Our Prehistory

By Benjy LongworthHistory

Our Prehistory episodes

July 21 51. Epipaleolithic
The Levant witnessed a gradual transition from simple nomadic societies to more complex sedentism. The earliest signs of this fundamental change in human life appeared during the Last Glacial Maximum.
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30 min
June 21 50. Southwest Asia: Upper Paleolithic Hub [Preview]
Migration out of Africa, interbreeding with Neanderthals, and colonization of Eurasia. What can stone tools, bone tools, and ornaments discovered in the Middle East tell us about those fateful events?
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5 min
May 07 49. Ritual and Violence in Africa
19,000 to 12,000 years ago ... As shifts to social dynamics took place in Africa, both human creativity and brutality flourished.
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24 min
April 07 48. Broad Spectrum Origins in Africa
25,000 to 12,000 years ago ... Human life was gradually changing across Africa at the end of the Pleistocene. One element of this transformation was a shift in what people ate.
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47 min
March 08 47. Last Glacial Maximum of Africa [Preview]
25,000 years ago ... Right at the peak of the Last Ice Age, most people living on the African continent finally embraced microlithic tools, an innovation that had been around for tens of thousands of years.
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5 min
February 08 46. Spread of the Late Stone Age
45,000 to 30,000 years ago ... Signs of Late Stone Age culture start appearing across sub-saharan Africa, hinting at long-distance contact between once isolated peoples.
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30 min
January 13 45. Late Stone Age of Africa
60,000 to 45,000 years ago ... Signs of cultural change started to appear among hunter gatherers in Africa, leading to the end of the Middle Stone Age, a period that had lasted hundreds of thousands of years.
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34 min
November 06, 2025 44. Post Clovis [Preview]
12,800 to 11,700 years ago ... In the cold of the Younger Dryas, at the peak of megafauna extinction, the descendants of Clovis fragmented into a range of new cultures across North America.
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5 min
October 05, 2025 43. American Megafauna Extinctions
Around 13,000 years ago, a wide range of large animal species started disappearing. The circumstances strongly implicate humans.
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46 min
July 31, 2025 42. Fishtail Points and Early South America
13,000 to 12,000 years ago... From megafauna hunters in Tierra del Fuego to Amazonian rock painters, the formation of early South America hunter gatherer societies was a complex process, and a sudden burst of distinct human cultures appeared at the end of the Ice Age.
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55 min

About Our Prehistory

From the publisher's feed

The history of humanity before civilization is populated by an array of cultures throughout the millennia and across the continents. The earliest humans followed diverse customs and survival…