Timeline of prehistory

Abstract

Historical studies are, first, a determination of facts, and then the order in which they occurred, and then conceptualize them and finally interpret them.
In interpreting the facts, we must avoid falling into causalist error; history is the realm of the contingent, nothing is necessary in it, nor predictable. The pretence of humbing it with "scientificisms" is necessarily sterile, and harmful. Remember, for example, Kelvin pretending that the scenario of evolution, for purportedly scientific reasons, could not go from 50 Ma., or to Bishop Usher, who fixed the duration of history at 6,000 years, setting as the date of creation 4,004 BC. Or, even more impressively, the entirely accidental disappearance of the reign of the dinosaurs, probably eradicated, along with so many life forms at the time, by the collision with an asteroid, which, had not occurred, would have allowed the evolution of those vital forms, which would have made it impossible those that replaced them, so that the futuristic civilization might never have occurred. Not only the different phases of our civilization, but itself, are contingents.
The dating procedures available today (1988) are very precise, and their existence provokes, of their own, an intellectual revolution; because it is almost impossible to stop commenting on origins, when talking about chronologies. Let us remember the intellectual transformation caused by Copernicus' heliocentric theine: by displacing man as the center of the universe, he modified the previous anthropomorphic conception, realizing that we did not 6 ourselves the center of the Universe, everything rue" different.