Dated History / Prehistory

"Most anthropologists had imagined a fairly harmonious transformation from ape to human, propelled by increasing intelligence. A missing link should be intermediate in both body and brain—Alley Oop or the old (and false) representations of stoop-shouldered Neanderthals. But the australopithecines refused to conform."

—Stephen Jay Gould, Posture Maketh the Man

Examples of Dated History that reference events predating the oldest civilizations.

Early hominids

• Science Marches On has a subpage for the Walking with... series, including some changes related to our understanding of human evolution.
• The infamous Piltdown Man, despite being correctly guessed as a fake the year after its "discovery" and several times afterwards, wasn't completely discredited until four decades later for several reasons. A big one was that many early 20th century people of European descent, including respected scientists, simply couldn't palate that humanity's ancestor could have originated some place other than Europe or its near vicinity, much less Darkest Africa^note For example, Roy Chapman Andrews, an alleged inspiration for Indiana Jones, discovered the Gobi dinosaur fossil fields while looking for hominids under the spurious reasoning that mankind must have evolved in a high place with fresh air, and expressly dismissed Africa as a swampy lowland that 'only grows vermin'. Some who knew better were supporters of the eolith theory, and the Piltdown Man was the only thing to support it, so they kept silent. Finally, the examining methods were still very crude when Piltdown Man was "discovered" but had become far more refined forty years later, and the Piltdown cranial and jaw specimens were kept locked away for decades to preserve them, with virtually no follow-up examination that might have exposed their discrepancies. Believers considered them too priceless to be handled, and any curators with private doubts may not have wanted their origin debunked on their watch.
  • The original model of human evolution, that the brain became advanced first and the body shifted to serve it (e.g. bipedalism as a consequence of using the hands to manipulate objects), was being systematically torn down with every new human ancestor discovered except Piltdown Man. After its "discovery" it was considered a clinching counter-example, but the reason it was finally re-examined decades later was that by then it was the only one. The theory is supported, along with Piltdown Man, in the B-Movie The Neanderthal Man, released just five months before Piltdown Man was definitely exposed as a hoax. It is also the apparent basis of the prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey (though Word of God is that they intended to depict the man-apes as bipedal, but made them quadrupedal in order to avoid Male Frontal Nudity).
  • Both the human cattle in The Rats in the Walls and the ghouls in Far Below are said to be more primitive looking than Piltdown Man.
  • After Piltdown was exposed, it was a common theory that the "discoverer", amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, must have been helped by a second, better educated man to fake the evidence, or even that such man created the hoax alone, as a prank on the unsuspecting Dawson, or someone else, before it all went horribly right. The suspects included paleontologists Arthur Smith Woodward (Dawson's friend and his greatest defender, whose 1948 memories The Earliest Englishman reference Piltdown Man in the title) and William Johnson Sollas (enemy of Woodward who would have wanted to humiliate him). In Piltdown Revisited (1979), Stephen Jay Gould derided the claim that the evidence was faked too well as a case of academics trying to save face, when in truth every single evidence (chemical aging of the bones, teeth abrasions to simulate use, accompanying