in cities would have resulted in the invention of the first forms of scripture.
It is therefore no coincidence that the first written texts of which we have traces concern codes for the regulation of urban life , and progressively we witness the birth and growth of immense archives in which hundreds of thousands of clay tablets engraved and left to dry in the sun were kept, and subsequently clay tablets engraved and cooked and following the evolution of the supports for the writing, at a certain point we arrive at the invention of the parchment which would have allowed to concentrate hundreds of thousands of written scrolls in a very short space, thus allowing the evolution of writing which, while becoming more complex, also lent itself to other uses, less useful for the organization of cities, but fundamental for the development of art and literature.
While writing evolves on the one hand, technology also improves, and progressively we would move from the use of stone as the main material for the production of tools, to the use of the first metals. In fact, man would have discovered that some rocks, if heated, turned into hot liquids and once cooled those liquids became extremely hard and resistant, and if sharp, much more effective than stone. Man enters the age of metals , an era that began about eight thousand years ago with the discovery of copper, one of the softest and easiest metals to manipulate, he would later discover, around the third millennium BC, that by combining copper with other metals, they would have produced metal alloys much more resistant than the single starting metals. thus the age of alloys is one of the three phases of the age of metals.
The first alloy discovered by man was bronze , produced by the union of copper that had characterized the previous era and tin, an extremely soft and malleable metal, not very suitable for the production of tools, but its union with copper produced a new material several times stronger than copper. The last phase of the metal age is called the Iron Age, this is an extremely recent era, which began just three thousand two hundred years ago, around the first millennium BC. The first to manipulate the iron would have been the Hittites, a mysterious people of whom they have very little information, and who disappeared supplanted by the Assyrians , a people we have much more information about.