HISTORY

PREHISTORY Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history or the invention of writing systems. Prehistory refers to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. The term "prehistory“ referes to the time since human-like beings appeared. In dividing up human prehistory, prehistorians typically use the three-age system. The three-age system is the periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age

ANCIENT HISTORY Ancient history is the aggregate of past events from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages or the Postclassical Era. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with Sumerian Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC. It starts with the date of the founding of Rome in 753 BC, the beginning of the history of ancient Rome, and the beginning of the Archaic period inAncient Greece. Although the ending date of ancient history is disputed, some Western scholars use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD (the most used), the closure of the Platonic Academy in 529 AD, the death of the emperor Justinian I in 565 AD, the coming of Islam or the rise of Charlemagne as the end of ancient and Classical European history.

MIDDLE AGES In European history, the Middle Ages, or Medieval period, lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history : Antiquity, Medieval period, and Modern period. The Medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, the High, and the Late Middle Ages.

MODERN AGES Modern history, also referred to as the modern period or the modern era, is the historiographical approach to the timeframe after the post-classical era (known as the Middle Ages). Modern history can be further broken down into the early modern period and the late modern period after the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary history is the span of historic events that are immediately relevant to the present time. The modern era began approximately in the 16th century.

CONTEMPORArY AGES Contemporary Ages describes the period timeframe that closely connected to the present day; it is a certain perspective of modern history. The term "contemporary history" has been in use at least since the early 19th century. In the widest context of this use, contemporary history is that part of history still in living memory. Based on human lifespan, contemporary history would extend for a period of approximately 80 years. Obviously, this concept shifts in absolute terms as the generations pass. In a narrower sense, "contemporary history" may refer to the history remembered by most adults alive, extending to about a generation. As the median age of people living on Earth is 30 years as of the present (2014), approximately half the people living today were born prior to 1984.