stone tools and fauna, the anatomical incongruence between a human cranium and orangutan jaw itself) had been denounced as crudely faked by experts on the respective area right after discovery. Nevertheless, Gould still supported the prank theory, identifying Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, another friend of Dawson, as the "second man" having a laugh at the meager British paleo-anthropological record compared to his native France. Finally, in 1997 American science historian Richard Milner accused Arthur Conan Doyle of creating the hoax as his way to humiliate scientists for debunking his favorite psychic (Doyle was also a friend of Dawson, and golfed in the area where the "fossils" were found). These theories exploded when Dawson's full, two decades-long history of faking discoveries was exposed in 2003 (including a Mesozoic mammal's find from 1891 that was altered with the same technique used for Piltdown Man), and were finally put to rest in 2016 when DNA from a tooth "found" by Dawson in 1915 turned out to be from the exact same orangutan used for the Piltdown Man's jaw in 1912.
• The discovery of "Ardi" in 2009, the most complete Ardipithecus skeleton to date, threw into question many established theories regarding human evolution. The prevailing theory on why humans began walking upright had been that Australopithecus, the first truly bipedal hominid, evolved on the savanna, and being bipedal enabled its ancestors to see further across open landscape, finding food and shelter and spotting predators more easily. However, analysis of Ardi's skeleton indicated that the thick forest-dwelling and one million years older Ardipithecus was capable of walking upright to at least some degree. The current theory is that bipedalism arose in Ardipithecus as a means to better navigate dense jungle and underbrush. Walking with Beasts, Walking with Cavemen, and A Species Odyssey all make reference to the older theory.
• It is a cliché of popular culture to show primitive hominids with hunched backs, intermediate between quadrupedal apes and bipedal humans (just see any Parody of Evolution), but it's been known since the 1920s that hominids from at least Australopithecus were completely bipedal, with their neck and back aligned under their head. Nevertheless, both Walking with Beasts and Walking with Cavemen show australopithecines attempting to walk on all fours before rising dramatically to show that they are actually bipedal. Word of God is that Beasts actually tried to make their Australopithecus less bipedal, but found impossible to animate their skeletons in such way. Dishonorable mentions go to A Species Odyssey, which actually coached mo-cap actors into walking "imperfectly" to play australopithecines (which paleoartist Mauricio Antón likened to Michael Jackson's dancers in the music video Thriller), and Before we ruled the Earth and Time Trap for showing even more advanced hominids walking (semi)quadrupedally.
• In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the man-apes follow their acquisition of intelligence with turning bones into weapons and using them to hunt big game. This is a reference to Raymond Dart's theory that Australopithecus was a big game hunter that used bones, teeth, and horns to make weapons before the invention of stone tools, and that hunting was the main driver of human evolution. However, in later decades C.K. Brain and others showed that what Dart had interpreted as Australopithecus dens with many animal bones accumulated were actually leopard dens, and that australopithecines found their way there as unlucky prey rather than hunters.
• More than a dozen pre-modern human varieties (Java man, Peking man, etc.) are now believed to have been local breeds of Homo erectus (which may or may not be the ancestors of modern humans) and not actually separate species at all.

