It is not a specific date, but one of the most important inventions of humanity: writing. “History has as its main object of study societies that possess or possessed writing, while pre-historians dedicate themselves to obtaining information about human groups that did not know how to write”, says archaeologist Marisa Afonso, from USP. This, however, does not establish a rigid and universal division, as writing began to be used at different times by different peoples, in different regions of the planet. In Egypt, for example, history would have started 5000 years ago; in Greece 3000 years ago. On the American continent, the definition of the end of prehistory has as reference the arrival of European colonizers. Thus, it is clear that this is just a symbolic landmark, born in the 19th century, to facilitate studies.
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In the book Prehistory of Brazil, historians and also archaeologists Pedro Paulo Funari and Francisco da Silva Noelli add: “Prehistory deals with the last 100 to 200 thousand years, the period in which the human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, existed. and also of the previous millions of years in which hominids, species that preceded ours, existed. This is equivalent to 99.9% of the past, therefore. Only 0.1% of the time of the existence of man and his ancestors in the evolutionary chain corresponds to the period in which writing exists.”