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Prehistory is the long stretch of human time before anyone wrote anything down. We still learn about it, but not from books — from bones, stone tools, fire pits, and pictures on cave walls. When writing begins, we start calling the story history. Though actually, that line is not the same everywhere: writing started earlier in some parts of the world than in others, so “prehistory” ends at different moments in different places. In loose talk, people also say prehistoric for anything that feels ridiculously old (“this phone is prehistoric”), which has nothing to do with caves.
史前；史前時代
組成pre- (before) + history. The history half goes back to Greek histōr, someone who knows or finds out; English pre- comes from Latin prae-, in front.
同家族的字
- historythe time we can read about, after writing begins
- prehistoricthe adjective: from that time before writing
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
prehistorynoun
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The time before written records in any area of the world; the events and conditions of those times.
- Along the way, elders of the Delaware, Lushootseed, Tsimshian, Colville, and Creek tribes have provided a comparative perspective on the long time frame of Keresan prehistory and culture.
- “We don’t find evidence for that sort of thing anywhere in prehistory.”
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The study of those times.
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Any past time (even recent) treated as such a distant, unknowable era.
- I was a town boy through and through. The country belonged to a vague pre-history.
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The history leading up to some event, condition, etc.
- Psychologists... are mostly bad historians, inventing—as Freud has done—their pre-history to suit their theories.
- One of the challenges of studying any Jewish custom is that we tend to view it in an anachronistic fashion; we think that what we do today is what was always done. Therefore, in this article we shall describe the pre-history of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, the four basic components of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony before the year 1800 as suggested by Michael Hilton, and six major changes that occurred in modern times.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。