Homo neanderthalensis

• One of the first complete Neanderthal skeletons discovered is that of a male with a twisted, bent spine, a wasted lower jaw, and a pronounced hunchback. Archaeologists assumed this was a typical Neanderthal skeleton, which led to the popular view of Neanderthals as hunchbacked, chinless knuckle-draggers, or outright beast-men. Later analysis indicated, however, that the individual in question was probably well over sixty years old and suffered from severe arthritis and bone wastage (so much for Social Darwinists' pet notion that ancient humans did not take care of the elderly, infirm and sickly but simply left them to die). Most skeletons found since suggest that a Neanderthal would look very similar to a modern human as long as they didn't enter a Homo sapiens beauty contest. Works referencing the old trope include The Day is Done, Alley Oop, Far Below, The Ugly Little Boy, The Neanderthal Man, My Science Project, and numerous cartoons from The Far Side.
• The Clan of the Cave Bear based Ayla's leaving flowers on Iza's tomb (and inventing the custom in the process) on a Neanderthal tomb found in Shanidar, Iraq in the 1960s, where clusters of pollen were found around the skeleton (this body, a male who lived to old age despite having an arm amputated in his youth, inspired the character of Creb). Thirty years later, this pollen was attributed to contamination by archaeologists, or rodents that had nested inside the skeleton after burial. And thirty further years on, more pollen clusters were found that could be explained by an actual burial with flowers. Allegedly.
• It was also assumed that Neanderthals couldn't speak, or that their ability to articulate was very limited, because no hyoid bone was found in a Neanderthal skeleton until 1983 (e.g. The Day is Done). Works that wanted to portray them as intelligent, like The Clan of the Cave Bear, had them use sign language. Now, it's even likely that the modern human's version of the FOX P2 gene came from Neanderthals. Studies of their ear canals have also shown that Neanderthals heard on the same frequency as us and unlike chimpanzees or more primitive hominids like Australopithecus, which is also indicative of the use of speech as communication. In retrospect, the notion that Neanderthals could even have lacked a hyoid bone is, in itself, an antiquated one: all other primates and most other tetrapods have such a bone, just not always positioned to permit speech.
  • The Ugly Little Boy was expanded into a novel where one of the doctors goes into a detailed lecture about the hyoid bone. The Neanderthals are portrayed as having a language with click consonants; Timmy learns to speak English, but it sounds a little blurry.
• Claims that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans couldn't interbreed — or that if they did, their offspring would be short-lived and/or infertile, a source of angst in Earth's Children, The Neanderthal Parallax, and Dance of the Tiger — have been thoroughly disproven with the discovery that most modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them (and in the case of East Asians and Australoids, also Denisovan DNA). As of now, the saving grace of these works is that all deal with pairings of Neanderthal men and modern women; for one reason or another, all Neanderthal DNA in modern humans seems to have come from females.
• Fair-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned H. sapiens meeting dark-haired, dark-eyed, sometimes dark-skinned H. neanderthalensis, and their obvious Unfortunate Implications. The most notable example may be The Clan of the Cave Bear, but it's not the only one. Even at the time of writing, this was questionable if not illogical, because Cro-Magnons were recent immigrants from Africa while Neanderthals had evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe by that point (this is explicitly why it's the opposite in Dance of the Tiger, from around the same time). We now have evidence that red hair and green and blue eyes were not uncommon among Neanderthals.
• The idea that Neanderthals disproportionally hunted cave bears and worshipped them in a "cave bear cult" loosely similar to the "bear cults" of some northern Eurasian peoples became popular in the mid-20th century after findings of cave bear skull piles at the bottom of caves. Later research showed that the most impressive of such finds in the 1920s was improperly described, and that all supposed human-made piles were just natural accumulations as hibernating cave bears died on top of one another over millennia, but by then it had been referenced by The Clan of the Cave Bear and Eaters of the Dead.
  • Backlash against this led in part to Neanderthals being characterized as devoid of symbolism and abstraction abilities, making them unable to handle sarcasm or have a religion, as seen in Walking with Cavemen and the 2005 Spanish prehistoric novel Tras las huellas del hombre rojo ("On the red man's track"). The other part of the reasoning was that there were no known examples of art associated with Neanderthals... but this changed. Though not without resistance, paleoanthropologists have slowly accepted that Neanderthals, at least in their last millennia, had music made with bone "flutes", decorated themselves with ochre, feathers, and sea shells; and made cave paintings (just fewer and less elaborate than modern humans - for now).

