deep history

plural deep histories

1. countableuncountableThe distant past of the human species, going further back than prehistory and considering the evolution of modern human anatomy.

   He was asking the reader to accept a gradual continuity in deep history, rather than making a giant leap from the present into the abyss of time, as undertaken by Prestwich and Evans when they started the time revolution.

   2021, Clive Gamble, Making Deep History: Zeal, Perseverance, and the Time Revolution of 1859, Oxford University Press, →ISBN

   1 more example

   “In the last two or three decades, historians have found it hard to think across large time spans,” he contends; gone are the sweeping narratives of humanity’s advance. The antidote to this “shallow history,” he said, is “deep history,” stretching back 50,000, 500,000, even 2.6 million years to the earliest humans.

   2011 September 26, Patricia Cohen, quoting Daniel Lord Smail, “History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words”, in The New York Times, →ISSN