How do we know what happened before "history"?

Question

If history began when man first began to write things down, how can we be concretely sure as to what did or didn't happen before we knew how to write? How do we know what was significantly important before history, concerning humans of course?

Answer 1

Two comments in response.  

First, we're not "concretely sure" about things that happened during the historical era.  There is plenty of debate, as I'm sure you already know.

Second, there are several disciplines that study the prehistoric era such as archeology, historical linguistics, anthropology, etc., and while they don't allow us to be "concretely sure" they are the best anyone has thus far come up with.

Answer 2

We can't be 100% certain without a written history. Archeologist have the job of trying to figure out history when there is no written account to help (or when no one can read the written account). Now some things can aid them in determining elements of history, such as burials.

Think about what might be buried with a person in ancient and prehistoric times. Bronze weapons might be one  such thing you might find. Now let's say you find a bronze ax head in a burial mound. Now I'm not sure how you test the age of the metal itself, but you can check the bones and carbon date them. This can then be compared to what may be known about the ax head. IE, perhaps it fits a certain style from a certain time period, or perhaps it looks older than that time period. If the bones carbon date to a period before the style of the ax head, then either you have to redate when that style was first used or you learn that the ax was buried in an older burial mound.

Pottery shards are even better than things like stone and metal because early pottery quite often had organic material added to it's making. So the pottery can then be carbon dated. And with enough shards, or if your lucky whole items, you can start to get an idea what something might have been used for. Which then gives you some kind of idea what life was like.

Or your not going through a burial mound but through a general location. Now let's say you're looking at a bronze mine. Written history says where it is and the earliest written accounts suggest the mine began long before the written history. So you dig in the area and of course you expect to find debris dating back to the earliest written, but you keep digging, finding debris that goes al the way back to around the time when man first started mining bronze in general. So you're then able to figure out about when bronze became a hot comodity in that area.

Really we can't tell the events that happened, but we can get an idea of what life was like or when certain things began to occur in certain areas. And we can get an idea when certain areas were settled or when folks finally stopped living there by how much of a footprint they left behind. And by footprint I mean the stuff they left, their garbage. A the more heavily settled a place, the larger the footprint. As a place becomes less important and people leave it their footprint becomes smaller.

Answer 3

Yes you are right.  Even written history can be slanted and prejudiced by history writers, their culture, emotional and psychological health, etc.

Once I had to write a paper on Julius Caesar comparing three writers.  There was a huge discrepancy between these authors.