Homo sapiens

• The Kull stories are canonically set around 100,000 BC. His homeland is Atlantis and its geopolitical rival is Lemuria - a sunken landmass first theorized in the mid-19th century to explain the presence of lemur fossils in both Madagascar and India, later assimilated by the Theosophical Society to the Kumari Kandam of Tamil legend and identified as the birthplace of the human race. Tales of continents that sunk catastrophically in historical times became definitive bunk when plate tectonics were confirmed in The '60s.
• The indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and other isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia were once lumped together into a singular group called the Negritos. Genetic studies have put the kibosh on this idea, showing that they actually consist of several distinct groups.
  • Up until 2011, it was generally assumed that the Andamanese peoples were descendants of participants in the Southern Dispersal, aka the Great Costal Migration, the initial migration out of Africa along the southern coast of Asia between 70,000 and 50,000 BCE. However, genetic studies indicate that the islands remained uninhabited until around 26,000 BCE, and the ancestors of the Andamanese were not directly descended from the first migrants out of Africa.
• The main inspiration of Tras las huellas del hombre rojo is the "Ebro Frontier" theory of The '90s, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of H. sapiens in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. By 2020, two archaeological sites from that period were attributed to H. sapiens, one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that H. sapiens reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
• As seen in Once upon a time... the Americas and Monsters We Met, the early peopling of the Americas was once thought to have happened in a single dispersal event from Asia when the Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, and a corridor appeared between the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets, allowing Clovis culture hunter-gatherers to walk between ice-free areas in Alaska and the lower 48, after which sea levels rose to cut the connection between Alaska and Siberia behind them. Later, evidence surfaced of people already living in the Americas 15, 20, or (more disputedly) 30 to 40 thousand years ago. It is now thought that there were at least two main dispersal events, one following the Pacific coast during the Last Glacial Maximum over 20,000 years ago, which may have been done by boat in some parts, and another by Clovis overland around 13,000 years ago that largely replaced the earlier migration leaving only residual genetics in South America. A third, coastal-maritime dispersal beginning around 5,000 years ago originated Arctic peoples like the Inuit, and an enigmatic fourth at some point in the middle may have originated the proposed Dené-Yenisean language family (if it is both correct and not a result of back-migration from North America to Siberia, as some have suggested).
• It was widely believed that all sorts of civilizational developments happened in the Neolithic Revolution and were linked to the rise of agriculture and the transformation of roaming hunters into settled farmers. Weaving textiles or making ceramics are advanced skills and something humans only did when they settled down, right? Wrong. The fact that ceramics were older than the Neolithic has been known for some time, but the more recent discovery of the imprints of textiles in said ceramics upends traditional perceptions of the earlier eras of the Stone Age considerably.
• The Tribe of the Cliffs and Earth's Children depict dogs and horses being first domesticated around the same time. Later genetic studies firmly established that dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years earlier than any other animal, and necessarily in a different context to livestock.
• Both Futurama and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (in an episode about the murder of a Crazy Cat Lady) reference the once Common Knowledge that cats were first domesticated in Ancient Egypt. However, in the mid-2000s archaeologists found evidence that cats had been domesticated in the Levant thousands of years before they were in Egypt.
• Marija Gimbutas's Goddess trilogy:
  • Gimbutas's interpretation of the Kurgan hypothesis linguistically grouped together a number of cultures that were located at the Pontic steppes. This grouping is now considered overly broad, and the "Revised Steppe theory" that focuses specifically on the Yamnaya culture as the origin of the Indo-European dispersal is believed to be more credible.
  • Her theory of a peaceful and egalitarian gynocentric Old Europe being replaced by the more warlike and hierarchical Indo-Europeans who made Europe significantly more patriarchal than it had been before has been contradicted by the discovery of Neolithic European hillforts, along with evidence that adult males were given preferential treatment in burial rites.
• Soviet historian and linguist Nikolai Marr developed the Japhetic theory, claiming that the Kartvelian languages of the South Caucasus are related to Semitic languages, from which he extrapolated that the Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic languages (along with the Basque language) share a common root, also claiming that "Japhetic languages" had been spoken throughout Europe before the advent of the Indo-Europeans. While the Soviet government promoted this theory at first in an attempt to apply Marxist theories of class struggle to linguistics, they began rejecting it in the mid-twentieth century, and it is now considered deeply flawed both inside and outside the former Soviet Union.
• The Light of Other Days has a researcher use the Wormcam to find that "Ötzi the Iceman" was a hunter who went too far into the mountains in pursuit of prey and died of hypothermia. The year after the novel was published, an arrowhead was found embedded in his shoulder. Later DNA of different men was found on him and his belongings, all but confirming that he was chased up there by a group that fought and killed him. Some old documentaries also depict him as a bald man purely because his mummy looks bald, but this is now known to be an artifact of decomposition. He actually had a full head of hair and a beard when he died.
• A popular belief in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries was that Europeans could be divided into two groups: "fair" Europeans from the north, known for rationality, intelligence, hard work, and integrity, and "swarthy" Europeans from the south, known for laziness, dishonesty, greed, and stupidity. Scientific racists later subdivided the swarthy Europeans into Mediterraneans and Alpines, the first of which was said to be creatively Brilliant, but Lazy and shiftless, and the second stupid, plodding peasants. Despite the skepticism of mainstream anthropologists and historians, the Nordic "master race" theory became a cornerstone of Nazism. Less horrifically, it also shows up in much of the fiction of the time: Conan the Barbarian might be the best-known example. Of course, we now know that Nordicism is bunk: not only do we now know that "Nordics" did not arise in Scandinavia (which was the last area of Continental Europe to be peopled), but also that the various "fair" Northern Europeans aren't particularly closely related to each other. Skin color and pigmentation variations are recent and can't be used to indicate relatedness.