Are there still prehistoric men

Answer 1

Prehistoric refers to a period without a written history. There are still a very few societies without their own written tradition, but as to whether they can be considered prehistoric this is more of a grey area. Even those societies which lack a written tradition of their own are recorded through the writings of others. Anthropologists and others write and record the ways of life of other people and so bring them into the realm of history through secondary sources. Archaeologically, a society which is recorded in the writings of others, but have no written records of their own is known as a protohistoric society.

There are modern hunter-gatherer populations that exist today, and archaeologists sometimes use studies of these people to aid understanding of the way people may have lived in the past. However these people are not prehistoric as archaeological cultures are. They are contemporary societies which have changed and developed over time just like every other.

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Here is a link which will answer some of your questions . . . http://www.historylink101.com/prehistory.htm.

Restated the question becomes do the direct decedents of men and women who lived during prehistory exist today? As there are no written histories of that time this is a question for the archaeologists. This link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human suggests that humans are first found living about 200,000 years ago. This is fairly conventional wisdom. It should be noted that some critics take issue with the dating methods used by archaeologists. It is a very complicated issue with high stakes. Primary critics would be those who support the creation theory for the genesis of earth and all its life. For there very strong arguments link to http://www.apologetics.org/. Any search on "archeology dating" will return a wealth of links to how archaeologist try and date artifacts for equally strong arguments.

As a note it should be added that as in most methods,the method may very well be accurate some of the time or a lot of the time, but probably not all the time. This question is very hotly debated by both sides almost as if the very nature of their beliefs i.e. the beliefs of advocates of science and of Christians are at stake.

One should be quick to point out however that it has been only in the last few hundred years that science and religion have come to this point of extreme polarization. In earlier times many men of science and religion saw no contradiction between religion and science but understood them as complimentary. For example, Roger Bacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon is said to have discussed the laws of reflection and refraction in terms of the beauty of the world as created by God. Isaac newton is reported to have composed the calculus as a glorification of God.

When examining this question one might consider whether there is an implied contradiction when the empiricism of science and the faith of religion compete. As the realms of their respective knowledge bases are distinctly separate, does it make sense for science which is of the empirical e.g. the world one can see and measure, and faith which in general is of things unseen and the unmeasurable. To confuse the issue even further, fully qualified scientists support the side of the religious position in this debate and religious figures support the empirical or scientific position.