"Let's Start at the Very Beginning - a Very Good Place to Start!" This is the Chauvet Cave in Ardèche, France dated from 30,000-28,000 BC; it is a pictograph of lions Have you ever seen those cave paintings... Fancy right?  While true written language didn’t really happen until 3000 BCE or so - we have “cave paintings” or pictographs (painted) and petroglyphs (carved) to look at.  We take this info - combine it with lots of others (skeletons etc) and we get a hazy picture of early man.  He certainly wasn’t a pretty boy…. https://www.britannica.com/video/194292/Homo-species-debates-human Something else to explore:  https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species?sort_by=field_age_timeline_maximum_value There were a lot of these early “humans”... The different varieties of humans lived from 3.3 million years ago to the end of the glaciers - which was called the Pleistocene epoch (era).  This means that they co-existed with mammoths, Canadian camels and elephants